
Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work) - luu
http://swombat.com/2010/11/30/no-new-ideas
======
7Figures2Commas
The problem with so many "startup ideas" is that they are a solution to the
problem, "I want to create a startup and don't have an idea." Not
surprisingly, this tends to produce copycat concepts, products with no real
market fit, services that target sexy but oversaturated markets, etc.

There are lots and lots of problems that are either unsolved or are being
solved in ways that are less efficient and cost-effective than they could be,
particularly outside of the consumer space. In many cases, these problems can
be solved with relatively unsophisticated applications. But the folks who sit
around thinking about the usual consumer internet suspects (Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, etc.) never discover these problems because more often than not,
they have no domain expertise.

Sadly, it seems to me that many technical wantrepreneurs have no real interest
in developing domain expertise because they believe there's more value in
mastering the framework du jour than focusing in on a vertical and developing
a real understanding of it over time.

~~~
ensignavenger
I have come up with a lot of ideas to solve business problems, but I am
reluctant to implement them for the concern that selling to such businesses
would be a far more difficult problem than simply creating something that
works better than what they are currently using. Business often make stupid
decisions based on relationships with sells people or brand recognition more
than merit of the solution. Of course, this problem exists in the consumer
space as well, but the market is so much larger (everyone is a consumer, not
everyone makes decisions on what solutions to deploy in a business).

~~~
ef4
In my experience, you have the difficulty backward. It's just fear of the
unknown that keeps too many technical people from attempting it.

If your product has a demonstrable return on investment, then it is far easier
to sell to businesses. Because businesses actually make decisions based on
ROI, and consumers mostly don't.

Remember that to make a fair comparison, you need to do it per dollar, not per
sale. Even if it's 10x easier to sell to one consumer than one business, if a
business customer pays 100x more money, then it is still vastly easier to sell
to businesses.

~~~
asdasf
>Because businesses actually make decisions based on ROI

They like to say they do, but they very frequently don't. I'd say easily 80%
of the software and hardware purchases I've seen corporate clients make are
based on things other than ROI. Things like "the sales person for product X
always takes me to nice lunches" or "everyone else is using Y so we need to
use Y too".

~~~
nikatwork
Thus the evergreen adage, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

------
lisper
This is a three-year-old blog post about a three-year-old HN comment about a
different three-year-old blog post. Just sayin'.

~~~
larrys
That expression peaked a few years ago:

[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=just%20sayin&cmpt=q](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=just%20sayin&cmpt=q)

~~~
prostoalex
Google Trends is based on searches, so it implies it actually started up three
years ago, and a bunch of n00bs had to find out what it means. It grew into
simple and powerful everyday expression that everybody knows a meaning of.

------
knowtheory
Derek Siver's observation back in 2005 that ideas are a modifier on execution
is a slightly better recounting of this point:
[http://sivers.org/multiply](http://sivers.org/multiply)

People can bitch and kvetch about elevator-pitch/vision level descriptions of
products, but such analyses are always shallow, and particularly for
interesting products almost always miss the point.

Always look to the execution.

(on the flip side, the flaws of poorly executed projects can often be very
easy to sum up)

~~~
phreanix
Does YC have a collection if post mortems for their failed startups? I would
find that very interesting.

------
igorgue
My advice is, chill, have fun, you don't need to be an entrepreneur.

I really don't understand why being an entrepreneur is so "sexy" (only to
other dudes, being sexist for a moment here) these days, it's lame.

P.S. I know, wrong forum to say that.

~~~
sergiosgc
It's the thrill of creation. You see, many people are creators. They feel a
need to pour their imagination into something that lasts, possibly something
that outlasts themselves. There are quite a few routes for fulfilling this
desire: arts, engineering, parenting, and, you guessed it, entrepreneurship.

And yes, this being a hacker forum, where everyone is the creator kind of
person, the percentage of possible entrepreneurs here is bound to be high.

~~~
igorgue
It's not the only way to create stuff, I make music on the side, and hack on
open source project. You don't need to be a CEO to make something.

~~~
sergiosgc
I never said it is. Quite the opposite. I was just placing the choice of
entrepreneurship against your advice of "chill, have fun". For many(most?)
entrepreneurs, creating an organization, and using it to create stuff in a
larger scale, is fun.

