
Ask HN: What to work on? - jere
I&#x27;m getting really tired of dreaming up cool ideas for apps, cranking out prototypes, and then finding there is zero interest. Here are my four best ideas for what to work on next. I don&#x27;t know how to &quot;validate&quot; them beyond a landing page&#x2F;adwords. Last time I attempted that, adwords banned my campaign immediately.<p>LongCal: Basically, a calendar that goes beyond the standard month&#x2F;week&#x2F;day view. Emphasis on long term thinking and planning. I made a very rough prototype here (click on logo to get some test data): http:&#x2F;&#x2F;humbit.com&#x2F;longcal&#x2F;<p>uTrim: A URL shortener for universities. The idea is to create trustworthy links that can only be created by people actually associated with a school. I already have a functioning app and if you don&#x27;t have an .edu account you can at least check out the landing page : https:&#x2F;&#x2F;utr.im&#x2F;<p>Vulgat Library: Helps businesses create an internal lending library (movies, books, games). I sold this to two game companies, so it&#x27;s the only thing I feel has proven demand. But I&#x27;d have no idea how to find more customers. This is the landing page that adwords objected to: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vulgat.com&#x2F;<p>Business naming app: After all the naming debacles I&#x27;ve seen on HN, I think an app that generates names (and checks against .com registration and trademark) could be really useful. My big doubt is if anyone would pay for it.<p>Do any of these sound worthwhile? Maybe I should just suck it up and do 30x500...
======
jacquesm
You're doing it wrong. No, seriously. Don't try to 'dream up cool ideas'. Go
talk to people, companies. Find out what _really_ frustrates them, see if you
share their view of their frustration and/or if you can find a solution that
is not entirely obvious and that gives you a way to monetize.

Make sure there is a large enough market before you put much more time in.
Then, once you've got a concept that is workable and has a large enough
potential market, try to convince your complainer-soon-to-be-customer to
become your pilot partner. Then execute on the idea you have, make your first
happy customer and then branch out to other people/companies with the same
problem.

------
digitalsushi
Here's an idea I have had for a while and I dont figure I am going to make it
so why not just see if someone else wants to make it.

It's mostly a mobile app because you have to be mobile to use it. (You can
emulate mobility at a desk, sure)

In my head I call this app "Road Stories"

The premise of this app is that while you're driving around, your phone knows
where you are, what speed you're going, etc. As you're driving home from your
folks, to stay awake you fire up Road Stories and when you are coming up on an
old memory worth sharing with the public, you hit record. The app starts
recording your voice. Base case, you're going the speed limit, there's no
traffic, so the story unfolds like one of those annotated amusement park
historical rides. "See that white house on the left?" You do, because you're
in sync with the original recorder. I'm sure there's some algorithm fudging to
make it work.

That's obviously producer mode. Then you have consumer mode. You leave it on,
and as it starts hitting nodes, it auto plays them. After there are
overlapping ones, it plays by newest, best, unlistened, etc cetera.

Advertisement is the obvious way to make any cash off it. I dont know anything
at all about that domain and I think this is why I never bothered trying to
make it. It'd be neat to know some local businesses tucked away off the
highway, sure. Mostly you're listening to hear either synthetic, or
historical, folklore.

I think it would be a neat way to make people more aware of where they are,
spread history, invent folklore, and just stay awake on that long-assed drive
across new hampshire at 10pm. Steal it if you want it.

~~~
wambotron
There was something similar to this at a startup called Broadcastr where
people would record audio at a given place. They ended up pivoting, and I
hadn't heard anything again about that idea until your post.

The real flaw with this is that most people are not natural story tellers.
It's hard to get content with that issue. You're bound to get people who like
to talk but have nothing to say, leaving you with a whole lot of nothing
useful.

------
adventured
The honest answer to your question is: the things you're creating aren't
serious businesses, they're toys. That's why you can easily dream them up and
crank out prototypes.

These things don't have pent up demand, and you're not solving meaningful
problems for people (thus there's no money or interest in them).

My suggestion would be to rethink what you think you know about being an
entrepreneur, or creating products for consumption. How you gauge whether
something will be useful for enough people, and why someone would pay for it.
You need to get a lot better at filtering out what seem like cool ideas, but
in fact are just toys that occupy (steal) your time.

I've made the same mistake you're making. It took me years to figure out what
I was doing wrong. Building what seemed like one cool thing after another, and
for some reason none of them were taking off.

Do one thing, _make sure that thing is worth doing_ , and put all your focus
behind it, unrelentingly for a long duration of time. Few things take off
right away, even when they're great businesses, they will always test your
will to stay in the fight. If you happen to find a great opportunity, and you
hop around and don't put all your effort into it for an extended amount of
time (even when things look grim), you'll never find out if it has a shot at
success. The emphasis is: make sure what you're doing with your time is truly
valuable ("is this the most valuable thing I can be doing with my time?" is a
legitimate question to use as a filter).

