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Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
337 points by 0bsidian on Oct 30, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 550 comments
I have spent the past year looking for good ideas for a startup and have little to show for it.

--------------------

-Things that we have:-

1) A great early team, made up of myself (just a normal bizdev guy) + 1 talented former private equity partner (who made a fortune on Wall Street) + 1 talented CMU CompSci PhD. The three of us have been friends for years and work together really well.

2) Investors that are willing to write blank checks (within reason) because of the trust in the team (mainly former colleagues of the PE guy).

3) Cash in the bank to continue experimenting

4) An interest in SaaS and ML (and some experience in the latter)

-Things that we don't have:-

1) Ideas of what to do

--------------------

We have read EVERYTHING on how to come up with startups ideas (ranging from Paul Graham essays to The Mom Test). We have ran interviews with friends in corporate and startups, asked old colleagues, attented conferences, organised meetups in our city, a ton of time spent networking, etc.

The few product ideas we came up with following the above process we dropped, often because we discovered that that space is ultra crowded or commooditized.

We will not give up but are getting unsure on how to break the stalemate.

Any tips or advice?

Thanks!




My simple advice is to stop looking for ideas and to start looking for problems.

Look for the pain, and to do that talk to people.

The challenge will be that most people accommodate the pain in order to get something done, but they don't like it.

A recent pain point I came across was that 501.c(3) organizations are good at organizing but often poor at "the Internet". That suggested that if you talked to a half dozen charities you could probably find a way to offer them a 'internet presence service' that would be a combination of tools to do calendaring, outreach, donor management, payment/donation processing, testimonial pages, event landing pages, Etc. Think of it as a mashup of Calendar, Wordpress, PayPal, Salesforce, and Quickbooks online. You make their interface to the site both simple to get to (suggest a hardware token) and the web sites appearance to be professional to people visiting.

If you architected it right you could also make it a onestop 'election' website (similar sorts of things and similar reporting requirements for donations etc)

Find folks who would like to get more out of the Internet or have trouble with it, and solve their problem in a way that saves them real money or real time. Then sell that to people in the same situation.


>My simple advice is to stop looking for ideas and to start looking for problems.

I concur, and add that HN could really help OP by complaining about random stuff here. Just complain about the first thing that comes to mind that's been bugging you, OP will really appreciate it!


Humanity is on a sure collision course with ecological disaster and potentially billions of deaths. Do something about climate change. Anything. Every new startup should be addressing the fact that we are on the Titanic and the iceberg is getting closer.


This is terrible advice. OP asks for concrete ideas and your answer is "the sky is falling."


Do you have a source for the 'disaster' and 'billions'?


There are mountains of evidence that we are on track for several degrees Celsius change by the end of the century. It's enough to make some large metropolitan coastal areas uninhabitable and huge swaths of farmland unusable. It will destroy the economy to uproot half the human population and move, and thus cause mass migration and starvation.

I hate to use labels but to believe anything else is to be a climate change denier.


What if you're wrong? I mean I don't see any of the evidence that you see, just a bunch of computer models that fit a curve.


I would recommend starting with Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet[1] by Mark Lynas which summarizes the research of many hundreds of scientists.

1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees:_Our_Future_on_a_H...


There is an all too common type of blog/post where the writer has said "[Large entity] has done something really dumb and all of my avenues for remedy have come to nothing".

The post goes sufficiently viral that it gains the attention someone within [large entity] who can actually do something about it. This is a terrible model. It's not really a model at all, it is the complete absence of any working model.

Make something that enables individuals to tell large entities that something needs to be done. Effectively turn input from many into a list of meaningful, actionable items that get delivered who have the capacity and desire to do something about it.


Though note that in that case the problems will mostly be techie problems - a useful way to find less crowded spaces is to ask people from different walks of life what their pain points are.


This is solid advice. Find people who aren't technically inclined but 'forced' to use the Internet to do something vital. They often have many things they would like automated.


