Ask HN: What are your startup ideas that you aren't pursuing? - marginalcodex
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marginalcodex
Heres mine:

My proposed business is a centralized website similar to Kickstarter that does
the financing for new music albums. With the spread of streaming services,
many artists are now making an insufficient amount of money through record
sales.

Bands would list the albums they could potentially release (ie their next
album, a live album, b sides etc) on a website where once the band has reached
their asking price, they will start working on/or release that album. The
price listed is not how much the album costs the band to make, but the amount
of money that it would take the band to feel sufficiently incentivized to
make/release the album. Once the album reaches this point, the band would
release the album for free online.

This creates two new streams of revenue - fans who really love an artist (or
have lots of money) can contribute proportionally. Additionally, cheap fans
that otherwise wouldn't pay for the album would be incentivized to with the
hope that the album comes out sooner, or out of fear that it won't be released
at all.

You can read more details here: [http://danfrank.ca/startup-
ideas/](http://danfrank.ca/startup-ideas/)

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blparker
Interesting idea. Perhaps the differences are nuanced, but would you expand on
why the artist(s) just wouldn't use Kickstarter or a service like PledgeMusic?

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alexkehr
A middle-out compression solution. Decided to make video chat software
instead.

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marginalcodex
Can you expand on what this means? I'm curious to learn more.

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byoung2
[http://www.piedpiper.com/](http://www.piedpiper.com/)

EDIT: Not sure why this was downvoted? If he's genuinely not familiar with the
show, it answers his question.

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byoung2
I had an idea for an indoor mapping app. Basically Google Maps for inside
multi-unit buildings like hotels, apartments, office buildings, malls, etc.
Existing maps and navigation can get you to the street address, but there is
no easy way to find building 3 or suite 240. I built a prototype Android app
for data collection (I used WiFi hotspots as reference points to tag the
location of landmarks inside). The big question is how to monetize something
like that. You could maybe license the data to delivery companies but I'm not
sure how big that market would be.

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asteadman
A CRM solution for small businesses delivered as a facebook chatbot - these
businesses have customers who "live" on fb, and in many cases have no web-
presence other than a fb page. Such a system would not require them to
install/maintain any additional apps, and in theory they would be saved a lot
of manual data entry by leveraging your fb page's existing graph connections.

However, I'm not sure it would work within the confines of the current
facebook graphi api restrictions though, they really seem to lock down getting
data out. They seem to want you to build chatbots for facebook without using
facebook data, which seems pointless, and in all likelihood a bad user
experience.