------
shubb
I have a startup idea that I'm not going to execute. I currently live with a
senior social worker, and my mother was a social worker. Over the years have
been deeply troubled by what I've heard. I think this tool could help them,
even if it's a bit creepy.

Social workers in the UK have a big problem. Different teams, professions
(police, medical, housing), deal with the same people, and often collect all
the pieces required to understand and prevent a tragic situation. But they
can't put them together.

There is an obsession with interpofessional meetings to tackle this, but every
serious case review shows that the knowledge was there but not put together,
leading to dead children. My perception is that often knowledge is mentioned,
but when discussing a different related case, or isn't formally written down
and passed to the right person.

My solution is inspired by the part of the CALO project that dealt with
capturing and exploiting knowledge from meetings. There are some great ideas.
If you do this, read up on it.

The product records all meetings, using existing meeting room Teleconference
hardware. The meetings are put through automatic speech and speaker
recognition on a best effort basis to produce a searchable index for that
meeting. So you get something like a transcript and can skip to the point
where Mr A is mentioned.

Supervisors, who in that field are criminally liable for mistakes by
subordinates, already review minutes for meetings. Now they can search for any
mention of Mr A, and see in what context he was mentioned and listen to that
part of the meeting. Obviously there would be control of who could listen to
what meetings, but these people already have big intrusive databases, so I
don't think they are too worried.

Ideally, you could then build graphs from there of who is mentioned together,
and do some Palantir style stuff to spot associations between people.

But the start is, very much, implementing a meeting transcriber by sowing
together a few brands of speech recognition engine, a web interface for
administrating and searching meetings, and selling it into social services.

~~~
jlgreco
If you are relying on teleconference hardware made by other companies, I
suspect that you will have those companies cloning your software for their
hardware.

I mean, I _assume_ Cisco Telepresence stuff doesn't already record/transcribe
meetings... If your idea starts to take off, I would bet that it will for sure
in the near future. That seems like exactly the sort of functionality you
would expect from that sort of hardware.

~~~
shubb
Well CALO yielded SIRI, as in on the iphone. That project had a number of
parts, one was an AI personal assistant, another was meetings, and another was
some kind of integrated battle control center.

Anyway, it yielded a lot of high grade speech recognition research and AI
research, which companies are battling to license. If you recall Yahoo's
weirdly overvalued purchase of Sumly, that was part of a deal to acquire a
license for this kind of tech.

I suspect the most credible opponents to this startup would be MS bundling
this kind of functionality into Outlook, or some other big company exploiting
this expensive but already licensed tech.

But what you get here, is first to market, and attack on specific verticals
(i.e. social services, and later related services). You can't be scared off by
'what if we have a competitor'. If you don't have a competitor, your market
probably doesn't exist. That is what I'd worry about here.

------
unono
Current thinking on this matter is to avoid the tired old web 2.0 hipster
stuff. The current batch of YC is all about solving real problem for real
people. Spoonrocket got the most applause ($6 meals delivered within 10
minutes).

~~~
untilHellbanned
i'm all for real ideas but the 7000th web food delivery service shouldn't get
people that excited, especially not the most select group of entrepreneurs in
the world.

~~~
unono
Spoonrocket is pretty unique. You'd have to go to the 3rd world like India to
get similar levels of service.

Spoonrocket's cars have builtin heaters that keep food warm, only 2 menu items
a day, and really quick delivery. If they actually expanded nationwide they'd
kill burger/pizza joints, or at least force them to innovate.

~~~
nickpinkston
Neat implementation details and 'disruption' aren't what make a startup unique
/ important. For example:

'InstaToiletPaper is doing really unique things like drone delivery of toilet
paper and a huge selection! If these guys succeed, they'd be out disrupting
the $20B toilet paper market, or at least forcing the to innovate.

~~~
unono
By that standard few startups are 'important'. Twitter (sms on web), Facebook
(another myspace), Microsoft (another OS).

