
Is anyone working on something that is not a website? - palish

======
jsackmann
first post, perhaps the first time I actually have something to contribute :).

There are two startup-ish things I do that are not websites, but are largely
disseminated via the web:

a) my main job is represented at gmatdaily.wordpress.com. I sell study
materials for the GMAT ...I worked in the industry for a few years, discovered
a multitude of problems, and am slowly solving them all.

b) i collect, package, analyze, and sell college baseball statistics to major
league teams ... my partner and I had a website for this (collegesplits.com)
where we gave away a lot of the data for free, but eventually took it down
because the maintenance wasn't worth it. My web presence in the field made it
easy to line up customers, and I suppose I could set up a members-only site to
deliver the data (and thus the business would be a website), but that's not
what the clients want.

Now, perhaps one of these days I'll work on something that IS a website :).

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SwellJoe
Our product is not a website, but it is web-based (it is installable web-based
system administration tools). I dunno if that qualifies by your definition.

So we have all of the pain of developing a web-based application (browser
incompatibilities, limitations of the medium, etc.) with all of the negatives
of installed applications (high barrier to adoption, lower volume, etc.). But
it does give us a business model that everyone can easily understand: Give us
money, we give you software, you install it, we support you. Next year, you
give us money again and we keep supporting you.

Web applications are the most fun to build, but there's an awful lot of room
for technology in non-web spaces. Large retailers a huge users of technology
(and their websites are generally not even a blip on the radar, as far as
technology expenditures go--I was involved briefly in a $2.7 million content
distribution deployment for Lowe's...I'm certain they haven't spent more than
a tenth that much on their website).

Lots of areas for high tech to make a huge impact on peoples lives (and thus
make a huge impact on your bottom line): Medical records and billing, legal
services, banking, accounting, warehouse automation, etc. There are businesses
working in all of these spaces already, of course, but there's still plenty of
niches left unfilled.

~~~
jason13
If your making your clients install software, why not just make your clients
install a specific broswer ?

~~~
SwellJoe
Hehehe...Good one. That's hilarious. ;-)

Seriously: Because we don't want to be evil. We're willing to not have rounded
corners in some browsers, or have menus that don't get animation, or
whatever...but we're not willing to prevent anyone (even folks who are blind
or otherwise have accessibility problems) from using our product.

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far33d
I'm fascinated by businesses that still deal in physical goods or services,
but are enabled because of the web. The two best examples being netflix and
city carshare-type businesses.

~~~
altay
oh, i totally agree, far33d... those make for the coolest companies. anyone
know anything about sensor networks? lately i've been thinking that a sensor
network plus an accompanying web app could be useful in lots of domains.

for example, here's an idea that's been kicking around in my head. (i'm not
the right guy to start this company, so i'll just throw out this there.)

you know how people at the gym often track their workouts -- "3 sets, 10 reps,
150 lbs" -- with pencil and paper? that's _so_ 20th century. why not build a
sensor network for exercise equipment? you get on a scale or weight/cardio
machine. it knows who you are -- RFID in your membership card? -- and it
wirelessly uploads your workout data from that machine to a server.

as a gym member, you get a login to an accompanying web app, which is
automagically populated with your data. you can set goals, track your workouts
+ results with pretty graphs, etc. no more paper+pencil tracking -- just work
out and log in.

sell this sensor/software platform to gyms (or perhaps the equipment
manufacturers), and you've got yourself a business.

where does the internet come in? well, aside from the tracking app for
individuals, with all this aggregate data, you'd revolutionize exercise
science. is interval training _really_ better than marathon cardio sessions?
more weight+fewer reps, or less weight+more reps? even basic collaborative
filtering would be cool: "people with bodies like yours got these results with
this workout plan."

it'd disrupt the (absurdly lucrative) personal training industry.

point is, out there in the "real world," there's tons of data that's just
waiting to be aggregated and analyzed. that'll certainly be the basis of many
interesting companies.

