Brainstorming Session Results

Session Date: 2025-10-04 Facilitator: Mary, Business Analyst 📊 Participant: User

Executive Summary

This document summarizes the results of an interactive brainstorming session for a project tentatively named the "Inspiration Engine." The primary goal of the session was a broad but thorough exploration of the concept, keeping in mind the constraints of a low budget and a small development team.

Using a Progressive Flow of brainstorming techniques, we successfully defined a clear and compelling product vision. The "Inspiration Engine" is conceived as an ultra-focused, private, and free tool for individual creatives. It will serve as a unified library for all saved creative assets (images, videos, music), leveraging powerful AI-driven search to make rediscovery intuitive and fast.

Key themes that emerged were an uncompromising commitment to user privacy and data ownership, the importance of a quick and simple user experience, a powerful AI-driven intelligence layer, and a freemium business model that supports the free core service with paid plans for teams and API access.

Technique Sessions

Our session followed a four-phase progressive flow:

1. Warm-up: Question Storming

We began by generating questions to explore the problem space. This phase helped establish key principles by turning initial answers into probing questions, such as:

How can the UI be designed to amplify a feeling of nostalgic rediscovery?
How do we balance a "retro" aesthetic with a fast, modern user experience?
What are the primary technical and privacy hurdles in connecting to multiple third-party APIs?

2. Divergent Phase: "What If" Scenarios

This phase stretched the concept to define its boundaries.

Insight 1: Exploring a "Teams/Agency" use case solidified the strategic decision to reject scope creep and focus exclusively on the individual creative for the core product.
Insight 2: Exploring a "100% private, zero social features" scenario confirmed this was a foundational pillar of the product's identity, leading to the principle of full user control and data portability.

3. Convergent Phase: Mind Mapping

We organized the validated ideas into a structured mind map with four key branches:

Core Philosophy: 100% private, full data portability, user-centric.
Key Features: App connectors (MCP), integrated LLM (search/generation), automatic semantic search.
User Experience & Aesthetic: Quick, simple, minimal, timeless/retro-class feel, max-three-clicks rule.
Business Model: Freemium core service, paid plans for Teams, paid API access.

4. Synthesis Phase: SCAMPER

We used the "Substitute" prompt to innovate on the completed concept.

Idea Generated: Substituting a visual-first interface with a "voice mode," where a user could speak an idea and have a relevant mood board instantly generated from their library.

Idea Categorization

Immediate Opportunities (MVP Focus)

Core Feature Set: A semantic search system for a user's private library, with initial connectors for major platforms (e.g., Instagram, TikTok).
User Experience: Develop the UI based on the "quick, simple, minimal" principle and the defined "retro-class" aesthetic.
Privacy: Implement the architecture with user-specific vector stores and a clear process for data export and account deletion.

Future Innovations (Post-MVP)

Monetization 1: Develop and release the "Teams/Enterprise" plan with collaborative features and advanced connectors.
Monetization 2: Build and document a paid API for developers and generative models to access curated styles from user libraries (with explicit user permission).

Moonshots (Ambitious Concepts)

Voice-to-Moodboard: Design and develop the voice-driven interface for generating mood boards from spoken concepts, positioning it as a key differentiator.

Action Planning

Top 3 Priority Ideas

Define MVP Scope: Solidify the minimum feature set required to deliver the core value proposition to the individual creative user.
Formalize a Project Brief: Use this document as the source of truth to create a detailed Project Brief, which will guide development.
Technical Feasibility Study: Begin research on the primary technical hurdle identified: the reliability and terms of service for connecting to the APIs of target platforms.

Next Steps

The immediate next step is to review this document and, when ready, begin the process of creating a formal Project Brief.

Reflection & Follow-up

What Worked Well: The Progressive Flow was highly effective, allowing us to build from a broad concept into a focused, consistent, and well-defined product vision.
Areas for Further Exploration: The potential tension between a "100% private" philosophy and "effortless, account-less sharing" will need to be carefully resolved during the detailed design phase.
Recommended Follow-up: Proceed with the create-project-brief task to translate this strategic vision into an actionable development plan.

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