
Ask HN: What kind of ideas are not VC-backable but should exist in the future? - allenleein
I have been thinking about what the current VC fund structure limits the founder&#x27;s imagination about the future for a long time.<p>Please share your wildest ideas.
======
colordrops
A new container system that gets rid of all waste - Design and manufacture a
set of a few dozen or hundred re-usable containers of different shapes and
sizes, and a system for printing environmentally friendly ink on them that can
be easily removed. Start a department/grocery store that does not use _any_
disposable packaging. Give tax incentives to companies that use this
packaging. The printable labels would allow for market differentiation since
package types are now standard. Trucks come around and pick up the empty
containers from customers, or they can bring them back to the store.

~~~
cbzehner
You've just invented shipping containers.

~~~
wyattpeak
I think GP has probably consciously drawn inspiration from shipping containers
to solve a smaller-scale problem.

------
egypturnash
A free program for doing US taxes that has the polish and SEO of TurboTax.

The ultimate successful exit sees the entire sector of “tax service middleman”
drying up once you have cut off the revenue of TurboTax and the rest of the
tax preparation lobby, so they can no longer keep lobbying the government to
have this complicated process instead of just automatically doing your taxes
and sending you a bill like every other civilized country. Your company
vanishes along with the rest of this sector.

~~~
avemuri
Think it's only a matter of time before one of the new age banks or investment
management startups do this as a customer acquisition hook.

~~~
rojeee
Nice intuition because it already exists in the UK for freelancers. Combined
banking, accounting, auto tax return:
[https://getcoconut.com](https://getcoconut.com)

------
williamsmj
How about a product that doesn't grow by accretion with the goal of acquiring
new users or upselling existing users, but rather changes rarely and only in
ways that benefit users?

The growth imperative required by VC funding is directly or indirectly to
blame for all the awful things about Dropbox mentioned in
[https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/](https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/). It's
difficult to see how a product like Syncthing would be of interest to VCs.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
That linked article is actually kind of crap. Contrasting the workflow of
downloading Syncthing binary and just executing it vs Dropbox sign up, install
& download is a false dichotomy.

Nobody who wants to deal with shell level management of a running program that
also needs to communicate with other nodes is part of the target user market
for Dropbox, totally different worlds, different feature sets, everything.

~~~
ponker
Yeah it’s like Picasso saying “You bought that Thomas Kinkade piece of crap? I
could have a bought a brush for $3 and painted something better in just a few
weeks!”

------
muzani
There's plenty of smaller problems that are not VC backable. VCs need you to
be a billion dollar company.

A lot of smaller markets exist. For example, I did a keto recipe app for Malay
food. Malay food is different to the usual keto recipes; with rice based food,
you can't simply replace everything with cauliflower. The market was about
200k people, too small for VCs but it was in high demand for the target
market. People just kept asking to buy more. We only pulled out of the market
because it was (literally) toxic and cultlike.

But similar problems exist. Primal diet for Japanese food maybe. Job boards
for part timers and teenagers. A better language learning app, maybe for
something very specific like Latin.

Take an existing market and hyperfocus it.

~~~
neilk
... _literally_ toxic? Like people ingesting poisonous substances because
someone told them it's keto?

~~~
muzani
Atkins diet: "Start at 25g of carb, and increase it slightly over a period of
time"

Local variation: "Never eat more than 25g carb"

"Drink lots of water. Eat a tablespoon of butter with every meal."

"Passing out is normal. Your body is detoxing itself."

"Soy sauce contains sugar. Substitute all your sugar with these substances."

"Yes, keto is expensive, but you can save costs by eating eggs and drinking
lots of water. I eat 10 eggs a day and I'm just fine."

"If you want to further accelerate fat loss, here are some pills you can get.
They're not approved by the health ministry, but the health ministry is bought
out by Nestle and trying to get you to eat sugar and carbs."

Anyone who goes outside this norm gets bullied and banned from the community.
It's really tempting to just blindly agree and let people kill themselves if
your salary is coming from such a community.

There's a saying that users don't buy drills, they buy holes. The 'hole' here
is that a keto dieter wants to lose 20kg in 2 weeks. Many are willing to die
to achieve it; there's lots of stories of people who are crash dieting for a
wedding or whose husbands have left them.

Keto diets are misleading too. A lot of the weight loss comes from water, not
fat. The rapid fat loss gives the diet credibility, especially when someone
has tried other things and only lost about 2kg with exercise and reduced
calories. Once you've established that credibility, you can tell them
anything. It's nice to have a business where people will blindly agree to buy
whatever you sell them, but I don't want to deal with that kind of
responsibility.

