We recommend to our students at Launch Academy (www.launchacademy.com) that they produce something they’re passionate about.
For some, it’s a nagging problem that they’ve wanted to solve for themselves. Examples from our current cohort include a distraction tracking application and a a responsively designed flash card app that helps you study, For others, it’s around a hobby or something that came up among friends. Someone in our current class is building a restroom finder app for their sister because of a particularly challenging time they had in Maine one weekend :-). For many others, apps originate as startup ideas or to satiate a need they had at their previous job. One student is building a really cool app that puts patients on a stand by list for doctors if there are cancellations.
The common denominator in all of the projects is that there is a story to tell where they’ve found a pain and built an application as a means to heal it. We find it creates a great dialog during the interview process that way.
Our students (Launchers) get particularly hung up if the idea has already been done. Remember the goal: it’s to showcase your coding abilities. Don’t get it confused with building an MVP that you can raise funding for. It doesn’t have to be a revolutionary idea - it just has to provide a challenging opportunity for you to show what you can do.
We call it a “breakable toy” because we aim for it to show a path of development and improvement. Having an interest in the domain is critical, because it encourages you to keep surmounting the technical challenges.