By now you have heard of the Hackathon happening at the QuickBooks Connect conference and we hope you are planning to be there, competing along with lots of other developers and teams to build a QuickBooks Online integration that not only gets you a chance to win a share of the $100,000 prize pool, but will also get the winners exposed to the entire QuickBooks Connect conference audience. Have you registered yet?
So you’re coming, or thinking of coming, but aren’t sure yet what to build? Here are just a few ideas to plant some seeds and get your creative juices flowing.
1) Niche Offering – One of my favorite apps is powerpetsitter.com. A whole business built around helping pet-sitting companies manage their clients and accounts while on the go. Can you think of a small niche “industry” that does not have a solution specific for them? How about a small café solution? (I mainly ask because my sister owns a small café.)
2) Do Customer Research – Reach out to a couple accountants and ask them what kind of tool they would love to help them run their practice. Stop by your local small business and ask the owners what apps they wish they had to ease the business of running a business. Then build it.
3) Non-Profits – There are some QBO apps focused on non-profit organizations, but there’s room for plenty more. Take a look at this page and check out all the non-profit solutions that work on desktop. Use these for inspiration to solve problems for non-profits that use QuickBooks Online.
4) Move to the Cloud – I hate to say it, but there are still many apps that exist for desktop that aren’t available for QuickBooks Online customers. These are gaps that you can fill! Just looking through this page can give you some inspiration for apps you can build to fill a gap in the QBO ecosystem.
5) Point Of Sale Integration – There are a lot of POS solutions out there but not all of them integrate with QuickBooks Online. Can you find a POS with an open API, or reach out to partner with them? If you can, then this might be an interesting opportunity for you.
6) Customer Social Tool – QuickBooks Online customers like the customer management features inside of QBO. Can you come up with a tool to help small businesses manage their customer base through social media? How about a tool that pulls in tweets or posts and loads the info into QBO for future reference? Or maybe a syncing tool that will join social accounts with existing customer information?
Have another idea? Add your comments, questions, and suggestions below, or tweet us at @ippdev.
See you in San Jose on Oct. 20! Happy hacking!
Disclaimer: If you implement any of these ideas during the hackathon, it will not give you an advantage in winning the prizes. See full contest rules here.
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