
Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea - 0bsidian
I have spent the past year looking for good ideas for a startup and have little to show for it.<p>--------------------<p>-Things that we have:-<p>1) A great early team, made up of myself (just a normal bizdev guy) + 1 talented former private equity partner (who made a fortune on Wall Street) + 1 talented CMU CompSci PhD. The three of us have been friends for years and work together really well.<p>2) Investors that are willing to write blank checks (within reason) because of the trust in the team (mainly former colleagues of the PE guy).<p>3) Cash in the bank to continue experimenting<p>4) An interest in SaaS and ML (and some experience in the latter)<p>-Things that we don&#x27;t have:-<p>1) Ideas of what to do<p>--------------------<p>We have read EVERYTHING on how to come up with startups ideas (ranging from Paul Graham essays to The Mom Test). We have ran interviews with friends in corporate and startups, asked old colleagues, attented conferences, organised meetups in our city, a ton of time spent networking, etc.<p>The few product ideas we came up with following the above process we dropped, often because we discovered that that space is ultra crowded or commooditized.<p>We will not give up but are getting unsure on how to break the stalemate.<p>Any tips or advice?<p>Thanks!
======
ChuckMcM
My simple advice is to stop looking for ideas and to start looking for
problems.

Look for the pain, and to do that talk to people.

The challenge will be that most people accommodate the pain in order to get
something done, but they don't like it.

A recent pain point I came across was that 501.c(3) organizations are good at
organizing but often poor at "the Internet". That suggested that if you talked
to a half dozen charities you could probably find a way to offer them a
'internet presence service' that would be a combination of tools to do
calendaring, outreach, donor management, payment/donation processing,
testimonial pages, event landing pages, Etc. Think of it as a mashup of
Calendar, Wordpress, PayPal, Salesforce, and Quickbooks online. You make their
interface to the site both simple to get to (suggest a hardware token) and the
web sites appearance to be professional to people visiting.

If you architected it right you could also make it a onestop 'election'
website (similar sorts of things and similar reporting requirements for
donations etc)

Find folks who would like to get more out of the Internet or have trouble with
it, and solve their problem in a way that saves them real money or real time.
Then sell that to people in the same situation.

~~~
Qwertious
>My simple advice is to stop looking for ideas and to start looking for
problems.

I concur, and add that HN could really help OP by complaining about random
stuff here. Just complain about the first thing that comes to mind that's been
bugging you, OP will really appreciate it!

~~~
reitanqild
Easily fixable phones and laptops.

My phones and laptops are small enough and lightweight enough.

Making them bulletproof is too expensive. But making them easier to fix,
documenting the process and authorizing repair shops would do be great.

PS: I don't need to be able to hot-swap parts.

PPS: pro models from Dell and HP at least are often quite easy to disassemble
and fix and I think you can often source parts from eBay for years after you
buy them.

~~~
emacsgifs
Phones not made by Apple are easy enough to fix.

Just replaced the screen on my Mi Mix for about $100 plus an hour or so of my
personal time.

~~~
ziggyz
I think iPhones are among the easiest to fix, nothing is sealed no mess no
glue. The cheap replacement screen for 5,6,7 cost around 20£ and takes around
20min to replace.

~~~
emacsgifs
should have known this, since it seems like common sense in retrospect.

I'm projecting from impressions I'd made since the Mac book pro became harder
and harder to modify and upgrade. I'd constructed a faulty assumption about
the repairability of iPhones.

It's never been difficult for me to find someone to repair one of my old
iPhones in the past, I just quit on iPhones last year and feel somewhat
disappointed with them since the v7s. (I am a fairly recent switcher to
Android.)

------
nnq
STOP. Just _go work for someone else,_ please! Pretty please! Find someone
with vision, and work _for /with_ him/her instead. Or merge as equal partners.

You sound like really competent people, but working under people _without
their own vision_ and _without their own ideas_ is a _wrist slashing inducing
experience..._ The people with the _ideas /vision_ should _be in charge,_ not
ever the other way around! If you're execution people, find some _"
idea/vision people"_ and _merge_ (like in 100% equal partners) with them and
make you team whole.

Nobody wants more "execution people" in charge. If it's not vision/ideas what
drives something... _it 's not worth doing it! we're all better without it!_
I'd work _anytime_ under/with and asshole with good vision/ideas than another
"executionist optimizer" that makes everyone's life hell trying to optimize
profit and efficiency when nobody wants more optimizing. People want _meaning_
from their leaders and managers, and this can only come from _vision /ideas._

Go head hunt for "you team's Steve Jobs", not for "ideas". You want the "idea
generator" and you want yo put him/her half-in-charge...

~~~
Jean-Philipe
I so disagree. I've met so many "people with vision" who were far off with
reality and ultimately failed miserably. Most successful startups I know,
including my own, have pivoted - i.e. they had the wrong vision to begin with
and figured out something else along the way. The team was what made them
succeed.

~~~
babaganoosh89
Usually you want someone who’s also a domain expert and knows the market
inside and out. More than just a vision that hasn’t been market tested.

~~~
TrickyRick
So a domain expert with vision. What would he need this team for apart from
maybe their money, which out of the three is probably the easiest to acquire?

~~~
mooreds
A team that can execute is worth something too. The original comment stated
(correctly in my opinion) that you want the person with vision to be in
charge. But a domain expert with vision may or may not be able to execute
against that vision effectively. If they are for real they'll have started,
even if it just a manual process or horrible looking MVP. But if this team got
together with someone with vision (and were able to check their egos at the
door, not a small ask) they could really execute against that vision and bring
a great product to market.

------
timfrietas
Tough love:

You've done _too much_ reading on the subject already and will learn nothing
from reading even more by indulging yourself in the comments here.

And although good teams can find good ideas they have to "try and fail" at
things, not just "consider and not try" things. I'm not sure how long you've
been at this and which ideas you have considered and rejected and for what
reasons, but if it has been longer than a couple of months, you don't have the
right team makeup. You need someone with a strong product background
immediately to find the intersection of product market fit and what you all
are actually good at and will be passionate about building.

I'd love to hear more about what you've thought of and dismissed.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
I think the problem as described is actually a team problem.

You don't have a good team without a vision leader who is articulating the
ideas and steering the company. Like a boat with no captain, labor and capital
resources are important but ultimately useless without a captain who has a
vague idea of the endpoint and a sense for the roadmap. Try to dig into your
collective social networks and see if you know anyone who has a vision but not
the wherewithal to execute.

FWIW Money doesn't magically solve a problem, it merely exacerbates a
situation. Talent doesn't solve a problem without a clear understanding of the
problem being solved. As much as people on HN like to devalue the importance
of ideas, it is an extremely important part of the process

~~~
darethas
> Like a boat with no captain

They haven't even left the dock.

~~~
sklinger
How can they? There's no captain.

~~~
samstave
They have a dock, and no boat?

------
mindcrime
_The few product ideas we came up with following the above process we dropped,
often because we discovered that that space is ultra crowded or
commooditized._

GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons once said something like (paraphrased slightly)
"never be scared to enter a crowded market. Just be better than everybody
else". Something to think about.

Beyond that, consider that your product is not the only dimension on which you
compete. That is, there are other ways to compete besides having the best
product. As we all know, the best product doesn't always win.

I'd recommend reading _The Discipline of Market Leaders_ by Fred Wiersema and
Michael Treacy, as well as _Mastering The Complex Sale_ , _The Prime Solution_
and _Exceptional Selling_ , all by Jeff Thull. These books deal a lot with how
to compete and sell and differentiate yourself... even when selling a
seemingly low-value commodity like sand. Another valuable book is
_Differentiate or Die_ by Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin.

~~~
shostack
This. If anything you can save time on market validation if you think you can
execute or offer something unique that the existing players in the space lack.

~~~
endymi0n
Hits the nail on the head. It's an often cited cliché, but Google wasn't the
first search engine and Facebook not the first social network. That works in
niches as well if you have the feeling that the current state of the art
somehow seems lackluster, i.e. with Adjust in app attribution or Remerge in
mobile retarteging. With a lot of mistakes learned but no baggage on board,
you can often attack sooner than you'd think with clear focus.

Lastly, if the main battle for a certain segment is over for more than a
decade, the incumbents seem to get lazy if they continue dominating the market
for too long. Look at eBay for example, or Linked.In - they have stopped
innovating and basically get worse with every "Facelift", but there's still
considerable demand with a lack of alternatives. It's a long shot, but
possible with great execution.

------
sauwan
Here's my idea. All I ask for is a free one if you use it.

A drone fence. Hear me out.

Problem: Fencing is FUCKING expensive. For many people who want to keep
animals out (garden, animals pooping in the sandbox) buying a fence is really
cost prohibitive. Plus they don't always work anyways.

Solution: Self driving drones with IR cameras in specific locations. Place a
camera or two in strategic locations, and have a drone take off and chase off
deer or rabbits. Return to the main station, land, recharge, repeat. Might
need to have a squirt gun with some vinegar or something to scare off the more
aggressive deer.

But combine some machine vision (don't want to chase children), autonomous
flying drones, and some smarts, and you could have a $2000 system that
replaces a $X0,000 fence.

Sorta the opposite of an invisible fence for animals.

I would LOVE one of these. I just don't have the capital or talent to make it
happen...

~~~
damosneeze
Pretty good, but also quite niche. I think many people who build fences are
not doing it just to keep things out, but also to keep things in, mark
territory, provide security against more than just deer, aesthetics, etc.

However, on the fence industry, I could see a shake-up of fence estimation
software. Perhaps one that uses ML to take the data necessary for an
estimation (geographic data based on asker's location + parameters, materials
& prices needed for the job, labor, etc) and create an estimation at the click
of a button rather than from human input and calculations? Could help to bring
your fence cost down (marginally, but still).

My dad was in this business his whole life, and said the software in the
industry right now is shite. Ripe for disruption.

~~~
blakdawg
I knew a guy who made a shitload of money with a software program he wrote for
carpet stores/installers to optimize cutting different carpet pieces to
minimize waste.

It sounds simple and boring, but if you can save people a lot of money, they
don't mind sharing it with you.

------
dmitrygr
Probably an unpopular question given HN audience, but how does one know a team
is _great_ if said team hasn't successfully tackled any problems? Is it
similar to my cat being a great pilot because she hasn't crashed any planes?

~~~
colordrops
The fact that they've spent the past year toying around without direction
supports your conclusion as well. CVs are just one metric by which to judge a
team.

~~~
jypepin
no but one of them made millions in private equity, so...

~~~
rainbowmverse
Are investing in other people's businesses and starting your own translatable
skill sets?

~~~
cyberpunk0
I'd say no. Just shows you can manipulate others but have 0 originality of
your own. Hence the situation they find themselves in

------
jmnicolas
And there I thought that the ideas were the easy part :-)

Frankly I'm not sure you can succeed if you're just a mercenary (not trying to
insult you).

To me it seems you're approaching the problem the wrong way : it shouldn't be
about doing like everybody else or trying to be successful just because you
think it will make you feel good but it should be about releasing this f __*
idea that is nagging you since years and that nobody can do better than you.

I have one of those ideas since 2007. One day ... ;-)

~~~
gt2
Care to say what the problem is that your idea solves?

~~~
jmnicolas
Frankly I'd rather keep it to myself. I'm baffled that nobody thought about it
since 10 years.

But right now I'm working on a back-end code generation tool : the user would
just draw a data schema and once done get a database (as a script or as a
container or directly in his cloud of choice) and scaffolding for the API.

The data schema is based on a specific method that makes it simple to think
about your data without having to grok foreign keys.

I'm not sure I can pull it off but I want to see how far I can go.

~~~
conductr
Funny, I built this exact thing back in 2007 but couldn't market/sale it. Hope
you have better luck &/ now the timing is right!

~~~
jmnicolas
I'd be curious to know more.

~~~
conductr
Email in profile

------
hyperpallium
Because great teams seemed more important than great ideas, YC tried funding
teams without ideas, but it didn't work.

Market research is deadly, because that's what big companies do. If there's an
objectively verifiable opportunity, they are already on it.

This is what's so interesting about Christensen's "disruption" \- part of the
definition is that the opportunity is _not_ appealing to incumbents. It's too
small, not wanted by existing customers, etc.

So perhaps the key thing missing from "great teams without ideas" is the
passion (aka _craziness_ ) to wholeheartedly pursue something that can't be
objectively verified. And then, to discover unforseeable problems and solve
them; or, to pivot to a new idea, serenpiditously picked up along the way...
_the journey provides the destination_.

So... just start. "Scratch your own itch" is a good way to identify an unmet
need, just something to start with. Don't consider market size etc. Also,
don't commit much money to it, just your time, treat it as an experiment.

------
ggg9990
Your post could easily read: "I've got a killer office space in an amazing
skyscraper with catered organic sous vide lunches and a yoga room, but I don't
have a business idea to put in this office space. Any ideas?"

The most important aspects of a business are: 1) what you do 2) how you do it.
Things like team, capital, etc. are secondary and only matter once you have
those two.

It's a bit like you said, "I have a fantastic transmission for a 1977 Jaguar
XFT T-Type" but it turns out that car doesn't exist.

~~~
adventured
Comeon, that scenario worked out great for Ion Storm.

~~~
frik
While Ion Storm had an extravagant office at the top of a skyscraper, Warren
Spector had great ideas and a track record of awesome games. And Ion Storm
created one of the very best games ever made, Deus Ex 1, and Thiefs 3 was
great too.

------
got2surf
Find an un-sexy domain that you have more access to than the average person.
Start to build domain expertise in that area as quickly as you can (people are
surprisingly willing to talk when you don't want to _sell_ them something, but
just _learn_ about how they do things).

Build something (anything!) that uses some cool ML technology (or even just
some simple statistics) in that domain. Think of this as an ultra-MVP -
something you build part-time in the order of weeks, rather than full time
over months. This keeps your "investment" low and makes you mentally ready to
accept changes.

Loop back with the people in the un-sexy industry to get feedback. Remember,
not all industries are bombarded with technology - you'll need to strike a
balance between showing them something sufficiently "fancy" to pique interest,
and abstracting away your technology so they focus on a problem it solves.

When my cofounder and I started ~4 years ago, we chose an un-sexy industry
that my cofounder knew from years of consulting. This was awesome, but even
with his amazing experience, our initial idea for a product didn't take off
(which was fine - it doesn't take too many wins to make the weeks of
development/sales profitable).

Over the next 4 years, we built another couple of offerings, which sold better
than the first. They took hold in various ways, but the insights behind each
product were usually driven (or at least influenced) by the people we talked
to about our initial product. Which brings me back to the key - build things
in a low-cost way and use that to identify tangentially related problems until
you think you've found a big enough pain point.

------
hpcjoe
Good ideas are hard ... sometimes simple and overcrowded markets yield the
best results. Facebook is basically usenet with a better UI/UX
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet)).
Amazon was a book store.

What you need is something where you provide a specific solution to a real
problem, something people are really willing to pay for.

Network, speak to people, ask them about their problems. What do they wish
existed. And if it existed, would they pay for a solution (is it a real
business).

I've got some ideas for things from recent life experiences that seem to be
common. This is where the best ideas come from. When there is a real need, and
those addressing it aren't doing it well, or at all. Look for that gap.

Never hesitate to connect with others either. A good conversation can spur
thoughts, and this is where ideas germinate.

Remember, the idea doesn't have to be a killer. Lowering friction in a process
to make it faster/easier/cheaper/better goes a long way to turning into
something good (think Uber/Lyft/AirBNB), even if the business is old and
commoditized.

------
mooreds
What non software domains are you experts in? There are lots of businesses out
there with problems that are solved with spreadsheets for which a focused SaaS
offering would be a 10x solution. See procore or gingr for examples (those are
just off the top of my head).

But you need the domain expertise (or be willing to acquire it).

Then, you also need to be passionate about it. To avoid the long slow SaaS
ramp of death ( [http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-
constant-...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-
contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/) ) you'll want to
really, truly have a burning need to solve your customer's problem. At least
one of you will have to have this customer empathy.

~~~
amelius
So how do you get domain expertise?

Sometimes I think the best way to go about it is to become a consultant, look
around in companies, and when you've found something, build a product for it.

~~~
mooreds
Hahah, that's the rub. Being a consultant can be a good way to acquire domain
expertise, as long as you are vertically focused: "I solve problems for
realtors" rather than tech focused "I build web applications" or "I build
mobile applications in Swift". Downside: can be scary to specialize, will take
some time.

Another way to do that is to actually do the job or take a job in a company
that is not a software company but that uses software. I worked for a real
estate brokerage for years and now know a lot about real estate. Downside:
again, you have to pick a specialty and will take a few years.

A final way is to do some research and talk to people about their problems.
This is much quicker, but will require some work that you won't get paid for.
Amy Hoy has some great stuff around researching:
[https://stackingthebricks.com/](https://stackingthebricks.com/)

------
rajacombinator
Just stay in your jobs and don't force it. Without a burning desire to do
something and/or domain knowledge, you're looking at years of frustration with
likely no results, just to chase the trendiness of doing a startup. The fact
that three people with supposed experience are not aware of any problems that
need solving is not a good sign. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. You
could draw on your investor contacts, likely strike out, maybe manage an
aquihire, but why bother. Much easier to stay in a secure job until you're
ready.

------
colorincorrect
why would you even found a company without a idea? that makes no sense to me.

just live your life as usual, and when you encounter a problem that you can
foresee solving, ask yourself: 0. would i pay someone else to solve this
problem? 1. do other people have this problem as well? 2. can i make a profit
by solving this problem on scale?

an obvious point but always worth mentioning: a good business proposal should
be short, obvious after the fact, and uses no big words (like AI, fintech,
Blockchain Technology) (at least internally)

------
curun1r
Try working backwards.

Step 1: Pick your customers. Are they small business, enterprise or consumers?
Are they in a specific vertical or are you addressing a cross-cutting concern?

Step 2: Start learning. Set up interviews and learn their business inside and
out. Perhaps volunteer to be unpaid labor as a way to get an inside look at
how their businesses run and where the inefficiencies are.

Step 3: Find the right inefficiency to address. It should be one that people
are willing to spend to address, not just one where people should be willing
to spend on. Also filter based on whether your team is best equipped to tackle
the problem (i.e. don't try solving a really hard problem that, if you're
successful, Google or Facebook could bang out in an afternoon with small
modifications to an existing product.) Also look for products/services that
give you a durable advantage, whether it's because you're the only one with
the right data or because switching is particularly painful or a host of other
reasons...much has been written on the subject, so read up for more examples.

Step 4: Go back and try to work up a demo of a product idea. It doesn't have
to actually work (read do things that don't scale), it just has to show your
vision.

Step 5: More interviews with potential customers. These aren't sales calls,
they're a chance to gauge interest and get feedback on features and potential
pricing.

You'll have a good idea whether you're ready to move forward or back to step
4, 3 or even 2 at that point, but if you hit on something, then your tech
starts coding and your non-tech starts trying to find launch customers using
the demo. At this point, you've probably read enough about the next steps to
take.

Good luck!

------
gajomi
I'm sure it must be out there already in some form, but you might want to give
a shot at "uber for day laborers". It seems to me like there are opportunities
on both the supply and demand side. On the supply side there its lots of room
for improving gig hunting and payment assurance for laborers. Staffing
agencies are of course in this space, but are pretty inefficient and catch
only a small fraction of potential gigs relative to something like craigslist
(which of course, has the downside of potentially unreliable payments). On the
demand side, there are definitely niches for short term gigs where a company
needs to scale up or down quickly (last minute work, no shows, etc). These
quick changes can be hard for staffing agencies to fulfill, largely due to
inefficiency in recruitment, even when the laborers are already in the talent
pool. If you don't have any experience with this area, its really easy to do
so: try to find some ditch digging on craigslist and see how many gigs you can
do before you get stiffed or otherwise mistreated (won't take long). Also, use
that pile of cash you have in the bank to try to find contractors to paint a
house, clean some toilets, etc. and you'll start to get a sense for problems
in the labor pool.

