
Question for PG/HN:  Where do you think we stand on your list of "ideas"? - jmspring
About three years ago, Paul penned his essay "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund".  Three years along, how do you think this list stands up today?  Are any solved (in part or in whole)?  Anything new you would add to the list?<p>I ask, because I remember reading this years ago and getting inspired to work on a few things (that didn't pan out).  Given the popularity of (and success of YC), it would be interesting to see what Paul and HN see as the state of the world for this list.
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jmspring
Link to the essay -- <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>

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dstein
When I go down the list I can only think of a few YC startups that have done
well by following these ideas (dropbox, heroku). The leaders in the categories
listed are not YC companies, and the big hits that YC did have were in
categories not listed (eg. Airbnb).

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marciovm123
Airbnb = Craigslist competitor (#25)

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dstein
I'd put Airbnb as a competitor to hostels, they're not really competing with
Craigslist directly.

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voidfiles
Funny, because they seem to get quite a few referrals from craigslist.

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oscilloscope
Wikipedia gets quite a few referrals from Google. Are they direct competitors?

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astrec
That depends on your view of Knol.

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andrewstuart
We built something alot like: 22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid.

The question is though, what problem does it solve? It was very hard to
explain to people why they would need it or care about it.

Spent a year developing it and spent alot of money on it. For nothing in the
end. A very cool technology and I still like it alot.

Lesson: build something people want, or that solves a real problem. Don't
build a solution looking for a problem.

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david927
That's funny because I'm also building a web-based Excel/database hybrid, and
I'm also a bit concerned about demand. But your story doesn't deter me at all,
for two reasons: one, because I'm crazy; two because of La Femme Nikita. Let
me explain.

People talk about ideas as being worthless, etc. No, they're not. You can't
get an oak tree with a mustard seed. But there's a big difference between even
oak trees. Idea and execution are the same thing, just two ends of a
continuous line.

The films _La Femme Nikita_ and _Point of No Return_ have nearly the exact
same plot. The former is one of the greatest action films ever made; the
latter is one of the worst.

That whole "build something people want" is only for people who want to make
money. And honestly, if what you want is to make money, be a dentist.

People waant Facebook and Twitter and Farmville. But they need core
technological innovation. They need better ways to work with data. You did the
right thing, Andrew. It wasn't a waste of time. And I won't stop either,
because the world has far too much of what it wants and far too little of what
it needs.

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kingsley_20
Actually, Facebook, Twitter and Farmville are great examples of products
nobody said they wanted and didn't solve any perceived problems, but are
succesful any way.

I've compulsively weaned myself off the "solve a problem" mentality because it
gets in the way of building truly innovative products, IMO.

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int3rnaut
Couldn't the problem be that people just have way to much time on their hands
and need help with that? Haha, seriously!

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schiptsov
Not just _Enterprise software 2.0._ but Localized Enterprise software. The
idea to adapt, say, SAP for Russian or Indian or Chinese laws, regulations and
actual document flow is totally broken. Hosted services also limited to US
market.

The problem is - it is almost impossible to get funding for such projects in
domestic markets.

So, it is a very simple and obvious idea to build Enterprise software using
the same technology that powers modern global-scale online services, targeting
emerging markets, but it is quite long and very expensive journey.

There are huge demand for hosted niched services for small and medium
business, such as tour operators (schedules, synchronizations), goods carriers
(simplified logistics), B2B systems (customer - supplier) and so on.

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paragraft
Something I've been pondering lately is whether there's a viable niche in
internationalization as a middleware library & service: it takes a lot of
effort to get right, it's tedious stuff (as I discovered when trying to
document postal address formats for most of Africa and Europe), and it
involves a lot of domain knowledge that's completely irrelevant to the actual
core business of most SaaS vendors.

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schiptsov
Yes, that is why it should be done by domestic startups and teams 'right on
the site'. So, YC's model doesn't work here - they fund only US-based startups
(because it is quite difficult to fetch a profit from aboard =) but this one
must be an international one. (same as that network of Google offices around
the globe).

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paragraft
What I mean is whether there's a niche for a single entity whose job it is to
be knowledgeable about all the sorts of issues you can run into in trying to
internationalize software and services, whether they be local tax issues, best
practices for translation layers in a software stack, cost estimations for
freighting products.

Like, i.e. an all-in-one service: build your SaaS platform against our
framework, and we'll handle all i18n issues on this given list, for this given
set of countries and languages, including payment handling and shipping, and
take a cut. A successful startup often doesn't have time to deal with its own
internationalization before local competitor clones get the jump on it (e.g,
Ebay, Groupon). So what I'm envisioning is a company that acts at a higher
level than the usual outsource-to-the-translator-agency routine, yet has
product-ized its offerings enough that it's not locked into the consultancy
business model.

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usedtolurk
There is definitely a market for this. International payment gateways like
CyberSource (www.cybersource.com) are extending their services to include
address validation (and correction), fraud detection, etc.

It would be very hard for a startup to compete in this space though - perhaps
a better opportunity for a partnership between a payment gateway and a major
distributer.

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benologist
My opinion:

\- Simplified browsing has happened ala tablets, mobiles etc, especially
purpose-specific apps.

\- Photo/Video sharing services .... they went mobile, big time

\- CRM ... I think twitter, facebook and internet outrage are changing that
pretty rapidly

\- Web office apps ... I (still) don't get the sense there's any major urge to
move to web office apps, but obviously the 800 pound gorilla in that space is
(went?) web

\- Online learning ... Kahn Academy

\- New payment methods ... Square, NFC et al

\- The web os ... kind of became redundant with the explosion of mobile and
tablet, but Chrome OS might end up mattering

\- Application and data hosting happened in a huge way lol

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jmspring
re: - Simplified browsing has happened ala tablets, mobiles etc, especially
purpose-specific apps.

