GoDaddy's New App Will Help You Evaluate Your Business Ideas

Starting a new business is tough. And we're not just talking about all the legal and accounting requirements you have to deal with, and the forms, and all the extra paperwork, and hassle, et cetera. To start a business, you have to have an idea. And while ideas are easy to come by, ideas that translate into a new, successful business model can be a bit trickier.

If you're a budding entrepreneur, why not ask for a little help?

GoDaddy -- yes, the domain name registration company -- has officially launched a new app for iOS (now) and Android (soon) that's meant to take a bit of the guesswork out of idea generation, assuming that those taking part give their honest, candid feedback about any business ideas you have. Enter, Flare.

"Everyone has ideas, but too often they don't go anywhere. We created Flare because we recognized the need for a community where people can get impartial feedback on ideas and connect with others to help them turn those ideas into something meaningful. Whether you've just had a fleeting thought and want to explore where you might be able to take it, or you've been dreaming of creating your own business your whole life, Flare is the first place to go for someone who wants to take the next step," said Rene Reinsberg, GoDaddy's vice president of emerging products, in an interview with VentureBeat.

Thankfully, GoDaddy is doing a bit to help keep users from having to rate and review hundreds of thousands of crazy business ideas at once. When you load the app, you're given three ideas to look at. That's it. And, to borrow a page from Tinder, you swipe left on an idea to banish it from your screen and swipe right on the ideas that you like (either personally, or ideas you think have the potential to actually make it as real businesses).

Each Flare user can submit one idea per day -- so, no, flooding the app with all of your ideas all the time isn't going to work. And if people don't really care about your idea and it earns less than ten followers (right-swipes) in a 24-hour period, then it's automatically deleted from Flare. If it has a little interest, though, then you can query more people to help you nail down some details.

"Once your idea is popular, you can ask quick yes/no questions to decide where you want to take your idea. Ask as many questions, as often as you'd like. Think about questions that you would need answered before you decide to invest a lot of time and energy into an idea and ask your followers these questions. Remember, these are people who love your idea and want to help you bring it to life. Make use of their help," GoDaddy notes.

Watch out, though. What you share on Flare is fair game for others to steal debut on their own, if you haven't done any legal legwork prior to sharing sensitive or detailed information on the service.

"In some cases, you may want to consider not sharing some technical details right away or filing a provisional patent to secure patent-pending status. Even then two ideas may sound very similar or start out with a similar purpose, but their paths can diverge significantly as they grow and become very different. In most cases, you -- the entrepreneur -- are the secret sauce to making an idea successful," GoDaddy cautions.