~~~
imtringued
I'm very confused. Shouldn't it be obvious that the only sustainable way to
reduce weight is slowly over long periods of time? I have no idea how the
human body works but surely starving yourself for 2 weeks and then going back
to your previous diet will not be very effective.

~~~
muzani
I'm not a doctor, but losing weight is not as simple as cutting calories. Keto
diets get the body to store less fat and focus on burning fat rather than
glucose as its primary fuel supply. I'll link WebMD if that clears things:
[https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/type-1-diabetes-guide/what-
is...](https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/type-1-diabetes-guide/what-is-ketosis)

If you eat nothing but butter and eggs for a week straight you'll get drastic
weight loss. It _is_ common sense that cutting calories and exercise is
effective. So if you do follow a a strict no carb diet, you'll be surprised at
how much more effective it is, without going hungry. You get a lot of
delicious things on the menu - meat, butter, eggs, oil, milk, cheese, meat,
butter. And my role as a developer is to show how you can combine those things
into something edible, like flaxseed pizza, konjac stew, and bringing sugar
free sweeteners back into their life.

After a week on this diet, bread will suddenly seem like the best thing in the
world, and you'll find yourself happy to throw money at the app that sells you
flaxseed bread.

------
Balgair
Be nice to upgrade democracy to git. Not, like in theory, but for real.

New law? Push the update.

Pull old law easy peasy. diff/grep on newer versions or the county's over.

Vote on what makes it to prod, sub-teams for smaller areas like parking
tickets, etc.

Yeah, it's simple at the end, but digitizing it all, linking it to the
underlying databases, root privileges, etc. would make it all run _much_
smoother. Be nice to see people get involved more too.

~~~
allenleein
Very interesting. How about upgrade knowledge to git?

People iterate knowledge together in a git-based knowledge base network.

Upload your own knowledge base, wiki to the network.

Push/pull -> new thoughts, breakthroughs...

Merge -> different knowledge branch

Then build a search engine on top of it.

~~~
Balgair
Jesus, that would make research papers easier. Historiography via pull
requests and push comments? Yes!

------
blamestross
Heirloom consumer electronics and computers. Moore's law is failing, and the
only reason we keep having to replace electronics is planned obsolescence and
the fact electronics are still just designed with replacement expected by
momentum.

Design laptops and cellphones to last 50 or 100 years plus. Start designing
for a long term and mature computer industry.

~~~
lachlan-sneff
Moore's law isn't dead yet, we've got quite a ways to go. There are feasible
paths to 1cm³ processors with billions of cores and enough processing power to
host thousands of humans minds.

~~~
blamestross
It's not that we can't get faster processors. Moore's law is about the RATE of
getting faster processors.

------
edanm
VCs are not the only game in town, so don't let their needs limit your
imagination!

It's important to understand that while tech-obsessed founders, like most of
the people found in Hacker News, usually think of tech-startups and VC being
almost synonymous with entrepreneurship, that's not at all true.

Lots of people all around the world consider themselves (and are!)
entrepreneurs, without necessarily building innovative tech or seeking VC-like
growth prospects.

E.g. the corner restaurant you ate at last week? Opened by an entrepreneur.
That barbershop that cut your hair? Same. Even much bigger ideas fit in this
category - the software that runs the local gym? Possibly a VC-backed startup,
but also possibly just a relatively small company focused on a small market,
not aiming for sky-high valuations but quietly churning out millions in
income.

These kinds of businesses have existed for long before VCs, and it's entirely
possible to get funding for them the "traditional" way, e.g. raising a
friends-and-family round, getting money from a bank, self-financing, charging
customers from day one, etc.

------
uncheckederror
Open source property tax assessment, admin, and collection software. This
space is foundational to the function of local government, but the existing
closed-source offerings in this space are expensive, dated, and opaque to the
public.

This will never be VC backable because the market is small and each local
government has special needs and unique requirements. The cost per customer is
high and there's a hard cap on the TAM.

~~~
ciarannolan
Do you mind if I ask how you know about this? Is it an industry you work
in/around?

I'm always curious how people discover these kinds of business ideas.

~~~
uncheckederror
In a prior job I was tasked with building a REST API client for a closed
source vendor product in this space as part of project to replace an existing
system. Data need to be captured from a dozen on-prem databases that supported
other vendor applications and then pushed into this new system using the
client I built.

Sadly, the vendor provided scanned copies of JIRA user-stories as
documentation of their app's API. Despite much struggling, the vendor wouldn't
implement even the most basic auto-generated documentation for their API
(Swagger). Bugs filed against their product regularly had a 3 month turn
around time.

If there were an open source product in this space I could have forked it,
made the changes I needed, submitted a pull request and then escalated it with
management to get it mainlined by the vendor.

We were their only client for this product and they needed us to implement
their system as an example of success so they could make further sales. But
their secrecy made good-faith efforts at building integrations with their
product extremely difficult. This might have been survivable if the vendor was
good at communicating.

Alas this project just got delayed for another year after it was discovered by
one of my old coworkers that the new system wasn't calculating property taxes
correctly. If we had taken the vendor at their word this would have not been
discovered and incorrect taxes may have gone out. Nobody loves taxes, but
people rightfully hate it when their local government makes preventable
mistakes.

Open source software in this space would reduce the rate of errors made in
these scenarios and allow the public to verify the correctness of the system
that taxes their property. As a bonus the cost of developing these systems
could be spread across multiple local governments who each employ their own
developers, rather than each group struggling through this process on their
own once a decade.

