or just browse complaint sites. There is a company in New Jersey that browses amazon reviews for feature requests and creates those updated products in china and sells them on amazon. They do hundreds of millions a year in sales.
Glad someone could make that work. I tried it with RentACoder a few years ago (scanning the "need a coder" lists for product ideas), but the requests had very little in common besides only wanting to pay bargain-basement prices.
What were the issues you encountered? I know a few people who developed side projects by reading through oDesk and elance jobs. I read them time to time to stimulate brain to come up some relevant features to my own projects.
Definitely you will need to have patience to find ones that catch your fancy. Also no one job going to give you idea, but when you read a lot of them, you start to see patterns and might develop linkage that will make interest project for you.
It was over 5 years ago. There really weren't any issues. I just didn't see any common threads that were interesting. Could very well be the type of projects I looked at.
See my comment below... Here is a quote from the fast company article about them..
"He has an entire team of people who read reviews on Amazon, looking for moments when people say, "I wish this speaker were rechargeable." Pikarski then makes a rechargeable version. "
That is really fascinating. The guy seems to understanding marketing to a level to not try and place his products in retail shelves as people tend to judge based on looks rather than features.
I did spend one Sunday afternoon reading up reviews on apple app store. while there were some pretty interesting ideas, I saw one huge issue - the search on app store is unreliable. One, there could be an app implementing the said "idea" or "feature" but somehow not readily visible. Second, no way to really dig and learn about your competitors. Third, the same search might hurt the app chances.
