Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Ideas I would like to see funded. What about you HN?
5 points by rokhayakebe on May 27, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments
1- A Rearden Commerce Competitor. Rearden has a few thousand enterprise customers. A group of talented programmers could launch a light version for consumers as well as the small 5 to 10 person teams.

2- An Open Table competitor. If you take a quick look at OT you can come up with 20 ways to improve the service. The only problem would be to sign restaurants, but you can start with your cousin's fiance's mom's restaurant.

3- A Paypal for web content. Add this piece of code to your video, blog post, or webpage and force anyone to pay 5 cents to access it.

4- A Google competitor. Crawling 1 million pages cost $2.00. Why does every search startup need to crawl the same web. One startup could do this and license access for a fraction of a fraction of the cost. I do not think you can rely much on Google to create your own search engine.

5- A startup that fixes Email (Gist is a great start)

6- A startup that lets you switch cellphone companies without paying a penalty fee.

7- A startup that re-invets cable companies. These guys charge between 19.99 and a few hundreds per month.

8- A Plug and Play office. Members pay a monthly fee and can make use of the office space/cafeteria/conference rooms 24/7 year round.

9- A plug and Play Mechanic shop. A lot of people love to work on their cars, but lack the proper space to do. Give us a park with all sort of high end tools to lift cars, engines, power tools to change tires etc...

10- A startup that can produce high end and eco-friendly container homes for less than 25k, and a state the gives cheap land to people who buy these.

*Bonus- A startup that will force users to turn off their phones, and PC and mingle with real people.




8 & 9 already exist in a number of places around the country.

10 exists in that there is plenty of cheap land all over the US. I have a neighbor that's selling off property for about $12,000/acre. Is that cheap enough? Move a bit farther north and you can find land for less than $8k/acre. You can build a small house for less than $25k if you start with a prefab building. Material cost is less likely to be a problem than people worrying that no one will want to buy the house when they move: that's why no-one builds small houses outside of trailer parks.

What would I like to see funded? Cheap satellite internet so I can move into the middle of nowhere or live on a boat with no POTS, DSL or cell coverage and still get at least a 1Mbps upload and download. I live just 45 minutes outside a major city and I barely have cell coverage in my living room!


>> 10- A startup that can produce high end and eco-friendly container homes for less than 25k, and a state the gives cheap land to people who buy these.

Some states like Kansas will already give you free land if you move there for a certain length of time, I think it might be like 5 or 10 years.


>> 3- A Paypal for web content. Add this piece of code to your video, blog post, or webpage and force anyone to pay 5 cents to access it.

That's not a bad idea - I'd pay 5c out of a prepaid account to see something on YouTube - and the music execs could stop whining.


It's also not a new idea. Tons of people have thought about and worked on micropayment systems (myself included). See http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.ht... for a pretty good argument as to why micropayments won't work. Basically they overvalue cheap resources (like web content) and undervalue expensive ones (like users' time).

Think about it in some real-life contexts of your own. For instance, do you pay per text message, or do you have an unlimited texting plan?


Actually if YouTube opened up access for pay-to-use services I can think of at least one business model.

There's a guy here on HN who rents how-to DVDs. I would pay a fee to view the content on YouTube to avoid having to wait for the DVD to be mailed. Maybe $5 for 12 hours of access.

This would be an interesting way to monetize YouTube: act as a video provider to small businesses who want to sell content, but don't want to deal with the hassle of managing their own servers and would like to take advantage of the name recognition.


Paypal killer.

Ebay killer.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: