8 ms·
New Startup Ideas Spreadsheet
To follow on from cdixon's recent submission (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190710), I suggest we put into practice the "opposite of secret" theory.
Feel free to add your own ideas and leave feedback on the others. Also if you see something that interests you, get in contact and make it happen!
- jcs 17y agoInspired by the recent submission from cdixon (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190710 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!
- apsurd 17y agoGood 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.
- nc 17y agoCrowdsourced startups anyone? ;)
- rafd 17y agoI'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.
- coryl 17y agoParticipated :D
- mtrimpe 17y agoWhao ... sharing a Google Doc with that many people is a really interesting experience ;)
- dbz 17y agoI'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.
- jayair 17y agoI would be really like to see the HN community do a project collectively. Come up with the idea, design, develop and launch it. It probably sounds more fun than it is going to be. But it should be cool.
- maxklein 17y agoThe problem is that whoever owns the domain or the password to the repository owns the project.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- wallop 17y agoImagine 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.
- jrockway 17y agoThere were plenty of search engines in 1998. Larry and Sergey's implementation just happened to be much better.
- coryl 17y agoThe fact thats its 2010 and no one else can get search right shows its pure execution. Google just does it right and keeps doing it right.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- amock 17y agoWhy 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.
- Blasa 17y agoI 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.
- imp 17y agoI saw that item on the list and thought that it resembled the website I recently launched: http://www.crunchcourse.com/ http://www.crunchcourse.com/ Is that similar to what you were thinking? I'd be interested to get your feedback on it.
- Blasa 17y agoThat 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 Be prepared to deal with these as you go forward.
- Khroma 17y agoI thought of some additional ideas. What do you think? - Invitations - A "materials needed" list for each class - A public forum for general subject discussion - A calendar - Conferencing (with voice, video, images, chat) - Buy books or supplies if needed - For learning languages, there could be a service to chat with a fluent speaker - To make tests, you can use something like Wufoo to make forms for tests - Background theme for classes - Progress charts - Grade checker - Mobile apps - OpenID/other logins - Citation helper - Look up quotes and verses - For whiteboard, maybe something with HTML5 canvas - Group mailing list
- khangtoh 17y agoGot 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!
- jpwagner 17y agomakes me feel bad for PG and and YC team: reading just those 20 or so responses is painful.
- lincolnq 17y agoHmm. 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.
- jpwagner 17y agoBest way to get easy karma: say hey-thats-not-fair to the cynical posts (regardless of hilarity.)
- lincolnq 17y agoI 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)
- DaniFong 17y agoDon't eat the vegetables, they grow in dirt!
- dkokelley 17y agoI 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.
- ntoshev 17y agoPainful? I read only the ones that interest me (quickly judged from elevator pitches) and it's exciting!
- pjharrin 17y agoI would be interested in discussing ideas with people, however it would need to be in a more private setting.
- dzlobin 17y agoI don't mean to be pessimistic here, but a 50MM plant to recover phosphorous from water or breeding hypo-allergenic dust mites?
- DaniFong 17y agoWhat'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.
- dzlobin 17y agoThe 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?
- DaniFong 17y agoWe 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.
- jasonlbaptiste 17y agoim 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. *Dog Walking 2.0 - potential acquirer 37 signals?
- coryl 17y agoDon't you know that dog walking is a big business?
- jasonlbaptiste 17y agooh it actually is. go read the rest of the pitch. it's obviously a spoof.
- mixmax 17y agoSome 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. Absolute genius I tell you!.
- nandemo 17y agoWait, do social welfare "clients" really get money for dog stuff? Where is that?
- mixmax 17y agoI've always thought good ideas were a dime a dozen. Maybe I was wrong.
- dnsworks 17y agoBody Doubles for Rappers is the clear winner here! It's not quite as scaleable, but it would be a great boutique service. BDFRAAS
- dnsworks 17y agoBah, since somebody deleted the BDFRAAS entry, I've saved it here for posterity: http://mhalligan.com/best-entry-from-a-hackernews-startup-idea-spr http://mhalligan.com/best-entry-from-a-hackernews-startup-id...
- t3rcio 17y agoThe 6th idea is great.
- amazonfx 17y agoI 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.
- dkokelley 17y agoNot 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.
- dkokelley 17y agoGot 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.
- ntoshev 17y agoHere is what the world will look like when you're done: http://tqft.net/wiki/Maneki_Neko http://tqft.net/wiki/Maneki_Neko
- spokey 17y agoThe 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.