Ask HN - What's your best startup idea?
Ask HN - What's your best startup idea?
O
/-+-\/
/ |
| \
/ /
/ /
_________ _________
/ BEST / \ WORST \
/ IDEA / \ IDEA \
/__EVER__/ \__EVER__\http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/startup-71-jump...
I know this happens to execs in pro sports a lot (people trying to get sponsorship, get the leagues using their products, etc) and I imagine it happens in other industries as well.
How you make a startup/product out of this I don't know but I thought it was an interesting tidbit to share.
1. Aggregate location info and travel plans of key celebrities from Twitter
2. ???
3. Profit
It could work.
EG - Got a startup that'll need buy in from a major wireless carrier (you're gon' change the industry like the iPhone did!) but can't get attention from any of them? Imagine what you could work if you were sitting next to the CEO of Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile on a 6 hour flight. How much would you pay for the information to get you that seat?
If they're that important they're either in First Class or private aircraft.
Not to mention you can totally do this in first class.
The lion and the mouse parable seems apt here.
Also, it would require a lot of people working in concert to make this work, which suggests that if there is such a market right now it is organized by people with a lot of pull.
But that was mostly possible because he had built up a relationship with the banker's assistant.
I'm a pretty shy guy myself - but every time I've opened my mouth to start a conversation with my seat-mate, I've never been disappointed. One key realization in life is that the guy next to you is (in general) just as awkward and desiring of social contact as you.
But, that happens almost never.
I have a no-iPod rule these days - I never listen to music on the go. Headphones-on is a great way to miss out on interesting people in life.
[edit] Also, this is in no way a comment on what you ought to be doing - but for myself I find that when I feel absolutely beat and just feel like crawling into a little corner and being alone, I do the opposite instead. I've never been disappointed. Instead of withdrawing into my own space I try to engage as many people as possible - and as a result end up more refreshed than I would've if I had sat for 3 hours in front of HN hitting Refresh.
(Sniff, sniff... what is that weird smell? Ah! There is an extrovert on HN! Anyone got tar and feathers?)
I personally like people and get unhappy if I spend too much time alone. And yes, I might be in the wrong profession.
But despite having quite a social personality, I get tired from being with people -- not energized, like you extroverts. A majority @HN probably are introverts.
(And no, I don't really know or care that much about pop psychology, but this is quite an obvious difference.)
Hence why I suggested what I did :) When I'm tired from a long day of work, my brain tells me to go home and watch TV/surf the interwebs. I override this instinct and go and meet people - and generally do not ever regret it. I'm a closet extrovert? I don't know, I'm no psychologist.
(Hrm, the min is -4 these days, right? Right?)
Take down the oligopoly of the existing credit scoring companies by providing an open algorithm to determine scores. Change it as necessary. Educate people on how to improve the score. Provide the data to consumers for free, charge others (banks, mortgage companies, etc.) to use it.
Sounds like it is a step towards transparency but doesn't seem to have much adoption yet.
On the other hand, if there was a way you could gather all this information without relying on third parties to actively notify you... that would be both cool and incredibly frightening.
There are some slides fleshing the concept out on this page:
http://ycombinator-w10-cofounder-search.tumblr.com/
What do you think?
(This is true for the duration of any startup idea that I happen to be working on)
The basic blocks of the news stories is source material: photos, quotes, observations that can be submitted by anyone.
Every contributor (sources submitting photos/ quotes/ etc, writers, editors) and every component (the photos, the source material, the finished article) are rated, and feedback goes both ways.
So, the best sources/ writers/ editors eventually float to the top:
I wonder if the benefit would be enough regardless?
Nice though, to see another example of people coming up with the same 'good' idea, one more reason to abolish patents.
http://www.edwards.af.mil/archive/2002/2002-archive-new_inve...
I think the 747 actually has motors that spin the wheels up. The lateral slide is actually not a big issue, the landing gear on most larger aircraft are steerable to allow for that ("crab landing" I think it's called).
Another idea in the file right after that one was to put vacuum flasks into car engines to keep the fluids hot after the engine is turned off. In theory this would reduce emissions & engine wear by reducing the number of cold starts. Turns out the Prius has that already.
On the other hand a Boeing engineer came up with the idea of the little winglets you see on airliners now, Boeing passed on the idea so he took it outside and worked with a guy named Joe Clark. Their company (Aviation Partners) has done very well.
