Alex Pooley's Blog

Why don't you subscribe to my blog while you're here? I'm a freelance web developer and I blog about Ruby, Rails, and business online.

Go ahead and subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

After work I caught up with an old friend over a beer and some wedges with the sole purpose of discussing business. It was an awesome atmosphere, and I think we made good progress. One important point that came up is that we both have lots of good ideas. Bucket loads! But for the most part, they’re not things that many people want. We’ve decided to approach the whole creativity/brainstorming thing from another angle - instead of thinking about goods/services that would be ‘cool’ we’re going to actively _look_ for problems that need to be solved.

I’ve been aware of the need to think like this for a while and I think I’m getting better. But I found that when myself and Dave were talking we would wander in to coolness exploration (and that was only after a pint). We’re going to make an effort to bring up interesting opportunities to each other from now on by starting with something like, “people need this problem solved…”, rather than, “wouldn’t it be cool if…” I think this conscious effort on our behalf will help us progress in our thinking.

We’re doing this each Tuesday after work, it should be fun!