Inspired by the recent submission from cdixon (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190710) regarding developing new startup ideas and being the "opposite of secret", I thought we could put the theory into practice.
Feel free to add your own ideas and leave feedback on the others. If you see something you like, get in contact and make it happen!
Good start, but I think this highlights the reason why around these parts "ideas are worthless". Very very very few people are inclined to actually give 2 specks of a damn about some sentence written in some cell on some spreadsheet.
What I'm getting at:
Show don't tell.
So how about a list of products/service prototypes that people are actually building, and making that a starting point. I'd much rather take 10 seconds to click around on an app, than read text in a cell as noted above.
Hmm. I think your comment sets a bad tone for the discussion, especially as the top-rated comment. While I wouldn't want to back many of these startups as they're written, I think some of them have potential to be grown into a viable business idea, and dismissing them all in one shot just biases the whole thread negatively.
I guess I'd just rather read constructive posts first.
I don't think karma is deserved for either of our posts. They both add to the noise. But I'm trying to reduce the overall noise (in a way which has more impact than downvoting) and you're increasing it. (voters: all the posts in this thread should be at 0 or 1 and at the bottom -- please make it so)
I would like to think of this document as more of a brainstorming session than polished startup pitches. Throw everything out there and see what sticks. Some people might find a gem from part of an idea, and tweak it to make it viable, even though the rest of the idea is garbage.
I put my idea up (about the group learning community), because I'd like it to be made. Even if I'm not the one to make it. It scratches one of my itches.
I saw that item on the list and thought that it resembled the website I recently launched: http://www.crunchcourse.com/ Is that similar to what you were thinking? I'd be interested to get your feedback on it.
That fills the same space as to what I was thinking about, cool! I'll have to try setting a course up.
I thought of some form of karma might be needed to avoid people joining a class and spamming the forum. But that is probably a issue for later.
More communication methods would be good. IRC server with a web client, and per class chat rooms that saved the chat logs.
The major suggestion I have at this stage is to separate the module from the class. So that different groups can follow the same module. Too many people following the same class would generate too much traffic.
I'd also though it would be nice to signal that you were willing to run a course if enough other people wanted to join a subject.
I also think that some way to create tests would be useful. Of course it wouldn't be under exam conditions, but it would be a nice way of seeing how you were doing.
You are basically setting up a community of some sort, which has the basic problems of.
1. Too quiet
2. Too Noisy
3. Attracts spammers/trolls
Wow, thanks for the list. That's more features than I have time to add though. For some of the bigger items like the whiteboard, I'm hoping people can use other services in the mean time. Some of those items are being worked on now though.
Thanks, those are great points. Spam hasn't been an issue so far, which is good. I'm working on a couple of those things already. I'm not sure if it's busy enough yet to generate an active IRC channel for each class, but people are always free to set one up on their own and post the info
Imagine it's 1998. Google doesn't exist yet. Would Larry Page and Sergey Brin have added their big idea to this spreadsheet? My argument is that if you have any idea that's worthwhile, you're not going to publicize it. It might make sense to get feedback from a few friends. But you don't want potentially dozens of other people trying to execute it before you have had a chance to. Brin and Page are good examples of the fact that ideas in themselves can be extremely valuable and are worth guarding.
Who's technical brilliance? Sergy and Brin's got them a better search engine, but wasn't it the AdWords idea that originated at Goto.com that got them to the Google they are today?
Adwords without Pagerank is useless. The pay per click and auction mechanisms for Adwords are innovative in a sense, but Adwords is not successful because of its technical implementation. Adwords are what people pay for in a literal sense, but the source of Google's money is their search implementation.
EDIT: At this point their brand is also a source of Google's money. Today you need both to compete in search.
What was their big idea in 1998? Search .. Not a billion dollar winner. They only really won after seeing Overture and saying "Damn, we could do way better than those ideala! clowns"
This isn't quite correct. Google may have the best search right now, but its competitors could be just as good and it would still take us a while to find out. That's what happens with momentum. Here's an example: in September 2009 Microsoft released a free anti-virus that was at least as good as its competitors [1]. I'd say its just now getting some traction (and that's with Microsoft promoting it). A small company would take much longer to get traction.
Why do you think no one else can get search right? Have you used other search engines recently? Years ago Google had better results but now I don't really notice a difference in the quality of my results.
oh yes I remember that story.
