bestattack

I don't understand what you are going to make.

Interesting idea. I'm having the classic reaction that people had to Amazon when it was new (don't people want to shop in person, touch the stuff? what if stuff needs to be bought same day?) - but am not sure if this means you're onto something :).

How would a farmer and a buyer find out about this marketplace?

Wow, kind of a crazy idea. I don't know how you get started on this. I do recommend learning to code yourself; at a very minimum, showing progress on learning to code will help you attract a technical cofounder.

How much money can I make for answering trivia correctly?

What is the history of trivia in advertising? I think it would be engaging, but I have never seen it (that I recall) on mainstream tv, so I can't imagine how I would react. Basically, why is nobody doing this already?

Hm, interesting; I'm excited about Slack based project management but my initial instinct is that this is not it. In particular, it looks like you don't integrate with Slack for the messaging component, instead choosing to build that piece yourself - is that correct? Why not defer to Slack on the messaging side and make it insanely easy to create items from slack, and reminders and so on?

Cute.

I know little about IoT -- explain how the language is abstracted? (last I worked on Arduino it was Processing/C++ I think). Does Favor compile down to the languages that are used, or how does this work?

To get users, instinct is to get your stuff in the hands of hardware bloggers / stores like sparkfun and hope that they start using it. Is that your plan?

Very nice. If I had a website I might be excited about this.

What is "standing up"?

I'm interested in your Flytrap language. Can you bring it to other platforms, like mobile?

This is very ambitious!

Has there ever been an educational game of this nature that was extremely successful? Oregon Trail, Civ, etc. don't count because they do their teaching through the environment. I'm not saying it would be impossible to make something really impactful, but I'd be worried about plowing a ton of dev effort into a new platform with lots of graphics PLUS enough ESL content to make it worthwhile and actually be fun.

Hmm though: I realized that English, at least written, is one of those things that people can improve at greatly through online interactions with others.

Anyway, the other fear I have about this product is that it seems like "a solution looking for a problem" -- it seems like you know ESL, and you are excited about VR, and you want to combine the two. But that's not the way to create a company; you need a market demand and then design a product to fill the demand.

Heh, did you watch "The Intern"? Thanks to that movie, I actually think this is a really awesome idea.

But, obvious two-sided marketplace. I think you are likely to hit bottlenecks on both sides. Are the signups willing to pay, and how much? I think that's the key to the whole thing. I also think you need to focus on a narrow niche. My grandma recently did this "Road Scholar" program, which might be similar in nature (all-inclusive trips targeted at sr citizens with a scholarly/educational component).

You spend a lot of time talking about what you're not (crowdsourcing) - but I don't fully understand what you are. Ballpark numbers would be really helpful for this.

OK, you have a network effect product and a two sided marketplace. How will you get users on each side of the market?

How much will an average household save if they go with you guys? I remember looking into this at one point in NYC, getting confused and thinking that the power companies were all pretty much the same. If you aren't saving people a substantial amount of money then it's not likely to be worth it for them to switch, which is my guess as to why so many users stick with the defaults.

Also, how will you get users? The reason I looked into it at all was that I was visited door-to-door, but I blew them off and only did the research when I realized they weren't completely full of shit.

Brings a whole new meaning to "pain point". I love it. As a person who needs dental work, I'd love to know which dentists in my region use your tech.

Your paragraph of text is making my eyes glaze over.

Wikipedia is popular because it is easy to use and shows up in search results. However it's not clear that your thing can or will be the same. I need a concrete example of how your thing will help me in order to be able to give further advice on the idea.

Hm, this is one of those ideas which (like daily fantasy sports) seems to be in a gray area around online gambling. I don't know if what you're doing is currently illegal, but it definitely is one of those things that (e.g.) the NY Consumer Finance people don't tend to like. So I think that's a big risk for the business. Maybe you can get around these somehow but is it really how you want to spend your life?

If you want my advice, I'd encourage you to work on something that makes the world a better place somehow. Then you can have the world (and the regulators) on your side, and that gives your business a higher chance to succeed in the long term.

Wow, this is really engaging. I love scrolling through photos and seeing them on a map, and I could imagine using this to plan my next travel destination.

I think this is very browsable if there is a lot of content, so I suspect your next step would be to somehow get the content from everywhere worth visiting as soon as you can, so that you can become a default destination for anybody planning a trip. How can you get the content?