~~~
Animats
There are lots of people who need jobs and need someone to tell them where to
go and what to do. This could be a real winner. Call it "Slaves 2.0".

~~~
gajomi
Your comment made me lol. But also made me think :)

Indeed its not hard to imagine how "uber for day laborers" could increase
worker exploitation. In particular the possibility of somehow skirting around
worker's comp insurance by arguing that it only facilitates transactions is an
obvious starting point. However, I think such a technology could also be used
to mitigate exploitation. The one thing that I already mentioned was payment
assurance. In general socializing the risk exposed to laborers as part of the
service could be a great benefit in growing the service.

~~~
hawski
It could mitigate, but VC money will not ROI itself.

~~~
heroprotagonist
20% off the top for basically running a directory service would, though.

------
BRitterbeck
There's plenty to be done in the bank risk management space. I was part of a
group a few years ago that tried to approach this space; however, family
issues forced me to leave software and go back to banking.

There's a piece of software, produced by a company called QRM, used within the
treasury group of a lot of large banks. This piece of software is both slow
(one run at a decent-sized bank can take several hours even spread over
hundreds of CPUs) and incredibly user unfriendly (you cannot do any analysis
within the software itself; everything must be dumped to Excel first).

Everyone I have talked with in the industry says this software must be
replaced; however, it will take quite a long runway to get things up and
going.

While I doubt that this piece of software could be implemented as SaaS for
bigger banks, I definitely think if you pitched a solution to smaller banks
and built up a group able to conduct the type of analysis you would do with
this software, you would have a winner. Also, if your CMU guy is looking to
come back to Pittsburgh, I might be able to get one or two other people
together for an in-person conversation.

If you are interested in learning more, please provide an email address, and I
will reach out to you.

------
benjismith
A crowded market can be _great_ because the demand has already been validated,
but nobody else has emerged as the market leader yet. That's where _YOU_ step
in, with your wisdom and insight about this market, to show the existing
constituents how your viewpoint of the world makes life better for them.

So if you don't have any ideas, it means you don't have any wisdom or insight
about any market. Therefore, you don't have a great startup team. Full stop.

If you have competent designers and engineers, you could maybe open up a
consultancy, and provide implementation services for other entrepreneurs with
ideas of their own...

The thing is: smart, creative entrepreneurs see ideas _everywhere_. They wake
up in the morning with a hundred new ideas, lacking only the human bandwidth
to pursue them all.

I'd venture to say, if you don't have ideas, you're not really living in the
world. You're just looking for a leprechaun with a pot of gold you can claim.

Try just being a fully-formed person in the world, with hobbies and interests
and passions and relationships and struggles and obligations and complicated
logistics, and see what problems you encounter while living that life.

You'll have a hundred ideas by the end of the day.

------
coreyp_1
I'm tempted to ask to join your group, but I'm finishing my PhD myself (in the
spring), so I'm a bit busy! :)

My most important suggestion is the simplest: Come up with more ideas. Take a
look through this guy's posts:
[https://medium.com/@x0054](https://medium.com/@x0054). Specifically, he set a
goal to come up with 10 random ideas a day for a month. They are all over the
place in terms of quality and practicality. Some of them are silly; some are
outstanding. If you do this for a month (as do each of your partners,
individually), you will have close to 1,000 ideas to comb through. Something
_will_ rise to the top.

Creativity is a habit. Creativity is a skill.

As for myself, I have several ideas that have risen to the top (out of
hundreds) that are definitely money-makers, but I don't (yet) have the
resources to pursue by myself. The hardest part for me is to find others who
are motivated enough to bootstrap a business! It sounds like you have a good
group, though, and for that I congratulate you and wish you luck!

------
JamesBarney
It sounds like the three domains you guys have experience in are software, biz
Dev, and private equity.

I would stay the fuck away from software because it's an incredibly crowded
field, that is notoriously cheap.

But private equity and biz Dev are great domains to be in. People will easily
write big checks to solve small problems in those domains.

Have those two guys on your team talk to everyone they know in their
respective spaces about what problems they have that they'd be willing to
spend money on.

Basically your goal is to find out what problem keeps VPs in those respective
domains up at night. And then brainstorm some way to make them worry a little
less. Then shop it out to those same guys to see if anyone is willing to buy
or help fund the app. Do this over and over again until you find an idea that
works.

------
pascalxus
I would pay, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for an APP that can
build me a house (all costs included). I am not alone.

Obviously, this idea is overly ambitious. But, can you take a moonshot idea
like that and break it down into smaller pieces? Perhaps, work on one small
piece of a really difficult problem. In the example I gave, perhaps a zoning
ordinance voting platform that makes zoning change paper work easier. I
realize most of the housing problems are entirely Political. But, you gotta
realize, those are problems too - and they are big ones!

~~~
rainbowmverse
Manufactured homes are already a thing. An app to streamline the process of a
custom build would be fighting against the (undeserved) stigma, but it'd be
interesting to see.

~~~
pascalxus
That's no-where near a finished product we can use. You have to worry about
getting land, plumbing, electricity, not to mention it's illegal in many
places. Often, The fit and finish isn't very nice and the size would be alot
smaller than most people want. But, they're probably heading in the right
direction, they just have a lot of problems to solve.

------
sah2ed
I'm pretty confident you'll hit up upon potentially viable ideas based on pain
points described by the community in past "Ask HN" threads like the ones below
(newest first):

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576236)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007)

Also, there was a Show HN nearly a year ago for
[http://patentsexpiringtoday.com/](http://patentsexpiringtoday.com/) which is
a service for exploring ideas whose patent protection have expired.

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309025)

------
breakyerself
Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

Low cost stickers that can be activated then placed on items in the
refrigerator to indicate how much time has passed. Should be feasible to
develop for a qualified team and would save People a lot of food. Maybe the
design exists and just needs proper marketing.

Easy, cheap, hassle free batch scanning of photographs. How many people have
boxes and boxes of family photos that they only see once every 5-10 years? Get
those things digitized and organized now cheaply and easily.

You know those people who fly over peoples houses, take nice photos, then try
to sell them to the owner? Why not offer people a digital copy of their
houses/property? Lots of applications for that. From games to interior
decorating to planning renovations.

Methane can be produced using electricity from solar power. Which could be run
in cars without much modification. This could reduce fossil fuel usage without
having wait for internal combustion engine vehicles to be retired. Maybe a
unit installed at home could provide fuel for an individuals commute at near
zero cost after it's paid off? If not maybe large facilities could make and
ship the fuel to be sold at gas stations. Some people would be willing to pay
a premium for liquid fuel produced by solar(At least I would). It could become
even more desirable if proper carbon regulations ever kick in.

A wikipedia for DIY things. Instructibles sucks. It would be nice to have a
well organized and very large corpus of information on how to do things from
the very general to the very specific. From various methods to repair a hole
in sheet rock to replacing brake pads on a 1997 Volvo to gardening with lots
of various individual plans for different home projects like Halloween
costumes, knitting, and woodworking. The hard part is getting a large
community of people to contribute to the making of it.

I could go on all day. Anyone can. figuring out which idea in the sea of
available ideas floating around, then executing it. That's the hard thing.

~~~
icebraining
Right, but the question asks about _good_ ideas, and that's a problem - how do
you tell it's good? Yeah, I know about market validation, but you can't
literally validate every idea you come up with. Especially if you have to
build an MVP to do it.

~~~
breakyerself
You can't know for certain if an idea is good ahead of time. You can identify
some bad ideas that look good with a little research, but the only sure way to
tell is to do the thing. Hell even if it is a good idea they might just fail
to execute it properly. I wonder if they're just too risk averse. Looking for
a sure thing when there's no such thing.

~~~
icebraining
For me, I wouldn't say it's looking for a sure thing, but feeling like I'm
probably wasting my time. Like you said, one can easily come up with dozens,
possibly hundreds of ideas. Chances are most are duds. Without any good way of
ranking them, what are the chances you'll hit on a good one?

Doing this kind of "idea lottery" just sounds like a recipe for frustration.

~~~
breakyerself
For them it's got to be frustrating. It's fun for me. I like brainstorming.

------
touchofevil
Would it be possible for your team to start a small VC firm instead of a
startup? Wouldn't that be a better fit for a team that has lots of capital,
one technical partner, and one sales partner, but currently doesn't have an
idea?

~~~
MrGrillet
I was thinking this too.

I was going to say it might be worth looking for projects that have been
validated by sales and then looking to grow them both with the team and
capital.

Having something like a space with a couple ideas/ startups in it that have
already been validated would lower your risk and expose you to more
opportunities while growing the business. I assume.

~~~
rainbowmverse
If they don't have enough interest (meaning knowledge) in any market to have
lots of ideas already, how will they know how to vet potential investments?

------
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg
Website & terminal integration that reads last ~30 lines of stdout&stderr and
suggests a solution/elaboration with links back to stackoverflow/forum post
that it came from. Launch as open source and sell to enterprises that want to
incorporate internal knowledge bases (extract Q & A from chat logs is huge)
without leaking data outside the company.

Program that takes an AST and valid transformations, learn what kinds of ASTs
humans prefer and offer a high quality auto restructure code tool that
guarantees no side effects.

Company that I can pay a small subscription to that works to protect my
attention, ad blocking has been done fairly well for free, but that is far
from the only attention hog. Most app's notifications are just distractions
and should be batched, only to be looked at at the end of the day. Should be
easy to take a picture of paper spam mail and have the company get it to stop.
Stuff like that.

Company that picks up anything from junk to valuables and either charges or
pays you based off of the value of the stuff. As a customer I'd like to take a
picture of the items, receive an estimate of cost or price and only have to
interact with the company, no coordinating with craigslist rando.

IoT company that produces cheap place-and-forget devices that monitor long
term potential problems in houses (major changes in how vibrations carry
through the walls, moisture in basement)

EDIT more:

A purely audio interface to email, specific goal being usable while
walking/driving to work.

Text preprocesser that estimates what you already know (tracks what articles
you read, how much of them you read) and greys out/deempahsises stuff you
likely already know. Having an estimate of what someone already knows could be
huge for manipulating the forgetting curve & estimating the likeliehood of
understanding what is in a piece of text.

Reddit/HN like site that ranks based off of amount of work done on the item,
try to be more popular than bitcointalk. Plenty of ads targeting crypto
holders.

------
skanga
It's simple. Add another person to the team who has a brilliant, world beating
idea but no working capital, great team, etc. You can talk to several to see
who has the "best" idea. For a start on this process you can contact me :-)

PS: I use google's email service and have the same id there as I have on YC.

~~~
GFischer
Definitely, just going through YC rejects there must be at least one that has
a great idea :) .

------
osrec
A text-book case of analysis paralysis! I get the feeling you're inability to
get something started may stem from trying to over optimise on your options.

The opportunity cost of selecting any particular path is real (and scary), but
you have to take the plunge! I have had a few reasonably successful start ups
(link to my latest one is in my profile), and I can tell you that if you are
careful to start small, the opportunity cost is not so big.

With a small startup, you don't really need to commit till you see traction.
Try this (I've done this in the past, and it's quite useful):

1) All of you sit down together to jot down a few ideas you have floating
around your minds.

2) Pick the best one at that moment, and think about who your potential
customers could be. Google a few actual companies - say 5 or 10.

3) Without writing a single bit of code, think about logistics and give the
idea a bit of structure (how it would work, how much it would cost etc).

4) Call the potential clients from step 2 and try to sell them the product. It
doesn't exist yet, but they don't know that. They will probably tell you "no",
or "we use xyz to do this already" etc

5) Use their responses as valuable data points - if all of them don't need
your service, maybe the idea's a dud. If they already have something doing the
same thing, and they pay for it, it may be worth exploring to see how you can
improve on the existing experience.

That should take you about 2-3 hours at most and will at least end up
generating some discussion. Clearly, you have time, money and people at your
disposal. Unfortunately, it seems, you've locked yourselves away in an echo
chamber to the point that the world can't reveal its many problems to you!

------
borvo
So .. a bizdev guy who has never found any business problems and a PE guy who
has never discovered any PE problems? Either you're overthinking it or just
doomed: you don't have a team.

~~~
AznHisoka
so harsh yet so true. off the top of my head i can think of a few PE problems
that warrant a product. For instance, Facebook just released a Locations API
for over a million locations. Which means you can find the number of checkins
for stores like BestBuy and Target everyday. This can be a goldmine for
financial analysts. Your team needs to stop screwing around.

------
dyim
I was in your position 21 months ago - loved reading startup books, money in
the bank, fantastic co-founder, but no idea! Advice is cheap but I figured I'd
share my experience:

Our attitude was to work on something, anything, no matter how stupid. Which
requires a pretty deep font of enthusiasm - it's not easy to get people
excited about a self-consciously ridiculous idea. Take the startup seriously,
but be willing to drop it if a better idea comes along. Here's what we worked
on in 2016:

\- Retro-Zine: subscription service for Playboy magazines from the '60s and
'70s

\- Fruit Mistakes
([https://twitter.com/fruitmistakes](https://twitter.com/fruitmistakes)): pre-
sliced fruit subscription for startups

\- Rat Dog Capital: trying to buy friends' lifestyle SaaS businesses

\- Panel Ninja v1: admin panels as a service (think a SaaSified version of
[https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin](https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin))

\- Panel Ninja v2: productivity analytics for enterprise customer support
teams

Thanks to YC, Panel Ninja v2 eventually turned into Loop Support, our current
startup. We're solving a real problem now (customer support as a service for
high-RPU B2C companies [1]) - and like you guys, we had very little to show
after a year in the woods.

All the same, I'm really glad that my co-founder and I spent a year eating
quail and manna - we got really good at working with each other in a lower-
stakes, lower-stress environment. Like training wheels and flight simulators.
So don't get discouraged :)

[1] If you work at one of these companies, you're likely stressing out over
holiday customer support. 1) Get back to work! And 2) I would love to help! My
contact info is in my HN profile.

------
coryl
You find ideas by digging for them in the dirt. This observation might be a
little more focused towards programmers, however.

Explore spaces where change is rapidly occurring, and build things with those
technologies/platforms/markets. You'll encounter problems along the way, be
they legal, technical, distribution, etc. Some of those problems will be
experienced by others and so you may stumble across a viable market. But
you'll only know that by walking down those paths, rather than gazing from
afar.

------
wj
If you can spare an hour I highly recommend listening to this talk that Tom
Kelley of IDEO gave on innovation and identifying problems as part of
Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders program:

[http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts/2054/Young-at-Heart-
How...](http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts/2054/Young-at-Heart-How-to-Be-an-
Innovator-for-Life)

The TLDR is to be aware of what is going on around you. He gives examples of
that in action including a couple that stuck with me regarding the turnstiles
at the Paris airport and children's toothbrushes. Things that are so obvious
in retrospect but it takes stopping and observing in order to identify the
problem.

My favorite quote from the talk, "Be childlike as often as possible. Be
childish as little as you can."

(If you're looking to do something in financial services I think there are
still a lot of problems that need to be solved and tons of opportunity over
the next decade as demographics shift. Just think of what has happened in the
past fifteen years. People used to do their banking in person. Now people even
considering going to an ATM an inconvenience. Let's talk.)

------
sudosteph
You really can't come up with a single workable idea? I find that hard to
comprehend. Maybe just invest in others for now, see where that takes you.

If you're really desperate to do it yourselves though, you need to get out of
whatever bubble you're in and start finding opportunity in more frequently-
overlooked spaces.

Here's an easy one. Seattle just started piloting dockless bike shares. The
competitors are kinda unimpressive, and nobody has offered an electric-powered
fleet yet. The minimum electric fleet size is only 10 IIRC. Seattle is super
hilly, and electric bikes would be great, but they are harder to make and
repair, and may be more likely to get stolen (at greater cost to replace as
well). However, traffic is so freaking terrible here that that bikes can
easily be the fastest means of transportation at certain times. There are lots
of amazonians with disposable incomes who would prefer to avoid the bus to get
home, but can't justify the inconvenience taking care of a bike and riding
uphill.

Figure out something cool to do with that. You'll have GPS data for all
movements that you can apply ML to estimate demand and determine the most
valuable places to leave them around town. Incentivize riders to drop them off
in valuable spots with ride credit. Maybe partner with Postmates or DoorDash
to make it a low-expense delivery vehicle for couriers who don't own cars.

Seattle is just one of the first to allow this model. Other cities and college
campuses (especially ones less dense than Seatle, that may not get much out of
traditional bike shares) will follow soon. There is a ton of room to grow. And
the sooner you start collecting that data and interpreting it, the bigger
advantage you'll have due to being able to make ML-driven optimizations.

------
john_teller02
Solve some real life problem like:

1) Cancer , heart disease health related problem. 2) Depression 3) Poverty 4)
Violence (how about a magic shield)

etc etc .. there are tons of real life problem that are yet to be solved and
NEED to be solved for survival of human kind. Just open your heart and eyes
and you will find.

------
vishvananda
I have been doing the big company thing for a number of years now after
exiting successfully as employee number one of a small startup and having to
shut down a larger and better funded startup where I was CTO. Since then, I've
done quite a bit of thinking about how to be successful should I choose to do
a startup again.

The conclusion that I have reached is that the best approach is to find a
boring problem. There are so many legacy industries out there that haven't
changed in decades. If you can improve one of those, you're basically printing
money. This was what Uber did for Taxis. A couple of examples of startups that
I've run into lately that are doing this:

ripcord.com: record storage is a multibillion dollar industry in the US alone
and is largely controlled by one company that is a hundred years old and has
not modernized. spruce.co: title insurance is also a huge industry that is
dominated by old companies with zero technology. If you've gone through the
process of buying a house you know how ridiculous the signing and title
transfer is.

------
throwaway2912
Are you looking for an idea or a “sexy” idea?

You could build an Ecommerce and sell stuff. Spend a few grands on some
products and see which one converts the best. Or create the landing of some of
your ideas and see if people will leave their info by buying some advertising
on Facebook/Google.

A crowded market doesn’t necessarily mean that you have no chance. The key
here is positioning your product to make it look different. If you have cash
to spend you can actually test a lot of “boring” ideas by differentiating them
(e.g. another to-do app that does X or is made for Y).

Even better, which problems do you face daily?

------
exabrial
The problem is you're looking for easy stuff to do. Here's four ideas I just
thought of:

1) Write software that uses machine learning to search for tornados in doppler
radar signal returns 2) Write software that manages inpatient health care,
orders, prescriptions, labs, etc 3) Write software that uses machine learning
to route network packets faster 4) Use machine learning to control an engine's
ECU to maximize fuel economy or power via valve timing, spark degrees/timing,
fuel/air mixture, injection timing, compression ratio, etc

~~~
lj3
This stuff sounds more like R&D than markets to build products for. Way too
risky for a company that hasn't even proven they can deliver a product where
most of the technical problems have already been solved.

~~~
exabrial
Interesting comment, I assumed all good idea required r&d!