~~~
blueblisters
I wonder how open source software would be received by local governments. The
conditions of government contracts often provide for guarantees/penalties for
the delivered software. Moreover, the barriers of entry are typically high,
the bidder needs to have x years of "prior experience" with crazy compliance
and insurance requirements.

------
shoo
how's this for a wild idea: humanity changes the objectives it prioritises to
value long term environmental sustainability & to focus on benefits to society
-- instead of prioritising things than benefit individuals & making decisions
based primarily on economic growth or individual profit motive.

(not only is that incompatible with VC funding, it's incompatible with
capitalism & western style individualism, so arguably operating in such a
fashion is unreachable from our current society, even if being able to operate
in such a fashion would be superior from the perspective of the whole species)

~~~
easytiger
Those things are also entirely subjective,as much as people like to claim
scientific imperatives for socialist constructs the best tool towards those
goals generally is regulated markets. Like we have now

~~~
adamc
There is a subjective element, but they are not ENTIRELY subjective. It's
pretty clear that less pollution would make for a more sustainable
environment... it's just more expensive. It's pretty clear that it would be
safer (prudent) to cut back on carbon emissions... it just has negative
economic effects.

~~~
blamestross
It's all about desired rate of return. Demanding short forces companies to
leverage externalities like causing pollution to make money.

Long term returns motivates you not to destroy the planet to achieve the goal.

Really Long term returns hinge on the fact that converting the asteroid belt
O'Neill cylinders is the future of mankind and destroying the planet to get
there is fine as long as you get enough people off this rock first.

------
jtfairbank
I'm building supply chain & logistics tech at Distribute Aid. We help
grassroots aid groups meet more needs, more consistently, and work together to
gain efficiency at scale.

We deliver $100 worth of aid for every $1 we spend on operations. Literally a
100x return for humanity.

The need is there. The scale is there. But it'll never get VC funding for
obvious reasons.

~~~
cambalache
> We deliver $100 worth of aid for every $1 we spend on operations. Literally
> a 100x return for humanity.

This seems awfully high, what does it include?

~~~
jtfairbank
We leverage partnerships with in-kind donors and shipping companies to get a
lot of stuff for free. And of course there are tons of community groups
gathering second-hand donations which we can send for free as well.

For example, there's a charitable factory making soap in Scotland. They give
us a few hundred thousand bars of soap every 6 months or so, and we ship em
out to 15+ refugee camps in Greece to ensure the hygiene of 100,000 people are
met.

Our 2019 budget was $10,000...

------
Jemaclus
Alternative battery systems for hearing aids. Most of the size of the more
powerful hearing aids are due to battery size. If the hearing aid battery
could be miniaturized further or even completely eliminated (by, say, running
off body heat or something), then hearing aids would shrink to be invisible.

The advent of Bluetooth has made it normal to have things hanging out of your
ears, but a lot of hearing-impaired people would feel less self-conscious if
their hearing aids were invisible, yet still functional.

Pipe dream, I know... but one can dream.

