Business ideas are out there, in the real world, you won't find them here (generally). Yes, "scratch your own itch", "do what you know", etc. All of those are true, to a point, and there are plenty of smart people here...some of them are even working on businesses that will be a success (or already are). But, if you just ask a bunch of entrepreneurs, investors, and nerds what they want, it's easy to end up working in the very small and competitive field of "things ten other people are working on, and the entire market is measured in hundreds of dollars".
I'm unfortunately not exaggerating. I've met quite a few people at startup mixers and events and such who were working on clones of things that I'd never even heard of. So not only are they working on something where they have established (by some definition of established) competitors, but it's a field that nobody outside of a tiny set of web 2.0 early adopters has ever even heard about, and only a small segment of those even care about it.
And, of course, I would be remiss in my duties as a curmudgeon, and HN old-timer, if I didn't say this: Ideas are worthless.
This is so true...
Is the discussion hurting anyone? No, probably not. As I mentioned most of the folks here are smart and interesting. Talking to smart and interesting people is generally good for you. But, don't imagine that it's the real thing, or that you'll find your business plan via discussion here--it takes research, customer interactions, and a helluva a lot of work, to formulate a viable business plan. And, talking on the Internet has the pernicious ability to make you feel like you're accomplishing something, when in fact, you're not actually doing anything.
And, honestly, I think that a big bunch of talent is currently being wasted on dumb ideas, and I suspect there is some sort of relationship with the kinds of things we reward in the Internet startup world with our validation, our blog posts, etc. That's not to say that executing on dumb ideas is time completely wasted...sometimes it can evolve into something wonderful (flickr from Game Neverending, or whatever it was called, for example). I think a lot of the dumbest ideas come from looking inward too much. "All the current todo lists can't remind me three times at randomized intervals throughout the day about important stuff, and I'm really bad at remembering to do stuff, so I will make a todo list that can totally do that!"
Just be careful how much stock you put in ideas you read on the Internet (including this one).
Your claim is that ideas are worthless. And yet, not all ideas have the same value. If an idea seems good, really good, then people are tempted to spend 2 years of their life pursuing it. Even when the idea is bad for obvious reasons that the founders never thought about. So even if I'm willing to accept that good ideas are worthless, BAD ideas definitely have NEGATIVE worth.
If a YC service can keep people from wasting their time on bad ideas that would be incredibly valuable. The founders are always too close to their own company to see if it's really viable. Either success hits you out of nowhere ("I can't believe people are paying for this!") or you're left quietly wondering what's wrong ("OK - no people are ordering dogfood over the internet yet, but any time now. We just need to increase our marketing budget...").
I'm not sure exactly what you're disagreeing with, but, OK.
If a YC service can keep people from wasting their time on bad ideas that would be incredibly valuable.
Yes, it would be priceless. But I doubt it can do anything of the sort.
The astounding thing is how hard it is for even experts (whatever that means in this context) to decide what's a good idea and what's a bad one. Larry and Sergey heard from an awful lot of smart people that yet another search engine was a bad idea. And, numerous failures heard from a lot of smart people that they were on the verge of something huge, if they'd just keep going six more months.
The founders are always too close to their own company to see if it's really viable.
That's absolutely true. But, you and I are almost certainly too far away. The only people who can really tell you are customers (even if they aren't paying you anything yet--the people you'd like to sell to), and even they're wrong a lot of the time, so you have to get a lot of them so the margin of error shrinks, and when they start giving you money voluntarily (or start telling their friends, if you have an ad-driven site, and traffic starts growing steadily), that's when you know you're on a reasonable path.
I don't see how anything we talk about here can prevent bad ideas or make truly good ones bubble to the top. Certainly, if you find it valuable to bounce early stage ideas off of smart people, it's got merit. But nothing we can do here is a substitute for real users, and unless your target market is "technology entrepreneurs who think Paul Graham is fly", that aint us. And, again, my point was that talking about things on the Internet feels like doing things...but it isn't getting you any closer to your goals.
Both Amazon and Paypal now have micropayment options (5% + $.05). Both have code you can easily copy and paste into a post to add a sell button and both have developer API's. Both are free to implement (no set-up or monthly fees), Amazon has cheap storage and bandwidth and you only pay for what you use. Tumblr and other blog systems are also free. Its time for a digital goods selling revolution!