~~~
lj3
That's the mindset of an engineer at work. Engineers want hard, sexy problems
to chew on. Businessmen want stable, predictable tech with large margins (low
production costs and a high selling price). This is why a lot of people talk
about converting an excel spreadsheet into a SaaS business. It's ridiculously
easy, low cost, stable, predictable revenue that companies will happily pay
for to not have to deal with their excel spreadsheets ever again.

~~~
exabrial
I fail to see how those are competing objectives...

------
sound_and_form
Make this. Somebody make this. Maybe it's not the obnoxious, catch-phrasey
SaaS bulls*t you wanted to do, but it will change the world and you can be
proud that you made it. There are millions of blind people in the world. They
shuffle around with rudimentary technology. Literally sticks. But they still
have ears. Synesthesia. Process the visual 3D world with a camera. Use head
tracking. Convert it into an immersive three-dimensional auditory world. A
curb sounds like a stream. A tree sounds like rustling leaves. A pole is an
electric arc. Traffic lights are pings. Red lights, walk signs all have a
distinctive sound replicated in 3D auditory world that maps as closely as
possible to the actual world. We have the technology. You can build it. Not
only would it radically improve the lives of blind people, it would be a blast
for the sighted to design and refine. Like a real life video game that
actually matters to someone.

~~~
perilunar
Wouldn't that interfere with echolocation? Most of us do it at a rudimentary
level [1], but some people have become quite proficient at it [2].

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation)

2\.
[https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kish_how_i_use_sonar_to_nav...](https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kish_how_i_use_sonar_to_navigate_the_world)

------
hguhghuff
I've gotta say this seems to be putting the cart before the horse.

This means that you want to be in business for the sake of it.

I've always wanted to be in business but it's always on the back of a driving
sense of something that I want to do / make happen.

Just seems strange to have assembled all the ingredients without a recipe.

~~~
kelnos
Eh, don't entirely agree with this. Part of the allure of starting a startup
is having no boss and being the master of your own destiny. (In reality, of
course, you'll have investors and a board to answer to, but it's still very
different and more appealing for some people than being a 'regular' employee.)
I think it's understandable and reasonable to be a proto-company in search of
ideas.

~~~
epynonymous
i also don't agree, they have found a group that likes to work together, likes
to solve problems together. i think that's a primary motivator. sometimes i
see my colleagues more than i see my family so it better be people that i
enjoy working with.

------
tylerhogge
"I'm a big believer that great ideas find you, you don't find them. Without a
unique insight, you shouldn't start a company. You have to be authentic to the
problem." -andy rachleff

[https://pando.com/2012/12/11/what-makes-for-a-great-
entrepre...](https://pando.com/2012/12/11/what-makes-for-a-great-
entrepreneur/)

------
m12k
There's an obscene amount of software used in the enterprise that is an
absolute pain to use, and inefficent too. Basically nobody in their right mind
would use this stuff if they weren't being paid to do so - and if someone
created a nicer alternative, the people using it would lobby their bosses to
switch. Basically, the design/usability/UX revolution that has happened in the
consumer IT space in the past decade has not made nearly as much of an impact
in business software (especially when it comes to software aimed at non-IT
companies). Companies like Slack have shown that you can make SaaS go almost
viral if you address a real pain point in a way that the people on the ground
understand and like.

------
npollock
Ask yourself why you want to start the business first. Provided making money
isn't the only motivator, start talking to people in the spaces that excite
you and your team. Design/mock some simple concepts, show them to people, get
feedback. Find pain points, offer hypothetical solutions, let the market shape
your ideas/thinking. Get that feedback engine in place, and the ideas will
flow.

------
euroclydon
How about an e-commerce service to layer environmentally sensitive and/or
humane shopping on top of traditional retailers like Wal-Mart, Whole Foods,
grocery chains and Amazon?

You could sign people up for grocery/sundry subscriptions, just like Amazon,
etc, and fulfill through those retailers.

Just starting with weekly groceries that omit single use plastics, by choosing
glass peanut better jars and cardboard detergent boxes.

------
leandot
Acquire a small business with market validation and good potential and scale
it up.

~~~
tal_berzniz
One of the better comments in this thread

------
jacobush
You should create a peer 2 peer competitive arcade game with its own
blockchain, with an instruction set based on RISC-V and a Cuckoo Cycle hash on
completed work to adapt mining difficulty. A very short block time and privacy
features lifted from Monero. Storage backed by IPFS.

Deposits put in a few blocks ahead to stop cheating. Store rage quits before
time is up, to penalise bad behaviour. Count me in.

New physics engine libraries or games altogether could be registered and
stored for a fee, on the blockchain. It would be like an app store. Each time
such a games was played, the original uploader could earn royalties collected
from the deposits.

Even copyright could be encoded, it could be set to expire automatically in 75
years, for instance.

------
kibrad
I can give you one idea for something I would really love if it existed, but I
don't have the resources to do it myself:

A marketplace for sales people and SaaS products. Every sales agent can sell
any product and get commission. This way, an agent walks to a business, and
instead of offering him 1 product he doesn't need, he can offer him from
dozens of products a few he really needs.

~~~
srebalaji
Great idea. Is there any similar product live?

------
pithic
First accept the fact that your team - despite their vaunted achievements in
many areas - is not competent in ideation. Ideation is more than just pulling
a rabbit (you've probably pulled one or two already, despite your collective
lack of skill). It's akin to pulling a rabbit egg out of a hat, fertilizing it
in a petri dish, and shepherding its development into a furry, scampering
critter). It's a process of vision.

Your options are 1) develop this skill; 2) find someone who has. Weigh the
effort and palatability of personal transformation vs setting aside the
signal-detection machinery that has thus far excluded competent ideators from
your circle.

------
SnacksOnAPlane
So here's a nice idea I had that I don't have time to implement:

A specialized debate forum. Basically, two people decide to debate on an
issue. They are the featured debaters. They write positions and submit them,
and then they try to knock down the other person's positions.

Watchers can comment on specific points they make, annotating them and giving
points for them. I imagine a system kind of like RapGenius.

Eventually, in the best case, the best arguments float to the top, and the
more common arguments will have a home on the net where people can point to
them instead of rehashing them over and over again. Leading to more
intelligent discourse and a perfect society.

------
lokendrachauhan
Considering you guys can start with a blank check and work on IP heavy ideas
(CMU PhD), it is safe to assume that you guys don’t want to go in something
which isn’t less than a billion dollar thing in 5-7 years.

So look for pilot projects in such industries where entry barriers are high,
defence, insurance, banking, health, oil &gas, etc. Wall Street connections
will come in handy to find the right folks to call. As of now the plan should
be to convert pilots into products. If need be do two or more pilots at the
same time and then take a call later based on what is most beneficial, the
amount and type of risk, comfort factor of the team, etc.

~~~
mogget
Reading through this thread with great interest, I actually have to wonder
what the OP's criteria really are. I'd _guess_ that lokendrachauhan's
assumption is probably valid, but that is somewhat based on my stereotypes
(and being currently involved in a venture that is driven by these kinds of
aspirations on the part of the CEO, not always to good effect, IMHO).

@OP, what are your general guidelines for a "good idea"?

Look at the range of approaches discussed: from Dane Maxwell's approach to
focused SaaS solopreneur to selling to big industries or the government (long
lead-times). Plus, some of the ideas mentioned are stunning. Ideas per se are
not lacking. $B+ ideas with low-risk and high differentiation might be ;)

Also, you description of "great team" sounds a lot like "bankable resumes",
but it is unclear what experience you guys have that would actually be
accretive to building an early-stage startup. There are a lot of smart people
who want to be involved in big deals. If your PE guy is not actually serving
as an SME for a finance-related product, and primarily brings a rolodex and
smell of money on his CV, then maybe he should be an investor or perhaps on
the board instead?

Consider also your tech SME, and that you've only 1 tech person of 3. Although
I do not assume a doctoral degree means no practical skills (I think there's
actually some discrimination against doctorates out there), does this guy also
have practical experience in small SW efforts? It seems a red flag that he
doesn't have ML application ideas.

I don't intend this to sound mean, in fact I identify with your situation in a
few ways, I'm just reflecting some honest thoughts after 3 startups.

Have you considered choosing something, even if it isn't perfect, to use as a
"forcing function" to get the juices flowing in your group and vet them as a
good team? I understand the opportunity cost of time, but actually doing
something might galvanize your thinking.

Good luck!

------
josefrichter
The problem is it's almost impossible to put together a functional team from
people who don't know each other for years. I have a solid idea and need 3
guys with exactly the background you described, especially the SaaS+ML
interest, but it doesn't matter because of this. The trust issues are usually
covered by a patchwork of NDAs, equity splits that turn out to be arbitrary,
vesting schedules that turn out to be unfair, and at the end of the day,
someone gets screwed anyway. So I'd love to see that problem solved first -
not sure that's also a business "idea" though :-) Good luck anyway.

------
djyaz1200
I'd suggest you and your team go to a bunch of Startup Weekend/Hackathon
events. When I've gone I've found a lot of cool people come to those who have
the other side of your problem, good idea but no tech/bizdev/capital. It's
also a great test to see if 54 hours of dedicated work on the problem yields
something that is interesting... if yes great... if not you may be on the
wrong path? (Note: there are some important rules about IP at these events you
should research/understand fully).

I'd also change your thinking/language from looking for an "idea" to looking
for a problem. The distinction may seem slight but it is important + helpful.
The idea is really the solution, which often isn't clear until after a lot of
sustained thinking/experimenting around the problem.

I'd try to find problems that genuinely personally piss you off. Building a
company always takes longer and is harder than anticipated... so you have to
be completely committed.

Finally, sell it in person right away... like day 1. Go sell it to people you
don't know for real money even if it's not ready yet. When you go around
asking people for money you'll either get it or get a lot of really brutal
feedback on why not. Either outcome is helpful at this stage.

Good luck!

------
jackgavigan
Look at technologies that are either at the Peak of Inflated Expectations (on
the Gartner hype cycle) or in the process of plunging into the Trough of
Disillusionment, and figure out what needs to happen for them to climb the
Slope of Enlightenment to the Plateau of Productivity.

Alternatively, build the world's best To Do list app:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355029)

~~~
faizshah
Have you taken a look at ClickUp (clickup.com), they're pretty new and they
have an answer to most of what you want. I recently interviewed for them and
they have all but 2 of your requested features currently implemented.
Dependencies are on the roadmap for this winter
[http://docs.clickup.com/features/roadmap](http://docs.clickup.com/features/roadmap)

You might also want to look at todoist business which is also formidable:
[https://en.todoist.com/business](https://en.todoist.com/business)

Are there any other features you would add to the list today? This was my
requested mix of features:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10997561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10997561)

------
skraelingjar
I highly recommend taking the time (2+ weeks) to travel as a team or even
better, individually. Think southeast Asia or Latin America. Limit yourselves
to a very small amount of money (outside of transportation) and experience
life differently.

As many others have suggested, meeting other people and opening yourselves to
different experiences will help. Maybe by meeting people and having
experiences though a different cultural lens will help break the thought
patterns holding you back.

Best of luck.

------
mchasse
I think that the general advice of "find something that bugs you and then fix
it" is a particularly bad way of building a business because you run a very
high risk of building something that nobody else wants. In general, "you" !=
"your customer".

My advice would be to go out and find some group of people/companies and then
ask them what problems are they currently facing that are not currently
ideally solved (stressed out moms, small businesses, etc. It really doesn't
matter, just a large accessible group who may have problems that could be
solved via ML).

This way, you don't need to know really anything about the domain because the
interviewees will know the space well enough and will tell you what's wrong
with it (and will most likely list ideas on how to fix it.) This will also
remove your worry about the space being crowded because even if it is, if your
interviewees are saying that there is still an unsolved problem, then there is
still opportunity for you.

Another idea is to attend a startup weekend and learn how to quickly test
assumptions/prototype and then try and replicate the process during the week.
(e.g. run one full validation sprint per week, every week on different ideas
until something gains traction.)

------
mikekchar
Similar to the advice about trying to find problems rather than solutions, I
would look at existing businesses that are doing well, but aren't executing
well. The computer world is _full_ of dominant products that were second to
the market (despite what people think). Often teams have great ideas without
great execution. You can capitalise on that and eat their lunch.

And like others comments have said, I would also start thinking very
critically about your self assessment of having a "great team". I could give
you 10 viable business ideas before breakfast (actually, it _is_ before
breakfast for me!) Ideas are cheap to the point of being worthless. If you
don't realise that, it's because you are likely inexperienced. This is not a
criticism, just an observation. I would start by cashing one of those "blank
cheques" and go looking for someone with experience who can help you. You are
looking for someone technical who can give you sound advice about how to
execute well building a product from end to end.

You may be thinking that the technical person on your team is who you need.
But what ever the academic credentials and how ever smart the person is,
execution relies on having done it all before. It relies on having failed a
hundred times before finally finding the one way that works.

Finally, no matter if you follow my previous advice or not, begin by
beginning. Like I said, good ideas are so common that they are worthless. You
will either succeed through good execution or good luck. So start. Follow this
advice:
[http://wiki.c2.com/?PlanToThrowOneAway](http://wiki.c2.com/?PlanToThrowOneAway)

------
7alman
If you have a hard time coming up with ideas, you probably shouldn't start a
company.

~~~
isaaclyman
This is harsh, but true. I've never heard a successful founder say "I don't
know, I just wanted to start a company with my friends and get rich." Every
dang middle-schooler in the US wants that. Companies are a means, not an end.
Successful ones always start with someone who's passionate about a very
specific problem.

This really comes out in corporate mission statements. Even if you're Xerox,
your mission statement is something like "Improve the rate of business
communications by creating the world's most excellent copy machines."

If you don't have an idea for a startup, you're missing the key ingredient.
The team literally cannot exist without that visionary person who knows
exactly what they're after.

~~~
Lordarminius
> I've never heard a successful founder say "I don't know, I just wanted to
> start a company with my friends and get rich."

I could not disagree more. Companies are started by all sorts of people: some
founders have a definite idea that is a perfect fit for the
market(Stripe,Heroku), some go over many iterations of their original idea and
may even end up abandoning it for something entirely unrelated(Reddit), the
last type of founder simply wants to be in business and does not even know
what his product is yet(Steve Jobs before he joined Pixar). The only trait all
founders share is drive and ambition.

------
iaw
An open problem that's "sexy" but may be intractable is that of fact checking.

Can you determine which articles in a corpus of news, or other documents,
agree/disagree with one another? Can you cluster and sub-cluster along
statements of fact being made? Can you then trace a statement of fact back to
it's "original source" based on when that entry was acquired?

There's a lot of opportunity in that space...

~~~
jmnicolas
People care about facts that go their way and ignore the others.

~~~
cptaj
Its a momma duck problem. Once they've accepted something as fact, they have a
hard time parting ways with it.

But if you could interject at this moment of initial assimilation and provide
some legitimacy or point out the lack thereof, you could provide a very useful
service.

It would also help people change their minds, although as you mentioned, that
is harder to do. But at least now you have better tools to do it.

Finally, not EVERYONE is completely disinterested in having their
misconceptions corrected.

------
lsiebert
There are a lot of ways to make a startup. If you are cynical, you can
undermine an existing occupation or skilled trade, either by replacing it with
contractors who lack the same job skills but who aren't employees and can't
unionize, or commoditizing an industry such that the people or businesses are
simply cogs in your machine, where people often pick the cheapest option even
if it undermines quality.

If you are less cynical though, you might want a startup that makes the world
a better place. So instead of looking for a problem people with money have,
you could look for a systemic inequity or market failure that hurts people and
keeps them from having money.

My suggestion would be payday loans and credit card debt. There is
competition, but there are plenty of ways to go with helping people.

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/04...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/04/20/id-
nv-ut-have-among-highest-payday-loan-rates/7943519/)

------
pkw2017
1\. Give all of the money to charity 2\. Ask the investors for more money 3\.
Goto 1

------
austinjp
Start a consultancy business building the ideas that others have.

Also....

You have everything you need, so nothing is niggling your motivation. Some
people work best under constraint, with limited resources.

Finally, are you too fussy? Do you analyse every idea to death?

------
LansanaCamara
Like others have said, try to solve problems instead of looking for ideas.

If you want a list of over 30 ideas (one of which I've been working on and
recently got accepted to interview at YC for), feel free to email me and I'll
send you my list. I write them down as they come to me, as crazy as some might
sound. lxc5296 [at] gmail.

Here's one:

Why don't you come up with a startup that helps people find ideas? Clearly
it's a problem you yourself have, as well as many others. It seems
impractical, but most great things are until someone comes along and does it
right.

How it could work: people can call into a center and talk with people that
specialize in certain topics and have conversations that lead to ideas. The
expert can get a feel for the callers interests and find an intersection
between them and problems that need to be solved.

Or, it can be strictly software based.

Eventually it can turn into a platform for people that don't know what
direction to go in in their life to seek help and get guidance. Trust me,
there's a lot of those people in the world (basically all millenials). Huge
market.

------
drawkbox
There are tons of problems to solve.

\- Invest in some products or teams that already exist and learn their
problems and come up with a solution that is needed or partner with them.

\- Reinvent a common pain point in business with service or automation, pay or
observe people in industries you want to enter and their problems.

\- Find a problem you have or know about maybe in private equity, computer
science or bizdev that you have experienced.

\- Innovate/iterate on a solution in the market that needs progression, this
might even be a crowded market or a commodity that may be easier to change due
to the lack of interest there. There are no new ideas under the sun but there
is lost of improvement that can be made.

\- Find a passion project, create a tool that targets a niche area of
something you like to keep your interest i.e. movies, art, games, finance,
sports etc. Spend enough time there and problems will be self-evident.

\- The problem you are having right now, maybe make a solution to that,
finding an idea that is marketable for a well funded team (a great problem to
have).

------
Veelox
Redfin and Zillow might have beat you to it but real estate has a lot of old-
fashion practices. I think there is a lot of space in that industry to
improve.

One anecdote I have a friend (~30) who works in real estate appraisal. He says
the industry is run on excel. While it might not make you a unicorn, you could
definitely make money having a better solution.

~~~
etewiah
Fully agree with you on that.

------
reacweb
I have one idea that I will probably never have time to do (I have 3 childs
and a fulltime job). It is an app to manage fuel consumption. The idea is that
some people use a notebook to write each time they buy fuel (I did until I
bought a Nissan Leaf). If the application is as handy as a notebook (maybe a
simple picture of the gaz pump would be enough to fill in the data), some
people will use it and you will start to collect the price and location of all
gas stations. Once you have enough data, you can provide additional service to
find the best gas station taking into account your position, current
destination, remaining fuel, ... Gas stations may want to pay you some
advertising, ... The application may grow further to take into account
maintenance of the car. Maybe it is a silly idea, but if you build it, I would
use it (for my second car).