InstaToiletPaper is a pretty good startup if existed. When you run out of
toilet paper you really want it quick. A drone could fly through a small
window and it get it to you. You'd pay $10 for a single roll.

~~~
VLM
Pivot into the lucrative "out of condoms" market using the same hardware and
business model to grow the startup.

Presumably any drone that can fit thru a bathroom window can fly thru a bigger
bedroom window.

~~~
kennywinker
[http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/02/14/college-student-
cre...](http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/02/14/college-student-creates-
condom-delivery-service-to-promote-safe-sex/)

Already a thing (minus drones).

------
bliti
I stopped looking for ideas, and focused on solving problems. There is a
difference. Ideas come with a lot of fluff. Meaning that under the right
conditions they might work. Solving problems focuses on talking to people who
have problems, and figuring out a way to solve it. I now spend at least an
hour every week talking to people who have problems I want to solve: people
who can pay. (:

~~~
abrichr
How do you choose whom to talk to, and where do you find them?

~~~
bliti
1\. I realized that a product is not built in a vacuum. Meaning that I had to
go out and figure out what products where needed. This led me to reach a
simple understanding: I would focus on building products that made people
money. Selling such products seems to be simpler (I am still testing this at
the moment).

2\. With #1 in mind, I focused on what businesses need to make money: clients.
Thus, I set out to learn how business generated new leads, or followed up on
clients.

3\. Now that I had focused on solving a type of problem (lead generation and
client follow up), I set out to research markets. Every business out there
needs leads. But some can be easily automated. Using patio11's appointment
reminder app as inspiration, I started to ask people how such app would help
their business. Turns out there is a big demand for such a simple application.
Who knew that sending text messages and making automated phone calls would be
such a life saver?

4\. Who did I talk to? Well, who needs to keep constant contact with their
client list? Dentists, insurance agents, private schools, auto mechanics, etc.

5\. Once I knew the who, finding the where was as simple as looking in my
cellphone. I called my dentist, and insurance agent to talk about the
application (before writing any code). They gave their feedback and I set out
to write it.

------
Xcelerate
Assuming your goal is to have a successful startup company, I've often
wondered what the optimal trade-off between time-per-startup idea and number
of startup attempts is.

For instance, I could spend a year working on two really big, elaborate ideas
that I have, but if they fail (likely), then I've wasted ("learned what not to
do" if you're the optimistic type) a year working on only two ideas.

Or... I could invest my time in a bunch of little startup ideas. Make one
simple webapp a week, and out of 52 of them, one should stick, right?

But the problem is that in general, the more time and effort you invest into
any particular idea, the higher quality the product of your idea will become,
and the better a chance it has for success.

So, I'm not sure what the best route is. If you look at which companies have
historically been successful (FB, Twitter, Instagram), you see that the
founder spent almost all of their time on that one idea. But, this may be an
example of selection bias. It could be the case that the biggest successes
require a huge time-investment in one project, but the probability of success
for any random project is very low. In a sense, they won a lottery of a sort.
Perhaps your chance of success -- but not _mega-success_ \-- becomes more
realistic if you focus on many smaller ideas.

~~~
no_gravity
"If you look at which companies have historically been successful (FB,
Twitter, Instagram), you see that the founder spent almost all of their time
on that one idea."

Where does that info come from and what do you mean with "all of their time"?

I would expect that the first iteration of those websites have been coded in a
few days or weeks.

~~~
Xcelerate
> Where does that info come from and what do you mean with "all of their
> time"?

It came from my memory of various articles I've read; but that's certainly a
fallible source, so correct me if I'm wrong.

And with "all of their time", I didn't literally mean "all of it". I meant,
with time appropriated towards working on a star-up, it was spent on only one
idea rather than multiple ones.

------
Lerc
Continuing in the face of a stream of "Your idea sucks" presents quite a
challenge. You can tell yourself that the best ideas and most successful
ventures had similar detractors, but it doesn't always help. You are aware of
your own project more than the casual observer. The weaknesses and hurdles to
pass are more apparent to you, and you can't help wondering if the comments
are insightful and your project really does suck and you are just too invested
in it to see the truth.