All this great stuff is out there, but no good interface exists to make it easy for a non-developer to implement it. The current solutions available require monthly fees that usually overcharge you for bandwidth, storage, or transaction costs, or limit you in some way (e-junkie limits the amount of products you can have). And in typical e-commerce fashion they have gawful help desks and incomplete documentation.
One big thing missing is a way to instantly direct your users to a download after they purchase something. I'm a non-technical guy who's looked into it, and believe me, its impossible to do without using a service such as e-junkie. But the parts of the solution are in place to make it happen for everyone.
I think a lot of people out there want less of a website, more of a blog, less of an online store, but more of an easy way to sell digital or physical goods. Think musicians (or musical blogs), photographers, artists (a really great way to sell artwork as you make it). Monthly fees make it prohibitive to sell artwork, because you usually only make one, and there might be some time before you make another, but a blogstore is a great way to do it.
I like Tumblr, because its non-technical yet can be messed with if you really want to dive in. What this problem needs is also a non-technical solution that will allow people to get at the nuts and bolts if they need to.
Anyone want to have a go at it?
1. A credit card or payment method already in the system, OR, a trustworthy vendor;
2. One click ordering or an Ajax style cart where you don't have to load a new webpage for every step of adding things to your cart and checking out.
3. Large product base spanning multiple product offerings but only one central payment center.
Obviously, this theory was postulated by examining by the most successful micropayment vendor out there, Apple. They're really good at it. Think about it: you don't need to enter your credit card information twice;they have one click purchase; they have multiple product offerings, but all payment goes through them. There is only one person who needs to be trusted, them.
I think the one person to trust thing is really the key point. People don't have time to evaluate online vendors for trustworthyness. But if they're already comfortable, it doesn't matter, and $.99 cents becomes no hassle at all to spend.
See here:
http://googlecheckoutapi.blogspot.com/2007/07/introducing-di...
"Now merchants will have option of tagging an item as digital within the shopping cart and specifying details about how it should be delivered. You'll be able inform a buyer that their digital purchase will be delivered via email, or you can provide a set of instructions along with a URL and license key."
Putting a wrapper around this sort of thing is something I think a ton of people would find helpful. Imagine if you could just upload a file, give it a product name, price, etc, and then write your blog post, and when you hit publish its automatically formatted with the buy button, checkout button, sends an email with a download link or directs you to a URL download right after you complete the purchase.Awesome.
Hmmmmm, Tumblr? Are you listening? Just got that VC cash and wondering what to come up with for premium services and ways to monetize? This is something I'd pay for.
I'm predicting that over the next 1-3 years, we're going to start to see a major shift as users move from mouse+keyboard to touch as the primary input to their computing devices. However, today every mainstream website is optimized for the mouse+keyboard.
My idea is to get ahead of the curve and create user experiences for all the major mainstream web verticals (such as Email, social networking, news, search, etc..) that are designed primarily for use with touch. For verticals that have a high switching cost (such as mail and social networking), instead of trying to build from scratch, the focus should be on a front end that pulls from an existing service (i.e. pulls from gmail pop or Facebook connect). Users could choose the verticals that they use on a daily basis, and each service would be available from different tabs. The core UX elements would be consistent across all services, and would be optimized for use with a touch screen.
If anyone's interested in hearing more or maybe hacking out a prototype with me over break, feel free to contact me at kleneway@hotmail
1) keyboards are an incredibly fast way to input human language into a computer system.
2) keyboard/mouse operate on flat surface while your arm is at rest. This makes it easy to use for 8 hours a day.
3) A small movement of a mouse creates a much larger movement on the screen. Yet, because the mouse is flat and at rest, it is easy to control.
4) Mice are far more precise at pointing than touch screens. Although perhaps that's a secret disadvantage, since it encouraged the use of small widgets. A good touch screen would most certainly not be able to use anything like our current UI widgets.
You move the monitor down, and make it very large. Build it into the desk at a slight angle. Your arms rest on the entire surface, so its very comfortable. The entire display and its interface is oversized, sort of like a media center interface. An iPhone like keyboard pops up when you need it, sized exactly like a regular keyboard. But quick keys on either side of the monitor's face can also input commands.
One possible perspective.
