Disruption and My Next Startup... You Help Decide | Hacker News Reader

Disruption and My Next Startup... You Help Decide

jasonlbaptiste.com

45 pointsmarkbao43 comments

I'm loving that woot for dating bit. I think that's a huge winner. Needs to be local though.

It would work better as a "auction" though, like you see at those charity fund-raisers. People apply to be "auctioned" off - submit detailed profiles - one girl one guy every day. People bid. Highest bid wins (make it fixed bids), depending on money raised, site sends them on a free date.

You might need to give the auctioned some influence in picking the bidder, but man what a cash cow.

I would start it in one city. Miami or SF Bay area were my first gut instinct thoughts.

The auction idea was one thought I had, but then it would be dependent upon whoever spent the most, and not the girl's tastes.

That's the thing that might kill it though.

Unless you're talking big money (which you may eventually) you're not likely to find many women/men who are attractive wanting to blind date for a free dinner or whatever.

What you could do actually, is get the person's friends to pick from the top 5, or have bidding levels that you can match to be considered "in", instead of auction style bidding.

This sounds like a great facebook app to me - Have their friends decide who they go on a blind date with.

Except by developing it on that dreadful site, you'll never make any money. :-)

I bet you there are more than a few people here that would disagree with that statement. (I'm not one of them, but I know that there are people making a killing on Facebook right now.)

My stance would be that all those money making apps would do just as well, if not better, outside of facebook as well.

While that's entirely possible, inside of FB you have the benefit of already knowing who the user's friends are.

Actually, it would be kinda neat to have strangers nominate two people for a blind date... wisdom of the crowds after all!

You would definitely have to do some leg work to find women who want in. They especially may not want the attention.

That was my thought of using virtual gifts. If you send a virtual flower or teddy bear to woo the girl, it helps indicate you're serious.

I also thought about letting the girl post her top choices along the way and let the audience comment and add their thoughts in. Another option would be letting the girl pick a "wingwoman" who helps and comments on the guys who apply.

I think you're going to have to do some work to alleviate the "creeper effect" - you know, the feeling that girls get from guys who they aren't interested in, but keep sending things anyways?

You know, you could make it a "bachelor" style date, in that you could send both guy and girl off for a weekend in Jamaica, or a week in Spain or something like that. Of course the whole thing just got a lot more expensive, but it still might fly.

You'd need to vet the contestants much more, but I'm sure that would take away the jitters some people may have in letting the highest bidder win.

EDIT: I got it. You combine the ideas: Virtual Gifts are submitted to get to a "bidding" stage. Auctioned approves profiles they would consider (They have the interest of keeping this amount high) Pre-approved people are allowed to bid. Winning bid wins. Date paid for based on amount of winning bid (the higher, the better the date, hence the reason the auctioned wants lots of bidders). So long as all the bids total more than the cost of the date, profit ensues.

exactly. The question is, how do you consistently generate enough traffic and get people bidding? Yes, it's 99 cents per bid, but if you're not interested in the girl, it doesn't matter. ie- shes too tall, it wouldn't matter if it were free. A PR burst would be nice for that week of launch, but what about the other 51 weeks in the year? If you can figure out that formula, profit ensues. Step 2: ????? actually exists here.

That's nothing to worry about. You said like woot right? Well, one pre-selected girl, one pre-selected guy per week (You can extend that to same sex matches as well, which makes for 4 contests a week, locally in X amount of cities.)

You put a detailed description of the auctioned on the site, along with the date description, and invite everyone to apply to bid. Auctioned selects those allowed to bid, I suppose you can put auto limiting options here if you want. (So far, no money). Bidding commences with a conveniently placed minimum bet (say 75% of date cost) and is not fixed - bid whatever you want. Since the bidders and auctioned are pre-selected, all we're looking to do here is get that bidding as high over the date cost (assuming only one date, perhaps if it gets really high, say 100% over the cost, the date changes, and so on and so on.) This way, you let the auctioned do your marketing for you - their interest is getting that big free night out, after all, so they keep the pool of allowed bidders large. So long as you keep the auctioned pre-selected for attractiveness/interestingness, you win. Throw a pictureless rss feed up there and don't worry, people will come back.

Hell, what the hell am I doing, I should just go build this thing!

I'd say just start with girls at first. Guys make it more complicated, and they don't have as much of a draw. I could be wrong here.

You'd have to have really in depth profiles of the girl of the week/day. Video intro, multiple pictures, in-depth Q&A, etc. If you're giving the restaurant for the date decent exposure, you may not really need to even pay for anything.

I think once you figure the traffic formula out, it's game over (in a good way). Creating attention and buzz for it will not be hard.

The thing I'm thinking about is, IF the girl is decently attractive enough to warrant such bids and attention, she should have no trouble getting dates. She might actually be wary of displaying herself on a meatmarket full of hungry males with 99 cents to lose.

I had a somewhat similar idea I fleshed out a couple of years ago that also involved local dating, but was more targeted at the 9-5 working crowd and bringing them together on an invite/want basis for quick coffee/lunch dates that brought a couple together long enough to 'get to know' but not so long that it got uncomfortable. What I couldn't figure out was how to monetize it, but your 99 cent 'participation' fee is intriguing me enough to try and resurrect it. I wouldn't mind exchanging a couple of no-strings emails with you if you'd like to discuss.

