

Show HN: Idea roulette (brainstorming site) - MaurizioPz

This is a website I've been working on in this holiday season. It tries to help creators in choosing the right idea to implement, and help you get reviews from your peers or from your friends.
To work you need to log in with a google account, describe your idea, and review the ideas of other (chosen randomly). You then will get reviews of your idea from others.
It's very basic as this is just a MVP of what it could be and I would really appreciate any suggestions/criticism you could give.
You can do it here or directly reviewing the idea of "Idea Roulette" I've created on Idea Roulette following this link (I know, really meta!)<p>http://idearoulette.appspot.com/ideas/10001<p>The homepage of the website is http://idearoulette.appspot.com
and it give probably a better description of how it works and why you should use it<p>Thank you for your time
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rsepassi
Have you considered giving a bit more structure to the "Idea" submission?
Maybe just split out basic questions like "What problem is this solving?",
"Who is this for?", etc. into separate fields. Might give it a bit more
organization and would potentially allow users to categorize/search based on
certain criteria.

One assumption that would need to be tested is whether people will take the
time to review ideas. And the other is whether people would be willing to
disclose their ideas so publicly. I think you can find better quotes/articles
to help convince people to disclose their ideas. Here's an excerpt from Paul
Graham's How to Start a Startup essay you may want to use (PG has some more
good quotes on the same topic in some other essays):

"An idea for a startup, however, is only a beginning. A lot of would-be
startup founders think the key to the whole process is the initial idea, and
from that point all you have to do is execute. Venture capitalists know
better. If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you'll tell them
about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you to get lost.
That shows how much a mere idea is worth. The market price is less than the
inconvenience of signing an NDA.

Another sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups
that change their plan en route. Microsoft's original plan was to make money
selling programming languages, of all things. Their current business model
didn't occur to them until IBM dropped it in their lap five years later.

Ideas for startups are worth something, certainly, but the trouble is, they're
not transferrable. They're not something you could hand to someone else to
execute. Their value is mainly as starting points: as questions for the people
who had them to continue thinking about."

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MaurizioPz
I actually choose to give less structure to the idea submission thinking that
there could be many kind of ideas so a less structured submission could be
better. But actually I'm not that sure about it. Maybe there are some
questions that should apply to all kind of ideas, so I could separate those
and let a general field for the ideas that don't apply. When you say that
people may not take the time to review ideas you mean that I made it hard with
all those fields to fill or that in general is a lot of work to read an idea
think about it and suggest improvements. The disclosure problem is probably my
biggest question at the moment. So I need to test what would convince more
people, but at the moment my biggest problem is how to get people to visit the
page since with no user I can't really test my assumptions.

Thank you for your comment, it is really useful.

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rsepassi
My pleasure.

What I meant about people reviewing ideas is this: what incentive do people
have to come to the site to review ideas? I see the incentive for the
entrepreneur: see what others have to say about your idea and figure out what
potential users think. But what reason do random people have to come to a site
to review other people's startup ideas? Are you thinking that the people who
post their ideas will take the time to review other people's ideas? It could
just be that it's an inherently enjoyable activity and people will do it for
the fun of it or the social engagement (sort of like Hacker News), but that's
something that would just have to be tested.

Good luck!

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Andrenid
Typo on front page... "Were ideas come to get reviewed" (should be "Where").

Also "You then review someone else idea" should be "elses".

"themselft" should be "themself".

Not being nit-picky just helping out :)

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DarrenLehane
It should be "else's".

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maze
<http://idearoulette.appspot.com>

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HowardRoark
Just curious, did you develop it using the playframework?

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MaurizioPz
yes, I find it really useful

