kuda.ai | code. guitar. life.

Programming feels like a superpower. Whatever you can think of, you can build. Your mind is the only limitation.

Often I see products that are still missing in this world. I hope I will have time one day to build these products.

I will present my ideas here. Is it stupid to share product ideas? Many startup experts will tell you that the idea is no worth anything. It's the execution that's worth everything.

CoLinkSpace: A Multi Player Bookmark Manager

I hoard knowledge: Books, videos, articles, newsletters, magazines, and links. Many links.

There are a myriad of ways how you can organize your links.

Browsers

A common way is using the bookmarks manager of your browser. This comes with problems, though. Your bookmarks are bound to your browser. Sure, you can use Firefox on your iPhone and on your Macbook and share the bookmarks that way. But what if you use many browsers? I do: Brave on my Macbook, Safari on my iPhone (because it enables dark mode via an extension), and Chrome for Work.

I have used Firefox for a long time. Although I could export my bookmarks, I didn't do it.

Bookmark Apps

Bookmark apps like InstaPaper or Pocket help you organize bookmarks across different browsers. They even provide additional useful features. They allow you to save websites, so that you can read them offline. Their UI optimise for reading. There is no noise, no ads.

Great stuff, but these tools are single player only.

WhatsApp, E-Mails And Other Chats

My wife and I send us many links back and forth. She has recently send me an interesting article on parenting that appeared in nzz.ch.

I have sent this article to a couple of my peers, too.

So I have many useful articles persisted in the chat with my wife. I often search links there.

Then, I also send links via email. Sometimes I have to search in my email and on WhatsApp. And sometimes I end up not finding the article.

WhatsApp enables you to create group chats. You could create a chat with your colleagues and share links related to work. But usually, you will also send many text messages back and forth. And the only way you can organize your links is by time. The latest shared link will always be the first.

Note Taking Apps: The Jacks of All Trades

I store my links in Bear, a beautiful note taking app for Mac. I can access the list from my Mac and from my iPhone. I open bear and search the file that holds my links.

This file contains multiple categories represented as titles.

To every link, I add a little description.

To find a link, I search either in the file, or globally.

This works really well. Though Bear is only single player, there are plenty of note taking apps that support collaboration. An outstandingly prominent candidate is Notion.

So, what are the disadvantages?

Well, note taking apps are so generic, they can do pretty much anything. And that's the problem: It has no focused scope on managing links. Writes are awkward: Open the app, search the file with the links, scroll through the page until you find a category that fits your link, append it, and add some information to it. What if a link could fit multiple categories? You could duplicate the link, but that's hard to maintain.

The reads are also not ideal. Usually, I use the global search or local search to find a link. This doesn't work too bad. But I can't search for only the website, for tags, for categories, for people I shared it with, for the title, for the description, and so on. The search is effective, but limited.

Conclusion: Note taking apps can do everything, but not necessarily with a great user experience. And I want a great user experience, that's why I use Bear, and not Apple's notes app.

CoLinkSpace: A Multi Player Bookmark Manager

In CoLinkSpace, users can create spaces and add links to these, cooperatively.

Let's make an example. I open a space called "parenting". My wife joins that space. Whenever we find an interesting link, we add it to our space.

We may invite other curators, if we want. If we think our list is useful to all parents, we may make our space public. So a space can be private and accessed only by members, or it can be public and accessed by anyone in the internet.

Every link has a preview. You can add tags, if you want. That way, you can filter by tags. You can add a description. You can let other members know, why a link is worth reading, or what you liked most about it. Whenever a member of a spaces adds a link, the others get a notification.

WishList: Receive only things you want, not waste.

I don't like the name yet for this product, but I love the idea.

I am sure you are familiar with such situations: Your wife's mom will turn 60. What are you going to give her as a birthday present? Christmas is coming. What am I going to give my mom? My brother marries. What present will they enjoy and use?

In WishList, I can add all the things that I would like to have. Maybe I want to have noise canceling headphones from Bose. I can add it to my list.

My friends and family can join my wish list. They can organize their presents on my WishList-site. A present may be expensive. Many people can share the price, and make the gift together.

It's a tragedy that we buy so many things that we don't use. Every item gets manufactured. Every item needs natural resources. And so many items will never be used.

WishList will make your friends and family happier, because they will only receive things that they truly want and enjoy. WishList will make the economy more sustainable, because we will reduce waste.

Further Ideas:

• OrgDashboard: An intranet for companies and organisations with dashboards and other content to foster effective internal communication.
• Random Chords Training for musical instruments, e.g. guitar
• terminal app similar to jupyter notebooks. Feels like editing a markdown file, avoids the clumsy data structure on disk with the json (i.e. lightweight), and is open to all programming environments, natively.
• InteractiveJQ: JQ is a great tool to manipulate json files in your terminal. There are already great tools that enable you to interactively run jq queries, and I would like to build something even better.
• Open source booking platform for non profit orgs, e.g. for retreat centers to organize food and beverages and bed and breakfast etc.
• clipboard stash: sometimes we copy and paste the same line of text over and over again. why not assign keyboard shortcuts to a clipboard?
• Content Calendar: Plan your content, and have it deployed automatically
• Personal Kanban: Something in between Notion and Trello, but optimised for todo planning