It seems they approached Digital Equipment Corporation to sell it to them for $1M and, they refused so these guys went ahead with their own search engine.
Google wasn't an obvious success in the beginning.
My take on this is.
If your idea is good you might as well put it out there as you won't be the only one who have thought about it.
If your idea is brilliant it will have no takers as brilliant ideas seem to be less obvious in the now and will only with time and in retrospect be obvious.
1) I think the actual story has elements of both variants--keeping an idea secret until execution, as well as executing on it and improving the idea.
If PageRank was closely guarded in any way, it could have been so that Page and Brin could submit their research paper about it to SIGIR--at which point it would be public. On the other hand, Page and Brin hosted the search engine for anybody to use.
2) As an aside, assuming the page below is the actual paper, does it mean Larry and Brin already have funding at the time they were writing it up? It mentions that users should try the search engine out at google.stanford.edu, but supposedly, it was their first investor who named Google.
I'm not going to lie. I literally said "Awww, Coool!" Then looked around to see if anyone noticed because I felt like my inner child surfaced a bit too much.
Got my idea up there: Crowd-sourced shipping (Tip: It's row 62). Not sure I'm the best person to go with this idea, but I would love to see the internet make something like this work.
I know it's a little bit out there, but I think it would be a fun startup to make something like this work.
The idea currently on row 17 "apt-get update/upgrade for music" is very good IMO. I would use this service.
You could also expand it in various ways beyond tracking new releases for a single band to make it more of a music discovery service, e.g., (a) tracking side projects started by members of a given band or band "communities" where there are several inter-related artists and bands that appear in various ways in one another's work (like Broken Social Scene, Wu Tang Clan or The Bird and the Bee) (b) tracking other bands/albums/songs etc. that someone had a hand in (e.g., show me new releases that Pharrell Williams produced) and somewhat obviously (c) tracking new releases in a given genre, which could be very fine grained.
Got my idea up, hashpic.com. Hundreds of thousands of pics are being submitted to Twitter/etc real time. Get people to #tag the pics, geo location is already there. We do not host the pics, but we classify and help discovery of pics using their hashtags. Think Delicious for pics.
Interested to collaborate on it, or has something to say about the idea, drop a note on the community feedback column on spreadsheet! Thanks!
What's pessimistic about them? They're hundred billion dollar scale problems, surely one could recover some of that. Currently desalination plants are even more expensive, and they don't do anything with the waste product. And breeding isn't very expensive at all, though with dust mites it's tricky because they're quite small and transparent to visible light.
The ideas aren't pessimistic; you're just preaching to the wrong choir. Those aren't startup ideas, those are huge problems that need research and huge amounts of capital. People also need cars that don't use gasoline and a hundred other things we don't have yet.
But breeding dustmites?
Sigh.
Do you then on releasing them into the wild or selling them door to door?
We already breed dustmites; just by accident. The incubators are homes, the climate controlled by the choice of laundry detergent and thermostat. This wouldn't be much different. A starting point is just measuring the allergen content of the particulates.
In any of these projects the dominant cost is salaries, which are not so high if you hire great young people who care about it. It only seems impossible to those with a lack of imagination.
As for selling them, here a market for you: ecologists with asthma. These probably number in the low ten thousands, they probably spend close to a thousand dollars a year in medication, and four years in lifetime. That's hundreds of millions in that market category alone.
I've been toying with the idea for a while, but there are still many obstacles to overcome:
a) Efficiency (communication, administration)
There's a reason most startups have 2-4 founders, and why certain open source projects eventually collapse under their own weight
b) Dividing the profits.
How do you measure User1233s? contribution vs. User252s?
c) More minds =/= better product
An enlightened leader (say, Jobs) is sometimes better than a democratic process. Also, massive collaboration tends to result in lowest-common-denominator results (ex. Digg, Reddit)
..but then again, a lot of these problems could be solved with some sort of (online web app?) system:
a) Basecamp tweaked for massive collaboration.
b) StackOverflow-esque reputation system + karma + uservoice demand identification?
c) No suggestions here yet, but HN seems to be doing a pretty good job at engineering away the Digg-problem.
I have to add my idea to the mix. It's called the Pixelator. It's a site where you can upload photos of people and it returns to you the same photo but with all the faces pixelated.
Not a bad idea, though I don't know how it would make money. Maybe you could choose which faces get pixelated, and then sell it to online newspapers, facebook, and Google street view.
im sorry, i love you all, but this list is filled with some really bad stuff. After reading more thoroughly I'm assuming a lot of it is just people messing around Such as:
100% return lottery.
pandora for chatroulette.