Yeah these are the people I like to talk to. I've built some great apps based on things I've been told by these folks.


Finding these people is a big challenge in itself...


Yeah you know, it's a great way to catch up with old friends and family. Just tell them you'd like to know their technical problems, and ask them to describe them. Sounds weird at first, but people love talking about themselves and will see it as you being interested in their lives, which is the truth. My dad told me about a problem that I built an app for years ago, and he still talks about it like it was the most amazing thing in the world. And once they know you're interested, all those people will tell you their technical frustrations pretty much anytime you see them. Sounds weird, I know, but it's something everyone can relate to, them having a technical frustration that you can solve. They'll appreciate you asking.


Finding non-technically inclined people is a challenge?! Do you live in the ISS?


Try the local chamber of commerce or any non technical forum or Facebook group.


Here's mine: fix income inequality and the staggering inequality in the distribution of wealth worldwide.

How is that a startup? I dunno, maybe there's a small part of that big problem that you can start tackling. Maybe it has to do with some facet of the economy you're improving/making more efficient, maybe it has to do with influencing policy. That's for you to figure out.

Find a big, big problem, and then look for a manageable chunk that your team can execute an idea on. You're in this for the long haul, right?


People who start companies are typically looking to increase “wealth inequality”.


Think of it more as like a negative externality.

People that use a car are not "typically looking to increase the rate of global warming and actively pollute the environment".

Using a car is a means of getting from place A to B, in the process however, you create a negative externality (i.e. pollute the environment).

When you create a startup you generally want to solve a very specific problem X at a grand scale, when you are able to do this while making some profit/growing in value you inevitably contribute to "inequality" as an externality.


Not really, most companies are small and don't pay more than a decent income even for the founders. VC-funded startups are an exception, not the rule. Even among software companies, I'd say, if you look beyond the US.


But (One of) the ambition(s) is usually to make money, thereby increasing inequality. I have yet to find a startup with the ambition to pay everyone median salary and donate the rest to low-income households. Nothing wrong with that, just a fact :)


The company I worked for previously paid decent (but not extravagant) salaries, and profits in the order of the low dozens of thousands annually. Meanwhile, our job consisted of outbidding and replacing SAP and Oracle solutions costing $$$$.

Paying $10 to an SMB owner instead of $100 to Bill Gates et all reduces inequality, it doesn't increase it.


Let me guess: you had a heck of a time hiring qualified engineers.


Shocked that the idea startup people can “save the world” is still going strong in Q4 2027

Would have hoped the last year would have shook you all to your senses


Hah, good point. I don't like to rant usually, but this is for the good cause.

I'm annoyed I feel the internet is turning more and more hateful.

I'm annoyed writing and fixing tests takes half of my time when writing code.

I'm annoyed business people only see the difference of salary asked and not what experience brings when having to choose between a junior dev and a senior one.


> I'm annoyed writing and fixing tests takes half of my time when writing code.

Then just don't write tests and wait for what happens, when you find a bug 6 month into production. ;-)


TBH, that's what I do. Most of the time the bug is insignificant enough that it doesn't really matter. Every once in a while I am freaking out trying to get an update through the app store at 1:00 am. For me, it's worth the tradeoff.


Fair enough. I wrote integration code to get shipping info into distributed logistics software.

I would've never done this without TDD because I dreaded to have hidden bugs sending washing machines to the wrong customers.


There's got to be a solution between those two extremes :)

I've started writing only integration tests, this is cool because most of the time it only breaks during refactoring when there actually are regressions. I've also made myself a chrome devtool to record my interactions with browser and generate capybara tests out of it, so it's quite fast to write and rewrite, it never happens anymore that I think "oh, maybe that change is not worth it".

But the thing is, this only works for apps/features having a web interface. I do more and more system programming, and I have no idea how to do integration testing on this (I think about using docker, but this would be even slower than piloting a browser).

So yeah, anyone who can solve the tests burden problem while still making code as robust, I'm interested.