Mobile and apps certainly have helped. But, there is still a problem of
knowing what urls (in the case of a browser) or sites to search or which apps
to get to help out.

It seems like there should be a better way of just "getting information" based
on location/interests/curiousities...

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salemh
Semantic web. Hunch is trying, other startups as well. You need so much "opt
in, we will find cool stuff (after 200 questions)."

The big boys of online data preferences who Could do these things would be
Google, perhaps FaceBook (which still brings up ridiculous unrelated ads to my
interests, however, I don't "click" any apps or "like" many pages out of
privacy). More on FaceBook, even my "prolific" friends (checkins, 200-400
friends, likes and friends with 100 or so movies, bands, apps, etc.) still
don't click ads.

NetFlix seems, after 4 years, of finally getting a semblance of "interests"
down.

That is quite a bit of data, time length, and me, the user actually rating the
movies I watch in a semi-diligent manner.

I would, in fact love to log onto Google, or wherever, see my "bored" category
of movies I may like to watch online, at the theater, local events going on
that evening, something coming up tomorrow and all somewhat related to what I
would enjoy, not just "pushing" or scraping a bunch of different calenders /
pooling app info together.

Very difficult problem.

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covercash
How about Apple? They have access or the potential to access a whole bunch of
info through that little touch screen life portal everyone clings to on a
daily basis. Add in iCloud and their Nuance partnership and you have something
pretty interesting.

"Hey iPhone, is there anything fun to do after work?"

It grabs your location, sees you have a late meeting blocked off from 6-7,
sees you were watching Transformers 3 trailers a few days ago, sees your buddy
Mike tweeted "Transformers 3 looks pretty rad, I definitely want to see that".

It now has an approximate time and location, a pretty good idea of what you're
interested in (both long term and short term) based on app data, and can see
if any of this aligns with your social graph...

Would you be interested in seeing Transformers 3 at 7:30 with Mike?

"Yes, send him an invitation." iMessage sent with all the details, when you
get a yes from him, Fandango launches and you buy your ticket, it gets added
to your calendar so you get a reminder after your meeting, maps out
directions, etc.

It's a stretch but if anyone can make harvesting that much of your personal
info look appealing, it's definitely Apple.

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jackpirate
I'll take the opportunity to post about my recently started (2 weeks now)
project on "design dependent search" (idea 16).

The idea I'm trying to leverage is that typing long search queries on mobile
devices is super awkward, but the touch screens make clicking much easier and
more fun. My site displays similar search results geographically near each
other on the screen, allowing you to make your searches more focused just by
clicking on certain areas. Right now, it only works on blogs with RSS feeds
due to my limited internet crawling resources. I hope to add media
(picture,movie, and maybe music) search by the end of the summer. I don't see
this necessarily working as a Google replacement though.

You can check out the prototype at <http://blogumbus.com> and visit the
developer blog at <http://dev.blogumbus.com>.

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boyter
Interesting. I had a play with it and I think there is some potential there.
Its somewhat similar to <http://www.chunews.com/> which I wrote some time ago
in that you can follow the links between similar articles and paged. I like
your implementation though.

How are you working out whats related? Links or some deeper textual analysis?

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jackpirate
Thanks for the heads up on chunews. I was having some trouble finding similar
projects to judge where I should focus development. How many users did you
get?

As for linkedness, I'm going to do a detailed blog post about it sometime, but
here it is in short:

Use the HITS algorithm to get hub and authority scores for each domain. Pages
are related only if websites with higher scores link to both of them. This
makes spam much less of a problem (I think!), and will make for some
interesting search algorithms that I haven't quite implemented yet.

~~~
boyter
I was more my attempt at recreating TailRank when it closed down (since I
assumed that it couldn't be that difficult to write). It just seems to overlap
what you have there quite a bit.

Not many users. It tends to get a lot of SEO traffic though (usually breaking
news stories funnel through it pretty quickly and you see a large spike) with
anywhere from 50 to 500 uniques a day.

Ah interesting. Chunews does statistical word ranking on each article it pulls
down to group similar stories together. From memory it uses links as well but
in reality since it checks exact links that never affects this.

One of these days I may iterate on it but for the moment it shows me whats
happening in the world at any point which is fine for me.

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jameswilsterman
Dating? Anyone think the chicken & egg problem has been solved or is being
solved? Any ideas how to solve this?

~~~
jcampbell1
When I look at the history there is a clear pattern:

\- Match.com solved it by starting in 1995 and working really hard.

\- eHarmony solved it by attracting the christian crowd with endorsements by
pat roberson and great offline marketing.

\- plentyoffish solved it with a great brand name, and using the "free
forever" look, feel, and marketing.

\- OKcupid solved it by creating tons of questionnaires that were fun and
interesting.

\- AshleyMadison solved it by targeting the infidelity niche.

\- AdultFriendfinder solved it by marketing to suckers on gaming and porn
sites.

The pattern is clear. There is no pattern.

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stevenp
Don't forget apps like Grindr. It's hyper-local, which is a whole new niche in
this space.

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kloncks
It's interesting to read this knowing that it was return years ago:

 _A form of search that depends on design. Google doesn't have a lot of
weaknesses. One of the biggest is that they have no sense of design._

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edash
I'd say this is the idea Hipmunk is going after...

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pbreit
Dare I say we'd like to work on 10 & 25? We've started testing a selling
format (<http://pricetack.com>) we think might be applicable in a variety of
situations and have some ideas on how to address the immense chicken & egg
issue. But have no illusions on the difficulty ahead.

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mslate
Anyone have any news of developments in 15. "Off-the-shelf security" products?

