Expand Any Idea into 10 Creative Directions

What it does

Takes a single idea and generates 10 meaningfully different variations by applying specific creative lenses. Unlike “give me 10 ideas” (which produces 10 bland variations of the same thing), this prompt forces each variation through a different thinking mode — inversion, constraint, analogy, scale shift, etc.

The Prompt

I have a seed idea. Generate 10 creative variations, each using a DIFFERENT thinking lens.

Seed idea: [YOUR IDEA — can be a product, article, project, campaign, anything]

For each variation, use one of these lenses (use each exactly once):
1. INVERSION: What if you did the opposite?
2. CONSTRAINT: What if you had to do it with 1/10th the resources?
3. ANALOGY: What does this look like in a completely different domain?
4. SCALE UP: What if this needed to serve 1000x more people?
5. SCALE DOWN: What if this was for exactly one person?
6. TIME SHIFT: What would this look like in 10 years? Or 100 years ago?
7. COMBINE: Merge this with something seemingly unrelated
8. SUBTRACT: Remove the most "obvious" component — what's left?
9. AUDIENCE FLIP: Design this for the people who would hate the original
10. EMOTION: What if the primary goal was to make someone feel a specific emotion?

Format for each:
**[Lens name]:** [1-2 sentence variation] — [Why this is interesting or worth exploring]

After all 10, mark the 2-3 that have the most genuine potential and explain why.

Usage Notes

• The “mark the top 2-3” step at the end is critical. Without it, you get a flat list. With it, the AI evaluates its own output and surfaces the genuinely promising directions.
• The lens framework works for any creative domain: product features, marketing campaigns, article angles, event formats, business models.
• If you already know which direction you want to explore, skip this prompt. It’s designed for the “I have a kernel but don’t know where to take it” phase.
• For deeper exploration of the top picks, follow up with: “Take variation #[N] and flesh it out into a full concept with target audience, key differentiator, and first three steps to build it.”