
Ideas for Startups (2005) - xcoding
http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html
======
pascalxus
Anyone can think of ideas. I'm sure we've all got entire documents with lists
of ideas we never followed up on.

The hard part is finding opportunities to create value for others (making
stuff people actually want). Generally speaking, people already have the stuff
they want that they can have. Now, I'm sure Paul Graham would say people's
desires are infinite and there's still many unmet needs and wants. For All the
stuff they don't have but want: well, there are major barriers to entry for
those business ideas (flying cars), the exception being those ideas that were
just recently enabled by another innovation (a Rare treat indeed). I think
we've had this conversation before....

And, as he said in another post: you've got to be at the forefront of any
industry. Live in the future. Meaning, use the latest tools and gizmos of any
particular industry in order to help understand where things are and get a
feel for them.

~~~
murukesh_s
Adding to that I would say it's a little bit luck with an eye for disruption.

Look at slack. We thought people had all the stuff they wanted but slack came
out of nowhere. We thought skype/sms/gtalk was good enough and came WhatsApp.
And snapchat, now it might look like a neat idea, but imagine that couple of
years back.

There is always room for disruption. Few categories of products are almost
like fashion. There is no additional value they are bringing to the table. And
there is no logical reasoning or no proper prediction possible on what becomes
the next big thing.

Then there is this room for replicating similar succuccessful ideas in
emerging markets. Hundreds of ideas waiting to be explored in hundreds of
markets.

Then the unexplored beast of enterprise software. Not the makrt of consumer
products rebranded as 'for' enterprise but actual tools or services that
improves existing ones, many of which are decades old. But you need to be deep
inside the domain to disrupt here.

And of course finally the innovative ones. Which are the hardest but perhaps
the most publicised making an impression that startups are all about
innovative ideas.

~~~
Can_Not
> We thought skype/sms/gtalk was good enough

Nooooo we didn't. Skype is garbage (on Linux and in general), sms is fast and
unreliable and expensive (to the consumers) but effectively free (to the gate
keepers), gtalk was cancelled in favor of hangouts, which has lots of room for
improvement (both in general and for organizations). Snapchat and WhatsApp are
priming for their big sell outs where they transform into some nightmarish
shitware/spyware/adware. IRC is cool for underground hacking circles, but
without a good GUI and reliable offline messages, IRC is dead on arrival if
you need non-techies involved in a serious work environment.

If anything, this market has been screaming and begging for disruption.

------
brian-armstrong
I actually think there's still potentially room for a new phone OS, though
maybe only just barely.

iOS is in dire need of new UX patterns. Take the text selector for example,
which felt like a stopgap when it was made and hasn't been changed since its
release. There a ton of papercuts like this in iOS.

I don't use Android regularly so I can't speak as much to its weaknesses, but
I believe there's a lot of room for improvement there as well, e.g. app
discovery and distribution

There's a photo floating around of Paris Hilton holding 5 phones. It's comical
but I think it also shows what's lacking. It'd be great if phones had
sandboxed profiles, completely isolated from one another in true multiuser
fashion. There are a lot of opportunities either for greenfield ideas or
adopting existing computing ideas to phones. You might find at least enough
market for a niche use capable of supporting a small to medium business

~~~
thewhitetulip
We need a full fledged OS for the mobile, despite the fact that Steve Jobs
created iOS so that phone softwares won't be "baby software" we are still not
seeing many apps which are mobile centered, they build the webapp first and as
an after thought the mobile app comes into place.

I want my phone OS and my laptop OS to be in sync, I want to program using my
phone and many many more features. But both iOS and Android lock us out of the
real stuff by making locking things up. Just imagine how the computing
landscape would have been if Linux wasn't open and as locked up as the "FOSS"
android. We'd be still using and cursing Windows3.4

~~~
icebraining
If you want to program using your phone, here's a C/C++ IDE and compiler,
which doesn't even require root:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.n0n3m4.dro...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.n0n3m4.droidc&hl=en)

There are also interpreters for many languages, various tooling and even full-
blown ports of GNU/Linux distros:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cuntubuntu...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cuntubuntu&hl=en)

Frankly, people overstate the lockdown-ness of Android itself. Maybe your
specific model was particularly locked down, but introducing a new OS won't
solve that problem.

~~~
thewhitetulip
I didn't say we need a new OS now, we need existing OSes to be a bit more
open. Have you tried programming on an Android phone? I have, the experience
is horrible. I used termux which is a full blown linux terminal. I installed
python and wrote a few python script and later Go programs also. Wasn't able
to get dependencies for Go programs because of root issue plus terrible
experience with typing things on mobile. Maybe I didn't have the right tools.

I want all my OSes to be able to talk to each other, when I write code on my
phone, I should be able to transfer it to my machine. There is a new project
which aims to do this, mobile OS and PC OS are the same in it.

