
Startup ideas you’re not using and probably won’t - barry-cotter
There are many, many possible business ideas that you might have that you are certain would make someone a good living or possibly wildly rich but you’re not doing them for some reason. Post each idea below as a separate comment and let’s see what excites the HN hive mind’s interest.
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barry-cotter
Baselang.com for languages other than Spanish.

Baselang has an amazing business model. They offer one on one Spanish tuition,
up to four hours a day for a subscription fee of $149 or $199 per month
depending on the package you want to buy. They use a video conferencing
software, Zoom, and they have the best guide to learning Spanish on the
internet, as content marketing. All the Spanish teachers are professional
teachers with good English who follow their well designed on house curriculum.

I think their major innovation is in the subscription. If you get one hour of
lessons a day that’s good value. At four hours a day it’s anazing value,
you’ll be fluent in Spanish in three months. But I doubt most subscribers even
use five hours a week. It’s the gym model. The people who swear next month is
going to be different, they’ll actually use the service, subsidise the small
number of heavy users and are where all the profits are made.

For no reason I can understand they don’t plan to teach any other languages.
If you can find a decent curriculum and buy the rights to it, hire some good
teachers and set up zoom you can do this for Portugese, French, Russian,
Arabic or Chinese. Italki.com is an inferior model.

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barry-cotter
Starfall.com but updated regularly. It’s a website to teach phonics and basic
math that was built in the 90’s and it has been the best website for teaching
that since then. It’s updated twice a year if that. It’s still using Flash, in
2019. The most valuable, useful content is free but there’s a bunch of extra
content for supporters. They have App Store apps which might be where they
make their money or the prices they charge for a whole school licence may be
high. I don’t know. I have only the sketchiest idea of how long it would take
to replicate its functionality and to have a bigger library of content but I
sincerely doubt it would take one decent programmer who can draw as well as
the average 10 year old longer than three months.

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anoncoward111
Outline.com except it's a browser and you don't have to input specific URLs
every single time

Alternatively everyone can just stop making 5MB websites. My 1kb/s mobile
Verizon connection can't handle it

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barry-cotter
How does that make money?

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anoncoward111
Would gladly pay $5 a month if needed. Technically you could release this as
client-side, no?

For example, I use Dillo on my Linux laptop. Anything that is not formatted
for HTML is completely rejected. I would prefer to set how stringently
filtered I want sites to be.

Try browsing zerohedge.com or any local news site. It is an abomination of
autoplay video ads, forced scrolling, 70% toolbars covering screen, photos
every 5 sentences...

And like 40kb of text.

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barry-cotter
Pinboard.in with reliable and timely support. By all accounts pinboard’s core
functionality works fine but apparently the owner goes months without reading
or replying to emails.