~~~
reacweb
It seems some other people had the idea [http://appcrawlr.com/android-
apps/best-apps-fuel-tracking](http://appcrawlr.com/android-apps/best-apps-
fuel-tracking). A couple of years ago (when I had the idea), there was nothing
barely usable.

~~~
reacweb
After looking at the screendumps of current apps, it seems they still are
awful. IMHO, a good UX is to have one click to take the picture of the pump,
then you can check the fields. The mileage field is automatically filled using
your average consumption, you just need to fix the last digits if you want,
then press OK. It should work fine even offline and synchronize latter.

------
qxmat
Stop trying to make the perfect product: make something small and fail/succeed
fast.

Once you stop being an external observer and commit to delivering a product,
your understanding of the wider market will improve... before long you'll see
profitability in places you didn't know existed.

There's nothing wrong in delivering something simple first. Most of the
consulting businesses out there simply 'solutionize' Excel spreadsheets (i.e.
add a web or mobile frontend to an internal process). Take the post room in my
building as an example: they've just upgraded to an electronic system
dispensing with the time consuming/error prone ledger entry and paper slip
delivery. Someone sold them a 'CMS' with a package input form and email
alert... As scope increased they added bar code scanning and a check-digit
shelf allocator.

------
dennis_jeeves
Yes, I do have a suggestion that will seem outlandish, but even if I set you
thinking I would have achieved my goal.

The problem of human health and aging. ( isn't it the biggest problem ALL of
us face?) On the face of it you may think that there are plenty of people
working on it but there aren't. Most of main stream research is aimed using
the conventional approach: Finding a 'cure' for a disease just like it's done
for an infectious disease.Example: cancer. This is a fundamentally flawed
approach. If you think of it older people have a higher probability than
younger people of cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc. So the more rational
approach would be to target ageing itself.

The SENS foundation is one such entity that has this approach
([http://www.sens.org](http://www.sens.org))

------
davidhariri
FWIW, my partner and I were in a similar position after winding down our first
company together ~1.5 years ago. We decided to just interview our friends and
friends of friends companies asking about their biggest pain points. This gave
us two things:

1\. A common pain point across a sample of ~10 companies (the pain point was
customer support, which lead us to the problem of automating first responses
to customer support queries and our solution is
[https://ada.support](https://ada.support))

2\. A group of early, paying customers to help us build the product they
needed. Paying because we wanted to make sure what we were building was
actually valuable.

I don’t know if my partner would be comfortable with me disclosing our
financials, but I’ll just say we’re close to being profitable with a team of
16.

Hope that helps ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
rdlecler1
Last year one of my friends said: “Not only are all the good ideas taken, but
all the bad ideas are taken too.”

------
neuronsguy
Here's a great idea: bitcoin settlement, custody, and clearing for
institutional investors. There is a huge first mover advantage to be had
signing up to prime broker every hedge fund's bitcoins and help settle OTC
transactions. I know people who need this. Good luck.

------
germinalphrase
Disrupt Standardized Testing

We spend ~2 billion on standardized testing in the U.S.; however, perceived
drawbacks in how these tests are structured and administered prevent more
widespread adoption (though expansion would provide valuable data that is
currently unavailable to front line educational staff). The need for
standardized testing is largely predicated on a lack of trust in the
assessments that classroom instructors are creating and administering, but
these untrustworthy assessments are being created in the millions every year.
It is a classic 'business that still uses filing cabinets' as the collective
value of these materials is largely silo'ed within the binders/file
cabinets/'05 Dell Inspiron of the teachers who made them.

Provide a platform that is structured around the creation and administration
of assessments BUT the test contents are made available for use by other
instructors. The value to the instructor centers on four attributes:
immediacy, authenticity, accessibility, and personalization. Immediacy in that
an assessment can be created simply by building an appropriate request (e.g.
'comprehension' 'to kill a mockingbird' 'grade 9' 'ten questions').
Authenticity in that this generative model pushes the instructor to rapidly
curate their provided assessment elements as appropriate to their lessons
(accepted questions remain, rejected questions are replaced: much faster than
creating from scratch). Accessibility in that as instructors modify assessment
elements (e.g. for an ELL student) those modifications become available to all
instructors in the future. Personalization in that the platform could provide
any number of assessments that the teacher distributes according to the needs
of their individual students, this distribution could likewise be automated to
react to past assessment results and further extend the teacher's
capabilities.

At the metal, it's one sliver of a Content Management System paired with a
Cognitive Tutor. You would need a process for vetting the validity of
individual assessment elements, but the teacher curation may offer an initial
path (as judging the validity of assessment items would be an implicit element
of the workflow). On the back end, you would be in a place to sell assessment
data to school districts that is poorly provided by current testing services.
You could also sell certified results for higher education, talent
identification, and so on. Further on, this platform would be well positioned
to create a marketplace for educational content, games, and domain specific
tools.

~~~
throwawayjava
This is a bit like saying "disrupt the federal contracting business, so much
money for such crap software!"

Standardized tests are a highly political product, and in most states the
creation of a standardized test has very little to do with creating an optimal
(or even good) assessment.

The idea of using teachers as part of the vetting process for questions is a
nice one, but your actual customer sit in state capitols, not classrooms.

~~~
germinalphrase
I don't think you're entirely wrong, there is political pressure behind
standardized testing; however, this is largely because the alternative was no
trustable testing. Making teachers' assesments trustable is politically
palatable to teachers while also fulfilling the administrative goals that
standardized testing has been asked (and largely failed) to resolve.

------
eigenvalue
My idea is that you should combine ML with something that is highly reliant on
human labor--especially where that reliance is starting to be the key
bottleneck preventing new capacity from starting up. A good example of this
would be slaughterhouses in the US; the pork processing business for example.
Get some experienced workers from an existing facility to wear google glass
type cameras, put sensors on the base and tip of their electric knives, and
project a grid of red laser dots on the carcasses, and record the process of
carving them up from start to finish many times with many different carcasses.
Get enough labeled data that way and you could replace human workers in a
dirty/dangerous/low-paid industry.

------
simonrobb
I have an Agtech startup I've been working on for the past year, but am
stepping away from it for personal reasons. It's R&D heavy, so I haven't got
customers yet, but I believe there is real opportunity (said every customer-
less startup founder ever). It's in an emerging market (agriculture) with
booming investment dollars available. Right now the product is largely IoT,
but there is scope for a lot of machine learning and blockchain in the near
future which would keep your PhD interested.

I've put a lot of hard work into this and would love to see it in somebody
else's capable hands rather than going to waste - would you like to talk it
over more? Drop me an email at sajrobb at gmail dot com.

------
meric
I have an idea and a prototype - there’s interesting capital gain tax discount
laws in UK and Australia and for investors who buy and sell shares there is
always a way to minimise their gains but it’s not straightforward for
accountants to calculate it matching the buying and selling transactions if
there are many of them for the same stock. The target market is DYI investors
and tax accountants. I don’t have the time or capital to keep it going, but I
have used the prototype to save myself thousands in taxes and have talked
about it to a couple of accountants and let another investor use it with some
promise. Feel free to take the idea. If you want an explanation just leave me
an email address.

------
tabtab
Dynamic Relational:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15352786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15352786)

Release an open-source version, but have a fee-based "enterprise" edition
and/or provide fee-based tech support, similar to MySql's and Php's business
model.

Organizations often need something dynamic, such as during prototyping, but
want to leverage existing RDBMS knowledge, principles, and the SQL language.
The Dynamic Relational model can tighten constraints as a customer's project
matures. The "NoSql" movement showed that dynamism is a sought-after database
trait.

------
leggomylibro
Everyone makes it so complicated.

Armchair opinion, for all that it's worth (so probably stop reading here):
what can you do to provide a lot of marginal value to people, without
requiring them to do much?

All kinds of things - how about something with clean water or reliable power
generation/storage? There is _no_ shortage of ideas out there, richie rich. If
you're REALLY hurting for something like an idea, it's going to show, and
you're gonna get grifted. What are you expecting to accomplish here, opening a
can of meat in a swarm of piranhas?

------
dave_sullivan
Stick to private equity, it's a better business and is evolving--plenty of
good ideas remaining.

If you're doing a software startup, your team should be 3 engineers, not 2
business guys and 1 engineer.

------
canterburry
Just this morning I was wondering if you could take a bed like the sleep
number bed and combine it with AI for a mattress that constantly adapts to
your sleep pattern, rhythm, position etc

~~~
pvaldes
Sleepspam... that would introduce a new level of super-evil :-)

------
ggg9990
You guys should become angel investors, not entrepreneurs. It's a good way for
people with money but no real penchant for entrepreneurship to get involved in
the startup ecosystem.

------
20years
Maybe consider acquiring a small SaaS that is already modestly successful but
has a ton more potential.

------
whitepoplar
Group buys for real estate rentals. NYC is perfect for it.

Remember how in college, you'd fill in your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. housing
options and get a match? Do that with groups of friends who are all graduating
college at the same time and moving to NYC. Landlords would love you, as you'd
rent out entire floors/buildings all at the same time.

Then build an ongoing matching service to fill the spots of individuals who
move out.

NYC real estate is physically shitty, so you can add value by focusing on the
social aspect of living.

~~~
Yertis
There's an awesome service that is executing on this idea in NYC and other
similar markets, and is growing pretty quickly:
[https://roomiapp.com/](https://roomiapp.com/)

------
peteforde
Some advice:

Keep it really simple. There's a tendency to build too much when your only
goal is to prove whether there's a market opportunity that you can capture.

Look beyond young people in urban cores.

Don't startup in a domain in which nobody on your team has deep connections.
While there have been exceptions, it's foolish to assume that your antecedents
were morons.

It's quite possible that the reason you don't have an idea is that your team
needs a fourth person that is really passionate about an idea.

One thing you could consider trying is applying your team to an existing team
that is having trouble getting traction for an idea you think has legs. Lots
of people are working on a product that they have no idea how to bring to
market.

Are any of you women? That missing fourth person is almost certainly female.
And guess what? There's a lot of things that could be made better in the world
for women.

If you start building a platform, I recommend that you skip the platform and
build the first product that you'd build using the platform if it existed.

One really helpful lens for idea evaluation is: what current behaviour is this
replacing? What do people with this problem do about it today? And are they
willing to pay money to do it differently?

I wrote a post a few years back that you might find useful.
[http://hackertourism.com/how-to-tell-your-friend-that-
their-...](http://hackertourism.com/how-to-tell-your-friend-that-their-
startup-idea-sucks)

------
rsp1984
Let me humbly offer my advice, based on my last 10 years in startups (with 2
years interruption working for big G):

1\. Figure out what kind of company you want to build and which spaces you
feel most comfortable with. B2C or B2B? Software? Saas? Hardware? Services?
How long would you like to be involved? 2 years? 5 years? 15 years? Any
different combination will require a different approach. Find alignment on
these points with your co-founders early.

2\. Align yourself with larger tech trends and figure out which ones you
actually believe in. As a reader of HN (or your favorite tech blogs) you
should have a good idea about the trends and hypes du jour. Pay special
attention to where BigTechCo is allocating resources. Proper alignment with a
larger trend (+ the right timing) is a _major_ success factor in startups (but
way too often gets lost in the discussion noise).

3\. Figure out if there's an area within a general trend you believe in where
you can get one step ahead of everybody else (e.g. because of
skills/expertise/connections of team members).

4\. Within that area, start talking to people.

5\. If that sequence doesn't yield any good results, start over. Only commit
to an idea if everyone has a great gut feeling about it. If your gut tells you
no then don't do it.

Happy to talk more.

------
logicallee
Let me put this into financial terms.

Currently your team is 'fundamentally' worthless (in market terms it can be
quite valuable). Despite being well-funded, it has no market in which it can
make money. The investors who are putting a dollar value on it are _mistaken_
, because its fundamental value is $0. (There is a mismatch between its
valuation and its fundamental value.) The investors are idiots. (By
comparison, they probably wouldn't invest in many very valuable startups at
the seed stage, again, because they're idiots.)

Well all right, you can get blank checks. Now you just need to add some value
to the business. So you're writing a check of your own. You're writing this
check:

[https://imgur.com/a/QnTgb](https://imgur.com/a/QnTgb)

And, ideally, will use it to pay for $1 billion in value: the new amount your
team will be worth.

The thing is, you can't really get anyone to take your check. "I Just want to
pay $0 and get $1 billion in value. Why is this so hard?"

Put in these terms, can you think of any reasons it might be hard?

(The actual reason is that the market misprices ideas, and although the market
prices them at $0, you cannot buy them for zero: the market does not 'clear'.)

------
segmondy
Hey, I have great idea but not capital. I'm sure there are many from the YC
rejects batch that feel the same, and a few that are probably correct. Perhaps
you should call for those, and see if there's an idea that got passed on, not
due to a bad idea, but rather to perhaps lack of a solid team. I'm a solo
founder working part time on my idea and don't have a team, so I'm sure that
contributed in me getting rejected.

------
thiagoperes
Why not any of the ideas here:
[https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/)

------
rb808
I think selling to consumers is tough, B2B level is much better area. Boring
stuff like hotel staffing, facilities management, insurance claim processing,
car fleet servicing, large building power conservation, commercial swimming
pool maintenance, hospital supplies. All that stuff that most people never see
so don't even know it exists. If you have PE friends find out what is
surprisingly expensive and annoying from management POV.

------
zilian
Ha ! I've heard before of the "great team + capital" story so I am not
surprised. A great execution team is a really good competitive advantage imo.

I'm already creating a business, but I have tons of ideas. I wouldn't even
want a share of the companies you could build from these - ideas are cheap,
right ?

You know hat ? I'll give you two very good ideas for free, and if you like
them I'd be down to selling you two excellent ideas ;)

------
x98l1vpUWHydi8U
Education.

Help improve your public school system. Help teach teachers. Teach other
people, yourselves -- start with your neighbour's kids, neighbourhood schools,
nearby orphanages and children's remand homes. Help scale great initiatives
that don't have the brand pull of Khan Academy and the ilk. Fund scholarships,
if nothing else.

It will be a drop in the ocean, but an extremely high-leverage one, IMHO.

And one that leaves a legacy. I'm sure many noble people will be willing to
write large cheques for legacy-creating initiatives.

OR,

Resurrect something that died an untimely death.

(edit) OR, Help turn around good businesses teetering on the edge.

Many companies and business models died ~15 years ago, in the dot-com bust,
only to become wildly successful in the last 5 years.

I bet many otherwise-reasonable businesses died for dumb reasons, in the
recent 5 years (like forgetting to be frugal).

If we believe that the market turnover cycle has accelerated; which businesses
died before their time, and could be resurrected over the next 5-7 years
(about the time to make a business viable)?

[https://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/](https://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/)

[http://startupgraveyard.io/](http://startupgraveyard.io/)

[http://autopsy.io/](http://autopsy.io/)

\---

(edits: minor sentence tweaks)

------
greyfox
Funny, i have 2-3 really good ideas that i feel are genuine and have large
profit potential, yet i have no team and hardly any programming skills to
launch them.

~~~
JGaltAteMyBalls
Have you pitched them to anyone honest enough to tell you how bad they
probably are?

~~~
greyfox
yes, and i got good feedback. actually from 3 people one of which is my boss
who basically said nice idea but good luck (no programming experience) and 2
friends who said they were down to program but wont really do anything until i
get some groundwork started.

------
johnorourke
AREAS \-------- Software Quality or Fintech. Don't waste a good team on
something like a Kale Smoothie Delivery Service For Beardy Hipsters. Software
Quality is a huge, growing issue - we have more and more young/new coders
arriving, massively increasing demand for code, and yet no government enforced
standards (such as those found in Law, Architecture and Accounting). The
industry is suffering the exact same issues that Fred Brooks wrote about 50
years ago, despite all our modern frameworks and IDEs, because we're just
doing more stuff with fewer people. Starting points: The Open Group (and
TOGAF), ITIL, MinistryofTesting.com

INSPIRATION \------ Hari Seldon, hero of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, was
deliberately put into a wide variety of situations and experiences to inspire
his imagination and fuel his emotional responses. Get out of starbucks, do
crazy shit and get uncomfortable - allow it to fuse emotion and desire for
change, because that's where motivation comes from. (related: read Think and
Grow Rich if you haven't already)

FROM IDEA TO BUSINESS \--------------- Read 'The E-myth revisited' and 'The
Lean Startup'

~~~
sampo
> Hari Seldon, hero of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, was deliberately put
> into a wide variety of situations

This refers to the books Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the
Foundation (1993).

------
swalsh
I've been a subscriber of opps daily for a while. I've started to realize one
of the problems isn't that the technology to solve these niche problems
doesn't exist... but rather most people either aren't searching for solutions
or they don't understand how to apply existing technology to solve them.

I think there's a huge business opportunity in marketing/modifying existing
software for new applications.

------
eugenejen
What I will say may be old. But that's what I feel everyday I use any piece of
software/service. Since I did some startups before years ago. I may just say
something only obvious to anyone who have tried them.

1\. What kind of stuff do you feel pain?

2\. Do all the existing solutions on the market solve that pain?

3\. Can you come up something that may be better so users will put their time
and money on your idea?

4\. Fail, why?

5\. Traction, why?

6\. Repeat, continue, 1,2,3 [4|5] until you decide to leave the industry.

------
at-fates-hands
Find an under served niche and then build something to service that specific
niche.

I do just that about four years ago and have a stable client base of about a
dozen clients who are all on our subscription based billing (instead of the
costlier hourly billing) we have. Because of what we bill out, and the ability
to work with my partners remotely even though we all live in the same city; we
have zero overhead which increases our profit margin considerably.

We started with websites and SEO. Now we're building enterprise level apps for
these firms and they can't get enough of it. The industry we're in is also a
tight-knight small community so once word starting getting around about the
stuff we did and how we helped these other firms, we started getting a lot of
calls. When we started, it was all cold calling, doing local industry
conferences, and reaching out to their professional organizations and doing
educational seminars and talks to increase exposure.

Start small and then go after the big stuff. Otherwise, you're diving into a
huge pool for competition. Focus on a small niche, own it, then duplicate that
model to other industries.

------
johan_larson
You are looking for a problem. It should be a problem that a) a lot of people
have, b) you can fix, and c) people are willing to pay real money for.

Have you found anything that meets all three of these conditions? That would
be something to jump on with both feet. But not a lot of opportunities like
that come along. So how about a two out of three, with the third question
being unknown? That might be worth trying, at least.

------
typetehcodez
I would highly recommend "Jump Start Your Brain" by Doug Hill. On page 88
there is a "Eureka" formula you can use to generate ideas. (#of good ideas =
((number of stimuli)^(diversity))/fear) Once you have an idea, just pull the
trigger and start working on it. It sounds like you have a lot already, but
are holding yourself back for some reason. Just take some action! Pick
something.

------
dunnodonna
What problem are you trying to solve is the only question you should be
asking. Given your background and given that you are useless in terms of
building products, you need to excel at connecting with users and if you want
a SaaS company then you need to work within industries you know well.

Second question is, how big is your market. That is the only question that
really matters to serious VCs.

I'll be honest though the fact that there are two "business guys" and only one
developer is a big red flag and I would not get involved with this company.
"Business guys" tend to not care for or understand technology and the reality
is that in the tech space you win with technological advantage. Period. All
best tech cos were started by developers (Google Facebook, Microsoft, all SaaS
companies I know of even if the founders were not coding at the end they were
developers by training - marc benioff, Larry Ellison) or had genius developers
coupled with brilliant sales people (Apple).