~~~
stmw
Have you looked at
[https://www.listenlively.com](https://www.listenlively.com) or are you
talking about something different? (It's VC-backed BTW).

~~~
Jemaclus
I haven't heard of that, but those hearing aids aren't anything special w/r/t
shape or size. They're using the same batteries as other hearing aids. I'm
sure they're getting their cost savings somewhere else.

See this photo:
[https://www.listenlively.com/_next/static/images/rechargeabl...](https://www.listenlively.com/_next/static/images/rechargeable-
model-f3a18946e7faf09551b34c1c40c508f8.png.webp)

They claim to be "invisible", but what they really mean is that the tube from
the aid to the ear is really thin and transparent, and the aid itself is skin-
toned. But it's not invisible, anyone can see it, and it's still big! (though
light-years smaller than they were in the 90s...)

First, a clarification. There are in-the-ear hearing aids and over-the-ear
hearing aids. The difference is usually one of power. An in-the-ear hearing
aid is usually for older people with minor hearing loss. Someone like me that
is profoundly deaf or with a severe hearing loss needs more powerful
amplification. More power == more energy, and more energy == bigger batteries.
That means that we need an over-the-ear hearing aid, like the one in the image
above.

The size factor for over-the-ear aids isn't due to design, but rather to the
battery. The battery is the biggest part! They're this big:
[https://helpingmehear.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/11/hearing...](https://helpingmehear.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/11/hearing-aid-batteries-2.jpg)

This means the aid cannot be ANY SMALLER than the battery.

If we could _eliminate_ the battery entirely and rely on some other energy
store, then the size of the aid could be slimmed down to almost flat.

The other problem with batteries is that batteries need to be changed when
they die. My battery lasts somewhere between 7-9 days before it dies. If we
were to use a smaller battery than the image above, it would die even more
often. And trust me, it SUCKS to be mid-conversation when a battery dies...
and it sucks even more if you didn't have any batteries with you and now you
have to run to a local pharmacy to buy some, and you're trying to communicate
with a cashier or whatever while completely deaf... Oof... But I digress... :)

Anyway! So the dream, as it were, is to create a battery-less aid that can run
off body heat or something magical like that.

------
satvikpendem
Just a note that "bootstrapper VCs" are coming up that fund ideas whose
revenue will eventually be in the <100 million dollar range, usually 10 or 20
million. Such examples include TinySeed, Earnest Capital, Indie.vc, Lighter
Capital, and others.

So this question might have some interesting answers if we take this knowledge
into consideration as well, as some of the ideas here could potentially be
funded by these VCs even if not by traditional ones.

------
andrewnc
Some sort of meme engine for scientific content.

We're fighting a huge war of misinformation and the current method of nice
graphs and we'll constructed prose is failing[0].

So we need to use much of the same tactics used by misinformation groups to
spread facts.

[0]
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6498/1405](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6498/1405)

------
benjohnson
Microsoft Access for the web.

Plot twist: The underlying framework, database connection system, and model is
sane - so that when you get to the point where the walled garden doesn't let
you change what you want you can dive into the underlying system to do
significant changes.

~~~
Smoosh
I've always thought that Excel redesigned as a database could be a viable
product.

~~~
EKLM-ZK88
Isn't that what access is?

~~~
Smoosh
Are you trying to get on my enemies list? ;-)

Actually, I wondered if someone would bring up Access. The problem with it is
that it is trying to be a "real" database with an accessible interface. I feel
it doesn't do either well. It can be very useful, but never simple and easy
enough for the target users I'm thinking about.

------
allenleein
A Git-powered Knowledge Network.

Goal: Empowers humans to explore and iterate knowledge faster

Features:

\- Upload your own knowledge base, wiki to join the network

\- Search network-based knowledge

\- 'Clone' a knowledge branch

\- Edit on it then 'Push' it back to the network

\- The branch owner / other users can choose to 'Pull' the update to their
branch

\- 'Merge' different knowledge branch

Steps:

1\. Build a search engine for network-driven knowledge

2\. The users iterate knowledge with other knowledge branch owners in the
network

3\. Build an efficient machine learning data pipeline on top of the structured
knowledge input & output system

4\. Use the unique data to train the customizable personal knowledge AI

~~~
anilgulecha
I'm working on a branching/merging authoring framework and application.

Git, specifically, is bad as a backing store - as merge conflict resolution is
not something you want end users to do - it's not friendly. p2p sync (OT/CRDT)
is what I'm betting and building on.

If anyone is interested in this space, I'd like to discuss/geek-out on this
with you. Please reach out.

~~~
billconan
any good tutorial on implementing crdt? Most of them are for plain text. How
to implement crdt for structured data?

~~~
anilgulecha
Looks at yjs - it's probably the project that's furthest along here.

------
mchusma
Open source operating system for healthcare (for people to store medical
records and diagnosis tools).

Medical diagnosis is fundamentally an information problem, which should be
both free and open source. But there may be little to no business model here.

~~~
YokoZar
You may be interested in the Direct project, a set of open standards for
secure communication between different healthcare systems:
[http://wiki.directproject.org/Main_Page](http://wiki.directproject.org/Main_Page)

------
jedberg
This is basically what government is for. For funding things that are good
ideas but not profitable.

~~~
maxharris
The government's actual purpose is the _one_ thing no business can do, which
is to use physical force against people that murder, rape, steal, defraud,
etc. Businesses can't serve that role because armed businesses fighting with
each other would quickly devolve into violent anarchy (and not the stable
utopia anarchists claim).

Incidentally, 19th-century America had a lot of faults and flaws (it was
incredibly racist), but an absolutely unprecedented amount of scientific and
industrial progress was made without much public spending at all.