~~~
shadtchnev
I've just returned from the gym with such a system installed :) Well, not
exactly. I have to enter my five-digit number at each machine, so that it knew
who is exercising but apart from that it does almost everything you described.
<http://www.fitlinxx.com/brand.htm>

~~~
altay
cool!! that's totally it. now if they'd only get this in my gym... =)

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startupper
Yes, we are working on a wireless startup -- not an application but
infrastructure. This includes hw, sw and fw. soldering irons, oscilloscopes,
etc. ;)

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especkman
I have plans for two projects dealing in physical goods. For one, I'll
probably use cafepress for production & fulfillment until volume justifies
reshuffling my supply chain.

For another, I'm going to advertise a blog we already have that has a small
but growing audience. We'll have a small inventory with a limited number of
skus. We'll probably make the items ourselves. I'm not sure how I'll handle
the commerce (ebay, yahoo store, paypay...). We'll do fulfillment ourselves
too. Once we establish a microbrand I have what I think is a clever bundling
idea to increase our average transaction size by about 2-5 fold without
needing to bloat our inventory. At that point, I'm not sure exactly what's
next, we might try it on a small scale, continuing doing our own
manufacturing, or we might line up offshore manufacturing and outsourced
fulfillment and make a big push. I think we'll probably do a blend of the two.
Start rolling out the evolved business model while still making the items
ourselves at the same time we're lining up manufacturing and fulfillment with
the goal for having them on-line in time for the holiday shopping season.

I also have ideas for web apps, but I'm cautious about both ad revenue and
hoping to be bought out. I do have an idea for a service that would be
monetized by transaction based revenue, but I have quite figured out how to
put it into practice.

------
Leonidas
I'm helping my dad design a replacement for the Digital Signal Processor.
Actually, it's already designed and it actually works through the Phase I
testing. Talk about years of painfully drawing up electric engineering
diagrams and deciphering electric engineering language to a way that you would
understand it to draw the diagram and write the description out. It's like
having a crash course on 4 years of EE education in a week. (I'm not an EE
major). Not to mention making suggestions upon the improvement of the design
and have your dad say "no it won't work" only to find out days later that your
proposal actually works but your dad is just too proud to admit it. I think
the closest he got to an offer was from Nokia but he chickened out and didn't
pursue it. Sucks for him and especially for me who spent days finding a
personal contact information to someone at Nokia.

Too bad, he's one of those guys who just likes to invents to see if it works.
Not much of a 'start a company' guy...I think he just wants to sit back and
enjoy the rest of his life as opposed to dealing with the politics of a
company. 9 years on working on something and the fear of someone stealing your
idea keeps you from sharing it to the world. It's a shame but oh well. It's
his 'baby'

I have my own 'baby' project to work on.

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fauigerzigerk
I cannot tell you in very concrete terms what we're doing (it has to do with
data integration), but I can tell you the reason why we will probably NOT do
it as a web app. It's not the UI capabilities, it's the data hub problem and
economics.

Anything you do on the web has to funnel every piece of data through that web
app because browsers cannot access anything other than their originating
server (They might soon be able to do that via Flex/Silverlight type plugins).
Even if they could, it just doesn't make sense for many data centric
interactive applications to buy a lot of servers when a huge number of
powerful PC clients does almost nothing.

I reckon, if I have some algorithmic data analysis stuff and I can distribute
that to client machines to some degree, I can make my service cheaper and
maybe even architecturally simpler in some cases, because there is a natural
partitioning scheme. Ok, now I see this argument becomes quite obscure without
going into further detail so I'll leave it at that.

------
palish
Web is certainly where the money can be at. But everyone probably realizes
that there are plenty of other things you can do and still create a startup.
The advice in Paul Graham's essays and YCombinator's library holds just as
true if you're not working on a webpage startup.

For example, I read about someone who created a startup selling knife sheaths
on EBay. Even if he were to create a website advertising his knife sheaths, he
still wouldn't _really_ have a webpage startup.

So, is anyone working on a non-webpage startup, and if so, what're you doing?
:)

Shawn

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boris
There are plenty of startups that make cool software. Trolltech, Sleepycat
(now Oracle), VMWare, Coverity are just a few that come to mind. I think the
main difference between software startups compared to web startups is that
there is a lot more depth to them. I don't think an average kid out of college
is capable of something like this.

I am working on software development tools: <http://www.codesynthesis.com>

~~~
nostrademons
"I don't think an average kid out of college is capable of something like
this."

I've done both desktop/server software and web software, and IMHO _good_ web
software is harder. With web software, you have to explicitly think about many
things that just aren't an issue with conventional software, like how to
distribute the load of a million users over dozens of boxes. It helps that
user expectations for UI responsiveness and robustness are somewhat lower with
webapps, but that's changing with AJAX. You also need to know many more
technologies to build a successful webapp: CSS, HTML, Javascript, a web
scripting language, SQL, database performance, server administration & shell
scripts, and any libraries necessary for your problem domain.