~~~
ddod
I think half of your advice is really good, and the other half not as much.
We've all seen examples of seemingly useless things becoming very successful.
Twitter, the Yo app, Let's Players, Beats by Dre, and so on. Your secondary
advice of focusing on something and putting all your efforts into it is what
separates toys from serious businesses. Most of our world runs on socially-
fabricated needs and wants, so it's not surprising that things like yet-
another-social-network or streaming yourself playing video games could be
lucrative.

------
sophacles
I know several universities already run url shortening services in-house, only
providing access for faculty/staff/etc. One of the drivers for this is
guaranteed longevity - urls in research papers need to live for a long time,
but they also need to be short as papers have page limits.

In fact, finding that the university which employs me has a url shortener was
a happy day - the url looks official, but it took a whole 2 lines from a
column in the paper I was writing. If you haven't had the "joy" of trying to
fit your whole idea into a short page limit, you may not understand how much
space that really is... Remember in high school when you would fudge margins
and font and so on, and using big words unnecessarily to reach the minimum
pages? Similar tricks are often done in reverse for research papers.

If you're going to sell that service to smaller universities that don't run
their own, or bigger universities looking to outsource, here's a few things
that really matter:

1\. Being able to tie into the existing SSO/Federated ID system the university
uses.

2\. Being able to guarantee lifetimes of the shortened links - perhaps even
providing for running the service after the company goes away (if this
unfortunately happens). Alternately, providing a way to migrate data to a
local machine w/in the university if all else fails.

3\. The ability to attach a university affiliated domain name - this lets
shortened urls look official rather than shady.

4\. The ability to move the shortened url target. Long lifetimes conflict with
changes in infrastructure in the customer organization.

5\. The ability to notify any/all of: the original poster, the poster's
department, and the university it department when target links stop working.

6\. (maybe) a caching service in case a long term url goes down - oops the
page seems down, but here's a cache of what it last looked like....

~~~
jere
I'm aware of the existing in house services, but noticed there are still a
bunch of universities without one. Even some big names. Those are pretty good
points. Thank you.

------
jasonswett
If you're a solo founder I think the place where the money is is in "boring"
B2B products. There's a whole community called the micro-ISV community you
might not be aware of that is full of people doing what you seem to want to
do.

I wrote about the micro-ISV community here: [http://www.jasonswett.net/the-
whos-who-of-the-micro-isv-worl...](http://www.jasonswett.net/the-whos-who-of-
the-micro-isv-world/)

~~~
jnye131
I found the link to bootstrapped forums very helpful, thanks.

~~~
davidw
It's a great community of people. It's still pretty small, but it's also very
focused, which is nice. It could probably use just a tad more 'mass' to really
become a going concern.

This is an alternative to Amy's 30x500:
[http://www.micropreneur.com/](http://www.micropreneur.com/) by the same guys
who put on MicroConf, which is a great event.

------
Kiro
What is 30x500? I googled and it looks like some kind of class but I don't
understand. What is 30 and what is 500?