~~~
sushshshsh
If armed groups are supposed to suddenly wake up and decide to start killing
each other to ensure their own survival, why haven't Russia and the USA nuked
each other off the face of the earth yet?

~~~
mongojunction
good question. but I think the answer is obvious when you consider the
different risks enormous groups and small groups face from disputes.

for small groups nearly every dispute could pose existential risk, but for
enormous groups very few disputes pose existential risk. then in the conflict
side, enormous groups have MAD, where conflict itself carries existential
risk. small groups of course can also be wiped out by conflict (even if they
don't possess a bureaucratic mechanism to ensure that,) but the risk side of
the calculation is heavier for them I think.

and enormous groups still engage in conflict with each other although it
happens indirectly via proxy wars.

also paradoxically the larger the group becomes the more its interests, or
"meta interests" (such as favoring stability and security), tend to align with
its competitors but for small groups it's almost like every group for itself.
but I believe that the calculation can tend towards cooperation being more
beneficial the larger group gets. but I think this factor only applies when
groups become very very large.

also there's some sort of entropy argument as in large groups cultivate more
structure, organization and order and therefore it would take more energy to
dismantle them so they're more stable. which not only makes them harder to
dismantle but also gives them more to lose if they were to decide to tear
everything down and build it up again.

that's how I think about it. what do you think?

~~~
sushshshsh
I think you have posited interesting ideas about the decisions that small and
large groups make about when to engage in conflicts and how to ensure long
term survival. I am not sure how true they are in reality, but I can certainly
see where you are coming from.

If I put myself into that situation for a moment, as the leader of a small
armed group, I can see two options at first. The first option is to go into
hiding and potentially die of resource starvation if I am unable to cultivate
the things needed to survive on my own (or be killed by outside attackers).
The second is to grow bigger and bigger by forcibly and preemptively taking
over the other small groups so I can secure my borders so to speak, but going
on the offensive can also lead to premature death as well.

As a result I think some hybrid approach is needed, where one goes into hiding
in a land so far away and inhospitable that nobody wants to attack, thus
there's nobody to fight.

------
idrios
Custom solutions for disabled adults and children. Conditions like cerebral
palsy, ALS, quadriplegia, etc force otherwise healthy people into isolation.
Steven Hawking famously had a custom program that gave him his voice back when
he lost it, but how many other people with similar conditions don't have
access to that kind of technology. Every person's condition and relevant
challenges is different so most solutions probably wouldn't scale.

~~~
sterlind
When I had bad mobility problems, I wanted to create a rollator that converted
into a lightweight power chair for when I was done walking. There are
rollator/transport chair hybrids, but those still require a caregiver to push
you.

In an age of hoverboards and cheap electric scooters, something like this
should be doable.

------
peterburkimsher
BeWelcome.org - like CouchSurfing, but without membership fees. Stay in
people's houses for free. There's no obligation to be a host (I wasn't for
years).

The site is made by volunteers, server costs are paid by donation, and there's
full financial transparency. Legally the structure is comparable to
Wikipedia/Wikimedia, and is a non-profit "association" in France.

Why volunteer? I build things because I want to. Sometimes they make it to
Show HN. But nobody uses them. I lose motivation when there isn't a colleague
asking me to fix things twice a day. Hospitality exchange has the network
effect needed to bring in newcomers and get people involved.

My dream is that it could be much bigger. Passionate people could start other
social networks within the same community: BeBook, BeChat, BeMail. I'd like to
build BeTranslate, starting with Chinese/English. At first it would just be
partnering with existing open-source projects (like all the CS meetups that
are choosing to rename). But it would also be a commitment of these developers
to never close their source, never charge fees, and always involve the
community.

------
minerjoe
How about systems that don't involve stat backed currency OR cryptocurrency?
Like using these amazing communication devices to connect needs with resources
without involving the middle-man god $.

~~~
rojeee
I think this is a great idea and economists have been looking at this for
nearly a century now, for example, there is Knut Wicksell's "Pure Credit
Economy" from 1919 but not much progress has been made.

There's a nice paper you can read called "money is memory" which argues that
keeping track of past transactions is actually a more effective way of
allocating resources than using money/tokens. I've been figuring out how such
a system would work in practice.

I believe that when we can more effectively and fairly manage reputation in
the context of transactions (I'm not advocating some horrid "social credit"
system that the Chinese government foisted on the country), then we won't need
money anymore. That means no central banks as monopoly issuer of currency and
I think the World will be a better place because of it.