(btw, you'll still find a bug in 6 months in production with 100% test coverage ;) )


Yes, no one said TDD code is 100% bug free.

I'm also not a fundamentalist when it comes to TDD. It really depends on "What can go wrong?" and "How much time does each route costs?"

The other day I showed the guy I'm mentoring how to write tests in go to test some Go middleware code for HTTP BasicAuth. This was some example code he found on the internet. And guess what, it has a basic logic flaw where it doesn't test for correctness of user AND password, but for correctness of user OR password.

Using code like this and not writing tests is really stupid.

When I was in university, I also read lots of papers on TDD. There are many "we had 20 students trying to solve a 2 hour problem with and without TDD"-papers and only a few "IBM and Microsoft used TDD and no TDD to write hardware drivers, these are the results" papers. Guess who I'm trusting more.


I remember when those papers were hitting headlines. The opinion of anti-TDDs back then was : "yes, it's certainly a good thing for students learning how to code", following the idea that it forced them to consider architecture rather than jumping on adding lines of code, and that experienced developers don't need it as much (thus, the conclusion was that those studies were biased toward people learning to code).

The answer of pro-TDDs was that you always benefit it, even when already experienced. I agreed with them, back then.

I don't remember seeing those about IBM and Microsoft, though. What were their conclusions?

Nowadays, I do what I jokingly call "documentation driven development", as a follow up for "top down development" that cucumber and the likes introduced. I'll usually first write about the problem I'm solving, then generally write about how I solve it, then write about components needed to implement that solution, then what those components do in details, then I write function signatures, and I stop there. I give it a month going back to it from time to time and I always figure out problems with it.

Refactoring that is awesome : no tests to change, no application code to change, it's just manipulating pure architecture, and it's incredibly fast to change while still being able to keep everything in mind. Careful planning is kind of replacing for me what TDD used to do (for the part about designing proper architecture ; I do integration testing for the part about catching regressions).

But really, I feel today that the methodology doesn't matter much : agile or not, TDD or not, this or that, whatever. What matters the most is people. The same methodology will have opposite results depending on who is applying it. I guess some methodologies will be better than others for learning programming, but I have really no clue how to measure that :)


As a pedestrian walking in SF, I am almost run over in crosswalks daily, even while knowing that drivers will run right through them. Fix that and I’d subscribe to a companion app with a blank white screen for $5/month..


Maybe, a platform where people pay to have specific problems solved by arbitrary agents.


Visibly carry a brick.


Easily fixable phones and laptops.

My phones and laptops are small enough and lightweight enough.

Making them bulletproof is too expensive. But making them easier to fix, documenting the process and authorizing repair shops would do be great.

PS: I don't need to be able to hot-swap parts.

PPS: pro models from Dell and HP at least are often quite easy to disassemble and fix and I think you can often source parts from eBay for years after you buy them.


There are many phones out there that are easy enough to fix the common problems with the right tools (heat gun, opener tool, set of small screwdrivers and picks). Replacing a dead screen is about an hour's work for a beginner and there are enough tutorials on youtube that most beginners will get it right first time. Most parts for common phones are commonly available on aliexpress. Most other problems can be dealt with by replacing motherboard/daughterboards or battery rather than needing to bother with reflowing solder.

The real problem is that phones depreciate so quickly that replacement parts (especially displays - Samsung LED screens etc are notoriously expensive) are often more expensive than buying a new second-hand phone on eBay unless you're willing to go down the route of separating bonded LCDs from glass/touch sensors is economically viable but that is much more difficult to do right, even with the right equipment (temperature-controlled hotplate).


Buy a Thinkpad? I went from opening it for the first time to having the internal screen cable replaced and working fine in a couple of hours.


Move to Europe https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kwaa5/the-europe...


I love how my Raspberri Pi I can just swap out the SD card and have a completely different OS. As a software developer, it would be awesome if I could do that on my laptop or phone.


Phones not made by Apple are easy enough to fix.

Just replaced the screen on my Mi Mix for about $100 plus an hour or so of my personal time.


