Creating an Idea Factory from one of my ideas from long ago.
Every year I run a challenge with friends in October. The goal is to create a new idea every day. After many years I had many fun idea “fragments” that were amusing and fun to talk about.
So for this spike I decided to showcase them. It turned out to be my favorite so far because it grew into something bigger than I expected. In just three days, I ended up building a fully functional idea management platform… and resurrecting a book I wrote years ago.
I created an idea factory and you can visit it at The Idea Is Website
Spike 7 was an absolute adventure.
Twelve years ago I wrote a book about how to turn ideas into companies. It was a system for taking a spark of a thought and growing it through stages: fragments → ideas → projects → companies.
For years that book just sat there. But during this spike, something unexpected happened—I rediscovered it. And I realized the spike I was building was actually the system from the book, just waiting to be brought to life.
Taking everything I know now—Jira Product Discovery, modern product management, ideation frameworks, company formation models—I started building theideais.com, the platform I originally imagined more than a decade ago.
And using the bot army, I was able to pull all the pieces together and give it form.
Fragments → Ideas → Projects
A full idea lifecycle, finally made real.
The system is built around the idea that creativity has stages:
- Fragments – tiny sparks, half-formed concepts, “terrible ideas” that might become great with time.
- Ideas – promoted fragments that gain structure, discussion, and history.
- Projects – the beginning of real-world execution, complete with contributors and work allocation.
I imported more than 350 fragments from years of challenges. You can scroll them, vote on them, comment, search, or run them through the “hot-or-not” style Fragment Matchup tool, where two random fragments battle and you pick the better one. No, those are not AI generated. I came up with them as I ran into problems and situations.
Once a fragment becomes promising, it can be promoted to an idea. Ideas have discussion threads, revision history, and the ability to spawn real projects.
And projects? They come with collaborators, contribution tracking, point-based slice allocation (using either my method or my friend Shane’s), and a clear way to grow something from playful thought into a miniature company.
It’s the same concepts I wrote about in the book, but now you can see how this factory would work.
Built in Three Days (with a decade of thinking behind it)
This spike pushed me harder than any so far.
I stitched together multiple products and infrastructure, deployed to Google Cloud, and at one point hoped Gemini would just take the whole deployment off my hands. It didn’t—but it did help steer me every time I hit a wall.
The end result is something I didn’t plan… yet something I’ve been building toward unconsciously for over a decade.
Why I Built It
I love ideas, I have found that they are the catalyst that communities need to rally around. I find them playful and amusing and help everyone see things differently. I wanted a place to showcase these fragments so they just might go on living their best life in someone elses business plan or product catalog.
Beyond that I want to build some of these with friends and see if I can still turn out more companies. So now I have a way to organize this.
Idea Growth (and theideais.com) gives ideas a home and a runway.
If anyone else wants to run one of these just reach out to me.