I think the takeaway is that as an outsider to one of these mature industries you may come up with new ideas but you're also at a significant disadvantage compared to insiders.
http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/17808/Pre-Spin-Airplane-Whe...
On the other hand, if the information is accurate, it raises major privacy concerns. Most reliable sources will not display the backgrounds of living people to the general public. If this were world-write, what's to stop someone from adding my grandparents, parents (thereby giving away my mother's maiden name), and myself without my knowledge? I might not want pieces of this information known--for example, if I were 1/8 $RACE and I lived in an area with a strong prejudice against $RACE, I would not want that fact known. I might not even be aware of this lineage myself--it could come as a real surprise, and possibly an unpleasant one.
My solution is to give my provider's my mother's maiden name when required, but to deliberately misspell it. This solves the first problem but not the second.
[Human Family Tree: Shallow Roots] http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2006/07/71298?curren...
First common ancestor 1000 A.D.!
Nothing else I ever did before or after came close, but if there is one lesson to take away from that whole period it is keep it as simple as you can.
Several times I have needed to get product X, be it a hammer, sandals etc. but have no idea where to get it locally. Do I have to take the bus to center, or is it sold in some of the smaller shops around me? One weekend we spent hours looking for sandals. At least here local shops don't list specific items they have on their websites.
I imagine this would work by people contributing product info from shops as they visit them, perhaps snapping pics of aisles with their iPhones, and then having a separate group of people tagging the products they see in the photos.
a website that allow FOSS community to pay up developers based on community request. basic goal : to speed up FOSS development.
i.e: let just say that user A want to donate $100 to pay any developer to create a 3D driver for X card. Later, user B want it to and increase the pot $150, and so on, and so on. At some time, some developers take a request and developing it, publish it and take the money. As a profit, 5% of the pot will be taken by the website.
So this website basically functioned as a mediator between FOSS user and FOSS developer.
But in actually fact it wouldn't get much by the way of serious pledges and it probably is more off putting for the developers.
(I still think it is a good idea though; and sorry cant find a link to the old thread)
EDIT: found it, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682450
Actually my idea was more different than I remember :P (sorry). Your is a better approach to the problem.
So far, this has worked extremely well.
It's what I'd be working on if I wasn't so busy with my main idea. :)
Provides coupons for purchased items. Or competitor brands.
Social ranking system for recipes. As well as flavor profile so that people who prefer similar recipes as you affect a recipes rank more then someone with opposing tastes.
Can send pre-order for packaging to local grocer or order hard to get items from the web.
Can be integrated with a personal chef service to allow them to know what you have on site.
I have a million more on this one. If anyone does this let me know. I would love to chat about my ideas no strings attached.
I think the problem with dating sites at the moment is that they make it easy to lie. If you've ever used Match.com, or something similar, the dates tend to end up poorly because one person who claimed to be into music listens to the radio on the way to work, while the other person who claims to be into music has a Masters from the Royal Academy of Music, has played in professional symphonies and spends eight hours a day practicing. Also, that is NOT and athletic build.
Now, if you monitoring their streams (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, whatever), you could determine what they liked, where they went and who they knew. I suspect this is way better way to form meaningful connections (it's how I found the love of my life). And if you're just looking for a random hookup there's always craigslist.
I've been looking for a co-founder for the Y Combintor summer 2010 session - http://ineedacofounder.wordpress.com - so if you're interested hit me back and maybe we could team up.
There are many sites struggling to gain traction in mobile aspects of dating, and the problem is likely that it's difficult to get a critical mass of users set up before using the feature is appealing.
Regardless, I'm not aware of anyone who has put all this together successfully. Dating (in many aspects, but surely online) has shown itself to be a tough nut to crack.
You're completely right, it's a hard nut to crack, and gaining traction will be tricky, which is why I'd probably just start in a few major cities first, or maybe just go after one vertical - think JDate but maybe for the younger/tech crowd.
Actually, I think that one of the big problems with dating businesses is that if you're doing a great job you actually loose customers. This may be why no one does a very good job of it.