The best technologists are driven and are not usually fond of "ideas" from
business people. Also, remember that ML is an area that will be conquered by
large companies, FANGs. It's not worth wasting your time on, if you are not a
technology person.

Given what you mention about your background, I would focus on creating a
company that is based on a problem the industry at least one of you knows
really well, and have light technology because you are not going to win in the
tech space if you have two business founders (my true honest opinion) not
nowadays. Something like consulting, something where sales matters more than
tech. Business people HAVE to be good at 1. strategy and 2. market so if
you're not that's a red flag. Maybe you guys like hanging out, a business
partnership is not a great idea.

------
startupdiscuss
I don't think you should drop an "idea" just because the space is crowded or
commoditized so long as the problem in the space has not been "solved."

Consider that there were many search engines before Google and many social
networks before Facebook and so on.

All spaces are crowded but there is still lots of room for improvement. Even a
simple todo app doesn't do quite all the things everyone needs. You can
imagine super versions of a todo that automatically uses your calendar to
allocate time to the tasks. Then when people want to meet with you, it show
you options that are spaced so you have time for your tasks and then analyzes
the tasks you do and don't get done, and notices what the differences and then
allocates the right time for the right task (morning for creative, night for
braindead, lunch for meetings) or whatever.

The problems are the same problems. Just look at the current solutions and you
can see they are lacking. Then the question is, can you find a good way to
solve them. (You code up the above solution and simply doesn't work, for
example. )

------
hoodoof
The one thing I am never short of is ideas.

I used to think they'd stop coming but always new ideas come and I write them
down in a list now. Too many to execute.

Some good, some probably not so great.

The accepted wisdom is that ideas are worth nothing but I strongly disagree. I
think _most_ ideas are worth nothing, but some ideas are incredibly valuable
so I don't give my ideas away in case I want to make use of them one day.

~~~
woah
You may end up taking your valuable ideas to the grave.

------
spoiledtechie
I have a Billion dollar idea. What I lack is team and funding. I hold down a
full time job and have had several small victories, check my profile. What I
lack is what you have. There are people sadly at both ends of the spectrum. I
am looking for funding quite badly. I know several willing to join my team,
only if we can find someone to invest.

If you are or can be a funder, find my info in profile.

------
sirspacey
My suggestion would be to run sprints (Check out the book "Sprints"). The
process of validating a market via leads and/or customer feedback shifts your
team from theorizing to exploring. One founder mentor of mine said it well,
"all startups are inevitable narratives in reverse, with a confusing reality
of constant reinventions on the way there." That's what your team needs
practice in - being a team in the midst of uncertainty. As a captain of
several startups I can tell you the art is in navigating with a team, not
possessing the conviction yourself. You guys have the financial background so
do what you do best: pull data from mattermark, angellist, and accelerator
acceptance announcements. Make a list of concepts you like and run sprints.
Pit your ideas against the ones you test. You'd be surprised how much faster
you'll get on your third sprint vs your first. At your stage of learning
competitors are irrelevant. Building something people want is all that
matters.

------
needSomeCoffee
I have a proven, novel means to gain insight about System1 response. Issued a
patent for it (which I think is reasonably well written). Worked great
applying it improve response to P&G's branded ads (then was part of McD's SG&A
cuts). Would love to use it to improve romantic outcomes (better than survey
response measures; e.g. "love at first [System1] sight" would make
Kahneman/Tversky proud). Etc. Same coin, opposite side. If I was you, I would
hang around some grabybeards who are 50+ and have been working in logistical
positions for corporations, expand your network, and hire a great salesman.
The GB's will have ideas, but not the where-with-all to act -- notably if they
have a family HC plan. The network (also a good GB win), and your sales team
are more important than a great idea. You really just need a "good enough"
idea, execution, plus sales to get started, then adjust. HTH.

------
InclinedPlane
I really, deeply, do not understand the issue here.

It is beyond me how anyone can be technologically savvy with an engineering
mindset and look out on the world as it exists today and not see innumerable
ways that it can be improved.

Is your roadblock simply that you're trying to look for the easiest ways to
make money? Or the sexiest? Take a look at the world and start coming up with
problems that need solutions, and potential ways that technology could serve.
Imagine things that _you_ , yes you yourself, wish existed but don't yet.
Imagine things that you simply wish were _better_. Keep iterating on those
processes until you have a huge list of problems that should be solved and
things that should exist but don't. Then filter your list down to only the
subset of problems that your team could potentially tackle well and that have
some sort of possibility for monetization in the near term, then pick one or a
few and run with it.

------
samstave
Uhm - the question NOT being asked here is WHY?

Why do you want to found a company

Why do you think your team is sound?

Why do you feel you can solve a problem that will result in something youre
passionate about sticking with?

Why do you think this is the best path?

etc...

WHY do you want to pursue this?

\---

With that said - as others have posted: find the problem to solve and then
address HOW you can be the best to solve WHICH problem with WHAT and WHO will
pay you for such.

------
aj0strow
GitHub for X. Construction is taken [1]. UI/Product is taken [2]. I'm sure
there are more document types.

[1]: [https://www.plangrid.com/](https://www.plangrid.com/) [2]:
[https://zeplin.io/](https://zeplin.io/)

------
kolbe
My intuition is that you should leverage your strengths, rather than try to
fit your talents into someone else's idea. It sound like you have a broad
array of talents, which can be a blessing for some businesses and a curse for
others.

Consider not even creating a new new business. Do someone else's better than
them. And there are several companies that seem to grossly overvalued by the
standard of "if I gave you [their market cap], could you make a better version
of them?" Since one of your strengths is an endless flow of capital, get $1b
and make a better Twitter (or whatever).

Maybe just follow Josh Levine's blueprint for $100mm?

[https://wp.josh.com/2017/10/23/adventures-in-
autorouting/](https://wp.josh.com/2017/10/23/adventures-in-autorouting/)

------
robbrown451
I'd love to talk to you but probably best not publicly. I'm looking for groups
like you describe, and have ideas to spare (many of which have a great deal of
development behind them but could use a team and possibly some funding to get
launched properly). I'd love to give you a demo or two.

rjbrown at gmail

------
structural
If you're interested in doing more ML work, here's an interesting thought
experiment to guide your research towards an idea: ML is currently widely used
for things like speech processing and synthesis, music, as well as vision. All
of this is sensing and reacting to stimuli at various frequencies. But there
is much more... So from the lowest to highest practical frequencies, what do
we use each band for, and what would it mean to see in it?

Some examples:

\- Single digit Hertz: seismic observations. Could you build a better
earthquake predictor? How about an active control system for shifting building
loads during an earthquake?

\- kilohertz: Lightning detection systems.

\- kilohertz to low megahertz: traditional FM/AM radio. Is there a better way?

\- gigahertz: think your good old-fashioned microwave oven. What if it could
automatically learn what it's cooking and how to best heat it evenly?

\- gigahertz: could you build a smarter Wi-Fi network (or cell network) if
devices reported their location when they didn't have coverage and the network
could automatically adjust?

\- tens of gigahertz: we now have object sensing systems in cars. what other
parts of life might that kind of technology be useful for?

\- infrared: what happens when a ML-based vision system wants to see in the
dark?

\- above the visual spectrum: ML + medical imaging (x-rays, other scans? what
could be learned?)

There are lots of fun research questions to be answered and new technology yet
developed. The wonderful part about doing some really structured research
along these lines is that you might have to ask about "who knows about this"
and run into the PhD student who's working in this area -today- but isn't yet
developing a product. There is a ton of university research that could lead
you towards an interesting new product: the idea doesn't have to be your own,
or even come from the typical "ideas" person.

------
newyearnewyou
I have the opposite problem, I work as an analyst, I have a ton of ideas, and
understand the tone of the industry, but I have no capital and limited team.
I'd love to work on one of my ideas with a team, if you're interested let me
know, I'll comment my email. Thanks, and good luck.

------
abraae
My suggestions:

1\. Don't sell to techies. i.e. ignore any ideas about software testing, cloud
base load testing, etc.

2\. Pick a solid business domain you know really well. There is no substitute
for domain expertise. Sometimes things that look really simple are actually
mindblowingly complex. And vice versa. But it sounds like you don't have that
so...

3\. Do something in HR Tech. Every single company on earth competes for
talent, and the HR software industry is already worth many 10s of billions,
and is not remotely built out. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of
startups in this space already. Also, in HR software you're dealing with
people, so there will never be any "one right approach" \- you can _always_
sell your crazy HR software product to at least a few wide eyed early adopters
somewhere.

~~~
donretag
I have an idea related to recruiting, but cannot figure out how to bootstrap
the project with products (aka developers). I have a few ideas related to HR,
so I like this suggestion. Solve problems.

~~~
guru4consulting
I would like to have a quick chat with you about your idea.. your expertise in
ElasticSearch might be a powerful tool for something. If interested, please
ping me

------
throwaway4532
We have a great product, targeted towards enterprises, well tested in the
local market, looking to expand internationally (including US). We have a
couple of international deployments in our portfolio already. Our product
could be categorized as a analytics, planning, data science solution. We've
been on the market for 7 years, growing organically.

Currently, we are looking for an investment to fuel sales internationally and
create new SaaS revenue channel to target medium and small companies. Your
team sounds like a great fit to complement our mission - for example you could
steer the US expansion. If you are interested, contact me under
awayt764@gmail.com and leave a comment under this post.

I'm sorry for all this anonymity, I'll explain more when we get in touch.

------
enry_straker
As chuck McM said, start looking for a problem, rather than an idea but i
would like to add this caveat:

1) Look at the background of you 3 guys, and list out problems which were
being worked around in the areas of your business development or private
equity or the domain of your phd friend.

There is a much higher probability of you guys having domain expertise in the
areas you have been exposed to in the past, and a lot of business contacts as
well - and solving a problem in those areas means that you will be able to
address problems you have personally faced before - through a combination of
software and services.

Note that there is no dearth of problems to be solved, but problems you have
faced before personally can be a much more fruitful area for automated
solutions.

------
wysiwyg3826
You need to identify the next big waves and decide which one you're most
passionate about, and where you can add value. You shouldn't shy away from a
crowded field. If the opportunity is large, a lot of people will enter the
field before/after you so you need to figure out how to differentiate your
product.

Here are a few tsunamis to think about:

1\. Self-driving cars - which part of the value chain can you make a
difference? Manufacturing, tech, ride hailing, financing, or others?

2\. OTT TV - eventually, all content will be streamed. Where would the new
value be created? What is the ideal experience in a world where you can watch
anything, anytime on any device?

3\. VR gaming/entertainment.

Everyone can see the big waves on the horizon. Not everyone knows how to ride
them well...

------
playseeds
You should give the money to a startup with a product, traction and excited
users that is founded by (a) non-dudebro(s).

Because those founders don't get the capital they need, because folks like you
unfairly do.

This is because the system is zero-sum and wack, but such as it is, what I
suggest is a much better place for the money to go, in terms of profitability
(as well as for other obvious reasons).

From there, you should get a job at an established tech startup in a BD role.

The last part is what is likely to happen anyway, after you guys give up
within the next 2-4 months. But it would be so much cooler if you did the
first part before that happens.

With Good Intentions, A Non-dudebro Founder Not in Need of Capital Because of
My Ability to Build Product/Traction with Little Funding

 _peace_

------
gerdesj
"We have read EVERYTHING on how to come up with startups ideas"

Have you understood them 8)

Sorry, couldn't resist it but as many have pointed out here: a business
generally develops from solving a problem and monetizing it.

Problem -> Ahah! -> I can charge for this -> Business

Almost certainly you lot are already aware of that basic fact. For now I would
personally suggest that you might want to consider what the basic premise
implied by your post (in my head anyway):

Profit == Purpose

... means.

You imply money at the moment isn't an issue - you cool kids have already been
successful financially in previous endeavours. Why not help fix a small part
of society in some way? I suspect that will lead to a financially successful
<something> in the long term.

That's what I'm going to do.

------
eightturn
How about buying a category killing .com domain name, and use that as
inspiration to build a business? The domain name can be your guide.

Here's one: Glowstick.com .. it's currently at auction.
[http://www.namejet.com/pages/auctions/standarddetails.aspx?a...](http://www.namejet.com/pages/auctions/standarddetails.aspx?auctionid=3993248)

Go buy it, and create an online ecomm store selling stuff to party folks,
halloween folks, safety folks, etc.

Or hire a domain name broker like MediaOptions.com or Evergreen.com to
handpick a domain - that way you have an unfair advantage out of the gate, and
a somewhat business direction already baked in..

------
paulsutter
Tunnels. I'm not kidding. Much cheaper tunnels would completely restructure
real estate, so there are trillons of dollars at stake. Yeah you're not the
perfect team for that, but you can hire the perfect team for that.

Examples:

\- at 200kph, a 50km commute takes 15 minutes. Draw a 50km circle around San
Francisco (all the empty land near Walnut Creek or in Marin County now "local"
to downtown)

\- at 1000kph, transporation between cities becomes better and faster than
private jets, for everyone (no need to drive to the airport)

Edit: Tunnels are still the most underrated big idea out there. Of course
those numbers come from Elon. "Without tunnels, we'll be in traffic hell
forever" \- Elon Musk.

~~~
stevewilhelm
Elon beat you to it:
[https://www.boringcompany.com/](https://www.boringcompany.com/)

------
vcool07
If you are really short of ideas, just check one of the existing popular
services which you use and see if you can offer the same at a cheaper rate.
For ex: if a 'package delivery service' is charging $1 for delivering a
package, see if you can provide the same service 50 cents cheaper, while
maintaining the quality of service.

You don't necessarily need to burn cash / offer insane discounts to achieve
it. Cost reduction can also be achieved by improving the supply chain to make
it more efficient, thereby reducing cost. For ex: replacing paid software with
free/open source alternatives, automating some of the mundane tasks etc.

------
pspi
I had this exact problem - I wanted to know how to find problems. I'd tried
Customer Development and concluded that interviewing potential customers is
not the way to go. People don't walk around with lists of their biggest pains
and interviews become easily biased.

I got then introduced to Amy Hoy's Sales Safari technique where instead of
interviewing people you observe them. You find out where your audience hangs
out online and listen what they talk about. After you do this enough you start
to see patterns. And these patterns are the raw material for figuring out
problems to solve. I highly recommend Amy's 30x500 course.

------
maehwasu
Email me at stestodrud@hvzoi.com (throwaway email address to avoid spam), and
I'll throw a couple concepts at you that our group wants to support, but
doesn't fully have time for because of an overabundance of opportunities.

------
needSomeCoffee
I have a proven, novel means to gain insight about System1 response. Issued a
patent for it (which I think is reasonably well written). Applied it working
with P&G to improve response to their branded ads. Would love to use it to
improve romantic outcomes (better than survey response measures). Etc. Almost
too old and tired now after a decade+ of having proven I am a terrible
salesman. Same coin, opposite side. If I was you, I would hang around some
grabybeards who are 50+ and have been working in logistical positions for
corporations. They will have lots and lots of idea, but no where-with-all to
act. HTH.

------
currymj
what is the PhD’s research area, specifically? seems like this might help
narrow things down, at least.

what industries has the PE person done deals in? in those industries, are
there any sources of very large costs for businesses? think about ways to get
in the middle and lower those costs.

there are probably also some spaces where existing solutions are mediocre
because access to capital is more important than quality to get a business
going. since you have access to capital you might be able to compete.

it’s possible to do a startup that is tech heavy while also being B2B. the
classic image of a consumer facing website chasing user engagement isn’t
everything.

------
lhuser123
I read somewhere about a curious service(not in US). They offered Listeners.
Someone who would just listen to you. I assume the cost would be far less
expensive than a psychologist while the benefits would be not much different.

There most be a way to provide some kind of similar service that could close
the gap (at least in the US) between the people in need of such services and
the high costs.

Mental Health services in general have a problem: high cost. To make it cheap,
some just prescribe drugs, which in the long run probably do more harm than
good. Most people just need to talk, but one or two hours a week is simply not
enough.

------
shardinator
I wouldn't try to build A startup.

Instead I'd focus on being a 'special forces team' for people who have a good
idea and some product &/or traction but need more people with your skill sets
and access to capital.

You would then be essentially super hands-on investors, who could add
significant value (although that really depends on you - you could also be
super disruptive).

Over time you'd pick up a portfolio of companies that you've worked in and on,
then exited and allow the initial team and new members you brought in to
flourish.

