
Show HN: Idea Minr – Business Ideas Aggregator - stevematzal
https://ideaminr.com
======
claudiulodro
It's wild to realize that this list of like a hundred innovative businesses is
just what people are launching today, and there will be a whole new batch
tomorrow, and the day after that, and so on. Just today's list is thousands
and thousands of aggregated hours of work by hundreds of people for
speculative riches with good odds of the businesses failing. And the stuff
that gets onto one of these lists is just a small fraction of what gets
launched every day!

This site may have been intended to inspire startup founders or side-project
hustlers, but it does the opposite for me: it has shown me the folly of trying
to make it as one of those!

Going forward I'm sticking to proven, local, likely service-based businesses.

Thanks, stevematzai. Very enlightening site, even if it didn't help in the way
you would have liked. :)

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Don't give up on the idea of being an entrepreneur.

Just realize that MOST ideas are iterative and not truly innovative. Nothing
wrong with that, but there is going to be a ton of competition when you build
a Chrome Plugin that does one neat copy and paste... even if it is very
useful.

(Useful Tool Example:) Citationsy for Chrome: Cite anything in one-click right
from Chrome

And honestly a lot of ideas might be interesting or funny... but they aren't
even good ideas.

(Funny but Stupid Example:) howlongisyourdong.com is now on product hunt: GROW
UP YOUR E-PENIS RIGHT NOW :

And some ideas are just wishes for things that obviously aren't going to turn
out well in execution.

(Product won't match customer desire Example:) Your mobile app needs a
website. I built Flycricket to generate and host a site for you!:

If you come up with an idea that is truly disruptive, that isn't something
everyone in your field has been asking for for years. You should pursue it.
But it should stand out on a list like this, not fit right in.

Edit: Many people do well building out the extremely obvious ideas that
everyone wants. But to do well that way you should be talented, work extremely
hard, and be well funded if you want to beat the competition.

~~~
stevematzal
Surprisingly, even silly ideas can transform into great business ideas with
the proper execution. A guy became a millionaire in the 70's with Pet Rock;
you wouldn't think that anyone in his right mind would buy a rock as a pet but
there you go, people are predictably irrational when it comes to financial
matters.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
But the reason we remember the Pet Rock is because it was the silly idea that
managed to be successful. No one remembers the thousands of floor tiling
businesses that were successful or the thousands of silly ideas that were
unsuccessful.

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O1111OOO
I wasn't aware that there were so many places/communities that focused on this
sort of thing. I knew of only a couple. It's exciting to look through it all.
Love the list format without all the fancy images that make scrolling and
eyeballing data so difficult.

sidenote: opened up the main page to hunt for RSS (or similar). Though none
exist, surprised that everything was on a single line. My poor (lightweight)
external editor stopped loading the page at the 50k character mark (hard limit
for allowed characters per line).

~~~
stevematzal
It's said that an image is worth a thousand words but that it's not always
true :) I've kept things simple and without clutter because the idea is that
one should be able to parse a lot of data in short time, no one has time to
look at a lot of logos that most of the time are not that relevant (for some
purposes). Image processing takes a lot of brain computing power :) Sorry for
the 'one liner', that's how Gatsby outputs the data.

~~~
dethos
For parsing this kind of information having a more structured format like the
`sidenote` suggests would be a very nice improvement (such as RSS for the new
additions).

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pedro1976
Kudos for the effort. How do you plan to curate that list? Maybe a git based
approach is more future proof, so not everything is on your sholder, like
awesome-tech-ideas or so.

~~~
stevematzal
Thanks for the suggestion Pedro, I'm testing the waters for now, there is the
possibility that I might add curation in the future.

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pedro1976
Slightly OT, does anyone of you know some idea resources outside our IT
bubble, e.g. renewable energy, recycling... ?

~~~
kickopotomus
Not exactly analogous but if you are looking for some inspiration, there are
some interesting data sets to browse though on data.gov[0], and innocentive[1]
has "challenges" in a variety of areas.

[0]: [https://www.data.gov](https://www.data.gov)

[1]:
[https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/browse](https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/browse)

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tomc1985
Reading that list feels like browsing an aisle at Big Lots, or those tables of
cheap stuff at Fry's

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owens99
Very cool. Just too bad ideas don’t matter and execution is everything!

I wish the world has more people with technical chops and less “idea guys.”
Knowledge of customer and ability to build the minimum viable product is worth
more than 100k ideas.

~~~
arcturus17
Never bought into how that saying diminishes the value of good ideas,
particularly that of a unique domain-specific insight. I'm rarely excited by
"the new Facebook" or "like X, but with AI", but when I hear someone say
something like "an app that creates layouts for solar plants, saving energy
consultants hundreds hours of work", that tickles my senses.

That's a real example from a meetup I went to the other day. Two solar
engineers who were tired of drawing these solar plant plans and realized a
computer would do it faster and better. They're killing it.

Many software engineers rely on domain experts to come along with good ideas
to execute on. Maybe ideas matter immensely after all.

~~~
zipzap324
Exactly, how many thousands of very strong engineers are there in SV and most
of them are not coming up with great businesses.

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yitchelle
Great lists. Now, is there an algorithm that would mix these ideas for a mesh
up for something totally original and market worthy?

~~~
stevematzal
Thanks, I thought about it but for now I'm thinking that the human mind is
more intuitive in what actually makes an idea applicable and feasible. It's
like Kasparov playing chess against Deep Blue, AI might come up with a lot of
calculations per second but it has none of the insight and intuition a chess
master has. However, there is a startup idea generator at [https://startup-
gen.surge.sh/](https://startup-gen.surge.sh/) if you want to check it.

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iamben
Pretty useful. Suggestion based on me looking at this on a phone (I'm unsure
how this looks on desktop!) - left align the titles and the copy for each
section. Would make the list much easier to scan. Well done for releasing!

~~~
pjc50
Also make the text a hyperlink, in honor of the 30 year anniversary of this
hypertext platform, rather than sticking a small link icon to the side that's
an inconvenient click target.