It _is_ a completely different skillset. With conventional apps, you need to
know how to architect a large single app instead of architecting a large
collection of collaborating servers. You need to know C++, Java, or C# instead
of PHP/Python/Ruby. You need to know intimately the particular toolset that
your app fits into - VMWare can't live without device drivers; Sleepycat can't
live without transaction algorithms; one desktop app I worked on needed an
intimate knowledge of TCP, including Winsock LSPs and Linux kernel hacking.
You get much more out of deep knowledge with conventional apps, while webapps
require a more shallow understanding of a very broad range of topics.

Also, the technologies you need for desktop apps don't have zillions of
articles on them plastered across the web, and the documentation is often poor
quality. But if you take a professional software engineering job, you'll be
expected to make sense of it and figure out how everything works (possibly
through prototypes, debuggers, and a lot of pain and patience). It's not
taught in college, but that doesn't make it particularly difficult.

~~~
tx
"I've done both desktop/server software and web software, and IMHO good web
software is harder."

I can only ask what kind of software have you developed, sir?

If web software was harder, you wouldn't see "products" created over a weekend
shaping up into companies a week later. And don't get me started on "millions
of users on dozen boxes".

The primitiveness of web application development is mainly the reason why so
many "ex-taxi drivers" and are rolling out web apps daily.

Two huge reasons why web app development is so trivial are: \- You control
your hardware. This is really important. \- You do not need to develop UI. Web
Pages are joke compared to the "real thing".

For starters, try to develop an super-simple desktop application that uploads
an arbitrary file to a given FTP address, let 100,000 users (let alone
millions) download it to discover: \- It won't start \- It won't connect \- It
crashes their computer. \- "Where did it go?" question after downloading.

You'll be amazed. You will realize that PCs of most people are just like
jungle, populated with adware, multiple software firewalls running
simultaneously, paranoid anti-virus packages, missing DLLs and weird security
settings. Moreover, users will be brutal: they'll be turning power off in the
middle of your disk writes, they will upgrade libraries you linked to without
asking you first, they will install your executable on desktop and will be
killing files you create, the list goes on.

Over 80% of developing desktop software consists of two things: \- Fighting
unexpected problems in a hostile environment of user's PC \- Dealing with
real, __LIVE __UI that is reflecting real-time changing objects, and is
pleasant to use.

On top of that you're trying to do this using minimal amount of libraries,
because you can't expect people to download 100MB installer.

~~~
nostrademons
Everything you mention is true, and a huge pain when developing desktop
applications. One of the projects I've worked on was to serve as the release
engineer for a desktop app that involved a Winsock layered service provider, a
background Windows service, a system tray icon, and a Java control
application, plus a large server-side component. My job basically consisted of
making a tweak to the InstallShield scripts, pushing it out to a dozen
VirtualPC images, and making sure it all worked and I didn't hose anything.
Then I'd find out that eg. it didn't work with Symantec Personal Firewall,
because they based their code off the same sample Microsoft LSP that we did,
the one that explicitly says "Do not use for production code", and didn't fix
the bug that we spent a week tracking down.

But webapps have the same problem, they just push the complexity into a
different area. I also volunteered for FictionAlley.org, a mid-size (110k or
so registered users) web community. We would get complaints from users that
the site was unreadable on their 40 character PDA screen. We'd get e-mails
from blind people saying could we _please_ make the site handicap-accessible
and usable on their screen readers. We would get irate e-mails from Opera
users about display glitches, or irate e-mails from Mac users wondering why
the latest feature we just released didn't work on Safari. We'd get tirades
from people because we added navigation bars, after getting tirades from
people because we didn't have navigation bars. We'd get constant complaints
about the (free) site being too slow, because we didn't have money for more
servers.