~~~
icebraining
I've written code (mainly bug fixes) on my Android tablet just fine. Used a
terminal with Vim, then used SGit to commit and push my code to Gitlab. I've
also written Python scripts to use in Tasker.

Yes, typing is a pain, but that's an ergonomics problems, not a lack of
openness. I got a cheap BT keyboard, which works fine on Android. You can also
use a plain USB keyboard with an OTG cable, though power might be an issue.

~~~
thewhitetulip
Yes, you are right on this one. I actually wanted my pone itself to be rooted.
But then again, I'd be demanding too much.

Also I want the mobile OSes to be root friendly, I know it goes against their
corporate goals. Cyanogenmod is also as good as dead now.

~~~
icebraining
What's wrong with rooting stock Android? I've done it multiple times to my
Nexus, works fine. Nowadays it's just a matter of plugging the device and
clicking a few buttons on a GUI.

Of course, there are devices which aren't as open as the Nexuses. But that's
not a lack of openness by the OS.

------
CalChris
I'm deeply skeptical of anyone who wants to start a startup. I'm very
respectful of people who have great ideas. One thing about _startup first_ is
that it ends up with a lot of duplication. Granted Google and Facebook were
duplicates. And so it's fitting that they are in essence aggregators.

But I'm an engineer (and not a VC) and I have a natural inclination towards
the Woz approach. The magic happens in the process of work. It doesn't happen
in office hours at an incubator.

I think a more useful article would be _Ideas For Founder Teams_. But that's
some hard thinking.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
If you respect Woz, you should also know that Apple was not the only company
that was in the personal computing space when they started. They were just
passionate about what they were doing and they did the best job at it.

I myself hate the cliche "Ideas are worth nothing it's all about execution",
but at the same time I also have no respect for people who think they have the
best ideas but never execute on them.

Ideas __do __matter, except that most ideas are too abstract, and you won 't
realize if your idea works or not unless you start it. That's why "idea
people" with no execution are never respected by people who actually do stuff.
Of course, that is, when we're talking about startups. if you're an actual
philosopher who theorizes abstract things, you __are __an idea person and I
totally respect philosophers

~~~
CalChris
You are correct that Apple was a duplicate. At a certain level, just about all
companies are. Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land. Same with
movies. Do you really want to see something truly original because you will
recognize nothing.

However, having _no respect for people who think they have the best ideas but
never execute on them_ is going a bit far. Arthur C Clarke wrote an article

 _EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL RELAYS: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio
Coverage?_
[http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/1945ww_oct_305-308.html](http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/1945ww_oct_305-308.html)

It calculated the geostationary belt and showed that it could be applied to
communications satellites. No patent, no possibility of exploiting it.
Basically a really interesting blog post before there were blogs.

So I give credit to great ideas that are short of startup potential. What I
yawn at is startups not based on great ideas. I'll grant that there are
successful startups out there that aren't based on great ideas, just
execution. But they don't interest me. So fundamentally, that's a personal
evaluation.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
"Great idea" is an extremely subjective thing, and I don't even mean it in a
loose sense.

Many people think great ideas are things that are so obvious like flying cars
or fixing cancer, fixing aging, going to mars, fixing racism, fixing global
warming, etc. They are great ideas, but at the same time they are all just
obvious ideas. If something is obviously a great idea and has great market
potential, it would be stupid for a large company to be not working on it.
That's why these ideas are mostly tackled by already large companies and
almost never by startups. In fact I have never seen a startup that succeeded
by working on an idea that was already obvious to the masses, nor have I seen
world-changing come out of this. Most groundbreaking ideas started out as
something you would think is not one of those "great ideas". Use the same
Apple example, most people didn't think personal computers would change the
world, they just thought it was some nerdy tech thing that would stay as a
fringe culture. That's why IBM got into the game late.

That said, I am not disagreeing with you that philosophers are bad, I already
mentioned that. I use the term "philosophers" loosely here. For philosophers,
theorizing is execution, it's not like they can build something. And I totally
appreciate thought experiments.

------
hienyimba
Very true classic. Its mind-blowing to imagine this advise still holds water
11 years after.

------
xcoding
What is your next idea for startup?

~~~
mathnode
A regional Condom Drone Delivery Service.

\- "Rubber up 'bruv", in the UK.

\- "Rubber a brother" for the US.

Expand to CAAS (contraceptives as a service) when applying for second round,
pre-ipo.

~~~
jlebrech
what about a swooning service, you get the rubber, an uber to the hotel and a
bottle of champagne.

~~~
thesehands
Uber to an airbnb. It shall be called accommo-dating

~~~
gonzo
So airbnb by the hour?

~~~
Gargoyle
You may laugh, but I just finished a gig working on this. Watch this space.

------
fiatjaf
Imagine what Leibniz would say of this.

~~~
choxi
What would he say?

~~~
kriro
„Beim Erwachen hatte ich schon so viele Einfälle, dass der Tag nicht
ausreichte, um sie niederzuschreiben.“

I had too many ideas to write them all down.