~~~
meritt
Traditional scammy bullshit. Pay $2k to take a class to learn how to be a
millionaire when the only route they're actually familiar with is selling
online scams.

~~~
jacquesm
There a big divide between selling a course that teaches you how to run an
online business and a scam. One thing is for sure there is _one_ party
guaranteed to make money of the course (the provider of the course), but if
you need to have things spelled out to you and tailored before you understand
then a hands-on course may work well.

Personally I don't see the value in it but I'm fairly sure that others do.
Calling it a scam is not nice. It also would require that you label lots of
other things scams as well if you want to apply the same principle to
teaching-for-money.

Probably I'm operating a scam (after all, what's the use of telling people
things they already should know about the companies they're about to invest in
for a fee) as well in your book.

Nobody forces you to sign up for that course, if you don't see the value,
don't do it. And if you did sign up for it and you felt it wasn't worth your
money then write about it or talk about it. Maybe ask for your money back.
Lotteries are borderline scams, 419 schemes, pyramids, MLM, those are all
scammy (as are sites that claim to sell you an article when in fact they sell
you a subscription).

30x500 is not a scam by any definition that I'm aware of.

Please provide evidence to the contrary, nothing is wrong with teaching people
how to run a business for a fee, and if not all of them become millionaires
but the course providers to then that's business as usual. Evaluate the
course, state what's wrong with it and how it could be improved.

(I have no dog in this particular race but I don't like such terms to be used
lightly, especially not about other forum members without there at least being
some actual evidence.)

~~~
heyalexej
Thanks for spelling that out.

------
dalacv
By the way, I would say that despite the amount of work you have put into
these ideas (a little or a lot), none of these pages made me want to "sign
up". Some honest feedback:

LongCal - Though it is a prototype, it is very unclear how I would use such a
tool. I use a regular calendar, and it is working for me just fine.

uTrim - It's been a while since I was in school, so I can't really say whether
this solves a problem that I had.

Vulgat Library - sounds interesting, but I can't tell much from the landing
page.

