Idaho Think Tank

A new social platform for sharing ideas and finding out how much they're worth.

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Inspiration

I really value "ideas" and "feedback," and that's what this app is all about.

This app is also about thinking differently and being creative. For example, this competition was geared towards creating a solution that would promote only one of Idaho’s three main industries: Agriculture, Healthcare, or Tourism, but my focus turned into creating an app with the potential to boost Idaho’s economy across all three.

What it does

Idaho Think Tank is a new social platform for sharing ideas. Following the focus of this competition, users can create, share, vote, and comment on ideas under the three given categories: Idaho Agriculture, Idaho Healthcare, and Idaho Tourism. If people work together and connect for "social brainstorming", we're going to improve our state and solve our problems much quicker.

It also introduces what I call "Social Pricing", where we leverage the wisdom of the crowd to arrive at a more accurate price point for a given product or idea.

Ultimately, besides the social aspect and the appeal of getting views and ranking for content, the main goal, in a sense, is to turn ideas into money. It's one thing to have a good idea, but when you have a good idea with a number tied to it representing it's value and backed by a large sampling of people, decisions are going to be made much faster.

How I built it

I wanted to do something mobile, but I worried about tying myself to only one platform (android or iOS). However, I was fortunate to come across the Ionic Framework in school, which allows you to build cross platform mobile apps with just one code base. I was hooked almost immediately. I was even able to leverage a few web views I had made previously from a class with a similar project.

Since Ionic is such a young framework, I certainly ran up against it's bugs and limitations, but I'm positive I would not have been able to complete two fully functional mobile apps on android and iOS, along with a backend, in this span of time, had I gone the native route. That being said, due to time and cost constraints, the app is currently only deployed to the android app store and not iOS.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenges I faced dealt mostly with time constraints and feature creep. The more I got into the app, the more features I wanted to implement, but I had less and less time to do it in.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This is the biggest project I've ever built all on my own. It was daunting at times, especially being a new developer, but over the last few months I just kept chipping away at it, feature by feature, and It's been really exciting to see most of it come together.

What's next for Idaho Think Tank

Take over the world? No, first things first. We’re going to focus on features. Lots of features. The trick up our sleeve is also our direct connection to our users. What other platform has a feedback channel built into itself? Our users are ultimately going to be the ones that decide what Idaho Think Tank will become.

And for starters, there's a handful of features we know need to get done:

  • Nested comments.
  • Email notifications and updates when there is activity with your ideas.
  • iOS release.
  • Private Ideas - It'd be easy to leverage the idea model and set-up a private idea repo/to-do list.
  • Build up the user profiles and add things like the ability to "follow"/"friend" other users.
  • Hosting images.
  • Finalize sponsored ideas or nail down our profit model.
  • Leaderboards and Rankings.
  • Social login integration and ability to share on social networks.
  • Improve analytics on Idea Statistics view.
  • SO much more...

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