I like http://ge.la.to and their take on this better than Thread, but I'm not entirely confident in their execution. Several aspects of the site didn't work for me and I think the need to fine tune their data mining algorithms. A profile's most recently/often talked about topics should not include "ff" and "rt" from Twitter. ;)
This may be the answer to RFS1: what will replace the newspaper industry? People won't pay for content anymore, but perhaps they'll pay for a personalized service to sift through content.
I know reading recommendations have been tried several times, like at reddit. But perhaps you can get a leg up if you get more data on the user - twitter, delicious, etc.
"My car was stolen today outside of 7-11 between 3 and 3:15. Black dodge truck. Did anyone see anything?" It would be community driven and targeted at locals. I imagined the draw to get people to participate would be to help "clean up" the community. Imagine a centralized resource for people to post about what they saw on 9/11 - assuming the government wouldn't shut you down.
UFO's sightings, missing pets, amber alerts could be other such usages.
Thoughts? I'm seriously considering developing this if it's well received.
In short, more and more people are going to college which makes getting into "top" colleges harder. I know there has been a lot of discussion as to the worth of the college degree these days, but regardless, I think the overwhelming majority of people still believe you should go to the best (highest ranked? best fit? whatever) college you can. The site hopes to "level the playing field" by connecting students with private college counselors at various price points in various locations. Ideally, I would like to include calendaring, planning, and video conference/recording functionality.
Anyway, here's the presentation:
As an example, I work at a "mom n pop" style mattress store that has 19 locations throughout the Midwest. We essentially have one main warehouse and two delivery trucks to cover the entire state of Illinois. Wednesday is the only day of the week that I can get any kind of inventory, and even then I'm unlikely to get everything I requested.
With that being said, I do believe that a simple web interface that could track the flow of our inventory through our network of stores could greatly improve efficiency. Even though every individual item is carefully tracked manually, I still have no easy way of identifying where I could potentially pull a particular model or size from to serve my customers. To find that information, I have to literally get on the phone and call each store individually to inquire about what they have. An automated system would certainly be welcomed, the question is only how. Could be a hard sell to a company that still relys on dial-up and fax machines...
http://tc50tweets.techcrunch.com/story/180036092/citysourced...
Concept:
Go to www.saturdaymorningrunninggroup.emailgroups.com
The webpage will have a box to easily add your email address.
To email the group, you send an email to saturdaymorningrunninggroup@emailgroups.com and it is broadcast to everyone on the list.
You would have the option of uploading various formats and building a portfolio of your work. This could be a suite of screenshots, embedded videos, or other such work that would allow employers to get a sense of what it is you do and how you do it instead f just matching keywords.
The closest thing I have seen to this is (was) SnapTalent - and their fate is largely why I am not working on this already. They did not have the necessary understanding of the HR industry and neither do I - but I think there's a definite need for this type of service. I'm sick of trying to represent myself in plain text - I don't think or work in plain text.
I wonder why such a site has yet to exist?
"The Halfbakery is a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users. It was created by people who like to speculate, both as a form of satire and as a form of creative expression."
1) You apply for the position you want. If a project needs a JS guy, and you're a JS guy, you apply for that position.
2) To keep people from applying for every single JS position available, there is a $100, sign on fee. This fee is kept in escrow, and if you are not selected as the JS guy, it's returned to you. Until a decision is made, it's out of your account, so you can't apply to 100 projects at once.
3) Once your application is accepted, and you become the JS guy, you lose your $100 permanently, and are possibly asked for more money as well. At completion of this transaction, you are now "one of the founders". You now review resumes of other applicants, and vote on them. Applicant with the most votes becomes "the mechanical engineer guy", for example, and he buys in to the company, and helps vote for the next guys, and so on.
The code is there, Im just not sharing it with you yet :D (some cleaning up to do and a bit of fine tuning)
It might work based on heat (drying cycle) or via a reaction with soap.
I'd like to see a rating and ranking system for drivers. A console in your car with a big red button-- when someone around you is driving recklessly, you target them and punch the red button... they rack up demerits (or frowny faces or whatever) and they can go to a site to see how they rank up, and how people think they drive.
Not that it's feasible or anything, but I'd love for somebody to do this; there are people in dire need of this service (myself possibly included).
I think it'd have to do speech recognition though, because texting-while-driving would probably be irresponsible to encourage.