I think iPhones are among the easiest to fix, nothing is sealed no mess no glue. The cheap replacement screen for 5,6,7 cost around 20£ and takes around 20min to replace.


should have known this, since it seems like common sense in retrospect.

I'm projecting from impressions I'd made since the Mac book pro became harder and harder to modify and upgrade. I'd constructed a faulty assumption about the repairability of iPhones.

It's never been difficult for me to find someone to repair one of my old iPhones in the past, I just quit on iPhones last year and feel somewhat disappointed with them since the v7s. (I am a fairly recent switcher to Android.)


As a manager at a large corporate the process for incurring expenses drives me nuts. There is an annoying approval process, expenses have to be logged, I have to look up the expense policy, justify the expense, track it against budget etc etc. Often there is modest expense I want to incur and I know the business is generally in favour, but the expense process is just so cumbersome and confusing that I dont bother. There must be a better way. Even though I have a corporate credit card I still have to keep invoices and assign each credit card expense to the right spending code etc.. Arggg, its making my blood boil just writing about it, somebody fix this please.


Pain HN? Show HN Pain? Moan HN?

i like the idea - we just need a new tag

HN Pain Point:

that seems more like it


I guess that's the basic idea behind http://oppsdaily.com/ and similar.


I used to think Dane Maxwell of The Foundation was the crazy one, and all those infopreneurs with blogs were geniuses.

I’ve since realized how wrong I was. Dane’s big thing was about interviewing small businesses, finding a pain and then being paid to solve that pain with a saas product. Seems pretty logical to me now.


NationBuilder[1] immediately comes to mind. Not as fully featured as you are suggesting, but targeting the same demographic.

[1] http://nationbuilder.com/


I agree with your premise but the example problem already has many established companies including Engaging Networks, EveryAction, Salsa, and Luminate. As a startup your job will either be to completely replace their stack in one fell swoop (VERY hard as a startup with no track record) or to somehow integrate in with the existing stack and eventually push it out (also hard but doable).


Well in the particular case this charity had no stack at all. They had a 'friend of a friend' who could do a web site, the person who knew me asked me how email worked because they wanted email addresses from the charity website but didn't want to change their "real" email addresses. I did my best but felt like something which was more like WPEngine would be a good single point of contact and setup. I also looked that the county 'dba list' (this is the 'doing business as' list that the county publishes to indicate when someone is doing business as a company name) and there were several new charities there. Seemed like a supply of leads for 'free'.

I don't disagree that there are people in this space. The nationbuilder folks (mentioned elsewhere) and apparently there are a couple people who specialize in setting up church web sites etc.

From a go to market strategy I'd probably advise that the team interview the executive committee of several new charities, compile a survey of charity sites and rank them from great to garbage, pull out the common functional features of every site, then decompose charities into every activity they do from filing tax returns to holding black & white balls. Look at how they manage payroll, volunteers, and assets. Listen to the problems the treasurer, directors, executive director, and donors have with charities. Where are their pain points and what does their day to day look like. Then pull all of that together and identify where there is commonality amongst groups and where their is uniqueness, and for each uniqueness attribute do the stake holders think it adds value or do they just not know any other way.

Then I would mock some interfaces to the infrastructure from using a phone, a web site, and maybe a chrome book like device. Look at security, look at complexity, look at time to complete tasks.

And finally after I felt the set of problems that could add significant value were identified, and I had helped a couple of new charities get from zero to online. I'd pull apart where the service business added value and where it didn't and develop a business model that was cost effective for the charity and sustainable for the startup to grow it in a boot strap fashion while the company got its feet under it for running its own organization.


I strongly agree with this. It is not an uncommon experience for me while working on something (either for work or personal) and hit a problem or annoyance and then go to work looking for the solution.

Occasionally, I can’t find a solution or what I find is either not quite right, too expensive, etc. When I have the problem myself I am genuinely motivated to find the answer and when I can’t... Well - I put that problem on my little list (along with a description of what I’d like the solution to be).

