Free Business Ideas

Idea: Smart Todo List App

I’m always looking for business ideas and I come up with quite a few on a regular basis.  I’m going to start posting some that I have little or no intention of pursuing.

The first one is “Smart Todo List”.

Basic User Need – I want the app to answer the question.

What is the most important task I should be doing right now?

Key Features and Concepts

  • Ease of Accessibility: Mobile and Web
  • Minimum friction and slowly gathering necessary information
  • Allow users to easily add items with  (Voice to text feature?)  Initially only asks for task description.
  • Slowly categorizes and gets meta information to help prioritization.
  • App uses meta information to reshuffle and re-prioritize list.

Main Work Flow

  1. User asks app “What is the most important task I should be doing right now?”
  2. App suggests one task  (based on meta data algorithm)
  3. User agrees and does that task.  Then can go back to 1. later. OR
  4. User says no.  App asks user “why not?”, by picking one of many ways to get more meta information.  (i.e. User can snooze for 1 hour, 1 day, 3 days, 1 Week, 1 Month.  User says it will take too much time when app simply asks, how long it will take…)
  5. App then goes back to 2. and suggests a new task.

Other Ideas

  • Utilize time of day – Could a category be associated with a certain time of day?  Work vs. Personal items
  • Utilize GPS or IP Address Location – Knows you are at work, at a store, at home…
  • User could be initially prompted with how much time they have so the app can immediately filter tasks based on that
  • User could be initially prompted with the category of task they want to work on
  • Possible Task Meta Data: Description, Category, Time to Complete, Priority Scale/Order in Category, Hard Deadline Date

Why I don’t want to do it

  • After building UberNote, I do not want to build another consumer productivity app.  I’m a bit burnt out on that market.
  • Everyone’s first apps are todo lists, project managment apps, note apps…   I really don’t want to do another.
  • This may exist, but I haven’t found it.

Why I might do it

  • I would like to see this app and use it
  • I’d like to test the idea/theory of slowly getting more information
  • The algorithm could be fun to work on and get right
  • I could capitalize on the large existing UberNote user base, since they are very close to the target market.

Does this exist already?  One friend told me it does, but could not tell me what it was.  Anyone have any thoughts or ideas to add to it?