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Show HN: Idea Generator That Uses YC as Data

ycremix.com

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Softbank founder Son Masayoshi striked gold with a similar method. He created a set of flash cards, drew 3 cards, and tried to conceive an invention from the withdrawn keywords. Having drawn "dictionary," "electric circuit," and "voice" IIRC, he ended up with an idea for an electronic dictionary that reads up the words. He hired his professor at Berkeley who was knowledgable in speech synthesizing for $50/hr. When the idea was realized as an invention, he filed the patent and sold it to Sharp, a Japanese electronic conglomerate. Having raised approx. $3 mil, he used that money to start Softbank. The rest is history.

Source: Recalling from biography I read years ago

In no way was the clever, difficult or value add part of this the CRC cards - persuading Sharp to buy your patent for 3 million is just one of the things I would like to know how to do :-)

Apparently, his father attending the negotiations helped the yet-inexperienced Son tremendously.

Do you remember which biography? I have a strange feeling I've heard this story before but I also feel I might have dreamt it up.

It's in Japanese, called 「志高く」.

I wrote something like this a while back for creating Enterprise Products. Just take some adjectives, nouns and adverbs, construct a sentence, and then swap out the adjectives, nouns and adverbs at random.

I even added a ISO-<random_number>-001 compliant adjective. It came out with stuff like:

"An isomorphic enterprise ready synergistic content management data platform for the responsive ISO-5438-001 compliant mobile web."

Great fun until I showed it my boss and, genuinely, he started getting ideas.

The first result I got said that for every condom I bought one would be given to a female entrepreneur in a developing country... then I realized that was the description of the actual YC company, not the satirical bit.

I'm really not sure where to go from there.

I like to think that I defer to others when I feel I'm out of my realm of knowledge. But I can't possibly see how that is either (1) effective or (2) not-insulting to the recipient. "Here, you can't be trusted to buy these yourself, have a free one so you can get back to work!"

It's about making condoms available for free to women for whom buying them is a non-trivial expense.

Lol wat? They give condoms to female entrepenuers in developing countries?

I found a combinator blog pot on the company, there's also an Oprah interview.

From the article: "Your condoms are currently in Whole Foods, Target, and CVS, and you’ve garnered tons of positive attention for your one-for-one business model that donates a condom to a female in a developing country for each one sold."

https://blog.ycombinator.com/interview-l-condoms-talia-frenk...

Then we can automate the creation of these products, a/b test in the real world and feed the successes back into the idea generator. Endless automated innovation!

To get these things funded, we'll need to append "using deep learning approaches" to all of the business ideas.

Self-driving nuclear reactors and currated wine deliveries for developing countries. Those are definitely ideas.

I dunno if this is satire but it's pretty great. I for one, am ready to invest in DoorDash for prosthetics and Greenshoe (cash for your every day needs) for commercial banks.

#2 is the Federal Reserve. Good luck disrupting that! (Bitcoin is sure as hell trying though)

Anyone want to join my startup or invest?

"Scentbird for github issues

Scentbird: The thrill of new scents. 30-day supply of any designer fragrance every month"

This is not so bad. A grab bag of bugs for you to fix. You get a random Github issue assigned and need to fix it within a certain time. The ultimate challenge to teach yourself new languages and frameworks. There's a pun with Scentbird/code smell in there somewhere, too.

Stinkbug

Algolia for search

Algolia: Build Realtime Search. A powerful API built for developers, Algolia delivers relevant results in your apps and websites from the first keystroke.

Search for the best search engines.

http://ycremix.com/js/define_data.js

I was going to post this too but feel bad pointing this data dump out since this is a cool web app; it just needs better security :)

Interesting getscale, sanrights and spinalsingularity all have much higher weights than everyone else.

> Interesting getscale, sanrights and spinalsingularity all have much higher weights than everyone else.

Much lower actually. They have e-05, e-06 and e-11 at the end. I think the list is from most successful to least successful YC startups, but unsure why those ones are at the very bottom.

Weights are inversely proportional to the Alexa rank for each startup's website.

IDK how good this is (if it's serious lol):

https://imgur.com/a/iRBZh

Eventually oil workers will be replaced by code.

I feel like I hit gold on my first try here: http://i.imgur.com/C7c3gvO.png

Everyone loves plastic surgery, but how do you organize groups to go and get procedures done?

You mean brosectomies????

https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-a-vasectomy-party-snips-chi...

>It’s a Vasectomy Party! Snips, Chips and Dips With Your Closest Friends

>Pals willing to spend a few thousand dollars are getting together for ‘brosectomies’ at clinics that look more like club lounges; ‘I guess it’s from the alcohol, but we had such a great time’

Wow, the more you know. Never would I have imagined something like this, but here it is.

Lol, thank you for this.

This actually has already been happening for years in places like Florida and apparently Texas now. There are 'parties' for getting your eye bags fixed which of course is at a discount.

http://andersonplastic.com/blog/2016/09/27/botox-parties-a-c...

When I think about it, I'm surprised that there isn't a web app that caters to this already.

Through Diaspora of course.

http://imgur.com/a/szhmi

Optimizely for groups and events. A/B testing in the real world :)

> Grouper for groups and events

...I'm pretty sure that's just normal grouper

EDIT: I can't believe I didn't notice this is satire. This comment stands as a symbol of my ignorance.

Some get recursive :)

Ctzen for primary care

Ctzen: 311 for the developing world.

This is awesome. It's like Mad Libs for the 21st Century!

It does generate some decent ideas, too. PagerDuty for food and farming.

Now we can use it to autatically generate simple landing pages, and then do reinforcement learning with the amount of signups they receive as a reward.

This is brilliant and hilarious.

Back button please?

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