My list is currently over a hundred items long. Most aren’t great - but some of them are quite good. I review the list from time to time and the good ones continue to develop in my mind. I’ve tried some my favorites, and a few have turned into something.

I have also tried (at length) to come of with ideas from the “solution” side (rather than the problem side). It hasn’t lead me to any material success and I feel like I end up mentally circling around remixes of ideas and products that are already well established.


Are you willing to share your list with us? Would be curious to see it.


Sounds good on paper, but a lot of people's pains are things that are Features, not products. So discern between those.


Heh, my friend works for exactly that kind of a company - services for nonprofits. It doesn't do all of those things you listed, but a subset of them. They seem to always have clients and are doing pretty well.


Do an idea funnel like a sales funnel

1st stage is pains

2nd stage is pains we can solve (don't underestimate the need of domain knowledge here)

3rd stage is what we have the competence to solve and can come up with a better way of solving it


You might check out Flipcause[1] - they do a lot of what you're describing

[1] www.flipcause.com


Cggy I'D W


i was the Lead Product Designer in this space - creating a marketplace for NGOs and remote digital talent ( all cohorts ). Its a noble space to be in. https://Catchafire.org — if you need a 15yr pro that has built solid products ( from ideation > UX > MVP > growth ) hit me up. Also happen to be doing some Ai UX in the DoD app space.

* You will also need a seasoned full-stack agile dev team that can hit the ground running with your CTO at the helm. I got that too for you -;)


STOP. Just go work for someone else, please! Pretty please! Find someone with vision, and work for/with him/her instead. Or merge as equal partners.

You sound like really competent people, but working under people without their own vision and without their own ideas is a wrist slashing inducing experience... The people with the ideas/vision should be in charge, not ever the other way around! If you're execution people, find some "idea/vision people" and merge (like in 100% equal partners) with them and make you team whole.

Nobody wants more "execution people" in charge. If it's not vision/ideas what drives something... it's not worth doing it! we're all better without it! I'd work anytime under/with and asshole with good vision/ideas than another "executionist optimizer" that makes everyone's life hell trying to optimize profit and efficiency when nobody wants more optimizing. People want meaning from their leaders and managers, and this can only come from vision/ideas.

Go head hunt for "you team's Steve Jobs", not for "ideas". You want the "idea generator" and you want yo put him/her half-in-charge...


I so disagree. I've met so many "people with vision" who were far off with reality and ultimately failed miserably. Most successful startups I know, including my own, have pivoted - i.e. they had the wrong vision to begin with and figured out something else along the way. The team was what made them succeed.


Usually you want someone who’s also a domain expert and knows the market inside and out. More than just a vision that hasn’t been market tested.


And who knows how to run a business. Sadly, it is quite often the case that those at the helm of start-ups are absolutely clueless about what it takes to run an actual business.

This makes everything look fine and peachy until the VC money runs out.


So a domain expert with vision. What would he need this team for apart from maybe their money, which out of the three is probably the easiest to acquire?


A team that can execute is worth something too. The original comment stated (correctly in my opinion) that you want the person with vision to be in charge. But a domain expert with vision may or may not be able to execute against that vision effectively. If they are for real they'll have started, even if it just a manual process or horrible looking MVP. But if this team got together with someone with vision (and were able to check their egos at the door, not a small ask) they could really execute against that vision and bring a great product to market.


Most startups fail. Even if the likely outcome is failure, it's still better to have someone with a vision at the helm even if it's the wrong vision. You'll never find the shore if the boat doesn't move.


This went a different direction than I was expecting from the first paragraph. I thought it would go in the direction of "work for somebody else, so you can learn the problems/inefficiencies/pain points in their area and then build a startup fixing those".


I can't agree. Sure, founders need to have vision, but they also need to be "execution people". You think they should just raise money and outsource all the hard work to their reports? Gross.


It all depends on the terms both parties agree on!