I have done a lot of things where upon presenting them to people, they would
say "What's the point?", "That can't be done", or commonly "There's no point
in an alternative to X. Even if it does work, people won't change from X". I
have even had "that's the stupidest thing I have ever seen"

The chances of those things becoming enormous successes are tiny, and I'm
aware of that. But the chances for those who _did_ become enormous successes
were also tiny.

It's a hard road, but only people who walk the road have a chance. Please,
rather than criticize the attempt, or the implementation, or the presentation,
or their use of apostrophes. Try offering directions that could help them in
the direction they want to be going. There's no point in saying "Turn back
now." Even if you think they are going in the wrong direction, they have made
their choice and the journey will be informative.

~~~
einhverfr
I would suggest a slightly different framework. Never say "turn back now."
However, I try to divide my criticism into three groups:

1\. Major show-stoppers need to be discussed and brought to light early on.
The point is not to say "don't get started" but rather to say "do you have any
idea what you are up against?" Having an idea is the first step to planning,
and planning is mostly valuable for mapping out obstacles and potential
solutions.

2\. Once one is past the commitment and planning phase, I think it is fine to
criticize implementation. The goal here is to bring up problems that might not
need to be solved right away but need to be on the radar.

3\. These need to be coupled with constructive support. Heavy criticism along
with solid support is golden. Heavy criticism without solid support is like a
lead weight.

------
ethanazir
No two ideas are ever the same; in the details... Sure Abraham Lincoln filed
for a patent on the essence of 'friendster' and other followed suit; but the
details make the difference.

~~~
jonnathanson
True, though the Abe Lincoln social-networking thing was a hoax.

(Lincoln held a patent, but it was for a method for helping boats navigate
sandbars).

------
graycat
> As I pointed out before, there are no new ideas. Everything of value has
> been done before in one form or another.

Let's see: Take idea some X and the set A of all efforts for idea X. Then take
the effort in set A that was earliest in time (probability of exact ties 0).
Call that effort T. Then when T was done, idea X was a "new idea" and not
"done before" in contradiction to the quote.

For there being "no new ideas", the research libraries are stuffed with
journals of peer-reviewed original research, and the usual standards for
publication are "new, correct, and significant". So, those libraries are
stuffed with "new ideas" that the quote says don't exist.

Are there new ideas in business? Sure: The transistor, the integrated circuit,
the Multics processor architecture (heavily borrowed since), security via
capabilities, access control lists, and authentication, the microprocessor,
RSA encryption, speculative execution, out of order execution, penicillin,
cardiac stents, and on and on.

'Nuff.

------
cstejerean
It's interesting that both Twitter and Facebook evolved quite a bit from where
they started. The newsfeed and chat have both altered how I use Facebook and
made it much more like twitter for me. When twitter first came out though I
don't really see how anyone could have claimed it was a Facebook clone.

~~~
pestaa
By this logic... Facebook is actually a Twitter-clone? My head spins.

------
muratmutlu
I saw a talk recently called 'everything is a remix' which said that every
idea is formed in some part by something that's been done before

[http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-
series/](http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/)

~~~
oscargrouch
somebody, somewhere must come with something for the first time.. this
copy/mix stuff is more reasonable in more common line of thinking (average
people)

how many people would be thinking at relativity when einstein did, or calculi
for newton(actually two with ), or marx thougts in "the capital", a music
piece by mozart or a painting by van gogh..

they created great things because their toughts were above average, and they
where not losing too much time with ordinary things.. like "what will i eat?"
"were are the kids" .. "i wanna a big iate" .. etc.. etc..

this kind of tought, that nothing is really original, only diminish the human
nature.. and if we mix and copy.. the problem are ourselves.. we can do
better, and improve with effort.. than some day.. that something really
original, that no human being could ever thought can come into reality

if people wanna think different things, they must first start to look to
different horizons, where nobody or almost nobody are looking at..

the innovations starts in the way you think.. you need to observe yourself
thinking, and be your own harsh critical

------
deerpig
Most of the comments here are twice as long as the original post, which wasn't
so much a post, but just a comment, on.... HN comments....

------
novaleaf
looks like the OP couldn't take the heat, and removed the original content.

Weak.

------
dpanah
Another smart twit. So he thinks.

------
powerpuffgirls
How is that even remotely interesting? wtf.