While you rinse and repeat and slowly build network effects and improved
learnings along the way.

~~~
iancmceachern
Do exactly this, and read the book "Rework".

------
indubitable
There's a really simple idea that's kind of a... why hasn't anybody done this
yet? A simple abstract surveillance fence. A weave of drones + infrared +
vision and other such tech (perhaps directional mics?) could create a highly
secure border around an area. Uses would include states/nations, private
households, company facilities, public works, maybe even things like sea
observation (navy please stop running into things, preventing illegal fishing
/ human trafficking / drug trafficking / etc) and so much more.

Seems like it would be a really fun problem to solve as well.

------
abakker
Cool. Make software that enables easy time series analysis and regression on
multi dimensional map data. Specifically, data from drones and micro
satellites with color dimensions, shadows, etc. There are no obvious friendly
to use tools for exploring this kind of info. Most map analytics tools that
are available are limited to one map at time (using ML to find what’s in the
map, e.g. The value in this data is time series (crop growth, trends, change)
but the target users are not super sophisticated analysts and programmers, nor
are they GIS power users.

------
tomerbd
I wish I had the capital and resources to conquer the world with my ideas,
every year I see them being implemented by others. please ping me @tomerbd1
twitter, let's see if you find any of them useful.

------
the_good_matty
Instead of spinning your wheels trying to come up with something for no
reason, why don't you address a problem that already exists?

Give the money to charity, if you have it, and then do something inherently
worthwhile.

------
whiddershins
I have a couple of ideas. I know everyone thinks they are an “idea” person
when they aren’t, but I actually have some pretty decent validation over a
long time frame that my ideas have a better than average hit rate.

If I believed in the team I would probably just give away my ideas for free,
or for the pleasure of being an advisor. I have almost no interest in going
through the steps of doing a startup myself at this juncture.

I would love to see a couple of these come in to the world through any route.

If that sounds plausible feel free to reach out at me directly and I’d be
happy to chat.

------
w_t_payne
Look for a macro trend, find a niche within that trend, then ride it. For me,
the current big trend is machine learning and machine vision. What new markets
does this trend create? What new needs does it expose? I think testing is an
under-served niche here, particularly since I think the next big trend/problem
will be regulation, compliance and safety of these products. Position
yourselves so that _if_ there is a move towards greater regulation,
certification etc... etc... you are in a good position to exploit it.

------
jaredbowie
We're a Blockchain company who recently did a $13.5m token sale. We have an
abundance of ideas and not enough time to work on all of them. We're currently
working with two other teams and would be interested in talking with you and
giving you awesome ideas, if you don't need hand holding through the entire
process (which it sounds like you don't). Contact us through the contact form
on our site [http://blockmason.io/](http://blockmason.io/)

------
tohk1
We're on to something here:

1) A great early product ( SaaS, ML, AI ), made up of a solid partnership and
early paying customers.

2) We have investors interested in funding this product but only managed to
raise six figures seed.

3) Cash is running fine but we need more to grow the team and product to win
it all.

4) An big interest in scaling a SaaS product for enterprise and a ton of
customers waiting to discover the new enterprise.

-Things that we don't have:-

1) More cash and a winning team to bring home the trophy.

Email me so we can change the world together: tohk1@hotmail.com (my old active
hotmail)

------
Scoundreller
My search results for "cola subscription service" is still disappointing.

You can get a beer of the month and a wine of the month subscription, how
about colas from around the world?

Less regulatory mess too.

------
sailfast
Talk to someone that isn't your stratified group of well educated, affluent
people.

Ask them what problems they need fixed in their life or what things they thing
are crap and could be improved.

------
pconnelly15
Try a two-step process here.

1\. Passion - what area excites the team the most? Health, AI, FinTech,
Hardware? You are going to spend a few years building a brand, company, and
product. The more connection you have to it the better.

2\. Network! Be inclusive. You are basically saying you can build at scale
quickly. Ideas come easily from interaction. Plan the next 30 days to scour
every event you can and go. Listen, don't build. See what pops for the team.
Iterate from there until something bubbles up.

------
aamody
Personally think that the best ideas come out of solving problems for yourself
or that you feel no one else can solve better. I also wouldn't be too worried
about crowded and/or small markets, especially if there is an opportunity for
the space to grow.

It seems a bit forced to look hard for an idea, its usually a process, not
something you just come up with overnight. Not to be a downer but it might be
better to look for some work until you find something you truly care about.

------
tomericco
We were at this situation a few months ago.

We are a great team, backed by great investors, but could not find a good idea
(after we pivoted from the last one).

It took us 2 long months. But we finally made it (hopefully).

My conclusion is pretty simple - take a "fast moving water" area, and build a
product with proved market fit around this area. If you can't recognize this
"fast moving water" area, use VCs and investors to understand what they are
excited to invest in, what sound sexy for them.

------
blrgeek
Check out effectuation.org - built networks of people who trust you/you trust,
and solve problems for them. Keep solving problems, and you'll find, in 6-12m
one or more problems that are worth solving at scale, because they are massive
problems for large numbers of people. In this process, don't take funding,
keep your runway as long as possible. This is the method used by expert
entrepreneurs, when they take an idea and convert it into a business.

------
Dnguyen
Here's my two cents, hopefully I can make a dollar back. I've been working on
an web app to let small businesses create/design logos. My idea is to build a
bot that translate requests in natural language to actions. For example,
enlarge the icon by 5 percent. Or move the text a little to the left.
Basically I want to cut down the time and cost of making minor changes that
clients go through with designers over emails. Good match for your #4.

------
lcall
Read everything at [http://onemodel.org](http://onemodel.org) . Make a better
user experience (UI and installer) and flesh out some of the features planned
(especially "sharing"), then $ from hosting, selling binaries, bespoke
features, consulting, or ~patreon etc. Send me some of it. :) I have detailed
plans & priorities (not on the site) but have been slow getting it done
lately.

[edited a couple of times...]

------
tyingq
> An interest in SaaS and ML

Maybe try a match matching endeavor?

ML might be useful in some specific niche where it isn't being leveraged.

It sounds like you have generic contacts and expertise in "ML".

Find a promising business niche leader and pair them with one of your ML
contacts. The business niche people won't know ML, but they'll know the
unsolved problems.

Like, for example, an airline centric niche company that does not currently
leverage ML. Or maybe healthcare, or whatever.

Make the marriage and fund the ML part.

------
joering2
Seems you have everything beside idea. I have a file on my laptop that I keep
collecting all ideas I believe might be of a value eventually once I get to
your comfortable situation (team + financials). The one idea I like especially
is Uber-style but nothing to do with taxis. Huge potential. But I don't want
to share it with everybody here. Too bad you removed contact email address
from your profile; I could just send it to you.

------
blitzo
I'm not sure if you realised yet or not but this post itself is an idea on
it's own - "Help potential great team without ideas finding ideas".

~~~
semanticjudo
Yah, I realized this too a while back when I was doing the "what problem do I
have?" exercise... "well, clearly I have a problem finding an idea." :)

I had some ideas on how to go about this but I think the major blocker to
scale is the "functional fixedness" bias. At least that is where I got stuck.

------
robotkdick
Problem with a lot of interest in a solution: writers seeking to grow their
audience. My investment into the solution spans a five years. I've built two
working solutions. Solution #1 has been sales tested for a month during which
it generated $20,000 from a handful of customers. If interested in a
conversation, let me know. I'm taking solution #2 to market in a few weeks and
have ready leads. @robotkdik

------
TYPE_FASTER
> The few product ideas we came up with following the above process we
> dropped, often because we discovered that that space is ultra crowded or
> commooditized.

Pick one and execute a MVP. You'll learn about your ability to make it happen
as a team. Part way through, you'll probably come up with a better idea.

I find walking our dogs in the woods or driving leads to thinking, which
usually leads to ideas. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail.

------
BrandonBradley
I like your pitch. And, you've got a ton of response here on HN.

I'm a bit late to the game here, but maybe we can jive. I have various ideas
in the cryptocurrency space. Solo founder, working for 3.5 years on various
ideas. I'm into private fund growth and market data/pipeline sales. Willing to
meet about my recent pivot (to market data sales) and the need for partners on
my end.

Drop me a line: brandon.lawrence.bradley at gmail dot com

Cheers!

------
a_d
1\. The most obvious advice in your case is to revise the heuristic you are
using to rule out your ideas. My guess is that you are looking at 'who else is
doing this' or some other question that leads to ruling out what you work on.
Thinking hard about just that might yield a better result.

2\. Instead of looking for problems, I think more about how is the world
changing and what can I do about it. I would advise you to do the same.
Sometimes something big changes and most people aren't paying attention. For
example, Trump's recent XO on healthcare allows businesses to form
"associations" (small companies can pool together to get large company rates).
In the recent Berkshire meeting, Buffett said that American businesses are
going to be increasingly uncompetitive (at the global stage) if healthcare
costs keep rising. These are things that are connected - if one is paying
attention. The uber thought is from Peter Thiel [1]

3\. Instead of thinking about a startup, start an industry [2]. I think Alan
Kay's talks are inspiring - but also give a good framework to think about
projects.

4\. If I could just give you one advice, it would be: Pay attention. Very few
people are paying attention to the whats happening.

5\. One of the biggest disadvantages that you have is that you already have a
team and money. This puts enormous pressure to do something "Big". No good
idea is going to survive this test - obvious "Big" ideas are taken (not that
you still can't work on them). So when PG says, works on "projects" and don't
think about starting companies - he means, just do stuff that you find fun.
This is very hard to do in your case.

I have helped several companies when they found themselves in the same
predicament as you did. If you think it would be helpful, I would be happy to
talk: ad@42.life

Best wishes and Good luck!

To end with a cliche: Stay hungry, Stay foolish

[1] Peter Thiel: pg 114 [http://gsl.mit.edu/media/programs/south-africa-
summer-2015/m...](http://gsl.mit.edu/media/programs/south-africa-
summer-2015/materials/0to1.pdf)

[2] Alan Kay at 1:10:
[https://www.startupschool.org/videos/11](https://www.startupschool.org/videos/11)

------
paul7986
Make an internet connected toilet that compares and analyzes specimen data of
all connected toilets and warns it user(s) of life threatening disease.

------
edoceo
With that setup why not just take over some early company and 10x it?

Most have ideas, some have MVP and some have early customers. Pick the third
one and bigulate it.

~~~
GFischer
That sounds like a great idea for the OP. Although any company with some
traction won't be so easy to take over.

------
issa
"Those who can't, teach". Why not start an incubator? Sounds like you have the
perfect skill set to help and support teams with ideas.

------
ahtsei
This is a long shot but here goes. I'm the single founder and developer of
gympro.com. Recently announced that we will be shutting up shop in January
next year. Would the fitness space be something of interest? I'm looking to
hand over the Gympro brand to someone that is willing to make it work, or has
some pivot ideas. Can send more details to anyone interested: aleks at gympro
dot com

------
ikeboy
Send me an email, let's chat for a half hour and I'll give you several ideas
that I'd use and pay for in my industry if they existed.

------
iguana
Lots of advice here is to go after pain points, or enter competitive markets,
or to question your team dynamics. I have a different perspective:

Set up a studio, where the team builds a new "thing" every 2 weeks. Then, 2
months later you have 4 things, and you can pick the one that inspired the
team the most.

Given your cash position, you should be able to easily float 2 months while
building a bunch of different things.

------
Entangled
There is the inevitability of paying for stuff with our watches, (ala Apple
Pay but global, not just 1% of market share) so there is a small chance for a
newcomer to disrupt a multi-trillion dollar market. And for those who don't
use watches, then a small pocket device, be it a ring, cell phone or something
like old Motorola pagers.

Those who miss the boat will blame themselves not being the next Whatsapp.

~~~
kbyatnal
"And for those who don't use watches, then a small pocket device, be it a
ring, cell phone or something like old Motorola pagers."

You mean like a credit card...?

------
marenkay
Sit together in a room. Talk about one thing that pisses you off. The more
annoying and impossible or even insane it seems, find a fix, sell it.

~~~
lj3
Let's build an Operating System!

------
jv22222
Send an email to justin@nugget.one

I'll give you free access to nugget. We have over 500 SaaS startup ideas in
there.

You probably won't find your final idea but it's very inspiring stuff.

Skimming through that much stuff can help spark or grow ideas you were
previously thinking about or you can think through the ideas in another
business domain.

Of course, there are just some great ideas in their own right and you might
pick one of those.

------
stevenj
What's a problem that you (or one of your partners) have that you wish there
was a good solution for?

Aside from that, I'd like to see the social stigma around mental health
eliminated. It's viewed as a positive thing to care about, and work toward,
better physical health. I wish that were true for mental health. I wish
improving your mental health was as normal as going to the gym.

------
adamqureshi
Would you consider to build a platform using AI to connect ad pro's to gigs/
jobs? link is below. I put this landing page up to test then got busy with my
other idea that's making money. Let me know. I have a bunch of emails from
providers. [http://tryoldster.com/](http://tryoldster.com/)

Goal MVP / validation /

------
Chris_Jay
It sounds like you're spending too much time in focus mode and not enough time
in diffuse mode. A lot of people are suggesting your team is just incapable of
diffuse thinking, but I would say it's a skill like any other.

Travel, read fiction, daydream, write down ten bad ideas right after waking
up... play a bit looser than you're used to, and some new connections should
form.

------
austincheney
Take a problem that you have and provide the world's strongest solution. The
problem exists because it imposed some kind of cost or inconvenience upon you
and valid solutions are absent or unacceptable.

Only you can form a valid startup idea, because it is entirely dependent upon
what you are capable and willing to execute upon. It is the difference between
a great idea and a product.

------
cowllin
I have an idea called Check Your Bias which is basically to make readers more
attuned to detecting bias in news they are reading by selecting words they
think convey the authors opinion and gamifying “guessing” how right or left an
article is. I ran a very basic MVP. I’m pursuing a different idea right now
but would be happy to share all my learnings and docs with you :)

------
rachelmend
Funny how life is... we have great idea, tons of people on a waiting list,
companies waiting for beta but no money and an ok team.... :-)

------
jamesq
We picked up ideas from our clients. If you've got a niche or area of
experience - offer consultancy services or pick up some projects and dig into
the pain points of your customers.

See where they're having problems and then do the research to see if it's a
problem for others in the same industry. If it is you have your idea and
probably your first couple of customers.

------
achristian
You need a framework, something that'll help you now and later. Feel free to
check out this essay, which I wrote years ago and has many holes but might be
useful in your case: [https://medium.com/@oped/innovating-
repeatedly-f4ab14ef228e](https://medium.com/@oped/innovating-
repeatedly-f4ab14ef228e)

------
mooreed
If we can agree that the problem defines the solution, then you will have to
work backwards to a problem that your team has unique competency at.

Restated, it is impossible to have a great team without the constraints of a
problem statement. It is similar to those who claim C++ is the best language.
With out the context of the problem to be solved, it is merely an opinion.

------
aurelianito
Things I would love to make but I cannot find time to:

* Syntax-tree aware version control system. Do merges taking into account the syntax tree of the code being managed.

* Real time stats of the judicial system by real-time analisis of the sentences.

My standard ideas license is: the first $100 millons you make, are yours. I
want 1% of the rest. If you make less than $100 millons, you owe me nothing.

Good luck!

~~~
riku_iki
> Real time stats of the judicial system by real-time analisis of the
> sentences.

I think the main problem with this idea is where to get data for analysis.

------
akerbeltz
If you see this and you’re open for ideas to be developed ping me here. I have
a bunch of them, and I have the ability to execute them, but I need a good
team. I haven’t had much luck in the past (and present) with partners. I’ve
started some startups which are running, but for a particular project I need a
smart team. Let’s talk. Regards

------
adityapurwa
In Indonesia, e-commerce is growing, a lot of people trade items online, the
problem with so many e-commerce platform is we have to insert our product to
those platform one by one.

I wanted to implement something like Buffer, but for posting product on
e-commerce platform. However, not all e-commerce platform in Indonesia
provides API for you to do so.

------
fierarul
The way I see it, you can make a business from a ToDo app, so it's just a
matter of sticking with it for a while and doing the bizdev magic.

If you want an idea, here's one: I'm looking at Cloud-based load testing based
on JMeter (maybe more frameworks later) A few companies in the field, but not
many. Plenty of room!

------
Brinsby
If you are in the Pittsburgh area, there is a startup weekend coming up in two
weeks which I am super excited for as there will be tons of great ideas tossed
around. You may be able to get some great ideas through the prototype phase.
Otherwise maybe join a startup weekend or something to that effect in your
area.

------
Geee
Start consulting in ML. Contact businesses and talk to them. How could they
benefit from ML? What kind of data they have that could be used? Do they want
to predict something from old data or do they need realtime systems? You'll
make money and maybe find something productizable as a SaaS in the process.

------
throwaway62824
Baby's first Bitcoin: an online platform for parents to introduce their babies
to the world of cryptocurrency.

------
vasilipupkin
Got a number of quite specific ideas and capital, but not a team to work on
them yet. You should provide a throwaway email address and we can connect, or
just email me at temporarythrowaway930@gmail.com. Couple of ideas regarding
decentralization ( where it makes sense and not just as a buzzword ).

------
seanMeverett
I have products that need built for days. It all starts with science. You are
in an incredible position that I never have been. Had to self fund everything
myself and all ultimately failed due to lack of capital even with traction.
Hold on to what you have. It’s the most valuable thing ever.

------
gotrythis
Hi.

I have been working on a startup that would disrupt a few industries, but it
turned out I bit off more than I could chew and I got burned out. Have a bunch
of paying beta testers, crazy stick rate, but have moved onto simpler things
for now. Have pitch deck ready and would be happy to discuss in private.

------
idlewords
Give the money to charity and get a job.

~~~
cwyers
I want to upvote this 30 more times.

------
j45
Competition isn't in the number of vendors in a space, but rather who reaches
a market the best. I wonder if some of those ideas would look a little
different.

Another source for uncovering pain is consulting - less about the income and
more about uncovering needs and gaps tied to marketplace needs.

------
quickConclusion
Just wanted to say good luck!!

I always wanted to start my own thing, thought about many ideas, started a
couple just for fun, not full speed, because they were not great ideas.

I was a bit where you are.

Then I met someone with a great idea needing help, and I was ready to jump. I
did, it worked. So it's possible, so good luck!!

------
krmmalik
You're missing what I call a "spiritual purpose". You can't actualise until
have one. You need to think about what wrong in the world you want to right. I
have a free 1hr course that expands on this concept further.

Http://learning.krmmalik.com

The course is called Idea to Launch

------
davix55
Contact me:
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabrielpaunescu/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabrielpaunescu/)

I'm doing something that will blow your mind. I already have customers, time
to build a team and scale

------
thisisit
Are you sure the idea as dropped only because it was crowded or commodity? It
wasn't because you thought it was not the next Uber or Facebook? The problem
is there are tons of smaller problems with niche market but not exactly the
next unicorn. Start with those.

------
kevando
Many great tech startups began because the founders had the protection of
doing whatever they wanted (fb, goog, snap) without worrying about other
stuff. You guys had a year to figure this out. Startups tend to happen
naturally and they aren't for everyone.

------
muzani
What I have been doing, to some success, is just finding products that have a
lot of demand. If I can do something that's 10x better in a brief period of
time, I do so. It's usually really easy to tap into an existing market than
building from scratch.

------
ThomPete
Find a problem to solve by asking people on their way out of an industry.

[https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-
problems-4...](https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-
problems-47ee63bb3511)

------
iamthepieman
You don't know your a good team until you've built something good. Good teams
are defined by their output not by how the members feel, how smart the team is
or how much experience it has. That said, output includes how the members and
partners feel.

------
pbreit
Valuable function for a niche.

Function ideas: scheduling, workforce mgmt, payments, commerce, task
management, workflow, ordering, marketing/advertising, customer mgmt

Niche ideas: restaurants, dentists, construction, financial advisors,
teachers, parents, event planners, handypeople

------
enjjorgenson
[https://medium.com/evergreen-business-weekly/how-to-get-
good...](https://medium.com/evergreen-business-weekly/how-to-get-good-
business-ideas-the-mental-alchemy-of-ideation-3ba21b66aa4d)

------
kylehotchkiss
Spend some time travelling. Around the country or the world. Talk to people
outside your normal social class. So many people these days have cellphones
and internet access (worldwide). Make their lives easier then find a way to
make some money with it.

------
PascLeRasc
Are there no problems in any of your personal lives? No healthcare issues or
financial needs?

------
LePetitDev
Transportation is a big problem, especially when it comes to commuting from a
suburb to a city. I would love to have more options outside of aging and
overcrowded mass transit. Are there solutions to this problem? Are there any
killer carpool apps?

------
daniel-cussen
This thread is getting a little crowded, but mail me contact information and I
might be able to hook you up with some really one-sided mathy competitive
advantages. Algorithmic stuff: same output for the same input, but game-
changingly faster.

------
personjerry
With your expertise and connections, why not start a consulting firm?

You'll see problems people have across different domains and maybe discover
some problems with opportunity for solutions. You can also make small
experiment projects as part of your firm.

------
BrassRhino
I have a couple of ideas if you are interested. I am working on an application
to Y Combinator, but I have no experience and no contacts (yet) that can help
me through the process. I would rather not post the ideas publicly. Can I
email you?

------
ratingsystem
I have two projects: rating-system.com - ran for years(profitable), can be
scaled and tailor-fitted.com - just launched(lots of work to scale). I do not
mind to share with the right team. You can find contact details on rating-
system.com

------
runningmike
Solve one of The world’s biggest problems using FOSS
[https://80000hours.org/career-guide/world-
problems/](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/world-problems/)

------
stevewilhelm
Sounds like you are missing a domain expert in a domain you care deeply about.

Find such a person and identify a few immediate "pain points" in the space
that can be quantifiably measured.

If I could humbly suggest a few: obesity, student loan debt, and US elder
care.

Good luck.

------
HashThis
I have a great business model but I'm looking for a team to pair up with.
Please contact me if you wanted a software engineer to join your team, and
bring a great business model.

I've had successful exits in the past. BryanStarbuck@gmail.com

------
pravenj
how about building a social platform and further learning site for serial
entrepreneurs?? Serial entrepreneurs get together to test ideas, projects,
etc... They learn mainly by seeing what others are doing and sharing thoughts.
I go to sites to learn something, it is designed for someone just starting
out. I want to talk to fellow serial entrepreneurs who are looking at various
ideas, but don't know where to meet them and how. Even sharing of visions and
opportunities that serials entrepreneurs see could be really insightful not
only for themselves, but for anyone who are looking at what is going to happen
next.