Until you've actually been involved with a website that has lots of visitors,
you have no idea what goes on behind the scenes to keep things running
smoothly (or sometimes not-so-smoothly). Yes, desktop apps are hard. I've done
them - not just the release engineering stuff above, but I also wrote the Java
app included in the package, and I wrote a Netbeans plugin for my current
employer, and both had to deal with the sticky platform-and-threading issues
necessary for a responsive, professional UI. I still say that webapps are
harder.

~~~
palish
You two should join forces.

------
nicomarchesotti
Is my first post. Yes at the moment I am working on 2 different business
plans. One has to do with recycling ink cartridges. I have found by the
research I have done that there is quite an interesting and virgin market for
that here in Spain. The second is a company which has been working for 2 years
but I am remodeling the system of production. This one is about Selling school
planners.

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uuilly
We just got an angel round for a destop sw startup. It is a visualization tool
that is OpenGL heavy and I'm not sure how I'd deliver that over the interwebs.

www.uuorld.com

We're using trolltech's Qt and releasing on Win32, OS X, and Linux. If anyone
knows of any mature packages for interactive 3d over the web, I'm all ears.

~~~
blats
Torque, Torque Advance, and now apparently Torque X.
<http://www.garagegames.com>

"Mature packages for interactive 3D over the web"

They are general purpose game building frameworks. I am currently working with
it in MMO form, all implementation code in Python. It is a mature package for
interactive 3D over the web if I ever saw one.

Hmm.. there may be something to that.... hey thanks! :)

~~~
blats
Ok, so I use the term "web" loosely there.. but things like Yahoo widgets are
blurring the line between desktop and web so I am taking some liberty.

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davidw
There are some food items that I would love to import/produce in the US, from
Italy. I'll see about it when/if we ever move back to the states. Food has a
lot of legal requirements, and more capital to start something up. On the
other hand, it's the thing I'm most certain of in terms of I _know_ people
would like this stuff.

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greendestiny
Yeah I make orthodontic software and just finished a prototype 3d scanner
(structured light style thing for those in the know). That sort of my day job,
although I own a 1/3 of the business. I really want to do some web2.0 ideas
I've got on the side - which is really the main reason I come to news.yc

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falsestprophet
In addition to some web applications, I am slowly developing several products
in the chemical sector. (I am a chemical engineer by training). But, the
barriers to entry are so high and the risks are so great (often including
literal physical danger) that software is decisively more attractive.

~~~
yubrew
I know what you mean (biomedical engineering). In health care, it's standard
practice to have at least 100x price mark ups, but a fair amount of barriers.

After talking to a couple people in biotech start ups, it seems pointless to
pursue something unless I am a cofounder. The marriage of science and business
is often not pretty.

------
musiciangames
My product is a game that teaches piano, but the delivery and monetisation are
currently via the web.

<http://www.free-music-games.net/valkyrie-invaders.html>

------
chmike
yes. A middleware communication protocol and its infrastructure. It is a new
communication tool with, of course, added value compared to existing
solutions. new tools = better ways = new applications = new opportunities.

Protocol is named DITP (distributed information transfer protocol) and uses
IDR (information data representation) as encoding rule (it's binary). The
infrastructure is named DIS (distributed information system).

Some usable code will be out in a few weeks. The system is original in many
ways and the curently forseen business model might be too. Coming out will be
announced on Y Combinator news.

------
aquarin
I do work on rating algorithm and forecasting algorithm that I intend to
implement as some sort of service or library. There will be website but just
for advertising purposes.

------
kilowatt
I'm in a small startup developing a cross-platform desktop IM client. In
Python. It's going to kick the pants off of Adium, Pidgin, and especially
Trillian ;)

~~~
sbraford
How will you monetize it?

~~~
vikram
Could try selling virtual goods.

------
rnc000
Yes, me: <http://server.imgseek.net/>

Looking for ways to license visual search technology.

------
jeffrese
I'm making replica '57 Chevy's <http://www.fresemotorcars.com/>

------
ynniv
OpenGL + Python + Cached Streaming Data

web - handhend - desktop - web

jobs@churchillnavigation.com

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rms
Biotech 2.0. Which of course involves a website and a physical
product/service.

------
mkanemoto
I am working on WiMax, the next generation wireless network.

~~~
nickb
<http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/InfectiousGreed/~3/115642924/intel_ceo_summi_1.html>

------
litepost
I'm making computers and software for babies.

------
smackaysmith
Raising chickens and runner ducks.

------
enorlin
www.defragcon.com

a startup that's not a website

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rokhayakebe
2 side projects for fun.

1\. Mobile search. No website. If we did it would be a one static page site.

2\. Image recognition. Also no interaction with a website. As far as goods, I
would stay away from it. Logistics r pain in the butt.

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gyro_robo
MMORPG.

------
samb
chartcapture.com

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juwo
yes

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codeslinger
Yes.

