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Comment by kintamanimatt | Hacker News Reader

Having skimmed through the summaries, the general trend is they're trying to solve a non-existent problem, or a problem that isn't painful enough that people would be willing to pay to solve. I mean, who wants to pay for their Facebook statuses to be backed up? They're about as valuable as old voicemails and the threat of loss isn't palpable.

There's a lesson to be learned in all of this: don't think about ways to make money, but think about painful problems that you can solve for someone, and figure out whether a viable business can be created with that idea.

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Maybe a "painful problems" spreadsheet would be more appropriate.

This reminds me of something Paul Graham called "sitcom startup ideas" in a recent post.

I highly support something like that. At some point I even wanted to create a listing website where people can submit "pain points" for others to solve. A "Pain Point Directory".

I'm not necessarily sure why anybody in their right mind would create such a thing and share it! Ideas are less valuable than execution, but ideas are valuable nonetheless!

People should really be solving their own painful problems anyway (always better to be your own customer!) whose solutions can in some way be successfully and profitably exchanged for money.

Some exercises work better collaboratively.

> I'm not necessarily sure why anybody in their right mind would create such a thing and share it!

Best startup ideas are about solving real problems. Some people care about problems getting solved, whether or not they are the ones doing the solving. Keep in mind that no one has enough time to try and solve all the problems at once. So if you see something wrong that needs to be fixed, and you don't have time to do it yourself (because you're busy fixing something else), why not just share it with people, so that someone else might work on it, thus helping to make our world a better place?

That's reasonable however I've always been of the opinion that it's better to solve a problem when you have the problem and are feeling the pain, rather than implementing someone's idea in the abstract. It always seems that the people who are really solving their own painful problems capture a market.

Maybe other people are better at implementing someone else's idea than me and I'm just viewing the world through Matt-colored glasses.

conspiracy theory

What if this is the writers of that new Silicon Valley comedy show soliciting ideas for their characters w/o having to pay writers!?

If they are not behind it, we should still send them this link. They could certainly make use of some of those ideas, maybe with a little bit of twist here and there to make them more comic. I doubt writers could get better startup ideas than actual SV people and SV-wannabies :).

In the original thread I made the joke that they don't really need writers, just a bot that reads popular HN blogspam all day.

Sad thing is it's true.

C'mon now, this is just a pool of ideas, no need to draw lessons here and put down all the ideas. I think it's a cool initiative regardless of their quality.

I didn't put down all the ideas, and in fact one of them I'm working on in a different form! (I'm not putting too much stock in it though; it's more to scratch my own itch than anything else.)

I made a broad and sweeping generalization that they're not especially high quality ideas. I honestly don't believe the market is really there for a lot of them, nor that they can be turned into decent businesses even if there is a market due to monetization issues. (Yes, I know, actually charging people's credit cards isn't as appealing as a sexy exit strategy.)

In any event, shouldn't we draw lessons wherever we can, regardless of the situation? After all, I'd rather look at a list like this and have it reinforce the tenets of a good business model. It's easy to get caught up in the "what-can-I-do-to-make-money" trap, rather than create something that delivers massive value to people with credit cards and painful problems.

Which one are you "working on in a different form"? :)

I'll make sure to have a Show HN post when it's ready! :-)

I agree, most of the ideas listed either already exist in some shape, or have no market at all. One issue is not just identifying problems one has, but identifying problems a large group of people have AND that they're willing to pay money for the solution.

The secret behind a great idea is actually the hours of research that go with it. You need to research the market very thoroughly, your costs and such and then suddenly it's an idea that's viable. Of course then comes the execution. But a an idea is not just good because it sounds good.

I think this table is missing some important columns. Consider adding these: - market size (in $) - time and cost for acquiring a customer - margin per customer ($ range)

I used to pay for services to backup my FB status & tweets - Backupify and TweetSaver. There was a market, once! But now FB lets you download your updates for free, and TweetNest lets you archive your tweets for free.

Sometimes the problem isn't identifying the pain point, but identifying the competitors that are already solving it.

I'm really curious: why would you pay to back up ephemeral thoughts? Did you plan on re-reading them, or did they hold some other kind of value?

The thoughts I posted to Facebook, and the tweets I tweeted were fairly low-value content. I deactivated my FB account and stopped tweeting from my personal twitter account; if I never saw those tweets or status updates again I don't think I'd be worse off.

People with kids usually post a significant amount of anecdotes, observations and photos about their kids. I can totally see that people could pay to get these backed up, formatted nicely and provided as a separate web service, a slideshow or a physical book that they could give to their kids later.

> They're about as valuable as old voicemails and the threat of loss isn't palpable.

The value of old voicemails goes way up when the people that made them are no longer around.

There are always the exceptions and I have voicemails, photos, emails, IMs, etc from people who are no longer around. If I lost those things (and indeed I have), I still have the memory of that person and that's far stronger and more meaningful.

Everyone's different though. Perhaps there is a market for automated "life" backups but I'm not part of that market.

eye of the beholder.

These actually seem pretty good to me. Obviously none of them contains enough information to tell if its a good idea because not enough of the idea is expressed in this format. But in the context of the format, it seems like a good list.

eg "Basecamp for travel planning" sounds plausible, but it doesn't tell you a huge amount about the service. If this was being taken on by people who know UI and have a interesting take on how travel planning could be simplified, I would not dismiss it.

Well, if you have the time, expertise, and inclination, make me wrong! I love seeing people succeed, even if it means my judgement was wrong (and it often is).

This is something I'm very interested in and would be keen in helping make this come to fruition.

If that's so, make it happen and I look forward to seeing your Show HN post!

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