Build in Public: Ensembl #2 - Coming Up with the Idea.
Hello, hello!
My brain actually has no issue coming up with business ideas; it's getting started that's the problem.
I get stuck finding the PERFECT idea. Worrying about things not working out, spending money on something that doesn’t return anything, or wasting my time on something that won’t pay off, I start none of them.
So what’s special about Ensembl that I’ve started? Is this a perfect idea? Is this the next unicorn business? Do I know this will pay off?
There are a few reasons I have decided to run with this project, which I may visit in another post, but the main one is how I came up with the idea in the first place.
There is an idea that floats around in the Indie Hackers world of ‘solving your own problem’ and that’s exactly what I am doing. This idea came to me one evening when my fiancée and I were trying to find a recipe she had found on Instagram. It was a reel video for chicken curry and we couldn’t remember if she had saved it or shared it. We spent ages scouring socials and messaging apps before we finally found it.
This wasn’t the first time it had happened; before going on holiday, we searched for things to do in Venice and sent each other posts we had found, excited about our upcoming trip. However, when we landed in Venice, we wanted to find those posts again, and they were buried in messages in multiple messaging apps and scattered across our socials. Annoying.
I had a thought about what social media is now. With the introduction of short-form content, they have become huge information distributors. People share useful information such as:
Chicken curry recipes on Instagram
Vacation plans on TikTok
DIY tutorials on YouTube Shorts
Things I want to buy on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook
Tutorials on LinkedIn
The list is endless.
This is what YouTube has done for years in long-form format, but with the introduction of TikTok, people want quick, easy answers in a short video or post. Socials are much more than feeds of your friends' holiday pictures now; they are becoming the new search engines.
Maybe replacing search engines is a stretch, but they hold all this valuable information in an easy-to-understand format. When my fiancée and I were going to Venice, not once did we Google what to do there; we only used TikTok. A trend is definitely emerging.
Back in sunny England that evening, my follow-up thought was ‘what an interesting thought, but I still can’t find this f**king chicken curry’. My OCD and engineering brain kicked in, and I thought about how this content can be organised so that it’s useful.
All socials offer you the option to save content in collections, which is nice, but I use all social media. All socials allow you to share content outside the app, but I use all messaging apps, and this useful content I find is getting lost or unorganised, stopping me from recovering it when I need it.
What if there was a single space to store this useful content I find so I can return here and find it easily? I can also share this with my fiancée so we can collect recipes and travel plans together.
Enter Ensembl...
I came up with the idea one evening, solving my own problem: How can I organise my saved and shared content across socials so that I can utilise it?
If you share my pain and want to solve this problem for yourself, you can join the waiting list below, where you will get exclusive access and updates. Just click here and enter your email at the newsletter.
Thanks for reading.
Jordan.