------
kickout
Paying farmers to sequester carbon and rebuild soil health in 5 year
intervals. $100/acre.

~~~
giffarage
this is real. check out Indigo Ag

~~~
kickout
Late reply, but yes I am aware of Indigo Ag. Will see if they can deliver on
their goals. I am dubious

------
yummypaint
This is only a partially formed idea: Some kind of derivatives market that
allows investors to make money speculating on fossil fuel reserves while
simultaneously discouraging extraction. The core idea is that fossil fuels are
a finite resource nearly irreplaceable at scale whose value will increase with
time, but the specifics of what lies where is poorly known, which creates an
opportunity for a market to exist. Participating in the market would have to
be more profitable than extraction, however. Maybe if the price of securing
mineral rights could be guaranteed to be greater than the market value of the
resource? It isn't clear how this incentive structure would work. I welcome
ideas.

~~~
eunoia
I like this.

It seems like this could also be within the scope of a single fund? The fund
would own mineral rights, investors could buy in expecting those rights to
appreciate in value over a very long term.

I suppose you’d want a few funds with different speculation strategies and
then basically end up back at a market though.

Also I don’t see how anyone invests without the end goal _eventually_ being
extraction.

------
threeseed
VC are middlemen. Their job is to funnel money from their upstream investors
e.g. hedge funds, superannuation etc into startups that they believe will make
money. The timeframe for this process is basically a decade. So a startup has
a decade to take money, do something and then return the money. It's why
startups are being held to the T2D3 growth benchmark. They need things wrapped
up pretty quick.

So if you are a startup wanting to build a long term business then the VC
track probably isn't for you unless you are willing to either (a) get acquired
or (b) IPO.

There really does need to be more revenue sharing VC options as this is the
only way to support the type of long term, sustainable businesses we really
need.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Not necessarily (although you are kind of right to a good extent).

There are other types of investors that will happily take the 10-year old
investment and ride with it for another number of years. Usually they do it by
discounting the value, and thus making money that way. (not good for founders,
employees, or early investors other than VCs with good clauses in their
investment contracts).

------
j45
Instead of trying to understand the VC lens, consider the customer lens and
solve a problem they have for $.

Any great solution that can be successful under 100M/y probably wouldn't be of
interest to VCs, so there's a lot of opportunity out there.

~~~
quickthrower2
Drive thru McDonald’s franchise?

------
jppope
Venture Capital has a sweet spot where they focus on Capital-intense (obvious)
products, preferably software. (Check out this video:
[https://youtu.be/vErPgQF3N38](https://youtu.be/vErPgQF3N38))

Many National Defense projects won't work for VC for a variety of reasons.
Some can, but security clearance and regulations usually scare VCs away.

Many service based companies... not because they can't (strictly speaking) but
VC has a system in place that doesn't gel well with service based approaches.

Anything that would take a long time to grow won't attract VC funds either.

------
fractallyte
OK, here's something big and _way out_ there:

A global power station that taps 'natural' electricity in the ionosphere.
Unlimited free power, already in the form we need. No emissions, no need for
mining or damming or drilling.

And the term 'aurora power' has a _really nice_ ring to it.

In more detail: a few days ago on HN there was an article
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580362))
about the risks of solar storms and EMPs on America's power infrastructure.
Solar storms induce potentially huge electrical currents in the power grid.
Rather than regarding it as a danger, why not find a way to harness it?

The Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American had a lovely article about
electrostatic motors, powered by the Earth's electric field:
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-amateur-
scien...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-amateur-
scientist-1974-10/) (Search for the article title, there's a PDF available
elsewhere on internet)

The SF writer Murray Leinster made extensive use of ionospheric electricity in
many of his novellas...

This is a civilization-changer. Like I said, _big_.

------
henning
Most businesses don't make sense for VC because they can't grow at the rate VC
needs in order to work or reach the size.

Pick any large industry and look at the software used. It is probably not
great (there is a difference between old software that works or works well
enough and badly designed software that does not do its job well). Within that
lies what is actually interesting, which is customer pain, and potential
customers who will pay to have that solved.

------
scythe
Seashell-mimetic ceramic-polymer composites:

[https://escholarship.org/content/qt81h4g1f5/qt81h4g1f5.pdf](https://escholarship.org/content/qt81h4g1f5/qt81h4g1f5.pdf)

On a less quixotic note, electric buses, particularly dual-mode trolleybuses
that never stop to refuel. They're slowly appearing but less exciting than
electric cars apparently.

------
simonebrunozzi
Cities of the future. Here's my 1-minute pitch [0]:

Cities are inefficient, expensive and unsustainable.

We could build cities in a better way. Ten times better. But why it’s not
happening?

$COMPANY will allow millions of people to pool money, resources and great
design to build better cities.

Our first milestone, or Tesla Roadster, will be to collect 100 million dollars
in pre-orders for the first $COMPANY village.

Builders, home buyers, and a 10x great design, as if you were building a city
on Mars. And maybe Elon Musk will like to help us too!

Eventually we will build entire cities from scratch, to make housing
affordable and clean for everyone.

I tried to build something like this already once, and failed, but I really
want to make this happen, and I want you to believe in me. So, let' talk!