I can see that there might be demand for this, although I would not recommend this app to my friends so that's a bad sign. I fear that casual people trade stocks for certain reasons - only one of which is to make money. In particular, I think a lot of people trade stocks because they have certain hypotheses about the world / markets and they want to test them out or be able to talk about them. Even people who invest in index funds have strong beliefs about which index funds are best. I guess you can tap into the "which managers are best", kind of, but it doesn't seem as appealing for some reason.

Neat! I've been a CS TA. However, I haven't needed a piece of software like this (to be fair, your site seems to be down so I can't understand exactly what it does right now).

One thing I'm worried about is that in the past, I would have wanted my students to use their own environment rather than web. Or the software was too complicated to give them a web version. However, I can see the use for lower level courses where the assignments are not too complicated.

What is O2O?

I like the idea. I recently had to buy an adapter for a sound system on very short notice. It wasn't available at Best Buy but it was at a nearby local music store. I got lucky because the Best Buy employee recommended the music store - I wouldn't've thought to look for a music store. Your app would solve this problem (if it had my adapter in its catalog, anyway), but it's a once-a-year problem for me and so I probably won't remember your product's name by the time I need it next year. So, how are you going to get users? Are there certain types of users who will use this more often?

Hm, I was going to say "installing Slack bots is not very hard" but I looked at your homepage and I got excited about the product. I want to try it. I think you should change the title of the apply hn to "Siri for Slack" though. If it worked well, I can imagine using this.

OK, I need you to give me a typical profile of a user (what they like to do, etc.) to understand why the user would join the site and contribute.

I've never heard of openbazaar so you'll have to explain that part to me in your pitch. This pitch would probably make sense if I was a storeowner who wanted to use openbazaar but didn't know how or it was too complicated. But your whole business depends on people having heard of this thing that I haven't heard of. Can you explain to the storeowner why they would want to be on openbazaar?

I don't understand the primary use cases. I'm a train station, serving movies to travelers? I don't understand where your product comes in -- travelers can already get movies on the internet. I get that it doesn't use my mobile bandwidth, but I'm not usually very worried about that and that concern is decreasing very rapidly over time.

I'm a coffee chain who wants to entertain customers with videos? I've never heard of a coffee chain who wants this, but maybe I don't understand fully. Explain how your product creates value.

To get started with an idea like this, you really need a specific use case or customer who wants something. Then you build it for them. You've dumped a big list of features, but at the early stage it's important to only work on the ones which actually create value for a specific user or use case. Do your customer development first. This is a really ambitious project so paring it down is probably your best bet.

I do think "works on mobile" is a really great thing, few forums work well on mobile and it's definitely the future :)

Oh "Latam" = Latin America, correct?

Are you taking on any jobs yourself, or sending every task to a freelancer? How do you maintain the quality of the work?

I'm confused about your actual vision. You need to start with a small concrete idea to build at first (the things listed in your "stop gap" section are good examples).

I'm a huge fan of m-kopa solar, which is along this axis. Check that out too.

You're using a lot of high-level descriptions and marketing speak that makes me have trouble understanding what your app actually does. Usually it's best to start with describing the one most useful thing that your app will do, to start.

I like this, I can imagine using it for a wedding. I'm worried about distribution since weddings are so rare. Is there a channel you can use to get your app into the couple's hands, that doesn't require them to tell their friends?

Interesting idea.

How will you get users? Do you expect people to say "you gotta be on bleepmic" to their friends, or is there another way that people will hear about your product?

What kind of usage patterns are people showing?

Wow, I like this quite a bit. Your tutorials are very informative without making me feel talked-down to.

How will you get users? I can imagine doing distribution via company training programs or via people telling their coworkers/friends about it (or maybe something else?). One of these vectors is going to be better than the others. Given your success on Reddit it's possibly a viral product, but if so, you need to worry about retention - it'll be interesting to see if users keep coming back to learn more.

How do you know people want this? Tinder exploded because "lightweight" dating/hookup filled a niche that wasn't served by any of the intense, profile based existing dating sites.

This moves in the direction of more intensity bc you aren't just swiping but, in some sense, agreeing to meet. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - and it may be good because it can absorb some of the Tinder backlash - but I think you need to understand the space and your niche and potential users incredibly deeply.

So, how will you get users?