Tell HN: I'm building a startup aboard the Startup Bus en route to SXSW | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I'm building a startup aboard the Startup Bus en route to SXSW

22 pointsnewy11 comments

I'm aboard @thestartupbus along with 24 other coders, designers and bizdev folks who are building startup projects to launch at SXSW. We began the trek 36 hours ago at the Vast.com offices in SF and are currently somewhere in southeast AZ (or maybe TX).

Me (@euwyn) and @shiftb are building Pairwise (@pairwiseinc), a Foursquare for business networking at SXSW and other conferences. Other great projects are being built as we speak. BeNeighbor.ly matches people with others that are willing to help. Dormdorm is AirBNB for university summer housing. Datebrowsr aggregates data from online dating sites. Stalkbox aggregates information from Foursquare, Gowalla et al. Txtli is a "Twitter for Cars".

A full description of our projects can be found at the following link, as well as a game that lets you virtually "invest" in the most promising ideas. http://game.thestartupbus.com/i/2d8a97d

You can find our homepage with a live map of the bus and live video updates http://thestartupbus.com

Feel free to send along tweets of encouragement to @thestartupbus and come find us at SxSW!

Bus full of conference-bound nerds working on a dating site.

This is why HN culture is impossible to parody.

> southeast AZ (or maybe TX).

New Mexico is that forgettable, eh?

So you guys have built this thing?

http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/06.html

The future. It's finally here.

Just make sure you don't get on this bus by mistake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_&_Teller%27s_Smoke_and... :)

These ideas are cute and fun.

Cute and fun does not a business make.

If cute and fun made a business, kittens would be rich.

Kittens are not rich.

Ergo, these are not "startups."

Isn't the lolcats guy rich?

They're not kittens, they're kitten pimps. Subtle but important distinction.

Also, I don't think they're "Google Bought Me Out And Then Killed My Project!" rich.

Also, they were as surprised about it as anyone else.

Still, I don't think cute and fun is such a bad combo for business. Hello Kitty, Harry Potter, Cabbage Patch Kids, the Olson Twins, etc. A bus full of nerds working on "stalkbox.com" in the desert seems like the opposite of cute and fun.

There's a difference between "cute and fun" IDEA, and "cute and fun" end result.

"Let's build a startup on a bus!" <-- cute and fun IDEA

"Twitter for cars!" <-- cute and fun IDEA

"Let's have a shop full of disaffected and underemployed designers creating frighteningly adorable characters with no story or purpose other than to merchandise around the world and especially to produce in mass quantities in China!" <-- cute and fun RESULT (not so much the idea)

And don't forget, lolcats were invented on 4chan. The least cute and fun place on the internet.

$4+ million per year revenues for i can has cheezburger network.

But he didn't build it in 48 hours and in a bus..

Though I would love to be proved wrong, I can bet these startups wont exist 3 months from now. Even if they exist, their "founders" will have moved on to another exciting project

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