
Do you have any spare startup ideas worth building? - jrwit
https://www.quora.com/Do-you-have-any-spare-startup-ideas-worth-building/answer/Chris-Remus?srid=kLCi&share=0c538573
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krapp
I do not. If I did, I would be building them.

The closest thing I think I had to what might be an interesting idea lately
was a tool that automatically detected and translated Japanese text in videos.
But it's technically way beyond my abilities, and I have no idea how I would
actually make money at it if I could do it well at all, and if Google can't do
it already, I definitely can't. I don't even know where Grimsby is.

------
mindcrime
Probably, although nothing sitting at the forefront of my mind right this
minute. Still, if anybody is looking for a startup idea, there are a few
things you can use to help kickstart your thinking.

1\. Look at pg's / yc's "RFS" (Request for Startup) posts.

[https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/)

[http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-requests-for-
startups](http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-requests-for-startups)

2\. Something I experimented with for a while, but eventually quit (much to my
detriment, probably) is this: try to think up 10 ideas a day, every day. Write
them down. Yeah, probably most of them will be shit, but if you're doing 10
ideas a day, you'll probably hit on something good just by the law of large
numbers. The question, of course, is can you distinguish the good idea from
the not-so-good ones?

3\. Read the news, pay attention to what's going on around you, and keep
asking "how could I apply some tech that I know something about, to help this
situation"?

4\. Doodle. Draw boxes and arrows and just try to connect things. Do this in
conjunction with (3) above.

5\. Here's one of my favorites: read about OLD tech. Go back in time. In tech,
there's a strong and noticeable "what's old is new again" theme. Old ideas go
out of vogue and come back into vogue in a slightly altered form. Look for
some tech idea that was trendy 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years ago, and ask yourself
if it could be revisited now and made more useful due to Moore's law, the
Internet, "big data", whatever. Or, on a related note, sometimes ideas come
out that are actually good ideas, but they fail because they were simply too
early. The environment wasn't right, but maybe it is now. Find something that
failed and see if conditions have changed enough to make that old, failed idea
into a viable idea.

OK, here's a free startup idea for you... take everything I said above, add
your own ideas to the mix, and then build a tool / service for helping people
come up with startup ideas. Text mine old news articles, books, manuals,
alongside current news articles and research papers (look at arXiv.org and
other pre-print servers) and identify a way to extract useful startup ideas
from that morass.

