I've told a few of you about the idea I'm working on these days and gotten some great feedback. I'm not willing to talk about the idea here, mostly because I don't want someone else to pick it up and run with it.

I think the broad idea is good but the implementation ideas I've come up with so far are too complicated. All of the great websites out there are great because they are simple. Complicated is not only bad, it's not even worth attempting.

So I'm stimulating my creative juices, I'm elaborating on a domain model, I'm going sky high and into the fine details. All of these views are giving me different perspectives on the same problem. In turn they also give me ideas about how to simplify the implementation.

Being creative is actually hard work, especially with just one person. That's why I try to bounce my ideas off of as many friends and family members as I can. A different perspective for brainstorming is invaluable.

As for my own creativity, I've found that it's much easier to be creative when I start with a blank mind. For example, I might take a walk around Dow's Lake, which takes about an hour. For about the first half of the walk I don't think about anything. Around the middle I start thinking about a tough problem I was confronted with and the ideas seem to flow much more easily.

I'm also trying to figure out what my users want. Oh, what folly. How can I possibly guess what my users will want? I think I can get about 25% of it right, mostly because I'd be a user myself. The end-user problems I'm having are probably going to be similar to problems that other people are having.

That's good enough for the first few iterations until deployment -- bootstrapping. The real power will be taking feedback from users -- their creativity and ideas -- and organizing and prioritizing the feedback for future iterations. The creativity becomes a collective thing instead of a singular thing and the project rides the feedback wave.