Business ideas: proving ideas are a dime a dosen
sixmonthmba.com
sixmonthmba.com
If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Frog
Retarded ideas make money too.
Twitter has little or no technical reason to be so limited, of course, but doesn't want to alienate the tldr crowd.
There is actually a town in china where the entire village makes their money painting caricatures of monkeys. Not saying it's a good career move, but at least that's the context for where the idea came from.
Interesting enough, the majority of the world's oil paintings come from this one tiny village with 5,000 painters who spend all day slavishly copying the same templates over and over:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiamen
You can find all their stuff on ebay and alibaba.
So I wouldn't call Xiamen itself a village, but you may be referring to a small village nearby.
Conversely, people who believe ideas are a dime a dozen tend to focus on shallow ideas. The lack of deep interaction with technology (and whatever a pivot is supposed to be) forces you into businesses with a more social rather than technical role: web design, blogging, social networks, etc. I don't see much of HN's advice working well for a company developing asynchronous CPU chipsets. In theory they should be the same; the advent of fabless semiconductor shops and hardware synthesis languages lets someone design chips in their garage in Iowa, but the depth of technical knowledge required makes it a much different game than starting up "a distributed Facebook" or "a Foursquare but for X."
But testing/evaluating an idea can be easier than full blown execution. and you can use it to estimate how likely your idea would succeed.
And at this point your idea has some value.
None of them is great, but the point is that every one of 'em (well, all the ones I've read) could be, if executed correctly, a perfectly viable business. Picking out a few at random:
Presentation Consulting - Teach companies how to improve their presentations
That's not a bad idea. Is somebody already doing it? Possibly, but that doesn't mean you can't do it too.
Online flower shop with one-hour delivery
Sounds tricky, and you'd need to restrict it to a couple of major and dense cities, but again there's no reason it's not a viable business. Market it correctly by encouraging men to send their ladies flowers spontaneously, and you could surely make some money.
Build Your Own Back Pack Shop
Damn you, random numbers! I don't much like this idea, but there's gotta be somebody out there (schoolkids, I guess) who would love to build customized backpacks for themselves. Great idea? No. World changing? No. Profitable if you get the product and the marketing right? Sure!
Famous, because they made Al Gores Climate Change presentation.
Timbuk2 have a successful business offering customised messenger bags.
http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/68-free-bus...
The point of the exercise is that most people think of five or ten ideas, and then go with the first decent idea they come up with. But if you actually force yourself to come up with 100+ ideas then it's more likely that your idea will legitimately be a good idea. Which is important since the first .1% of the work you do on the project has a large influence on whether the next 99.9% will make you either millions or zero.
Fred Wilson also recently said that he would use one of the 999 if someone made it, in case that means anything to those perusing the list.
may as well have suggested an lunar-orbiting space platform that launches rockets to mars...
This story might prove that ideas are a dime a dozen, but one can argue that good ideas are not.
Could happen, in today's angel investment climate...
Most of them seem to be a solution to really mundane everyday consumer quirks. None of them attempts to use basic human needs such as need for communication and approval. Its just "somebody could do my laundry" and "somebody could write something on a website".
32% beer at £35 a bottle:
Funny: #120 A travel company that arranges people to stay at others houses.
Not ideas like "I want to create a backup tool" but rather ideas like "I want to create a backup tool that allow the user to simply drag and drop the files they want backed up into a folder on their machine". In other words ideas that are followed by an insight.
When people walk around saying ideas are a dime a dosen and execution is everything they forget that execution in itself is empty. You need to execute on something and that something is ideas.
Ah dang, I was just about to re-invent the microwave too!
Methinks the idea was something crockpot/rice-cookerish which you dump all the stuff into at once, say into different sections of the cooker, and it ensures everything finishes cooking at the same time even though everything cooks at different rates. Lower/higher temps for some things, delayed start for others...
Otherwise you're talking about charities.
What exactly is that? I'm scared.
They are reasonably popular on a small scale.