

Ask HN: Best Idea you never followed through on? - ezrider4428

Over the years i have had a lot of ideas, as i'm sure many of you have.  So, i pose this question to all of you.<p>What is the best idea you had that you never followed through on that is now hugely successful?<p>For me, the year was 1999 and i had an lighting bolt of an idea.  I should put all my music on my computer and share it with all my friends.  Remember Napster, that's where my idea could have gone.  I cant say i'm bitter, because idea's come an go.
======
runT1ME
I wrote a system that was basically Terracotta, (automagic distributing of
java programs across a network) before Terracotta it existed.

Basically, I had a bet with a friend that it was impossible to at runtime
distribute across multiple machines a program that was designed to run on a
single machine.

At the time, I was living at home and not working, so I spent a ton of time
reading up on the java classloader, how to instrument classes at runtime,
dynamically rewriting calls to the "thread" class and mashalling them over the
wire to another vm that was running, and executing it on their.

I didn't get very far, because after thinking about if it could become a
product, I realized just how many performance issues there were going to be.
Years later when I ran into the terracotta engineers and they were telling me
the route they went, I was nodding my head realizing they were running into
the same issues I did, and still struggling to overcome some of them.

They have quite a nice product now, but they didn't exactly blow up so I don't
have too many regrets about not productizing it.

All in all, I learned a lot about java, virtual machines, threading, and how
to teach myself new skills.

------
anigbrowl
London, 1993: 56k dial-up isn't cutting it any more, and ADSL is hideously
expensive. It occurs to me that cable TV is getting more popular, and that
this would provide more than enough bandwidth for most people. An evening of
technical research seems to support the idea. I call the business development
people at the cable company the following day, but am unable to persuade them
that spending money on 'an inter net' might be more profitable than catering
to the existing demand for sport, porn and light entertainment.

I was right from a technical standpoint...but they were also right from a
content standpoint, though it took me a lot longer to appreciate that.

~~~
kierank
What part of London had ADSL in 1993 considering the ADSL spec was ratified in
1998 ;)

~~~
anigbrowl
Duh! Good catch. Maybe it was just DSL, minus the A? I've gotten so used to
the current acronym I didn't think about that. More like it
was...I...I...godammit. (...wiki...) ISDN! DSL existed back then but I think
ISDN was the only affordable consumer alternative to dialup in the UK at the
time.

------
jacquesm
There can only be one 'first', and if yours isn't it than that's just too bad.
The 'I thought of that first' meme is one of the most common and most easily
dispatched things that almost all entrepreneurial types have experienced at
least several times in their lives.

The easiest way to think of it is to realise that for every idea that 'made
it' not just one but probably more likely several 10s and possibly 100s of
people had that idea too and they didn't follow up on it either. Chances that
you're the first are very small.

Your idea couldn't have gone anywhere, at least, not by itself. You need to
get a lot more factors just right in order to create something that really
takes off.

The more interesting question to me is what ideas do you have that you are not
following through on _right now_ , that you can make a similar post about 10
years from now?

And, what are you going to do about it?

~~~
ezrider4428
I think that you have to learn from the past? I will never again not follow
through on an idea i think has legs. In the end you have to trust yourself.

------
tortilla
I love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. When I was around 12 years old, I
had an idea of peanut butter slices, like individually wrapped cheese slices.

A couple years ago, I read about: <http://www.pbslices.com/history/index.html>

------
waivej
For me it was a Facebook style photo sharing system (2001 - before Friendster
and years before Myspace or Facebook). I worked on it full time and turned the
code into a CMS to make ends meet.

Though, there are lots of "waves" of technology/change in the market. When
they line up you get great opportunities. Napster hit when computers were fast
enough to decode mp3 files and people had broadband at home. The key is seeing
them with enough lead time and fortitude to paddle and be in the right spot
when they hit.

Personally, I want to know what new waves will line up in 3 years.

~~~
jdminhbg
Actually, I think Napster hit when college students had PCs (and ethernet) in
their dorms. Kazaa hit when broadband started to get popular. Good point,
though.

~~~
waivej
That's great. You've changed the way I think about that.

Napster was peeking in 2001 and I was incredibly inspired by the platform. As
a photo geek with broadband (for 3-4 years by then) I figured it was a perfect
fit...until I realized that my target market (grandparents, parents, siblings)
mostly had dial-up. It really caught me off guard.

I'll start looking for waves that hit specific groups with certain
attitudes/goals. For example, the "selfish elites with ipads" rather than just
"ipad owners".

------
rjprins
I have an idea for neural networks that is different from everything else out
there. I've been thinking about it for years.

Finally going to start on it in September. Expect the rise of robot legions
next January.

