My billion dollar business idea | Hacker News Reader

My billion dollar business idea

lbrandy.com

30 pointsspydez35 comments

I have a billion dollar idea: Start a grocery store. Seriously. When you have enough money start another. Keep going until you have thousands. It can't fail.

Another billion dollar idea: Start selling well designed Scandinavian furniture really cheap. Build a few megastores around the world, and make sure to squeeze your suppliers to keep prices down.

These two amazing ideas made Sam Walton and Ingvar Kamprad billionaires. Execution you say? Nah, these ideas are so obviously amazing that they've probably spent most of their time in business fending off blonde playmates while drinking martinis at the beach.

Ideas are nothing without actually making it happen, even the really great ones.

If it were as easy as just coming up with the idea, everyone would do it.

> Start a grocery store. Seriously.

WalMart's big innovation was to apply sophisticated, dynamic just-in-time production methods to its product distribution system, cutting out both inventory costs and out-of-stock sales losses. The efficiencies from JIT logistics allowed the company to grow big enough that it could dictate prices to suppliers, driving competitors out of business and further locking in its monopoly in discount retail.

Walmart has been a huge company since, I don't know, I did a report on their stock in grammar school in the '80s. Is it really the case that sophisticated/JIT/dynamic/etc has always been their key differentiator?

Not arguing, just asking.

No, but it's been key in keeping them at the top.

> As the chain began to take off, [Sam] Walton made major adjustments to manage the growth - again always seeming to see ahead. As early as 1966, when he had 20 stores, he attended an IBM school in upstate New York. His goal: to hire the smartest guy in the class to come down to Bentonville, Ark., and computerize his operations. He realized that he could not grow at the pace he desired without computerizing merchandise controls.

http://www.time.com/time/time100/builder/profile/walton2.htm...

Neat! Here's a question. When Wal-mart started "computerizing", the technology was in its infancy. The modern Walmart supply chain/fulfillment operation is ultra complex, and every advance has to be retrofitted onto their existing systems.

If you were Sam Walton today, starting afresh, do you think the technology required to reach Walmart levels of efficiency would be nearly as complex as what they have now? You get to design your whole operation around the software, instead of the other way around, right?

It's an intriguing question, encompassing complex issues around the linearity of application development, the constraints of path dependency, and so on. Frankly I don't know enough about the internal workings of WalMart's operations to answer helpfully.

The question is: would they really start from scratch or would they try to shoehorn their processes into some existing application that kinda, sorta does what they need and then hack-and-patch the rest of the way?

It's more like, if you were starting a retail business of any sort, are there tech decisions you could make very early on to drastically reduce the eventual cost of operating a nationwide chain?

It's a tough call. You don't want to optimize too prematurely for scaling, because the kind of system that would work effectively for a nationwide chain would likely be a very poor fit for a single store or small regional chain. My guess is that a more valuable trait would be an aggressive willingness for the business to 'kill its darlings' and break from processes that can't scale, rather than falling prey to the psychology of previous investment and chasing its losses.

In addition to the JITing and the computerization mentioned elsewhere, WalMart had a very specific strategy of geographic domination: they defined their service areas, and then ensured that no one in that area ever had to drive more than 20 miles (later 10, etc) to get to a WalMart. The wave of WalMarts started in the east and spread steadily west as the company expanded.

According to _Good to Great_, that was also Walgreens' genius as well; packing stores within short distance of each other also simplies logistics.

That was the point of mixmax's tounge-in-cheek message. Execution matters, ideas don't.

You don't think JIT logistics is an idea? Execution matters, ideas also.

They can dictate more than prices to suppliers: they can also dictate financing terms. This allows them to collect from customers before paying supplies. So in some cases they literally can lose money on every sale and still make it up in volume, by investing suppliers' capital for their own purposes.

Placebos are already routinely prescribed by doctors.

As usual with any good idea people have had it before you did.

Really? Not that I doubt the placebo effect, but in today's litigious climate, I'd be very surprised if modern doctors were actually engaging in the necessary equivocation to produce the placebo effect.

My take on modern medicine is that most doctors in the U.S. are pretty much limited to cover-your-ass medicine. That is, ordering unnecessary tests and writing unnecessary prescriptions.

I imagine that some prescriptions for antibiotics by doctors are more or less because the doctor doubts it calls for antibiotics but rationalizes that the placebo effect will help, coupled with patient's angst that they may leave the doctor's office empty-handed.

Anti-biotics are not prescribed unless there is some need for them because there are serious detrimental side effects of using anti-biotics when they are not strictly speaking required.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_resistance

From your replies, it's pretty clear that you're not familiar with medicine in the United States. Antibiotics are frequently prescribed without necessity by doctors that would rather have a happy (and continuing) customer than lose a client for doing the right thing.

That's extremely irresponsible of them.

This is what was probably a direct consequence of such behaviour (it started in the UK and has since spread worldwide):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphyloc...

As for me not being familiar with medicine in the US, you are correct, I have lived in Canada and currently live in Europe.

It happens in Europe, too. Sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking that prescribing antibiotics is the only skill some physicians have.

Penicillin basically started an arms race that we can't possibly win in the long term.

Pretty scary thought.

Tetracycline is routinely prescribed for acne, which isn't much of a need, strictly speaking.

Two things, one: the world is a lot larger than just the US.

Two: doctors aren't going to go out of their way to tell their patients they just got some compressed sugar because that would take away the effect.

There is a class of patients that will run to the GP every chance they get and they won't leave until the doctor 'has done something' which translates in to 'had prescribed them some medicine'.

In these cases doctors prescribe placebos without any qualms at all, and to the happiness of both the patient (the placebo works!), insurance company (they're cheap) and the GP (patient leaves them alone).

There was a TED talk by an Indian neurologist who said that placebo works even if you don't believe in it.

The Placebo effect was debunked in the New England Journal of Medicine several years ago.

When you do studies that track three groups -- treatment, placebo, and no intervention -- the placebo resembles the no intervention group. People just tend to get better when they get sick and that is conflated with a placebo effect.

Google "placebo nejm" for details.

Surely not sugar pills, it's got to taste horrible, good medicines don't taste nice! Perhaps sugar pills but coated with bitrex ...?

For me a business idea also encompasses the possible path to getting traction. "If we had x and Walmart would sell it, we would make billions" does not count - is has to include "Walmart will sell it because".

It is already done. It is called Homeopathy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy ;-)

he makes this joke in the article

It is not a joke. Homeopathy is the billion-dollar business he is talking about.

Obligatory link to That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0

Obecalp ("placebo" backwards) will be available for purchase from http://inventedbyamother.com/

Ikea is a great idea. Sell artistic looking pieces of furniture that cost crap to produce.

why buy a frank wright designed chair for thousands of dollars when you can buy a similar chair for a hundred and no one will even know.

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