[0]: [https://youtu.be/GtMybYBGCwc](https://youtu.be/GtMybYBGCwc)

(please don't share this video elsewhere for now, if you can be so kind)

Edit: I will soon apply to Apollo [1] with this. Suggestions are welcome :)

[1]: [https://apolloprojects.com/](https://apolloprojects.com/)

~~~
danielheath
How do you avoid the sorts of issues that plagued Milton Keynes?

Social infrastructure is inordinately complex; I am not aware of a planned
city that is pleasant to live in.

~~~
ajuc
Planned cities were a thing since renaissance and some of them worked quite
well.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_city](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_city)

I've only been to Zamość out of these and it's grown out of the starting plan
in last few centuries, but it was operating as designed for a while.

> Jan Zamoyski commissioned the Venetian (from Padua) architect Bernardo
> Morando to design the city, based upon the anthropomorphic concept. Its
> "head" was to be the Zamoyski Palace, "backbone" Grodzka Street, crossing
> the Great Market Square from east to west, in the direction of the palace,
> and with the "arms" embodied by 10 streets intersecting the main streets:
> Solna Street (north of the Great Market Square) and Bernardo Morando Street
> (south of the Great Market Square). In these streets, the other squares were
> placed: Salt Square (Rynek Solny) and Water Square (Rynek Wodny),
> functioning as the "internal organs" of the city whereas the bastions are
> the "hands and legs" for self-defence.[13]

------
betocmn
I already purchase several personal care products from Thankyou [1]. I would
love to see their model expanded to many other categories, perhaps an entire
supermarket with only such brands.

Edit: Fixed link

[1] [https://thankyou.co/about](https://thankyou.co/about)

------
captn3m0
SaaS businesses that are priced by usage. Pricing by subscription ($x/month)
or by users ($x/user/month) is much more easier, more predictable, but makes
these unattainable for a large chunk of the global market.

VC funding means revenue optimization, which leads to either of the above 2
revenue models (or some variation thereof).

Charging your customers like how tarsnap charges its users means you won't
ever make a lot of money, but it can be a sustainable business.

------
bravura
Most open-source, as well as most scientific work that gets published.

[edit: But these aren't sustainable businesses, necessarily, if that's what
you're asking.]

------
auslegung
For a loose definition of “idea”, find the minimal viable dose of fasting.
We’re sure fasting is good for humans but we’re not sure what the sweet spot
is. 16 hours every day? 3 days every month? 1 week every year?

It’s difficult to convince someone to fund something that can’t be sold. How
do you profit by seeking fasting?

~~~
ambicapter
Sell it as an ebook :D

------
ww520
Second Life with VR, with AI-driven NPC, plus deep-faked faces and bodies of
real people (e.g. celebrity). Bonus would be a cybernetics jack-in to have a
fully immersed experience.

With all the push to remote work, it's not farfetched to do your daily Scrum
on a Hawaii beach inside the Second Life VR.

~~~
ciarannolan
When you launch this, I would recommend not including the phrase "cybernetics
jack-in" in your marketing materials.

~~~
ww520
Isn't jacking-in the term for interfacing the brain to cyberspace via a
cybernetic interface jack? Probably it's too obscure a term.

~~~
ciarannolan
Eh, sorry, I was making a lame joke.

------
nthacker
Your site is rad.

Here's my idea:

P2P grid compute + storage that is actually cheap and can drive down the cost
of computation significantly.

Can be achieved with unikernels, homomorphic encryption, ipfs. There's a lot
of compute and storage available all over the world, idle, waiting to be used.
A system like this can utilize it

~~~
isaacimagine
I've worked on similar things in the past; I think this idea (A distributed
compute + storage network) in general, is great. However, although Homomorphic
encryption is pretty cool, it's not that fast. AFAIK, current state-of-the art
is essentially simulating Boolean gate arrays.

If anyone has any insight on the technicanal foundational feasibility of this,
please share :)

------
tartoran
Anti police brutality but also anticrime body cam always on recording in
overwrite daily loop mode. Live streaming, a plus

------
aresant
A company that picks up, breaks down, and recycles Amazon boxes once a week
for $49.95 a month.

~~~
conductr
I doubt that price point would work. But I do miss daily door side trash pick
up from when I was an apartment dweller. I’d pay $50 for that.

------
kickout
Paying farmers to sequester carbon

------
Jemaclus
Here's my brilliant/crazy idea: drive-thru mass. Wait, wait, don't leave yet.
Hear me out.

