My App Ideas Volume 1

By Angus Cheng

I wrote a book about how I created Bank Statement Converter. You can read it here. At the end of the book I wrote this:

A lot of people have emailed me asking for my ideas.

This is kind of funny I think, when someone comes to me and says they have an app idea I think “oh man please go away and leave me alone”. I guess it’s different because I’ve actually made apps that make money.

Idea #1 - Locally Recorded Interviews

Video interviews are often done over Zoom. The problem with this is quality of the recording can be really bad, because zoom records what their servers receive and if network conditions are the Zoom client sends low quality video/audio.

Solution: Create a web app that records your camera + microphone and stores the data locally. Once you finish your interview you can send the high quality video to the interviewer.

Idea #2 - IndieHackers.com but for Stand Up Comedians

I’ve actually started working on this already. It’s online at comedybook.org

IndieHackers is a community for people who start software businesses without outside investment. The cool thing about the website is it’s basically a website for a specific community.

And you can apply the idea to other communities. You could make one for pilots, lawyers doctors whatever. I’m a fan of stand up comedy and open mic comedy. So I thought it would be cool to make a dedicated community for comedy.

It could include:

  1. Comedian profile pages
  2. List of upcoming shows for comedians on their profile page
  3. Forums
  4. A list of all the open mics in a city.

#4 is Good for SEO and useful for comics that are traveling. Also useful for people who want to watch comedy.

How does hit make money? Maybe by charging comedians for premium features.

Idea #3 - Open Source - Bank Record Getter

Accountants have asked me a few times to create an app that hooks into their client’s bank account and just sends them all the transactions.

Building this requires writing code for every bank. Perhaps a front end extension that drives the users browser, logs them into internet banking and pulls down PDFs or saves HTML pages.

It is tricky because you need an account with loads of banks or a relationship with the banks.

But what if you made it open source? And you said something like “developers can create integrations for their bank, and they get some money everytime their integration is used”.

So you make your platform. Then I come and create integrations for “hsbc.com.hk”. A user pays your platform $100 to get some bank records, and then you send X% to me for usage of my integration.

Idea #4 Text Based Image/Video Generator

Image and video editors are cool, but I like the idea of a text based video editor. The user puts in a bunch of commands into a text file and it outputs a video/image file.

Example:

import "video.mp4" as video1
import "audio.mp3" as audio1

set_canvas 1280 720
play_video video1 0 seconds 10 seconds
play_audio audio1 0 seconds 10 seconds

Basically a textual representation of video/image editing software.

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