Producing an ecosystem where normal 'sheeple' workers can be employed outside of the restraint of big companies is another opportunity. After these mass lay-offs people will see that working for one boss who can fire you is bad and that multiple bosses will produce more stability. These workers and the companies that use them will need sources of information[eg http://freelanceswitch.com/], tools to manage work and workers [basecamp] and ways of communicating with peers and customers[twitter].
Original ideas are combinations of other ideas, but they're ideas combined by humans.
If I were to pull some buzzwords from a single niche (let's say social networking) from a hat, say.. Twitter, music, friends, pictures, e-mail, profiles, voting. I could pull a lot of random ideas from joining some of them together:
- a site that lets you specify the music artists you like, then it finds Twitter users who have mentioned all of those artists.. instant music buddies!
- social profiles oriented around people's e-mail addresses
- random MP3 sent to your e-mail each day as voted for by people on a Web site
- voting on Twitter in elections
- use song mentions on Twitter to establish the most popular songs for certain artists
I won't go on..! These are not really great ideas, but they're not nonsensical either.
You might argue that earlier I mentioned "unconnected" ideas, whereas "Twitter, music, friends, pictures, e-mail, profiles, voting" are from a niche of sorts. True, but when I said "unconnected" I guess I meant more that the ideas are not connected in any practical way, rather than sharing a common element. Random words would probably not cut it :)
Etsy provides a clean, centralized storefront for individual merchants / creators to sell their products -- taking over what used to be the significantly more decentralized and disorganized venues of eBay and Craigslist.
This site would be a similar such venue for people who are trying to sell services. A glance at the Craigslist "services" section shows plenty of people like this -- computer repairmen, graphic designers, programmers, housemaids, accountants, tutors, personal trainers, and many more. Each person would be able to personalize their "storefront" with a list of their services, some copy text and an image gallery, and a section for people to post reviews / testimonials of this person.
I came across http://www.workstir.com recently too, which is a similar concept. But I have to wonder... do either of these sites actually have a business model?
I had some thoughts on how to possibly monetize this sort of traffic, so a couple other web sites in this niche doesn't really discourage me too much if these guys are just rolling on advertising.
And, like you, they have a monetization plan. Something to check out if you haven't done so already. They received quite a lot of useful press coverage outside of the regular tech channels - no doubt that helped them build this level of traffic. Hopefully you have some connections at Martha Stewart Living too :)
Angie's List is interesting -- very high quality, I'm sure, with that "Consumer Reports" style business model. But they also lose a lot of traffic going subscribers-only. No doubt they're rolling in money, but I'm glad to see it's not the same monetization idea I had.
Seeing all these has inspired me to throw together a prototype. I'll post it on HN in a week or two when it's presentable. =)
1) Alumni software which lets universities/companies manage alumni communication and also lets alumni network with each other. A few top-tier unis and companies have in-house stuff for this, but most don't. Facebook/Linked-In just don't work for alumni networking due to trying to be too many things at once.
2) Publisher driven ads service. Current ad systems suck for closed sites (i.e. non-public) or sites which know a lot about the user (dating sites, social networks). Most of the big sites in this category currently solve this by running their own networks but this obviously isn't feasible for many sites. You could probably build this as a CPA ad brokerage service and expand from there.
As for the ads service, I'm not sure if you're talkinga about something like addiply, which is a UK-based attempt at hyperlocal advertising that avoids the Adsense model.
http://www.twadservices.co.uk/cufc/taintro.php
The guy who started it was profiled in this piece in Britain's Guardian newspaper:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2008/dec/04/startups-adv...
I would think you would need some kind of background in advertising and be the kind of person who doesn't mind knocking on a lot of doors to attempt this kind of venture.
Here's their self-description. Sounds like what you're talking about (let me know if I misunderstood):
"We empower both the local/niche publisher and the local/niche advertiser to source and place perfectly-targetted, digital advertising themselves without third party intervention."
I don't see why this would not work even better in the US but it remains to be seen whether Addiply will have any success - it seems like an uphill battle to me.
As for the ad thing I think we're not quite on the same page, I'm talking about a system which gives publisher a bunch of ads which the publisher can then run as they see fit (presumably using their inside knowledge of their users).
Once you've got some kind of skeleton show others. They can see ways of improving and fixing it or try out new approaches themselves. Let those enthusiastic [and sufficiently skilled] about your prototype jump in and help you build a next version.
Choose dictators over committees.