Wordpress.com 20 years more advanced, for video blogging.
Public Takeover - Use capitalism to control the ills of capitalism, one share at a time. Use crowdsourcing and social network effects to take over public companies by linking all socially-responsible minority shareholders.
"Wordpress.com 20 years more advanced, for video blogging" is one of mine. I'd love to hear critiques of it. I realize the "pitch" is bad, but did you read any of the other sections?; I'm trying to convey that it's not just a hosted platform for video blogging, but that there's some technological innovation involved as well.
I think videoblogging has been done and done, different concepts, different ideas, several iterations, none have truly taken off. The points made already about people not being as open to it are valid, and even if/when you get past that barrier, you then have to start turning the users/readers. The nice thing about ~reading~ blogs is that you can bookmark, switch to another tab, highlight portions, and even email complete entries, all from the relative silence of your office cubicle.
you could build something very advanced (theme wise) and the back end coding on top of wordpress. If it worked well and I were a videoblogger, id pay for it.
That's not a bad WordPress theme idea. But that's not at all what I'm suggesting, because...
That doesn't improve the video player interface at all.
That doesn't make metadata for videos any better.
That doesn't provide any improvements in the ability to remix video.
That doesn't offer any advantages for having multiple video bloggers on the same platform.
That doesn't add any interactivity to video.
I feel like I'm saying, "There's a ton of room for innovation and additions to the paradigm of web-based video viewing", and you're saying: "sooo... a better theme, then?"
If you believe in the idea, just go ahead and build it.
I have seen a couple of times that the idea did not make any 'sense' to me during ideation stage, but when was presented with a working application - I just 'saw' it as needed!
For certain ideas, the way they are executed matters a lot.
The problem with video blogging is that it doesn't have the same mass appeal as text blogging. As uncomfortable as people are with their grammatical abilities, they still blog, constantly, no matter how much we hope they wouldn't. As for video blogging, the barrier to entry is a lot higher, and self-consciousness about "public" speaking and appearance severely stifle the potential "market".
I generally agree with you but I wonder if this is a generational issue. I personally would never leave a video comment to somebody's YouTube video. But I see a lot of younger people (e.g., under 23) who are absolutely comfortable doing so.
I disagree. I could see a platform for hosting video blogs working, despite people feeling self-conscious. The barrier to entry is really only a webcam on a laptop, and I believe YouTube proves that people are in general comfortable with themselves. Having a wordpress-style CMS dedicated to video submissions shouldn't be too difficult.
Great points. Maybe video "blogging" isn't the right term. There's definitely a lot more video content being produced these days, but little innovation in the platforms supporting it.
Part of the problem I feel with home-produced video is just the poor quality. A good number of us use macbooks with that awful little camera in the absolute wrong place. It's probably hard to do, but a video camera in the center of the screen would do wonders. And lighting tends to be an issue. I've been thinking of building a multi-pointed light meter (profably in software) and using that to control 2-4 strings of adjustable LEDs that would be to either side, plus maybe the top and bottom of my macbook pro. The idea here is that software could do a good job of adjusting the lighting for better quality.
You'll live to be embarrassed by that; this is actually going to be built. I've heard from six people who've started working on something like it already.
It's not even that hard: Facebook for the platform, directed edge for the recommendation engine, something like camarades.com / ww.com for the webcam plugin.
Some years ago I had an office in an incubator, and me and a guy from another company had a competition on who could come up with the most ridiculous yet somewhat believable pitch. He won with this:
Dogwalking is big business - there are more rich people with dogs than you would dare dream of, and they all need to have their dogs walked. On the other end of the leash there are social welfare clients that want more money from the state - and if you have a dog you get a monthly allowance to buy dog-stuff and food. So the ingenious business proposition was to make money by walking rich people's dogs, and renting them out to welfare clients that only need a dog for half an hour to prove that they do indeed have a dog that they can claim dog-welfare money for.
I don't know about "big business" but I could imagine a startup that made it easier for dog owners to find a person to walk their dog. In Boston, most people charge $15-30 a walk depending on length and whether it's a group or individual, so money could be made by handling transactions and charging a small fee.
Would add value by providing customer reviews and rankings.
Feel free to add your own ideas and leave feedback on the others. If you see something you like, get in contact and make it happen!