Let's face it. Church is boring. Most of that time on Sunday is consumed with
the same old filler material. The choir sings. You stand up, you sit down, you
stand up, you raise your hands, you sit down, you kneel, you stand up, you sit
down. You sprinkle in hymns in between prayers. There's always The Lord's
Prayer, which everyone recites by rote like zombies. The pastor/priest gets up
and delivers a sermon/homily that may or may not be interesting. You stand up,
sit down, a basket lands in front of you and you drop a few bucks into the
donation basket, stand up again, sing another hymn, then sit down.

Finally, mercifully, it's time for communion. You wait until the row in front
of you has gone, then you stand up and, like a parade of penguins, waddle down
the pews until you get to the aisle where line up like lemmings and shuffle
forward until you reach your destination. There's a little "this is the body
of Christ, this is the blood of Christ", yadda yadda, then you sit down, stand
up, sing a hymn, sit down, close your eyes for the final prayer, shake
everyone's hands and leave.

For Catholics, at least, the important bit is communion, that little 5 minute
sliver in the middle of an hour is the most important bit.

But hey, I mean, you're a busy person. You want to beat the crowd to the post-
church Olive Garden all-you-can-eat buffet or you want to watch the football
game that starts at 11:30am on the west coast, and all of that sitting and
standing and murmuring along with prayers is cutting into your valuable time!

So,... drive-thru mass.

You pull up in line. There's a sign at the beginning that says, "Turn your
radio to 1530 AM". You turn to the channel -- or maybe you download this
week's podcast episode?! -- and it's the priest with today's sermon. He's
talking about how the world is a scary place, and the only way to survive is
through the grace of God. Yadda yadda. It's a 5-10 minute affair, but that's
okay because you're in line for communion!

You pull up to the window, and a deacon leans out and says, "The body of
Christ", then hands you a cracker. You eat it as you pull forward to the next
window. The deacon leans out with a thimble-cup of wine (or grape juice, it's
so small, who cares) and says, "The blood of Christ." You knock it back, do
the sign of the cross at the Jesus-on-a-cross hanging just past the window,
pull forward, drop a few bucks in the donation chute, and then head out on
your merry way.

Time elapsed: 5-10 minutes.

You saved your knees and back, and you got the sermon, the body/bread, the
blood/wine, and if you're really feeling it, you listen past the sermon and
catch a hymn or two, and beat the crowd for those unlimited breadsticks.

Seems like a win/win to me.

~~~
solresol
I think that has been the most interesting part of the pandemic for me -- how
church has changed and adapted. I sometimes find myself in the bay area to
meet clients, and if I'm there on a weekend there's a church I tend to go to
(NBCC).

One day on a whim I said to my family, why don't we "attend" last week's NBCC?
So we did.

Apparently the Mandarin-speaking congregation (in my home church in Sydney) is
getting a lot of attendees from Beijing.

When the restrictions were somewhat lifted (so that you could have more than
immediate family in your house), we started a system where we rotate around to
different people's houses in groups to join the videoconference.

There's no reason we couldn't have done these things before, but we just
didn't do it until now.

~~~
Jemaclus
My mother-in-law is a die-hard Catholic and has been raging for the past three
months because she can't go to church, and I just don't understand why she
can't just watch the live-stream that the priest is doing. But for her,
there's _something_ about physically accepting communion. (I'm not Catholic,
so I don't really get it, but I've been sternly informed that I should just
not talk about that with them lol).

I've often thought of churches as a poor man's country club more than as a
house of God, and so yeah, I'm with you! I don't see why this can't just go
remote like most everything else.

I do wonder how the long-term landscape will change due to COVID...

------
reilly3000
Tell me which laws apply to me, here and now, by which regulators.

------
so33
cities built around transit and biking.

~~~
kspacewalk2
I think the entire country of the Netherlands is a startup in that market.

------
badrabbit
Commercialized consumer ready redux-os

------
forgotmypw17
Protected wild areas where no synthetic chemicals, lasers, nanoware, etc. are
allowed.

~~~
mandelbrotwurst
Like this?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Wilderness_Preservati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Wilderness_Preservation_System)

~~~
forgotmypw17
Yes, but for human habitation

------
mongojunction
a distributed way to map and collect the data structure on the web
crowdsourced from a community of people not only passionate about mapping out
the structure of app HTML and how it corresponds to data types, but also
people who want to collect and use that data.

the data can be used for anything from competition and pricing analysis, to
dashboards, to creating automatic RSS feeds of anything.

it just seems that being able to unlock the late and value of all of the
information the structured information on the web which is presented only in a
semi-structured form but with the addition of human labor could be so it's
machine usable could unlock so much value.

but I've been pitching VCS and y combinator on this idea for the last six or
seven years and not so much as a peep of interest so it seems that this idea
doesn't possess a way to create a lot of money but I do believe it's very
valuable.

------
formercoder
The vast, vast majority of businesses are not suitable for VC funding but have
the potential to be great.

