
Ask HN: Those of you who started companies.  Where did you get your idea? - tinktank
I have started working in Enterprise software and am very interested in soaking up ideas for potential new companies.  Where did you guys get your ideas for a company? Did the idea pan out?
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smt88
This is an unnecessarily risky approach. Don't start with ideas -- start with
a market.

Do you have lots of friends whonare dentists and would use software for
dentists just because you asked them to? Great! Now figure out if there's
something they all need.

You should have friends and family lined up to use a specific prototype before
you write a single line of code.

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siquick
tldr; solved my own problem

I was having problems keeping up with all the new vinyl releases that were
coming up so I built a tool to collate them into one easy to navigate place. A
couple of years later this turned into a customer-facing website.

Then I realised that once I found the record I wanted it was hard to find a
store that had it in stock as most of the records i wanted were very limited
releases. So i extended the site to do a real-time stock check of my favourite
record stores to show me which had the records in stock.

I now have record shops coming to me wishing to be listed in the stock check
feature and I charge them money to appear, either through a monthly
subscription or a CPA basis.

site: [https://www.soundshelter.net](https://www.soundshelter.net)

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operatorius
Found a small bug: Was searching for cs + kreme records (cs and kreme) clicked
to check for stock on hhv, hardwax, deejay.de and juno

Juno showed expected search results - actual page of the record; hardwax was
queried for the label name - total stasis - ok; hhv showed completely
irrelevant results although they do not have that record in stock at all;
deejay.de query was malformed. An attempt was made to search for "total
stasis" (label name) but ended up in searching for total 20stasis.

I've noticed that deejay.de expects to query with whitespace being replaced by
a plus sign /total stasis ends up in /total+20stasis and /total+stasis is a
correct param that gives the expected results

~~~
siquick
Thanks for the feedback - pushed a change to fix the malformed DJ request.

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jonathan-kosgei
I wasn't that great with frontends or particularly patient enough to learn it
all, so I built an API - ipdata.co

8 months later, and I'm glad I did it.

~~~
tinktank
Very cool but I'm surprised you're able to make money in such a competitive
environment. Did you know of the competitors before you started or did you
just do it?

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mabynogy
YC catchphrase is good for that "make what people want". Try to understand
what people around want or need.