30x500 - I wouldn't shell out that much cash unless I have seen proven results
(and not just off of their website copy). Do you know anyone who has gone
through that program?

~~~
mcdougle
I could be wrong, but I think uTrim is designed with professors in mind --
namely, the ones that publish their research. They'd be the end users. I
honestly don't think students would care enough (maybe grad students who are
publishing research).

It seems like the monetization strategy would be to get the university itself
to purchase the product (licenses or something) and then that would allow
anyone affiliated with that university to publish trustworthy, shortened URLs
(to their research, or in their research to whatever resources they used).

At least, that's what makes the most sense to me.

------
czbond
Some feedback from someone who has been in the same position. Most projects
seem to have little interest at first. Your job is to iterate on the value
prop, customer needs, and messaging - ideally by talking to customers. Simply
running ads does not give you feedback that you need: eg: is there no interest
because people don't understand the product (for me, Vulgat provided me no
insight), or is it that the value prop isn't clear. Talk to people - the end
user/buyer/purchasing cycle/industry/vertical is vastly different for each of
these products. Focus on a product you can directly access the users. IMHO

------
keithwarren
I am actually working on a project that I started for personal use, it lets me
define a bunch of ideas and some metrics about those ideas (like market size,
revenue potential etc) and then weight and score each of those metrics. I can
then share this list with friends and colleagues who can also score the
metrics about each idea, without seeing mine or anyone else's score so there
is no bias.

The gist is, finding an objective (or as close to it) way to evaluate ideas
within a simple structure.

Anyone else interested? Anything better already exist?

Basically, I had too many ideas and could not decide what to work on.

------
dalacv
I read through the first half of this book (link at end) and some of the ideas
in it may help you. It talks about some specific examples of iterating through
the validation cycle. I can't say that I've created a multi-million dollar
business off of the ideas in it. But some of the specific steps that the
author outlines just make sense once you read them.
[http://runninglean.co/](http://runninglean.co/)

------
lprubin
I recommend working in reverse and picking a target market/niche that you want
to serve, and then finding and interviewing people from that industry/market.
Ask them what problems they face on a day to day basis. Find out how painful
those problems are and find out how they're solving them now. If the problem
is painful enough and you can solve it better than how people are already
solving it, people might very well pay for it. (Patio says every time you find
a problem being solved with passing excel sheets around, a SaaS angel gets its
wings).

Then brainstorm a solution to the most painful problem or two that you can
solve with software, double back to your interviewees and see if they would
pay for it. If a decent percentage are willing to pre-pay for it, you've
already got your early adopters waiting for you and you didn't have to write a
line of code. If nobody is interested, you may have saved yourself a ton of
time and effort and now you can easily move on to researching the next
problem/target market.

More info: [http://www.smoothconversion.com/blog/why-you-don-t-
validate-...](http://www.smoothconversion.com/blog/why-you-don-t-validate-
your-product-idea/)

------
yeezul
Concerning uTrim, I'd juste like to point out that you shouldn't limit
yourself only to .edu. I'm a Comp. Science student at Concordia Unviersity[1]
in Montreal, Canada and I personally hate it when certain services are limited
to U.S. university users, when in fact they would be extremly useful for other
students in different countries that do not use an .edu domain.

As an example, Concordia uses different email adresses depending on your
faculty: _@jmsb.concordia.ca,_ @encs.concordia.ca etc.

I believe it would be a good idea if you could implement a way of submiting
"new" universities to the list of accepted schools, which can then be
handpicked by youself. I suppose ideally a list of most universities available
would be better. Dropbox used an amazing email list for their Space Race
challange a few years ago, however I can't seem to find it.

[1] [http://www.concordia.ca/](http://www.concordia.ca/)

------
dennybritz
Here are some thoughts, even though I'm not sure you asked for it ;)

LongCal: I think there is something there with regards to "long-term
thinking". But don't market it as a "calendar app". I believe there is
potential in tracking people's long-term goals, breaking them down into tasks,
and translating these tasks into chunks of work to build daily schedules and
habits. The above is what I currently do in a text editor, and there is no
"calendar app" that can do it for me. Don't make another calendar app, the
space is overcrowded with Machine Learning powered calendar apps. How to
validate? This one is tricky. I'd try customer interviews strategy (dalacv
posted a book) to see if people are really unhappy with their current time
management apps, and why. No need to build something before you figure out the
pain points. Ideally you have a mockup of what you have in mind in order to
validate your hypotheses against what people are telling you in interviews.
Monetization is an issue you don't usually worry about with these kind of
products. If you build a great product then people will come, and with enough
people money will come.

uTrim: I'm not sure about this one. I never use URL shorteners unless they are
already integrated in a service I'm already using (e.g. Twitter). The bigger
opportunity here may be to sell this directly to universities and
automatically shorten anything that is posted on university-internal mailing
lists and forums and provide analytics on top of that. How to validate? Try to
sell it to universities (in particular, certain departments for certain
