
Random Startup Generator - omergertel
http://www.ykombinator.com
======
gojomo
Yuri Milner is investing $150K in each reload of this page.

But seriously: sometimes randomness breaks assumptions and generates great
ideas. See also:

<http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/>

 _Added:_ Sites with working online decks:
<http://www.joshharrison.net/oblique-strategies/>
[http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/oblique/oblique...](http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/oblique/oblique.html)

~~~
math
A friend of mine swears by a strategy he calls "smashing ideas" to generate
ideas for research: Take two fundamental ideas from the literature (the more
fundamental the better) and try to smash them together into a new idea. Says a
remarkable amount of research (and successful papers) can be viewed in this
light. The strategy is obviously a great creative tool, generally. Though, for
business I still reckon the best primary mindset to have is identifying real
world problems and thinking of solutions to these problems (perhaps smashing
comes in at this point). In research and art, creativity pays off more because
real world benefit as voted by paying customers is not as important.

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gersh
I propose the ycombinator turing test. Can you generate an application which
will get accepted by ycombinator? This may require generating additional
content to establish team credibility including twitter posts, blog posts,
etc.

~~~
pg
Since the main thing we care about is the people, you'd either have to lie or
be genuinely good.

~~~
gersh
How do you know who the people are? Presumably, the app would create blogs,
facebook pages, linkedin, twitter, etc. Passing a phone interview would be
harder, though not impossible. You might need really good voice recognition.
Speech generation probably wouldn't be insurmountable.

In person, this might be trickier. This might require a robot mannequin.
Alternatively, you could hire an actor with wireless ear plugs. Presumably,
the computer would tell the actor what to do.

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hendrik-xdest
"CloudPerfect is a creative new way of getting you upvoted on Quora. Between
trolling /b/ and marriage, people believe they can't learn how to paint. This
is where CloudPerfect comes in, with lots of coffee and an army of monkeys,
CloudPerfect will revolutionize your social experience."

Sounds reasonable.

~~~
dkersten
Oh sweet, I've always wanted to learn to paint, but I'm much too busy getting
married and trolling /b/...

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callmeed
Funny, a few of the startups I generated are actually available domains (and
kinda catchy):

    
    
      bridgeini.com
      swiftmolsh.com
      crunchmob.com <-- considering buying this one
      molshoola.com
      dateoola.com
      jotperfect.com
      inpoke.com
    

Good design, btw.

~~~
markkat
Every once in a while for fun, I try to find as many good .com domains as I
can. There are a lot of good ones out there.

I've considered having a best available .com competition here, but think it
might be considered wasteful, doing the work of squatters for them.

~~~
ultrasaurus
There was a recent XKCD[1] on pairs of words that sound good together and
quite a few of those domains were available. So I don't know what it'll be
yet, but my next project is going to live at lasernarwhal.com.

[1]<http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/04/trochee-chart/>

~~~
markkat
Lol. My surprises of the day were toogeo and talkik. I think I have a knack
for finding these. I should charge. :) Ooh, talkic is even better. It's like
talk and topic!

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brown9-2
I had an idea for a similar joke website a few months ago, but their algorithm
is much smarter than mine. Looking at their code, it looks like they are
essentially randomly combining sentence fragments together in order:

    
    
        var A = ["A new and improved", "A better, faster", "An awesome", "A vibrant", "An innovative", "A faster", "A rapid", "A quick and dirty"];
        var y = ["Searchable", "Virtualized", "Cloud-based", "Mobile", "Application-aware", "Viral", "Friendlier", "Online", "Web-based", "Streamlined", "Performance-oriented", "Next-gen", "Revenue-shared", "Professional"];
    

I attempted to mine Crunchbase profiles and then build "descriptions" of a
startup based on a markov chain, but I found that there was too much noise in
most of the Crunchbase descriptions to produce text that sounded at all
plausible. Their method is a lot smarter (and easier).

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maxdemarzi
What do they call that style of illustration that looks like it was done with
a fish-eye lens effect. (City with guy playing golf picture).

Is there a stock image site that has a collection? Edit: Found it here, but no
mention of what the "style" is called. [http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-
illustration-10284891-beaut...](http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-
illustration-10284891-beautiful-world.php)

~~~
xelfer
A polar panorama? [http://content.photojojo.com/tutorials/create-your-own-
panor...](http://content.photojojo.com/tutorials/create-your-own-panorama-
planets/)

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dschobel
Great execution but needs more "$X is a dead simple way to $Y" so as to
properly channel TC/Arrington.

~~~
catshirt
or the popular "$x is the $y of $z"

~~~
Sukotto
Or, as the Simpson's put it... "Anything that's the 'something' of the
'something' isn't really the anything of anything"

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc5vN2XReWs&subject=Simps...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc5vN2XReWs&subject=Simpsons-
something-of-something)

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Dramatize
Click on their about page:
[http://www.joinfireplace.com/#topics/d1e41f00330b11e0a86e27b...](http://www.joinfireplace.com/#topics/d1e41f00330b11e0a86e27bb48e450e5)

Then click on their logo.

Love the instant load.

------
giu
I love the text it proposes to share on Twitter:

" _OMG ShopMob is the next Quora!! #omgnextquora_ "

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giladvdn
Thanks for the love guys :)

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middlegeek
Not quite complete, nowhere does the description say the team is "passionate"
about technology and/or design.

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nhangen
I'll admit to spending 5 minutes flipping through - well done :)

~~~
fedd
"this is where xxxx comes in"

wrote the phrase down to my english idioms book. all investors are mine!

~~~
shadowpwner
I wish I could meet an investor now, just to say to him "This is where the
jousting monkeys come in".

~~~
cema
This is where investors come in...

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paulitex
"Pure Javascript, HTML and CSS. No server side at all. Simple and easy."

Surprisingly surprising - the average framework X programmer would
automatically use framework X. What a great example of using the right tools
for the right job.

~~~
zv
No need to overengineer. Server side scripts are not needed in their case.

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armandososa
Great! This is how you make a generator. The Malcom Gladwell one was dumb and
totally not funny. This one make me laugh.

The names were very catchy too.

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fedd
is it a parody on the startup bubble?

how funny it would be if some sophomore really implements one of these mock
ideas and become a blnaire

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wheaties
Great website. Can't be viewed in landscape mode on android. The socks and
twitter link obscure the text. At first I thought that was part of the joke.
Whatever. Gave me a laugh this morning and that is worth its weight in gold.

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lurchpop
hahah i always suspected my NoSQL database was missing A SOCIAL TWIST!

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localhost3000
Can you make it so we can submit silly/lousy ideas we've had or heard from
others? Or maybe ideas that were rejected from YC? That would be a fun
collection to look at.

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hydrazine
StumbleUpon for startup ideas. Awesomely amusing!

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OoTheNigerian
Hehe. Nice one. it is a good way of scanning through a bunch of crowd sourced
ideas though.

Back to scanning through.

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herval
geez, I almost entered my email on the "notify me" first time I opened this!