~~~
tocomment
That's great. Anything you can share?

~~~
reeses
Apparently nothing that will result in time traveling humans coming back to
kill him before he can create sentient robots.

------
alok-g
Am in full agreement with jacquesm.

Here's my partial list:

Application virtualization, <2000\. Submitted invention disclosure in 2003 or
so, when prior art search revealed someone had a patent issued a year earlier
(so they must have been filed several years before that).

Physics hardware acceleration, 2000, while working on a virtual reality game.
Learned about PhysX in about 2006 or so.

RISC and VLIW processor architectures, 1996, junior year undergrad, while not
being aware of their prior existence.

Following two were while I was working on Sinclair Spectrum+ at 12-15 years of
age, and largely unaware of what already existed at that time:

3D computer graphics/animation, 1990, 13 years of age, after learning
coordinate geometry two years ahead of peer students. Tried to come up with a
simple mathematical function f(x, y) that that would resemble a human face,
with no success. Prototype created frames offline using interpreted BASIC and
cycled them on the screen using hand-written machine code.

Compilers, while using slow interpreted BASIC on Sinclair Spectrum, 1992, 15
years of age, when I first learned how to program in machine code manually. My
prototype would only convert text code in reverse-polish notation (RPN) to RPN
instructions available on the processor (so more like assembler really).

Envisaged zero static power logic with complementary relays (like CMOS), at
high school, while not knowing anything about CMOS then.

Lesson learnt: (See jacquesm's comment).

------
cousin_it
Many years ago I had an idea for "emergency help with computers" but didn't do
anything with it. A couple years later all of Moscow metro was suddenly
covered with leaflets advertising "emergency help with computers".

Once I had an idea about adding georeferencing data to regular photos of
landscapes - not just top-down images - to overlay them on the 3D terrain.
Later this capability appeared in Google Earth for user photos and it looks
great.

------
SnootyMonkey
A couple years before Amazon's Mechanical Turk came out I started thinking
about web services (SOAP at the time) with human beings at the end point. To
do the things for our software systems that only humans could do.

I had a few long brain storming sessions with friends about it, but other than
that I did nothing. Now it's my favorite story to tell people when they ask me
if they should execute on their pet idea.

------
buro9
The biggest is probably an eBay for services and rentals. Basically non-goods.

This includes renting your neighbours lawnmower or drill, through to renting a
holiday apartment, or a floor for a night and was envisioned to be heavily
integrated into a calendaring and scheduling solution.

I pretty much went into detail of scenarios like the floor space swapping
(AirBNB now is very close to what I had described), went into detail on
renting apartments around events (think along the line of apartments in London
during the Olympics). I also researched and thought about how this same system
could be used by small businesses, for example how you could bid for a slot
with a famous hairdresser and the auction market would set the rate... so a
skilled person in great demand would earn more than normal rates.

------
rick888
I had the exact same idea a few months before Napster became really popular.
Instead of a separate client/server, my idea was to use IRC (and a specialized
fileserver) for sharing mp3s.

One night while I was working on this project (I got it to a functional
level), I turned on the TV and saw a special report on the old TechTV talking
about Napster. I gave up on it a week later.

Even if I pursued the idea, I don't know if I would have gotten very far. I
had no money for servers/bandwidth and no way to get venture capital. Not to
mention that most of the filesharing clients that were around during that time
were sued out of existence.

------
i5baladotcom
In 2001, I had the idea of creating a bookmarking system for saving all my big
list of researched url's and named(now called as tags) as personal and
official links for my personal use. Few years later I heard of something
called Delicious.

------
dotBen
I came up with what was essentially Jaiku a number of years before it launched
(which is funny cos Jyri is a friend now).

I built specs and wireframes and was beginning to plan out the backend but
then lost interest after a number of investor-friends couldn't see the market
for it.

To be honest, I'm not sure there is a market for it but that also proves that
startups don't always need a market on their own to be successful and exit.

------
freshfey
Definitely a mix between Rhapsody and last.fm - I told everybody that I was
going to do this: mp3s in the cloud with sharing capabilities. Now everybody
asks me "What happened to that idea, did you hear about last.fm etc.?" - kinda
bitter, but it would have been a big project + you would need good connections
to the music industry to pull that off without getting sued, so no regrets :)

------
kschua
The biggest one missed: A way to connect to friends similar to Facebook,
Friendster. (there are still somethings in there that I believe can be
improved which I won't mention)

What I didn't see: the "Status" which Facebook implemented. The apis which
opened up games like Farmville (though I don't play it). This would probably
have killed my idea off though

------
mrduncan
I distinctly remember having a _very_ similar idea for Twitter after seeing
how much people used their AIM away messages as statuses a couple of years
before Twitter launched. Of course, I'm sure tons of others did also - there
wasn't really a lot of magic in the idea, good (enough) execution and network
effects is what made Twitter successful.

------
min5k
It was during the mid-80's and I was 12. I loved playing computer games.
Activision had 2 that I loved - Little Computer People and AlterEgo. I
remember wanting so much to have these games combined that I wrote the company
to suggest that they do this. I never sent the letter. 15 years later, Sims
comes out.

------
duopixel
in 1998, at age 18, I made my high school's yearbook on CD (with Macromedia
Director), along with two friends. I told them the format seemed stale, and
that the future of yearbooks was on the internet, where you could keep in
touch with your classmates and upload photos of your current life.

Even though we were computer geeks we had almost zero execution capabilities
at the time, so I'm not kicking myself on the head.

~~~
pgbovine
... even if you were to make Facebook in 1998, it might not have gotten
critical mass due to it being simply 'too early' (and also not getting seeded
in a college campus environment) ... iirc, Friendster and others were started
in the late '90's bubble but all fizzled out

------
brianbreslin
this should really be a two part question: which ideas did you have which you
saw someone else come out w/later?

and/or which ideas do you wish you had followed through on, that you still
haven't seen someone do. (like i dunno, cold fusion).

I had written a business plan for a site to connect students to each other and
let them share pictures. wrote this in 2000. yeah so much for that one.

~~~
ezrider4428
To me the question is about not going for it and then later realizing that it
could have been huge. Basically regret. The good news is that you can learn
from the past and follow through on as many things as possible, at least until
that gaping void inside you is filled is dollar bills.

------
captaink
Wanted to buy Google when they went public. Did not have enough money. Argh.

------
pizzaman
didn't buy divx.com when i looked it up and it was still free.

~~~
newobj
and i didn't buy mcdonalds.com and a zillion other domains when they were
available. as a starving college student, $50/yr (my memory of the cost)
seemed insanely expensive at the time.

~~~
pizzaman
hehe, yeah i was in the same situation.

------
Apreche
All of them, so far.