products and then let it ripple through other departments)

Vulgat Library: I'm assuming employees lend stuff to other employees (landing
page isn't clear on this)? How to validate? Figure out what segment your
customers are in and try to sell it to them. You'd probably need a more
exhaustive landing page. This can be consumerized enterprise play where you
are selling to individual employees within a company. They can set up the
system themselves without needing permission from any higher-ups. They then
invite other employees. Basically the Dropbox model. This way you can use
consumer marketing strategies instead of needing B2B sales.

Business naming app: I may be wrong but personally I'd forget about this one:
1. Generating good names automatically is extremely difficult 2. I doubt
people want to have generated names 3. Don't see obvious monetization 4. One-
time use

------
chegra
I remember in school, there were subjective subjects like literature where
your grade is based on how someone else, ie the teacher, felt about your work,
and there were objective subjects like maths where no matter if the teacher
liked you or not, you got your right grade. Try focusing on the part of
business that is objective.

What I am saying is that find businesses where the quality of the product is
directly correlated with the success of the product. For instance, if you
could create an exaflop computer, I don't care if you are bad at marketing you
will be rich. Another example is AI, if you could get software to learn
generally, you will be successful. Yet another example, being able to easily
control an android(human size) remotely[this could be used in construction,
farming, security, elderly care, site seeing etc.].

These are hard problems to solve, but you are trading easiness of producing a
product for a guarantee on success.

------
ChikkaChiChi
Think lazy.

The most successful technological innovations throughout history have come
from making a manual or longer process automated or to take less time. Start
with things in your life that you feel are unnecessarily complicated and map
out the possibilities from there.

The other issue is that the techosphere is plagued with solutions that solve
the problems of the technocrats that populate it. Start talking to your family
and friends outside of our bubble and ask them what is on their wishlist. Find
someone in a flyover state that still has a flip phone and has no reason to
upgrade to a smart phone because there aren't any solutions to problems they
have.

We are in the infancy stages of what computing and wireless technology can
accomplish. Those that bring something new to the table have the greatest
chance to succeed, and the odds are best when you tap into a market that isn't
currently being served.

It isn't sexy, but it is profitable.

------
j_s
Far more important than ideas is learning to validate them quickly;
unfortunately HN is a bad place for validation since few here are your target
market.

If you're looking for more ideas, here is some additional reading:

Passive income ideas:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868)

Startup ideas spreadsheet 2010: [http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag-
R_ZlGO21NdE9HSWRk...](http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag-
R_ZlGO21NdE9HSWRkbjNyUGRxS2JIV3NxYVdiaXc&hl=en_GB)

2012 re-discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190974](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190974)

Further HN discussions of ideas:
[http://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/forever/0/startup%20ideas](http://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/forever/0/startup%20ideas)

------
chandika
The key is to find customers first. If you have a hunch that something should
work, there is always a possibility that you can uncover some pain points that
you can build a business around.

You need to speak to enough customers and iterate on what you offer to figure
out the validity.

Coding stuff up is always a lot more comfortable, and a no-touch approach like
adwords based validation is 'easy', but really, you need to be in front of
people to understand if there is any validity to your thinking.

Open ended conversations around the problem area usually results in great
insight and can lead to some valid ideas you can work off of. Also, speak to
more than one person in a given problem area and it's not too hard to ask 'do
you know anyone else that has this kind of problem?' to find a common theme
and get an idea of a market size thats worth your time.

------
shrig94
It looks like you're a great engineer but not an "idea" dreamer (that's not
bad news, since most people aren't).

I think the best you can do to ensure your success is to make sure this is a
problem with real demand--a great way to get started, since you're a great
engineer, would be to do some software consulting for someone under the
premise of you building software for your startup to sell and doing additional
custom work for them (IP reasons). This is awesome because you essentially
keep the lights on while being assisted by your customer in creating a product
that has an actual need; whether that need extends beyond your customer is
another story entirely--though, doing this a few times, you'll probably land
on something universal.

------
zhte415
LongCal seems like quite a nice interface for writing a theme based biography
(of self, project, company, etc) with a super nice way of zooming in to detail
and out to big picture. I like it. Someone like NYT could well use that type
of interface for a long-form article, obituary of someone particularly
prominent, a country or government, etc. Coloured themes / tags run on the y
axis, time on the x.

------
walterbell
Have you considered identifying one target market first, then working
backwards? If you identify one group of humans (with healthy budgets!) that
you want to serve, every discarded prototype for that market will surface new
knowledge of what they need.

Re: naming, [http://namevine.com](http://namevine.com) asks for current
registrar and may be earning affiliate revenue.

