Some Thoughts After Judging for My Dream App
It's been non-stop for me over the past week as we've judged the thousands of entries that came in for My Dream App and picked 24 finalists. Here are my thoughts on them as a whole.
A good 80% were uninspired, infeasible (probably the most common reason for eliminating entries), or already done. 15% were decent but not well fleshed out. We were judging looking at the potential of an idea as well as its current form, but a lot of them just didn't have much beyond the one good idea.
4% or so were very promising, but ultimately didn't make that top 0.9% of finalists due to several reasons. This is the stage where we looked at, is this idea markeable? How big is the potential audience? Is the idea one that can appeal beyond geeks? What are the UI possibilities? This was the toughest part of the judging process, and involved probably dozens of hours over a few days in a group chat with all of the guest judges present. But in the end, we were really happy with the finalists that were chosen.
One of the biggest and most common criticisms of the My Dream App concept was probably the concern that "normal people" wouldn't be able to come up with great ideas. This type of comment was posted as comments at Digg and Slashdot, and even some personal blogs. (Probably by snooty developers feeling maybe just a little bit threatened by the idea of average joes entering software development. )
Well, I think it's safe to say at this point, those concerns have never crossed the fence into the realm of real problems. The ideas are there, the vision is there, and I'm fully confident the winners will be fantastic apps with a tremendous amount owed to the community for choosing and improving them. A pat on the back to all of you who entered.
Make sure to check out the finalists as they are revealed here. (6 down so far, 18 to go.)
Comments
Up until this point, there have been 7 responses to “Some Thoughts After Judging for My Dream App”:
I've been excitedly following MyDreamApp as well and I'm looking forward to seeing how things progress.
I do have to take a bit of exception to your comment that some of them weren't well fleshed out. Just how fleshed out were you expecting in 500, er um 800, characters. My guess is that you relied heavily on the detailed forum postings of the entries you've chosen. That puts the entrants which chose to heed the warning of "your ideas might get stolen if you post to the critique forum" as a distinct disadvantage.
That said, I applaud your efforts and I remain supportive of the concept of MyDreamApp. I just hope this goes well enough to have a MyDreamApp2. 
Peace,
Dean
Phill Ryu
Dean, I'm talking about within the bounds of the character constraint. Many entries did not fill out the space at all, and maybe elaborated on some features but not the whole idea when space could have been used much more wisely. We did not look at the forums to decide on finalists.
Dean-
I'm not an MDA judge, but I am privy to the judging process. I can tell you that the forum posts had virtually no bearing on the judging. The winning ideas were pretty damn well articulated, even in the space of 800 characters.
Given that you have have been exposed to the types of submissions from the general public, perhaps you should post up a page that shows (future submitters) examples of: (uninspired, infeasable), (decent, but not fleshed out), and (promising). So people might be able to revamp their ideas before entering them.
Phil/cmundhe,
First, if I offended you, that was not my intention and I apologize. I just remember the frustration of trying to cram my suggestion into 500/800 chars. I'm (obviously) one of those people that can't get an idea across without a lot of words. In the end, I felt like my entry was written by a caveman: "Ugh, program. Ugh, stuff. Ugh, copy." I understand why the limit was in place though.
Its good to know that the selections were made from the 800 character submissions. The finalists I've looked at definitely deserve to be there, including a couple of my favorites from the forums. I can imagine there were some well thought out entries. I can also imagine there were many that looked like they dropped by the submission page for 5 minutes to take a shot at the MacBook.
I think Binarynomad made an excellent suggestion that I would echo. If there is a MDA2, examples of good and bad submissions would be most helpful. In particular, the submissions of the finalists would prove very instructive, I think.
Peace and Blessings,
Dean
I don't have a link, but I'm looking right now, but I KNOW for 100% sure that I've seen an app just like iStyle for vista.
It was on a preview page for vista with some guy as the narrator.
Travis Bell
September 07th, 2006 at 1:56pmSounds exciting Phill, I am anxious to see the finalist when his/her app is chosen.
The 80% being completely uninspired does not surprise me however. Most people have very little understanding of what it takes to not only make an application, but actually make something that is both marketable and profitable.