@phreanix sure, would be good to talk. send me an email: j[at]jasonlbaptiste.com

@icey - yeah, women should be able to clearly mark a guy as "out of the running". Creepers will definitely come to the site, but having an application fee (micro-transaction 99 cent level) should create some barrier to entry. How much of a barrier? That I don't know.

hey david, drop me an email j@jasonlbaptiste.com Your contact form was too long and I don't trust those things to not be black holes :-P.

Writing everything down started happening / was inspired by this long Ask HN thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475736

TONS of good stuff in that thread. Still my favorite discussion here.

Great insight into the thought processes of aspiring start-up founder with track record. Not disimilar to pg/YC's RFS.

Key context for all of us with excellent ideas going nowhere:

"Ideas only get you so far, and getting true feedback is a lot more valuable to me than the rare off chance of someone 'stealing' 1 of 12 ideas that I may or may not ever pursue."

Track record?

I'm not sure that has any basis, surely Jason is a nice guy, but the only track record I am aware of is:

Some random company - Social startup which never went anywhere long term, but had decent buzz at some point (iirc).

Publictivity - Which the towel was thrown in on (& may go open source)

Ramamia - Started with Mark Bao which seems to be barely lingering (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ramamia.com/)

I'm not sure if that is a track record.

[EDIT: Downvoted for disagreeing with someone & backing it up - anybody care to explain why?]

Track-record as in has actually launched products. You can look at that as not being much, or you can look at it as being more than someone who hasn't done any of that, which would include a good number of people reading this.

Interestingly - I always kind of felt & have seen the opposite, all of the people I know from HN have indeed launched something, although my sample size is only 6 people.

Because you're attacking an HN regular for trying and failing, when he already admits he has a lot to learn (and failing teaches you a lot) and just wants to make something useful for people. It's not kind to attack people for failing and goes against the HN ethos, because the only real failures are those who were too timid to ever try.

I understand you were replying to someone else's comment, not any claim Jason made. You may wish to explore ways to be more diplomatic, or hold back the attacks if you can't find a better way to express yourself.

Yeah, I surely wouldn't say track record as if I've done something special or overly successful. I've built products and done things, but I have an insane amount to learn. I'm just a guy looking to build something that people want to use.

I really like the #4 and #6 mainly because we are working on both. :) I totally believe that education industry needs a makeover because it is extremely fragmented and highly inefficient with very less innovation.

and the strange thing with this is that everyone agrees education industry needs major innovation but not much VC funding is being poured into it in spite of huge (billions) opportunity.

the textbook/education industry is probably the largest on the "change the world" scale. It would take a really adventurous and patient VC and/or Angel group. You would also have to have a good group of advisors and/or team members that knew the space. It's a long long term company, but at the end of the day it would probably have the largest impact. If I were a VC, I would fund the right team to do this without hesitation.

That's because there are powerful interests that aren't interested in innovating here: they like the industry just the way it is.

Find an idea that you are passionate about and ready to pour time and money into. I would bet that of those ideas maybe 1 or 2 are things you honestly want to do (and think you can do).

I agree. This is the starting point you could say. From here, there are about 4 or 5 different pieces of criteria I'm prioritizing by. The biggest one with the most weight is passion.

I'm all for the Home Shopping Network one... WOOT.com For Home Shopping Network... Make a home shopping network for people like us... get a prime time slot... make it huge.

There I was thinking that obviously "jasonlbaptiste" and "markbao" were sock puppets but no, mark bao sounds Chinese. A few clicks confirms it.

So what the hell? Have you guys got an agreement to submit each other's stuff or something? Honestly I don't like that. If jasonlbaptiste writes something good on jasonlbaptiste.com, then just submit it yourself, jasonlbaptiste. You don't need a proxy.

I shared the post with Mark and he submitted. I was going to do it in a tiny bit, but it's silly to repost it under my name.

OK guys that's cool. Just you know, submit your own stuff. There is no point mixing it up.

Hope you didn't take offense, none intended! : D

I understand the first glance reaction. No offense taken at all :-).

Mark is partners with Jason on one of the startups Mark is involved with (it says that on his profile), so it stands to reason he reads Jason's blog a lot. Don't need to be a conspiracy.

Markbao did 9/11!

Hm. Too soon?

Anyway, I didn't mean to allege a conspiracy. Just saying that if people write something, and they have an account here, they should take ownership and submit it themselves.

What? As soon as I blog anything interesting (or that I think MIGHT be interesting), I should rush over to hacker news and submit it? I always feel weird submitting my own stuff and (honestly) submitting it to social news sites is not the first thing that pops into my head when I blog.

Uhm, the community votes on whether the submission is good or not. Who cares who submits it?

I can't vote down. I'm not a fan of the zero-substance "look at me" approach. Other people are (which is why the "look at me" approach exists), but it's unfair to say the community decides on whether the submission is worthwhile.

It's quite normal that one HN user submits something from another HN users blog. Some of my blogposts have been submitted by other users, I don't think that's unethical or wrong. If the community likes it they'll vote it up, if they don't they won't.

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