Hello HN,
I've been kicking around a couple of ideas for startups that I'd like to share with you. I'm having trouble deciding which one I like best. PG and others speak about changing ideas often in a Startup, so you shouldn't worry too much about the initial idea. Companies like Paypal are often referred to. However, I see this more as evolution rather than full out change. It is much harder to completely shift focus. Justin.tv did it, but it took them more than a year to go from one idea from the next. I'd like to avoid this if possible. First, I'll probably run out of money. Second, the opportunity cost is rather large.
With that in mind, here are some idea's I’ve been thinking about. Let me know what you think of them. Please start building them if you like, or let me know if you'd like to try and work together on any of them.
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1) Online golf tee time systems that courses use suck! They are so bad that calling to get tee times is still the default method. The vast majority of existing software is practically unusable. It should not be hard to build software that kills everyone else. Features include:
-- Support all browsers (many do not)
-- Fix the broken login system. Most software requires you to login. No one can remember there login because the actual software is not the brand the consumer remembers, it’s the golf course. So I end up making a new account every time I want to get a tee time. That sucks, I usually stop at this point. Instead use open-id
-- All existing software uses the same broken UI. Currently there is a date picker and you enter the date and time you are interested in. This makes sense for airlines, but golf courses typical only let you get tee times 10-14 days in advance. I would rather see each day lined up, with the weather, price, and how busy the course was included. Clicking a day would show the day's list of all tee times. This would allow you to do things like find the least busy time, or find two tee-times back to back.
-- Edit reservations. Most existing software makes you go through the whole account hassle, then you can't even make changes to your reservation without calling.
--The killer feature, beyond building a usable website, would be a mobile website version and native mobile applications.
I’d charge per transaction. I like this product because the software is directly responsible for revenue (or making stuff golf courses want). Also golf courses want to minimize the time they are spending answering the phone.
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2) Mobile applications for students to get info about their colleges. This already exists for ~10 schools and the company who built these was actually just bought by Blackboard. Nonetheless, I think there is a lot of space in this market. In 5 years, students will be getting this info in a better format than they are now. Features would include:
-- News
-- Athletic Events
-- Interactive directory, with one touch calling/emailing
-- Calendar of events
-- Pushing emergency security notifications
-- Big CALL SECURITY button, since most students do not have security's phone number in their phone
-- Dining Menus
-- Interactive Map of campus/local attractions
-- Possibly some social networking thing where students could post where they are hanging out.
To start, I've tried to only include features that wouldn't require integrating into a schools internal network. This would keep the friction of installation much lower. At some point it would probably be worth looking into integrating though. I’d focus specifically on smaller schools that don’t have the IT infrastructure to build anything like this. High Schools could also be targeted.
As a student I was always running around, and I would have loved to be able to get this information easily. As it was, loading up the website and navigating just takes too long. Also, I think schools are very interested in security these days, so focusing on fleshing out new ideas surrounding that would be important. Also, Students are early adopters with new tech.
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3) Completely Digital Tickets. This idea actually came out of #2 as I was thinking about possible features. At school, I hated having to go to the student union between 10 am and 12 am with 7.50 in cash to buy a ticket to whatever event. The basic usage would be as follows:
-- Event coordinator sets up event tickets on a website. Coordinator chooses how many tickets, price, etc.
-- Student gets push notification on their phone that tickets for event are on sale.
-- Student buys ticket using ITunes account or similarly easy payment option. The goal is to be frictionless.
-- Student goes to event with his/her phone and redeems ticket in one of four ways. The different ways differ in security, but also in infrastructure needs. Event coordinators could choose which option they prefer.
a) student shows flashing ticket on phone. This could obviously be counterfeited, but with sufficient animation could possibly work for small events. It would still be harder than counterfeiting most paper tickets used.
b) student presses a button which tells a server to send ticket redeemer a text msg with the name of the student and how many tickets he had. The txt would always come from my phone number, so txt spoofing would be required for counterfeiting. From some basic research txt spoofing looks tough in the US.
c) Mimic Bump Technologies, student bumps phone with ticket redeemer. This requires all ticket redeemers to have “smart” phones, but would be the most secure.
d) display a bar code that could be scanned. This would require barcode scanners as well as an API to exchange bar code info with the event coordinator.
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4) Real Time Shopping. This is my least formulated idea, so bear with me a bit. Basically, I think there are a certain class of transactions that could be possible, but aren’t yet. These transactions are extremely time sensitive. They occur when the buyer is interested in getting good deals more than getting the product at an exact time. I was thinking about what happens to pizza’s that are ordered, but never claimed or can’t be delivered. Obviously, the pizza places would like to sell this pizza, but they have a very limited time before it goes bad. I think there are a lot of potential industries where this could work, but the three that stick out are the food industry, ticket industry, and coupon/deals from consumer companies.
I think it is just becoming possible to start trying to solve this problem. Consumers need to be able to subscribe to different types of products in geographic areas they choose. Subscribing could be done in a variety of ways including twitter, mobile app, txt msg. The actual transaction mechanism may need to be specific to different products.
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Each Idea gets progressively less conservative and more “futuristic”. I’m having trouble deciding whether it’s worth trying to solve one of the harder problems or going for the relatively more concrete ideas.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be great!
You go to the airport you want to travel from, and go to a "last minute" lounge, preferably behind security. Then, every time a flight is about to leave that has empty seats, the seats appear in an auction (available on smartphone devices or via wifi in the lounge) that will last maybe 10 minutes. The winner gets a digital boarding pass and is required to report to the gate within 10 minutes, or the flight is lost. The idea is that almost any revenue from an otherwise empty seat goes directly in the contribution margin.
There are any number of problems, especially getting not-yet-travellers through security, as well as baggage, but the essense of selling a very-soon expiring product is the same.