~~~
d7z
If you need that, check out [https://DoerHub.com](https://DoerHub.com)

~~~
pravenj
Thanks. Looks good, will definitely check it out.

------
memyselfandeye
It sounds like y'all are an up-and-coming VC fund waiting to happen. Find some
niche of founders that traditional funds have a habit of overlooking -
minorities, women, etc - and help them build some rocket ships!

------
aerovistae
Off-topic but I admit I find myself wondering how much 'a fortune' is.

------
OliverJones
Look for people with their hair on fire. Figure out how to put out the fire.
Check this out. [http://oppsdaily.com/](http://oppsdaily.com/)

Don't overthink it. Good luck.

------
maerF0x0
My 2c . Start consulting/contracting in a domain of your choice. Once you've
worked with 10 companies you'll probably see a pattern emerge of something
they're failing at.

Do that thing well and charge for it.

------
bgdnpn
Solve these and then we'll give you some ideas: \- global warming /
environment \- jobs / gentrification \- education/empowerment \- food / health
\- space exploration / colonization

------
khalloud
I’m no expert, but I would recommend build something—anything. This will test
how the team thinks and works together creatively and ideas might come along
in the process as pain points or aha moments.

------
csours
Small robots for manufacturing.

The market for large robots for manufacturing is full of very capable
machines, but small robots could re-use many cheap components from cell phones
and other consumer electronics.

\---

Or, to mashup your own list: MLaaS!

~~~
RoboticsAU
Would you mind elaborating on the small robots idea? What would these robots
do?

------
everdev
I have a list of ideas and need a team to build them :) You can reach me here:
[https://www.andybrewer.com/](https://www.andybrewer.com/)

------
malux85
Contact me [https://www.linkedin.com/in/alain-
richardt/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alain-richardt/)

would like to chat in private! :)

------
mallubaba
I am a machine learning reseacrher at IIT Bombay,India and there are lot of
startup ideas and potential here for the local population. If interested,
please mail me : mallu.baba003@gmail.com

------
Spakman
I'm a big fan of solving your own problems. Your problem seems to be coming up
with problems to solve. Perhaps you could work on something that helps people
to find problem to solve?

------
lifeformed
Why not tackle some of the problems on the Requests for Startups list?

[https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/)

------
wolco
Based on your team I would build an AI driven contact manager to send
email/reminders/calender/schduler that hooked into slack and facebook using
bots to issue commands.

------
dmix07
Look us up and get in touch @ [http://invanti.co](http://invanti.co) if you're
looking for a group that has a problem-first approach

------
amelius
Ha, I think you have found a perfect problem to work on: finding ideas.

Your company could provide consultancy services to other businesses, and as
such you could collect problems, and sell them to other businesses!

:)

~~~
viraptor
There's already one of those: [https://nugget.one/](https://nugget.one/)

~~~
amelius
I want to see some success stories (with references to real companies, not the
abstract "they helped us start our company and it's a big success now" that I
see in the testimonial section)

------
bloaf
Make a note taking app that doesn't suck.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474609](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474609)

------
nickler
PM if you're interested in chatting. We have something we're working on that
might be a good fit for the right group. I'm always happy to chat at the very
least.

------
nradov
Roomba for rodents. Build a small robot which can act like a mechanical cat to
kill small household pests like mice and rats. (I've had rats getting into my
garage lately.)

------
sasaf5
What about a crowdfunding platform for science? Especially for replicating
previous controversial results. It seems to me that traditional scientific
funding fails at that.

------
pier25
Don't look for ideas, look for problems you want to solve.

------
DevKoala
You are being too conservative. You need to be willing to fail.

------
scardine
Just attack a "red ocean". For example, 50$ for agent for month at Zendesk for
a simple ticketing system is way too much, that market is ripe for disruption.

------
DebLevine
I've got an idea, and some basic code. I need engineers, blank checks, and
passion for the idea. Can we talk? \- Deb Levine linkedin.com/in/deblevine

------
aylmao
You've perhaps thought of this already, but it's worth putting out there:
don't focus on making something new but rather in making something great.

------
molokai42
I have a great idea that might interest you. I don't see a way to message on
HN so reply to this if you want me to share it. Then I'll lost my email.

------
codinghorror
What pisses you off? What makes you angry?

Go build a startup to change that.

------
jacquesm
Start a fund. Spread your capital and let others do the heavy lifting. Use
your experience and connections to improve the chances of those that you
invest in.

------
epynonymous
i have plenty of business ideas, but have basically been a one man team, which
given my full time work status has been slow to say the least, i'm more of a
product developer at heart so am looking for business and tech guys to team up
with. message me if you're interested in talking, i would not mind sharing my
ideas (not only sports related) and we could take it from there. stephen at
madsportslab dot com

~~~
epynonymous
forgot to answer the questions in your post: in general, here's what i would
suggest, seems like the 3 of you don't necessarily need to work for a living
which is a great situation (correct me if i'm wrong). what i'd suggest is to
find something that you really enjoy doing, for me, i thought about all these
ideas that happened to be popular during whatever time, and though i had
plenty of seemingly plausible ideas, at the end of the day, i really didn't
care too much about those, sure there would be challenges to tackle and things
to learn for a few years, but i would get tired of it really quickly. for me,
i got lucky and figured it out, albeit later on in life. from a child, i loved
watching and playing sports, i used to read the paper every morning as a kid
just to look at all the stats, i could figure out the progression of games
just from the numbers. obviously you'll have to figure this out for
yourselves, but the fact that you seemingly have the financial security issue
resolved, you could start thinking about things in the upper layers of
maslow's hierarchy of needs, scratch that, even if you don't have financial
security figured out, go for what motivates you. i think elon musk is a great
example of someone that goes after the big problems even when there are huge
precedents or incumbents in the way, this is the stuff that legacies are made
from, solving the potentially unsolvable, he's really leaving his mark on
society and since time is severely limited, go for the big things that you
care about, the proverbial world hunger type problems if that's your thing.
i'm sure whatever comes of it will fully enrich your lives and i'm not
necessarily talking about money even though there's plenty of potential for
that.

------
varjag
How about an investor service for scoring startups from their pitches? Use
historical data from YC applicants over the years to train the fitness
function.

~~~
RoboticsAU
Is that data publicly available?

------
vcwannabe21
This sounds like a really interesting opportunity for someone with a ton of
ideas (solution) to join a talented, well funded team. Where does One sign up?

------
okonomiyaki3000
You know, a great team with capital's a little like the mule with a spinning
wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it!

------
cvaidya1986
I am willing to help you iterate on the ideas you could possibly be working
on. I have the background and network that can help. Feel free to reach out.

------
zmikescof
We have the idea and are working towards its validation. We would soon look
towards building a team and seeking funding. Maybe we should join forces?

------
joss82
You could build a very generic product that would act as a problem detector.

Talk with your early users. Once you've detected a pain point, pivot and
double down on it.

Good luck!

------
1amzave
_" The wise man speaks because he has something to say. The fool speaks
because he has to say something."_

(See also: comments by idlewords, pkw2017.)

------
pschastain
What about general-purpose software? I've been toying with a software idea for
years that has as guaranteed a user base as you could get.

------
pjy04
Travel booking for corporations Scheduling automation Expense approval
software health care billing Hiring dashboards from job post to hiring

------
mathperson
Do something about nlp+social network -> Russian fake news detection. Sell it
to Facebook/twitter so they can shut down propagandists

------
melvinmt
I have acted as a Technical Advisor for teams like yours in the past (one of
them got acquired by Google). Contact me if you need some help.

------
savrajsingh
I hope the three of you get equally excited about whatever idea you choose.
That’s the real issue. You need passion, not thought exercises.

------
mrlag
I have ideas every 2nd day. Here is one: Your own highly individualized,
probiotic and _noncancerous_ toothpaste. Professionally attuned towards your
taste/mood and hygienic needs. Send a cheek swab. Get the lab results. Taste
the samples. Order your own mix. Colorize it. Share recipes online. Order
retro toothpastes. Order bloody vampire toothpaste. Mix it at home. Put them
on the blockchain. Make toothpaste fun again. Who wants to revolutionize
toothpaste with me?!? Oh gawd, I can't stop.

~~~
guru4consulting
"Make toothpaste fun again" \- I'm in :)

------
atYevP
I've always wanted there to be an app that find me coffee shops with
comfortable couches and chairs. Might be a good starting point!

------
non_sequitur
You could just launch an ICO, doesn't seem to really matter what it does. A
platform that helps launch platforms that launch ICOs?

------
chmike
If you look at problems, look at the problems of people or companies who have
money to spend. Don't simply look, talk with them.

------
amelius
Idea: build a job agency for (groups of) _great_ developers that want to work
from home or their own office.

You could be your first customers :)

------
jVinc
You need one more team member. Go out into the start-up community, go to pitch
meetings events etc, and find that person.

------
johndubchak
I find it hilarious that everyone is offering advice and not ideas.
Unfortunately I don't have an idea for you, but a suggestion:

Sponsor a hackathon where you provide a few categories of problems to solve.
For instance:

\- ML used as a personal tool \- SaaS solutions for connecting Healthcare data
sharing (that one should be interesting given HIPPAA restrictions alone) \-
None currency uses for Blockchains

And just see what develops. You may find ideas that you can delve into
further.

------
BeefySwain
Are you open to hearing ideas? I have a couple that I think have value, but
lack the bravery and means to pursue them.

------
djcjr
Disregard what others are doing. (Richard Feynman)

Imagine something that must be here 30 years from now. Invent the future.
(Alan Kay)

------
kampsduac
Childhood education in the States. Find some teachers in your area and ask
them what they could do with x in y time.

------
lunarmobiscuit
Happy to share a dozen great ideas I’ve seen that lack team and capital.
Linkedin.com/in/lunarmobiscuit

------
Chris_Jay
I would really like a simple NLP algorithm that combs candidate profiles and
identifies undervalued candidates.

------
kcorbitt
Hey, I work for YC and would love to talk to you about this -- feel free to
reach out to kyle@ycombinator.com.

------
bloaf
Bring the Inferno OS to the IoT. Unify all the protocols that are out there by
implementing 9P2000 on them.

------
ianamartin
How do I get in touch with you?

I have a couple of ideas with legit legs. I am also pretty competent at
implementing stuff.

------
wstrange
Golf Course Tee Time Booking.

There are _hundreds_ of apps out there, and they all suck.

A really compelling app could sweep the market.

------
mabynogy
I have tons of ideas and I'm also looking for partners.

Feel free to reach me @gmail or on rizon with the same nick.

------
meannie
Find an entrepreneur with a great idea and join her founding team as raise
muscle or fund her venture.

------
stephen82
Build a platform that fixes the hiring procedure and help experienced older
programmers to find a decent job like they deserve it.

Think of it as a lightweight version of LinkedIn, FaceBook, and Github
combined as one.

No one should have any trouble finding any sort of job or whatsoever.

This platform should be implemented in such way that any country out there
should be able to offer jobs to nearly all their residents.

------
teckays
Hey @Obsidian, I might have something interesting for you. PM me on Twitter
(@teckays) if you will.

------
40acres
The marijuana industry is only growing, you might want to see what
opportunities lie in that space.

------
zafka
I think there is room for a full service solar company. Feel free to email me
for the full rant.

------
maihillel
I have a great person who have amazing idea but need the team send me a mail
maihillel@gmail.com

------
Berone
I have a venture, ping me about it. It is a SaaS and ML play in the marketing
automation space.

------
kumarski
ML + SaaS is an overplayed space.... too many competitors and they all dream
the same stuff.

------
mikhailfranco
So Normal, Lucky and Smart walk into a bar ...

... and after a year still can't find a punchline.

------
bloaf
Make a wikipedia, but for implementations of algorithms written in a literate
style.

------
rch
If you don't come up with anything I'd love to chat with the CMU person.

------
npezolano
Everything is going to be crowded these days. Are you guys based out of New
York?

------
chadcmulligan
Watch star trek

Figure out how to get from here to there

implement

------
peterwwillis
Did you look under the couch?

------
arisAlexis
I have at least 2 ideas that are very worth it. Find me on twitter arisalexis

------
vinitagr
Make the technology for flying cars. Like the one in the movie Blade Runner.

------
baron816
I have plenty of ideas that I’d give away for nothing or almost nothing. I’d
say at least one or two are viable. You can contact me if you’re interested
and I can share via email. Would mostly just like to see an idea of mine
become real. Could be worth five minutes of your time.

------
bloaf
Make a chemical process modeler that isn't stuck 15 years in the past.

------
philip1209
Do contract work as a mini agency. Seeing others problems may be helpful.

------
cwkoss
Decentralized content-addressable network parallel to the internet.

------
pkw2017
1\. Give all of the money to charity 2\. Ask for more money 3\. Goto 1

------
cjbenedikt
Interested in FinTech for Impact? email me: cjbenedikt@gmail.com

------
biggio
Big things have small beginnings. Focus on small. Really small.

------
meannie
Find an entrepreneur with a great idea and fund her venture.

------
tootie
Pick a popular site/product and copy it. Aim for some sort of marginal
improvement or marginally lower cost. Come with some unique marketing or niche
of their users. Ideas don't have to be totally original.

------
laksmanv
0bsidian - Would like to reach out, is there a good email?

------
viach
Just make sure you have Block or Coin in project name.

------
anigbrowl
How much are you willing to pay for original concepts?

------
erikj
What was the PhD working on before joining your team?

------
hawski
Scratch your own itch - make an idea sharing website.

~~~
dest
[https://www.demandrush.com/](https://www.demandrush.com/)

------
BatFastard
This same post was up a few months ago, suspicious.

------
gressquel
You dont find ideas, ideas find you.

It happens when you do some work and suddenly need some tool that could "do
this or that" but all you find is complicated solutions or no solution at all

------
virgil_disgr4ce
I've got at least one genuinely new idea that has not been done before that
could change the study and popular understanding of human history. Feel free
to get in touch.

------
zapperdapper
Perhaps the problem is lack of industry experience?

I have plenty of ideas. All I see are problems that need solving. There are so
many things broken in web/IT that they can't be listed here. I have a file
with literally hundreds of problems that need fixing and that's just
scratching the surface.

Example, I think someone already mentioned this earlier but have you ever
browsed a bunch of corporate websites - I have seen so many websites that are
so horribly broken that it's just crazy - there are literally MILLIONS of
broken websites out there. You could start by looking into why that is (I've
been thinking about it and believe there's numerous business ops just in that
area alone)...

I recently wrote about how the first company I worked for ran their entire
operation (which was quite complex) with a few dumb terminals and a few Z80s
clocked at 4MHz, running something called TurboDOS:

[https://coffeeandcode.neocities.org/remembering-turbo-
dos.ht...](https://coffeeandcode.neocities.org/remembering-turbo-dos.html)

I once wrote an entire oil rig data acquisition system in TurboBasic in a
weekend. You could use ON TIMER to called a routine every second or so, no
assembler required. ON KEY and ON TIMER gave you event driven programming (ok
primitive but effective). There were things like INPORTB and OUTPORTB (I
think) that could write directly to ports for control and data acquisition.

So are we going back in terms of productivity? What can you do about that?

Are you still waiting for someone to come up with a viable alternative to
JavaScript?

You could almost come up with something by looking at trends like the move to
multi-machine, multi-processor, multi-core, multi-threaded and there are so
many things that could be moved to that model for scale. Then there are the
tools to help profile and debug those things. Example: Elasticsearch - Lucene
was/is a great library for search/indexing, but the Elastic search guy (Shay
Banon) saw the opportunity to scale that to multiple machines.

Scale drives a lot of innovation: look at innovative technologies like Redis
for example.

Another example - SQL databases. Have you ever set up a MySQL replication
cluster and kept it running 24/7? Sure there are excellent services like
compose.io and the new kids on the block like Cockroach Labs, but highly
scaled database with ease of set up and management is not really a solved
problem. Just keeping the darn thing up and running is often a challenge.

Like I said, I could go on and on...

p.s. yes, people are right - a bit of competition is not necessarily a bad
thing...

------
qwertyfdx
Did you research on blockchain technology?

------
Findeton
A webpage to store all media for families.

------
scandox
Pensions are a really shit experience.

------
amigoingtodie
Social fart app.

You can share your farts with others and vote on the 'best' fart in various
categories (temporal,geolocation) with leaderboards.

------
lkrubner
Here is a pitch I wrote for an idea I am working on. I think the ML/NLP space
still has a huge run in front of it, even if it now seems crowded.

There is a much longer version, of course, but I had to cut 75% of this before
Hacker News would allow me to post it.

\-----------------------------

SUMMARY:

For many years I've worked with startups involved in data mining, so I've
gotten to know how the current crop of these firms operates. The companies
that I've worked with rely on Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language
Processing (NLP). All of the startups that I've worked with so far, and all of
the one's that I've read about, fall into 2 categories:

1.) they got into a business where they thought they could use humans to do
data aggregation, and now they are desperately trying to build ML/NLP stacks
to automate the work.

2.) they were certain they didn't need humans, because their Deep Neural
Network was magically effective, but now they are having to rethink their
business model because their Deep Neural Network has been less of a magical
breakthrough than they expected.

There is a great deal of redundancy in the current efforts to find the right
balance of ML/NLP and humans. One company might use Spark to ingest documents
about medicine, another analyzes advertising using a Hadoop cluster, another
scans the web to pull in millions of articles that it runs through Storm,
where it parses the data and then stores the final results in Cassandra. Each
company stumbles through a painful process of trying to figure out where it
should use humans to patch the failures of its ML/NLP techniques.

In particular, there are specific patterns of using Mechanical Turk to vet
those items where ML algorithms could not reach a high level of confidence. A
given item can be sent to 5 different people on Mechanical Turk, and we can
accept a vote of 4 or 5 as representing a high level of confidence. But if the
vote is 3 or less, then we need to escalate that item to an even higher level
or review. I've seen multiple companies build similar processes, which is why
I think this should be a business of its own.

It's important to be aware of the limits of startups such as Bigml.com. Most
of the time, data analysis is just the starting point of a longer process that
involves much interpretation on the part of humans. But much of that later
human vetting can be standardized, and so firms should outsource the work.

LONG VERSION:

Let's start by talking about one particular industry, which is firms that sell
data about privately-held companies. There is a great conversation on Quora
that summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of most of the enterprises in
this field:

"How do CB Insights, PrivCo, DataFox, Owler, Tracxn!, Mattermark, and Venture
Scanner compare for private company research?"