~~~
mikejarema
I'm the dev behind Namevine. It makes a little bit of side income for me via
affiliate revenue. That initial popup is an attempt to help me prioritize
which affiliate integrations to pursue next and of course helps ensure users
are sent to register at a registrar they'd likely purchase at.

------
femmebot
Since the HN community does not necessarily represent the target market for
the ideas you mentioned (except, maybe the Business Naming app), you won't get
usable data by polling the wrong audience. If you're interested in generating
income for your effort, you'll need to know how to sell the product — and to
whom — to help inform what to build.

------
jay-saint
A quick suggestion if you want Vulgat.com to succeed you seriously need to
build out your website and put some focus on SEO. A pretty landing page with
no detail no content will have a huge bounce rate and never rank for any terms
that are relevant to the product. Your site does not even rank for its own
brand name.

------
ads1018
Make sure there's a market for you ideas before you build them. Read Business
Model Generation.

[http://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-Generation-
Visionaries-...](http://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-Generation-Visionaries-
Challengers/dp/0470876417)

------
Envec83
My advice would be to dream bigger. You can't be sure if anything will work,
so why not take a shot at something big then? I don't see any of those ideas
becoming large businesses.

------
redmaverick
I like LongCal. It is pretty good. I would use it. Not sure I would be willing
to pay for it though.

~~~
Chromozon
I somewhat agree. LongCal seems like a neat little tool, but I would not pay
money for it nor would I use it for very long. The defining feature is being
able to scroll in and out to see shorter and longer periods of time at a quick
glance, but that's about it. You said the emphasis was on long term planning.
However, I don't personally do any long term planning further out than a year,
and I feel as though most other people are the same way. The only long term
things I can think of are planning to take a vacation in two years or saving
enough money to buy a house in four years. I don't think a calendar app is
going to help with these goals because they are too big to forget. Also, the
calendar app market is dominated by big players that provide integration with
email, Facebook, etc. It's fine for a learning project, but I'm not sure how
you are going to get anyone to switch from using their Google calendar to
yours.

------
heyalexej
Is 30x500 some sort of framework? As in 30 tiny projects, aiming to generate
$500 each?

Your problem seems to be a recurring theme here on HN and elsewhere. People
building amazing stuff (as in intellectually stimulating, fun to build,
difficult to do, impressive etc.) with amazing technology (shiny new
languages, stacks etc.), launch it and yet nobody seems to care. Nobody seems
to be willing to throw money at an app, service and so on. Why is that? People
often build things that solve non-issues. And I love all of this, 99.5% of the
stuff I build is purely for fun, learning, play and prove something (to
myself). But that's not where the money is most of the time, though the things
I learn from play are useful for the 0.5%.

I'm sure you read everything there is to know about the entire lean thing
(Business Model Generation got mentioned already). Are you familiar with the
work of Dane Maxwell [1]? As jasonswett wrote, the money is in the boring
stuff. Dane Maxwell developed a robust and proven framework to help
bootstrapped businesses with hands-on advice and mentoring. I highly recommend
to have a look at his work and look up some of the success stories. It's very
inspiring and you can learn a thing or two. His advice is more in the tune of
people like DHH (you're much more likely to succeed in building a small
company that solves a specific problem than, say, the next Facebook). Does it
seem achievable for you to build an app with 50 users who pay €150 each? Or
with 100 users who pay $70 each? Would you be happy with something like this
for a start?

Pick something that solves a real problem in an area where there's money. B2B
that is. Pick something that bothers you when you interact with other
businesses as a starting point. Why is there friction? Work from there. Talk
to those businesses and ask them what their biggest pain points are. What they
would be willing to pay for if somebody (you) would solve it. You will have to
pick up the phone, write emails and talk to people in person. That's all scary
stuff (at least for me). You will be surprised what businesses are struggling
with. Which things eat up tons of their resources and could be solved with
open source solutions that you simply glue together. Once you find something
that you think you can solve, nail the business owners down on it. Demand
commitment. Make them part of the process and work closely with them. They
will become your evangelists later on. Make them pay for a year in advance.
That will truly validate your business idea. Only then start to build.

[1] [http://thefoundation.com](http://thefoundation.com) [2]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Athefoundation.com](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Athefoundation.com)
*

* The website is built in a way that it's hiding some of the content. You get it for a share on Facebook or an email sign up - that's why I've chosen this form.

~~~
saevarom
30x500 is basically a sales course: [https://30x500.com/](https://30x500.com/)

~~~
heyalexej
Oh. That thing. Thanks for digging it up. My brain seems to actively suppress
some things. Can't judge the product though. May or may not be helpful for
some people who need help or guidance with certain things and I wouldn't go as
far as calling it a scam (as people in this thread pointed out). It just may
not be the right product for a certain group of people.

------
riffraff
why did adwords object to the homepage?

~~~
jere
They pointed to two explanations:

>Google allows sites that collect personally identifiable information from
users as long as this is not the primary purpose of the site.

>Google doesn't allow the promotion of sites that offer incentives in order to
collect users' personal information (such as free quiz/survey results,
horoscopes, etc.) where collecting this information is the primary purpose of
the site.

If offering updates on the project is an "incentive", well, I have no idea how
anyone does this. The adwords+landing page concept is so ubiquitous on HN.
I've asked here before and gotten no explanation.

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tzaman
Do 30x500. I'm having a hard time seeing any of the above becoming
multimillion businesses. But then again, maybe you're just not good at
pitching :)

