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Comment by icey | Hacker News Reader

Would people who can't find startup ideas be interested in paying for a service that provides a stream of ideas along with basic market research?

I don't know what the exact mechanism would be (subscription of some sort most likely, with an additional "Pay to remove this idea from all the listings" fee).

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It would depend on the quality of the ideas. If you could list ideas with clear potential and which you backed up by research that might be something, especially if you did preliminary market validation by speaking with potential customers. I'd probably even pay for it. I'm an entrepreneur (and have a growing list of ideas), but there are things I'll never think of because I'm simply unaware the problem exists. For example, I often see semi-trucks for grocery stores or supplying other retail businesses and I wonder if the Internet can make some process in that system more efficient. I'm pretty sure there is, but I have no idea where a pain point might be because I've never been on the inside of that process. That's just one example, but there are tons of internal business processes that I'm simply unaware of because I'm not exposed to them. As a result most of my ideas are consumer focused which I can relate to, and this is a fun (e.g. facebook, myspace), but crowded and fickle market segment for Internet startups. Going after b2b is less sexy, but can be quite profitable, and in some cases I think easier to implement and gain traction.

Considering how much people overvalue ideas, that is one fine business idea :-)

No. I think ideas are a dime a dozen. I used to have a huge list of ideas, they are worth nothing because they never saw the day of light.

I have gone a little step further and actually implemented them. Then no one came.

My new pet is heavily quantitatively researched. Had my first 5 users before I even mocked it up. I just sent them something I made in mockingbird for their review, and they don't seem to be involved in software development (they're all academics/artists and are giddy about the experience :-)

I'm always surprised by people who can't think of an idea to work on. My problem is I start on one and then get distracted by the next one too soon. I've got a jar of post-its with ideas of varying strength.

Maybe these people don't count the silly ideas they get, which they have no way to solve, or would not actually produce money, or are impossible.

Fair point, but I suspect the "Need an idea"-types (to generalise) are looking for anything that might have a faint hope of success. If you have the judgement/sense to discount ideas for the reasons you listed, I doubt you're on HN begging for ideas.

People have been buying established businesses and improving them and profiting for a very long time, so whilst the "entrepreneurial spirit" doesn't sort of feel right with buying ideas, it is certainly a viable idea.

Delivering a basic upvoting type system for ideas would probably be interesting to a lot of people. Getting good ideas out of people (especially for free) could be difficult, and finding a way of getting only positive feedback (comments etc) on ideas also difficult (working on the assumption that you want ideas from the public rather than just from an internal team), but solving difficult problems is what it is all about!

I've passed on a lot of ideas that I have had because I don't believe they could make enough money to be viable for me (I live in an expensive country etc) but having an income of a couple of grand a month might appeal to a lot of people in other situations and those ideas could be useful for them.

I'm inclined to believe that the ability to identify an opportunity is a necessary hurdle. If someone can't get that far on their own, it's not very likely that they'll will have the drive to pursue the idea very far.

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