

Ask HN: Validate my startup idea? - echoninja

Imagine there was a microphone in your house that could detect events using complex machine learning techniques and can be applied to home automation?<p>e.g. if it hears the jingle of your keys (and not your flatmates) after 6pm and it hasn&#x27;t heard you turn the shower on in the morning, it turns on a warm bath for you.
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tirrellp
Sounds interesting, but the use cases get me excited. It sounds like you are
brewing an interesting platform/solution for an unknown problem. My advice is
to stop right now, find a clear problem people have that they are willing to
pay to solve.

All-encompassing platform plays are hard to do without a solid use case to
build from. However niche, you need to absolutely smash someone's problem with
this platform, and once you find success there, you can go horizontal.

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wikwocket
What a lot of other posts are getting at is that this sounds like a cool
challenge, but that it doesn't exactly solve a pain point for anyone. No one
is thinking, Man do I need a robot to pour a bath for me when I come home, but
only if I haven't showered that morning!

There is nothing wrong with solutions looking for problems: there are a
zillion of them on store shelves right now. But this means that 1) you'll have
to overcome an education barrier to convince people why they NEED your
product, and 2) you'll be able to get much less insight about whether anyone
will buy your idea.

These sorts of ideas could be bad for a new startup. It's easier to build and
sell something like this if you have a larger R&D budget, a large marketing
budget, or a large reach so that you can get it in front of potential buyers.

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27182818284
You're asking us to find out about product-market-fit to alleviate your
product-market-fit risk, but the real risk with ideas like this is invention
risk. Google still only gets about 7/10 of my voice translations right when I
directly speak to my phone.

Similarly, you don't have to ask Hacker News if a pill that cures diabetes
would be popular, the risk there isn't product-market-fit it is invention-
risk.

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notduncansmith
I think you're on the wrong forum. Try this one:
[http://highdeas.com/](http://highdeas.com/)

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taprun
It might just be a matter of picking out a better use case.

How about if it listens for someone screaming for help and calls an ambulance?
Assuming you can limit false positives, you could probably sell it for use
with the elderly and the infirm.

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echoninja
the aim would be to build an api for event detection that broadcasts events
that can be hooked up to actions.

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tirrellp
Whose problem does that solve?

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gojomo
Plausibly valuable, or even inevitable someday. But would require much greater
adoption of home-automation, and a few more-compelling must-have benefits, to
seem a good business.

Considering your example, are there any automatable bathtubs yet? Or is making
such a thing part of your idea? (The cost of retrofitting such installed
plumbing, and the electrocution liability, suggest to me it'd be a long, slow
quest.)

