

Coshx Labs is giving away $50k of development. No strings attached. - btaitelb
http://competition.coshx.com/

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darkFunction
Clever. So they get lots of great app ideas, pick the 4th or 5th best idea as
the winner, build it, and then get to work on the actual best idea submitted
for themselves.

~~~
wasd
ideas have very little value. what really matters is the execution team.

~~~
mildtrepidation
People love to say this, but it just isn't true. Ideas can be very valuable,
particularly when they come from a well-informed perspective in an untapped
niche/market.

Of course an idea isn't useful without execution, but without the idea, you
have nothing to execute.

~~~
mixmax
Here's the question I always ask when the idea vs. execution debate comes up:
Can you give me one single example of someone having sold an idea for a
sizeable amount of money?

I haven't heard any good answers yet.

~~~
mbesto
Better yet - if ideas themselves had value, there would be a marketplace for
them.

Note - There currently is no marketplace for ideas that I know of.

~~~
c0w
> There currently is no marketplace for ideas that I know of.

Have you heard of Venture Capital?

~~~
mbesto
Actually, I have. Venture Capital is financial capital used to fuel early
stage or high risk business startups.

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korzun
"We can build the technology, that is the easy part. Turning a product into a
sustainable business is the challenge."

Technology is 'easy' if your portfolio (
[http://www.coshx.com/projects](http://www.coshx.com/projects)) consists of
applications such as poll management and event scheduling.

In reality if you are going to build something awesome, it's not going to be
easy.

~~~
jmathai
> In reality if you are going to build something awesome, it's not going to be
> easy.

Turning a product into something that people like and use is nearly impossible
(statistically speaking). Once you solve that then turning it into a
sustainable business is easy.

Seriously, it's all hard. Only people who haven't tried to do it believe it's
easy.

~~~
korzun
Agreed, I just wanted to point out how silly that line is given the projects
their company build.

"Let's build a new search engine, easy stuff! We build a to-do application
just the other day!'

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saganus
I tried sending an email to competition@coshx.com but I got a mail delivery
subsytem error:

"We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact
(competition) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages
to the group".

Maybe there's a misspelling somewhere? has anyone tried to send an email there
as wel?

~~~
btaitelb
Sorry about that, we had the permissions set too strictly. It's fixed now, and
I want to thank you for bringing this to our attention before the competition
starts.

~~~
saganus
Great!

------
dang
This sort of contest announcement is not really Hacker News material, even
though it is an appeal to the HN demographic. The trouble is that such posts
are not themselves intellectually interesting. If something cool gets built as
a result, that would be interesting, and well worth posting here.

------
Thedavek
I'm a developer at Coshx. We'll have full details on the rules and such when
the contest starts. Will also see if someone can answer questions here but I
don't know the answers to these offhand. Thanks for your patience and
interest. :)

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refrigerator
Awesome! Any idea how public the public voting will be? i.e will a large
community (4chan) be able to vote for their own idea and win easily?

~~~
owenthethird
Thanks so much for the interest (Owen from Coshx here). The voting will be
100% public for the first round in order to pick the 5 finalists. If an
individual or team can get the entire 4chan community behind them, then I call
that market validation and more power to them! Official rules will be sent out
soon and they state that an individual or team must be behind the concept, but
that operating companies are excluded from getting free work. We want to help
someone launch and idea, not reduce costs for a profitable company.

~~~
dangrossman
Being able to get 4chan to vote on something is probably more correlated with
meme creation skill than validation of a market for any product. This type of
contest often measures the size of participants' networks and their ability to
leverage it, not the things being voted on. Lots of them run by large brands
end up being won by people like teachers who can convince their boss to ask
all the students in the district to vote for their teacher because they know
him/her, regardless of the idea submitted.

~~~
owenthethird
If we help a teacher launch a great idea then I will consider this competition
to be a resounding success. I am sure some people will try and 'game' the
voting, but this is part of the reason the final winner will be picked by
experts. We toyed with picking the winner ourselves, but this is against the
spirit of what we are trying to accomplish.

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mpeg
US-only ?

~~~
saganus
Same thing I was going to ask. They say the contest rules will be published
when the competition starts if I'm not mistaken.

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manishsharan
Why post this on HN ? We are mostly programmers , techies or in tech business
and s/w is not difficult for us. Why not advertize/post this on Business
magazines or trade publications for Dentists , Doctors , Plumbers and such ?

~~~
owenthethird
Why not advertise on both? People at HN have already asked some great
questions and even offered helpful insights, and we appreciate that.

~~~
manishsharan
You are right; my post was not phrased well. What I meant was that Dentists,
Doctors and Trades people etc. would appreciate this offer as well or even
more. And to publicize this offer to them, you may have to advertize in their
publications.The downside is that the cycle would be much longer.

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Cassandra108
Gotta spread the word on this one!