[https://www.quora.com/How-do-CB-Insights-PrivCo-DataFox-
Owle...](https://www.quora.com/How-do-CB-Insights-PrivCo-DataFox-Owler-Tracxn-
Mattermark-and-Venture-Scanner-compare-for-private-company-research)

Danielle Morrill has written a great blog post about how and why she created
Mattermark ("The Deal Intelligence Company"):

[https://medium.com/@DanielleMorrill/introducing-
mattermark-t...](https://medium.com/@DanielleMorrill/introducing-mattermark-
the-deal-intelligence-company-a9ed7c8a9872)

According to Crunchbase, she has so far raised $17 million to build out her
company. Samiur Rahman, the lead data engineer at Mattermark, has given a
revealing interview about how NLP helps Mattermark pinpoint data about deals
that companies may be arranging:

[https://www.techemergence.com/how-natural-language-
processin...](https://www.techemergence.com/how-natural-language-processing-
helps-mattermark-find-business-opps-a-conversation-with-samiur-rahman/)

Anyone who tries to scour the Web for information about companies, either
publicly held or privately owned, immediately runs into a few problems,
including the fact that any given company may have dozens of subsidiaries with
similar names. The law, or a regulatory agency, might have forced the company
to break up. So, for instance, German law has forced Deutsche Bank to set up
different companies for loans and investments. As a consequence, one finds the
following names on the web:

Deutsche Bank - Corretora de Valores S.A. Deutsche Bank A S Deutsche Bank AG
Deutsche Bank GmbH Deutsche Bank S.A. Banco Alemao Deutsche Bank Trust Company
Americas Deutsche Bank Trust Company Delaware Deutsche Bank Journalists tend
to misspell these names, or just use the generic "Deutsche Bank," which makes
it difficult to discern which incarnation of Deutsche Bank is the subject of
the article.

Samiur Rahman says he is a fan of "word vectors" and "paragraph vectors", and
then he uses the Nearest Neighbor algorithm to figure out which companies are
similar to each other. As the interview makes clear, Mattermark got into a
business where they thought they could use humans to do data aggregation; now
they are desperately trying to build ML/NLP stacks to automate the work. (In
my taxonomy, they're a Category 1 firm.)

...Some customers buy from several of these data-analysis companies. Some buy
from both CB Insights, which has the best data about deals, and also CB-Mark,
which has the best estimates on revenue. The customers are often sales teams
hoping to find new customers for their own companies, but sometimes the data
is also used for research (as at the universities) and sometimes the data is
used for VC investments, as Danielle Morrill made clear in her history of
Mattermark. Right now there are something like 30 companies in this field
(selling data about private companies), though I assume this will eventually
consolidate to something like 3 or 4 companies.

THE HYBRID APPROACH USES BOTH HUMANS AND ML/NLP

For the foreseeable future, the best approach to data mining is a mix of
ML/NLP plus humans. The ML/NLP scripts can be calibrated to produce an
estimate of confidence. When there is high confidence, the entire ingestion
process can be automated. When there is low confidence, the item-of-data needs
to be flagged for human review.

The process I'm working on needs two levels of human review, but I'll also
talk about a third, if only to dismiss it.

1.) low-level: for tasks that don't need much context, yet still can't be
automated, the item-of-data should be sent to 5 different people using
Amazon's Mechanical Turk. If at least 4 of these people come to the same
conclusion, we can assume that this was data that low-skilled people were
successful at categorizing. For instance, if an article had an ambiguous
mention of Deutsche Bank, but 4 out of 5 people came to the same conclusion
about which Deutsche Bank was under discussion, then we can consider this
item-of-data categorized, and the rest of the ingestion process can proceed
automatically.

2.) medium-level: this level of skill is needed if people with low-level skill
failed to agree on how to categorize an item-of-data. If something was sent to
Mechanical Turk but 5 people each reached 5 different conclusions, the data
clearly needs a much closer inspection. Medium level skill review would also
include large parts of medical and legal data sets, where data can be read
from context by a person who lacks specific medical or legal training. "While
I worked at Google I downloaded all of Google's documents for self-driving
cars and now I'd like Uber to finance my new self-driving car startup" is a
sentence that can be understood by an untrained layman, though the realization
that this describes illegal activity is still beyond the ability of a pure
ML/NLP approach. People of medium-level skill would be people who work
directly with my startup. They could do the work remotely, but they would
require some training, so I would have a long-term relationship with them.

3.) high-level: this is a different market, and so I'm not going to consider
this. Data that requires high levels of skill might be items of medical or
legal knowledge that a person needs extensive training to understand. Trying
to deal with this kind of data would require a completely different business
model. I'm not considering this as part of my current project.

WHO ARE MY CUSTOMERS?

My customers would be every group that:

1.) needs the output of NLP scripts...

2.) ...applied to a data source they specify...

3.) ...vetted to a high level of confidence

The market for ML and AI startups might seem crowded, but I think there is
still many opportunities there, in particular, regarding standardizing the
process whereby humans review the output of ML and NLP scripts.

------
eurticket
As others have said, merge

------
user-on1
How to connect with you?

------
tehlike
tackle IRA investments. include me if you like the idea.

------
MeiravGutman
Call me...0544912978

------
Dowwie
.. said no one ever

------
justinzollars
Lets connect.

~~~
joering2
Hie might have tried but your information has been redacted :)

------
georgewsinger
I'd like to argue something contrarian in this thread: you could be on the
right path. Some facts to keep in mind:

\- There are on the order of 20,000 new startups each year; most of the other
people in this thread are from this pool.

\- Only 2-5 of those 20,000 startups will end up mattering (i.e., will reach a
high enough valuation/impact on the world to move a needle).

\- Of these 2-5 startups that matter per year, almost none of them were pivots
(Twitter is LoudCloud are the only examples I can think of).

\- The conventional wisdom is to take an incremental idea and run with it;
"ideas don't matter and execution is everything"; run sprints and use the Lean
Startup methodology to pull the market out of an idea (or pivot), and reach a
local maxima.

\- This will only get you the result that 20,000 startups a year typically
get: incrementalism, small victories, and/or failure.

\- There's also lottery ticket mentality to this conventional style of
thinking: you're no different than anyone else, so stop ideating and start
doing, and maybe you'll get lucky.

If you've been at it for a year and haven't found anything good enough to give
your life to, it could mean you are different than the average HNer. It could
mean you have a calling to think bigger than most people do.

Here is some material you may be interested in which bolsters this viewpoint:

\- Alan Kay's "The Future Doesn't Have to be Incremental":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o&t=1830s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o&t=1830s)

\- Peter Thiel's book _Zero to One_. Among other things, this book discusses
the importance of avoiding competition and commoditized markets (unless you
have something 10x better; i.e., Google's Page Rank).

\- Listen to interviews with Elon Musk, who claims he started by thinking
about HUGE problems that humanity faces and worked backwards. Instead of
thinking incrementally, Musk thinks extremely large and seems to plan for
years in advance: [https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-
plan-j...](https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-just-
between-you-and-me)

At some point, of course, you have to interact with reality, and that could
involve interacting with negative people on HN (and especially real customers,
etc). When Reid Hoffman started LinkedIn, he talked with dozens of people in
his network and more than 2/3 said negative things about his idea. It's part
of the process of getting calibrated with reality. But this shouldn't be your
starting point; it should be what you do after you find something that
actually moves you.

Finally, I want to say that me and a friend were in a similar boat to you and
your friends several months ago: we had been reading about technologies and
problems for months and had rejected incremental ideas that didn't move us. It
looked like we had just fucked around for several months and had nothing to
show for it.

We ended up working on a experimental VR Window Manager as an attempt to bring
Linux to a new computing platform (i.e., VR):
[https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula](https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula)

Here was our rationale for this idea when we started:
[https://gist.github.com/georgewsinger/46ea8d6b16fb8bf3249358...](https://gist.github.com/georgewsinger/46ea8d6b16fb8bf32493586fb9ea34be)

It's very much in the spirit of the advice I just gave you. Lord knows we
could be wrong, but one problem we don't have is in doubting whether our
project could matter if we pulled it off.

Good luck.

------
graycat
For any such project, the best input is luck!

Setting luck aside, the most important step to success is the first one,
project selection.

Currently, broadly the best projects are from (A) information technology or
(B) biotech. Of course, some projects could be some of both. Why? Because (i)
the basic technology has not yet been nearly fully exploited and (ii) earnings
per dollar of opex can be fantastically high.

I prefer (A) information technology because the basic technology has been
improving so much so quickly and because we can exploit applied math, old or
original, heavily neglected by current information technology business. Why
math? Because broadly we take in data, have computers manipulate it, and
report the results. For more powerful manipulations, proceed with applied math
likely with advanced pure/applied math prerequisites. Not many people are
doing this, and this fact is part of the opportunity.

The computers are good at doing what we tell them to do, and the math tells us
what to tell the computers to do.

Here I concentrate on information technology.

(1) Problem. Want to find a problem where the first good or a much better
solution will be a "must have" for enough people and revenue per person to
make a successful business.

(2) Solution. For the first good or much better solution, get some advantages,
e.g., from some math. The advantages can be the key to the "first good" or
"much better", that is, blow the doors off, knock the socks off, present and
likely future competition. And the advantages can be _secret sauce_ ,
proprietary intellectual property, with trade secret protection, and a
technological barrier to entry, i.e., a "Buffett moat."

(3) Use the Internet to deliver the solution. The users can have mobile apps
and/or Web browsers.

Okay, I've done (1)-(3). For the problem, currently there is no good solution,
and the first good solution will be a "must have" for essentially everyone on
the Internet in the world, smartphone to desktop, now and for at least decades
to come.

For a fast, first-cut, round-number, back of the envelope, ballpark estimate,
based on the above and some other solid, public financial data, the company
should grow quickly to be worth $1 T.

Currently the production quality software is in alpha test. To the users, the
solution is just a Web site with just a few, simple Web pages that are easy to
use and load very quickly (400,000 bits per page with only old HTTP, HTML, and
CSS and nearly no JavaScript).

I'm the solo founder, did all the work, and am 100% owner.

I have a long background in computing, especially for science and engineering,
and a long background in business. My Ph.D. is in the applied math of
stochastic optimal control from one of the world's best research universities.

------
OneWordSoln
As a person who has studied geniuses of various sorts (Hokusai, Feynman,
Einstein, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Shannon), I can tell you that genius appears to
be the combination of natural talent, opportune environment and very hard
work. If you find such a person, and that person is hungry and honest, then
you should be able to become their patron and reap the benefits of stimulating
them and reflexively being stimulated by them.

If you and your team are honest and honorable, I would be more than happy to
share my projects with you, at least one of which is most certainly genius.
Without question, I most certainly share the most important factor in geniuses
of all varieties: my simple curiosity and love of knowledge. It is also my
natural naivety and lack of concern for money and my utter lack of the mindset
that most people have in its pursuit that has left me at the mercy of the
greedy and ruthless (but also with a very happy, normal family life and the
ability to sleep soundly). As such, I have very little means to pursue my
ideas, even though I have achieved enough to be able to provide hard proof
that my ideas are still years ahead of their time, and are based upon my
experience in dealing with practical needs of modern software development
projects, which my resume will demonstrate more than adequately.

Like I said, if you are honorable and intellectually honest about what you
don't know (that is a fundamental key to greatness), and you want to work as a
team where each member is respected for the uniqueness that they bring to the
table, then let's figure out how to chat.

I am deadly serious about this. And while I'm not a fan of TDD as a strict
discipline (because I am already a particularly belligerent software tester
myself that feels that TDD is a bit over-the-top in terms of structure), I do
understand the necessity of setting specific, testable goals. As such, I feel
that our world society has failed to create a proper goal for our achievement
as a unified human race. I propose that we declare "done" to be "Lasting peace
and happiness for all human beings."

My goal, therefore, is to somehow utilize my life's work in information
systems to help promote and achieve that definition of "done". I understand
that we could engineer such systems to create that society for all human
beings, irrespective of ethnicity, form of religion (or lack thereof), sexual
orientation or gender identity. While I respect money's ability to measure any
endeavor's value to the society producing it, I do despise the love of money
for its own purpose while so many human beings suffer in poverty and the Earth
is being destroyed due to short-term profit being pursued at the expense of
the long-term health of the Earth and its peoples.

I believe that it is my loving perspective on helping others that has given me
insights into next-gen technology endeavors. I would love to share my
perspective with your team and let you judge me for yourselves. In any event,
I'm not feeling very eloquent tonight, but I can share with you my belief that
if you make a Bodhisattva Vow or somesuch commitment to facilitating the
transformation of this world such that it becomes "On Earth as it is in
Heaven", you will receive all necessary inspiration to achieve your goals and
far, far more. I wish you all success in your endeavors.

I would enjoy speaking with your team and sharing what I have learned and the
kinds of information projects I have already envisioned. My question here is
how do we connect without our doxing ourselves, for I have no website to point
you towards.

------
ChicagoDave
Call me.

David Cornelson

------
andys627
scratch your own itch

------
wtfsrslyomg
world peace solve homelessness, starvation save puerto rico

~~~
wtfsrslyomg
i mean srsly, you know who's REALLY drowning? PUERTO FUCKIN' RICO

------
egypturnash
Make art, not money.

------
bobby_the_whale
Coming up with ideas is easy:

\- make a robot vacuum cleaner that doesn't require maintenance

\- design a system which allows a robot vacuum cleaner to move between floors

\- make a robot vacuum cleaner that doesn't require one to empty the dust bin.

\- make a robot to plaster my walls for a fixed fee with insurance that if you
fail to deliver I can get it done fully paid by my previous guy with escrow
money in the bank if you fail to deliver

\- install solar panels automatically (too challenging? I thought you had a
"great" team)

\- automate kitchen staff in restaurants using smaller or equal space

\- build a machine which can take a message and optimize it for the target
audience; e.g., by making it simpler to understand or more politically
aligned.

\- build a machine that cheaply figures out whether the fish/meat you are
serving up in a restaurant contains toxins

\- revolutionize space travel using far out ideas you probably wouldn't
understand

\- figure out what could potentially be built in space cheaper than on Earth,
patent it, and give Elon a call.

\- build a quantum computer (some startups do this already)

Your problem likely is that you want to get a "great" startup without the
required capital and resources. You literally have _one_ guy according to my
count, because a money guy is worthless (below a billion dollars to burn) and
business development people are a dime a dozen.

If you don't have domain expertise to know how something could be done better,
the probability of failure is going to be enormous.

In principle, I could probably help all of the above happen, but all of them
require a lot of capital, people, and patience.

Take for example MAPPER Lithography. This is an example of an innovative
company, a startup if you wish, but it started 17 years ago. If you really
want to make something of value, that's the kind of commitment you should
have. If not, try to create the next Snapchat (still no idea why it's worth
anything).

Until that time, get a job. Having a job is not the worst thing in the world.

------
xstartup
I was a CEO of 3 successful startups. I am a developer (Python, Go, JavaScript
not a very good one or devs here on HN with ML/AI or other experience). I
don't have any formal education either. I just pursue whatever interests me. I
am more focused on the technical side, sales and marketing, and customer
service. I did all this at my previous startups. I never raised any funds and
the previous companies mostly did 1-5M in yearly revenues and were
bootstrapped with my own savings (which I got through selling apps when it was
relatively quite easy). This time I've found a new 50MM USD annual revenue
opportunity as per my very conservative estimate. The idea is sketchy but all
my previous successful products had some evil bit in them. I can see and feel
it but can't bring it to reality. I'll need a couple of blockchain experts,
lots of salespeople, good copywriters. I write my own marketing angels but
need someone to present my words to the audience as I am not a native speaker.

------
idibidiart
Given you're outsourcing your ideation to the public why not just form a seed
fund and invest in other people's ideas?

------
alexanderstears
IF you guys activate on this idea - let me know. I'll work for no salary (but
equity) and I have an extremely strong vision of how this should be -

build an augmented reality app to help people with basic car repairs - start
out with small jobs like replacing lights and air filters and move into more
complex tasks and gear for technicians. Eventually you can expand out into a
wider variety of machines.

------
ythn
Work for a boring telecomm corporation for a few years and you'll have a
bazillion ideas for services and products to streamline things.

------
Pica_soO
Implement Industry 4.0 for dairy products like cheese or yogurt. People
provide a recipe, you provide the production facility. Allow people to sell
there own "family" recipes via your shop- become the steam of old family
recipes.

------
xstartup
I am in an exact position, I've money, a solid product (paying customers) but
no good technical team. I am having difficulty in scaling up the business all
tech folks told me that my project will require a complete rewrite.

~~~
wolco
To some a rewrite sounds like fun. A way to do things better. What kind of
product is it?

------
kapauldo
This is bizarre.

------
probinso
Come up with ways to allow nude pics on facebook

------
opendomain
I have many good ideas and domains to match.

contact me at HN AT opendomain dot org

------
PatientTrades
What is your goal to get rich or to change the world? If your goal is to get
rich then just start an algo/AI hedge fund. Might have to add a couple quants,
but sounds like you have the perfect initial team for it. However, if you want
to change the world than you should focus on everyday life. Change the way we
humans, sleep, drive, eat, fly, love, workout, etc. Focus on the simple things
in life, and integrate your ideas into it. Simple things are what change lives

------
rwallace
Truth to be told, I think the web is mostly built out at this stage; not that
there aren't any more websites to be built, but I have genuine doubts as to
whether there are more websites to be built that would generate enough profit
to justify venture capital investment. Would you consider ideas that would
entail recruiting hardware engineers?

That that having been said, my best shots at the question as asked:

A local reviews site where you make a long play and your selling point is
being serious about tackling the accuracy of reviews.

A stackoverflow competitor where you don't let the deletionists take control
of the site.

A browser fork where you make a bunch of little quality-of-life improvements
like killing sticky headers, and make those happen automatically by default.

------
Shed
Obsidian! Love your exciting post. I’m known as the ‘Ideas Man’ (name of my
first book too). Ideas and creativity are my areas of expertise. I have two
ideas at the mo that I’m looking for a Team to work with on. Even if you don’t
like either, maybe I can help you find an idea you adore. Please contact me
via my one of my websites www.ShedSimove.com or www.MotivationalSpeaker.biz
xxx

------
heygrady
Write an evolutionary ML bot network that trades stocks in 5 minute intervals.
Don't try to compete on the nanosecond micro trading end, just try to beat the
market by making "good" decisions in a reasonable, human timeframe.

The question your bot is trying to solve is, "should I buy or sell this
stock?" And the criteria is, "will this stock be up or down in the next X
minutes."

Let the bots play in a fake market until they start to make money. It should
be enough to give each bot a pot of money ($10k?) and call it dead when it
goes broke or call it "good" when it makes good bets.

This is a good space for ML because the inputs are fairly well understood
(stock tickers and a small set of common stock metric values). You can add in
some novel inputs, like weather data in all of the trading capitals of the
world (NYC, Toyko, etc).

The two tricks are this:

1) You need a community of bots that are all communicating with each other.
Meaning, each bot knows what the other bots think, and how much money they
have.

2) You need to let each individual bot's neural network evolve. Meaning, let
the "best" performing bots "breed" with each other. Also meaning, let the
values in the neural network set themselves through evolution/random rather
than bothering with backpropagation.

This toy [1], showing an evolutionary neural network "learning" to follow a
maze should be inspiring. Or, imagine a version of Agar.io [2] where you had
to decide if a pellet (a stock) was a good idea to eat/purchase.

[1] [http://ml-games.tomasz-rewak.com/](http://ml-games.tomasz-rewak.com/) [2]
[http://agar.io/](http://agar.io/)

~~~
cellis
Or, first read _A Random Walk Down Wall Street_.