I couldn't figure out how to make it practical or monetizable, but it'd be fun to have something to scream at while driving now and then :)
I'd love something with a Yelp-esque interface that allows me to search for any product, whether grocery item or gadget, or whatever. e.g. "I wonder what people think of the Blueberry Stonybrook yoghurt?".
Previously it wouldn't be that compelling, but with mobile computing being what it is now, it could be very helpful.
Although Gdgt's focus is more on gadgets and crowd sourcing all information instead of just reviews.
Kind of like a distributed library of users holding textbooks for a finite period of time until it is eventually re-queued for someone else to checkout. Payment for textbooks exchanged are abstracted as credits according to some scraped average.
MIT did a neat concept car which could be stacked together for compact parking as well.
They have very, very good cupcakes.
If it's completely free it will indeed not make you a lot of money, but what you could consider is to limit the number of validations an IP can make in a certain window of time.
If they exceed that ask them for a contribution.
Paypal needs this.
Allow users to give feedback on every representative, bill, or amendment that affects them from their specific city, county, and state.
My assumption is that it won't involve paypal. :-)
Seriously though, that's the difference - some way to avoid the third party lock in that paypal forces, replacing it with a simple: "money from my account into your account" method.
We have newly-arrived Europeans working at our US office that cannot believe people still write cheques here.
[Edit since there has been some curiosity: here is who underwrites the scheme in the UK: http://www.bacs.co.uk/ - as you can see it's not-for-profit unlike PayPal. US companies that trade in the UK (like ebay.co.uk of course accept payments in this way . eg see http://reviews.ebay.co.uk/Payment-by-Direct-Bank-Transfer_W0...]
Here in Europe this is the most common way to exchange money. I perform at least 5/6 transfers every month as individual, and many more with my company.
Many people object to being in debt in principle. Yes, yes, I know you can pay off the balance every month, but clearly most people don't, otherwise credit cards would not be in business.
Also, for small-time ebay sellers and the like, the overhead in accepting credit cards is non-trivial.
And not the crappy dual screen mock up they have now that looks like it was invented in the 90s.
what im working on now.. have four others but i will keep them in my head for now
1. The Reverse Job Board
The mini pitch: “Buy and sell work online.” What it is: You know all those job boards you see littered around the web? This is a job board flipped on its head. Think of it as a “work wanted” board. Instead of employers posting job offers, this is a place for service providers to post requests for work. How it works: Designers, developers, writers, and anyone else wanting work can post their request, together with the percentage or fixed fee they’d pay to someone providing a lead. Why it’s hot: More people than ever are turning to the web as a source of work. Sometimes it’s very hard to find it, or very time-consuming to browse offers and make pitches. Wouldn’t it be great if people could find work for you? And imagine getting paid just for referring someone you know who needs a new website or logo design. Where the money is: Take a commission when work is successfully placed, or charge a monthly fee to either buy requests or see contact details.
2. Live Auction Sites
The mini pitch: “Buy it now on steroids.” What it is: Online auction sites are great, but few of them capture the same adrenalin rush and buzz that you get from a real auction room. I think there’s still space for a well-executed live auction site that makes listing and bidding super-simple. How it works: Imagine a list of iPhones for sale — you can only bid on the one at the top, and it’s only available for minutes instead of days. Bids are live and backed by escrow, and when the top item’s been sold, the ones below float upwards and a new item becomes active and open to bids. Why it’s hot: As a seller, it’s becoming increasingly complicated to list things online, generate buzz, and make a quick sale. A simple live online auction site could solve all that. Where the money is: Make it free to list and just charge a commission for successful sales. You need to think carefully about how you’ll guarantee that all bids (and items!) are genuine. This could be by asking users to deposit funds into their account prior to bidding, or some other way.
3. Website Sales
The mini pitch: “The place to buy and sell websites.” What it is: If you’ve got an established website to sell, where do you go? There is still no clear-cut market leader in this field. What’s stopping you from filling that gap? How it works: List your website for sale at either a flat fee or auction rate. Include screenshots, traffic, pagerank and earnings info and watch the money roll in! Why it’s hot: Domain name sales are big business. But selling a website for what it’s really worth, or buying an online property in a trusted way is still rather tricky. Where the money is: Take a commission from successful sales in return for offering escrow and listing services, or charge for each listing.
source: http://www.dailybits.com/11-undiscovered-website-ideas-to-st...
I like it.
Diapers on a dog just dont seem right...