Tough love:

You've done too much reading on the subject already and will learn nothing from reading even more by indulging yourself in the comments here.

And although good teams can find good ideas they have to "try and fail" at things, not just "consider and not try" things. I'm not sure how long you've been at this and which ideas you have considered and rejected and for what reasons, but if it has been longer than a couple of months, you don't have the right team makeup. You need someone with a strong product background immediately to find the intersection of product market fit and what you all are actually good at and will be passionate about building.

I'd love to hear more about what you've thought of and dismissed.


I think the problem as described is actually a team problem.

You don't have a good team without a vision leader who is articulating the ideas and steering the company. Like a boat with no captain, labor and capital resources are important but ultimately useless without a captain who has a vague idea of the endpoint and a sense for the roadmap. Try to dig into your collective social networks and see if you know anyone who has a vision but not the wherewithal to execute.

FWIW Money doesn't magically solve a problem, it merely exacerbates a situation. Talent doesn't solve a problem without a clear understanding of the problem being solved. As much as people on HN like to devalue the importance of ideas, it is an extremely important part of the process


This is the most obvious issue. They don't have a great team. At best, they have potential great team members. A great team implies applying talent and a vision to solving problems. They can't come up with a problem to try to tackle. Most people here on HN have 7 problems they'd love to work on but don't have the time or resources. I also think it is a big challenge to pick a problem you don't understand or have no background knowledge about.

I'd suggest picking an industry with known inefficiencies (health care, education, etc.) and have all three go work at three different companies in that space for a year. Then come back and I'm sure lack of ideas won't be the issue.

Remember, ideas are almost worthless and at best merely a head start. Execution is EVERYTHING.


> Like a boat with no captain

They haven't even left the dock.


How can they? There's no captain.


They have a dock, and no boat?


Yep. You need the product guy.


Or gal


Yeah I agree that they appear to be missing a designer or product developer. More concretely, they need someone who is imaginative and can see the big picture from a user/customer perspective.


Exactly. And since that piece is missing, I wouldn't describe that team "great", but at most "good" or "promising". Maybe "promising but incomplete" is the best description.

As a team leader (or manager) one of your most important tasks is to choose the members and to get them together. If you didn't fill in all needed roles, you haven't finished that task.

(I wanted to add a Tom DeMarco quote here, but I don't recall which of his books described how to build a software development team - perhaps "The Deadline"?)


www.iancollmceachern.com


Great point - in every product that you've dismissed, there's a lesson to be learned. Particularly for commodotized products - if there is a way to do it cheaply, what is it? What new technology enables companies to offer their services for so cheap, and where else can you leverage that tech?


The few product ideas we came up with following the above process we dropped, often because we discovered that that space is ultra crowded or commooditized.

GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons once said something like (paraphrased slightly) "never be scared to enter a crowded market. Just be better than everybody else". Something to think about.

Beyond that, consider that your product is not the only dimension on which you compete. That is, there are other ways to compete besides having the best product. As we all know, the best product doesn't always win.

I'd recommend reading The Discipline of Market Leaders by Fred Wiersema and Michael Treacy, as well as Mastering The Complex Sale, The Prime Solution and Exceptional Selling, all by Jeff Thull. These books deal a lot with how to compete and sell and differentiate yourself... even when selling a seemingly low-value commodity like sand. Another valuable book is Differentiate or Die by Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin.


If you as an entrepreneur feel that the market is too crowded or commoditized, though, that's a very good signal not to enter it. Not because it actually is too crowded, but because you don't know it well enough to come up with a unique differentiator that will resonate with people actually in that market.

When you stumble across an idea that's actually viable, it feels like "Oh, why has nobody else done this yet? I better get it out there before the competition eats my lunch." It's very likely that you're actually overestimating the threat of competition, but that's because you have domain knowledge that makes the key differentiators of your product obvious to you but inconceivable to other entrepreneurs.

From your perspective, the idea was obvious and different, and that's why people use your product. From an outside perspective, you entered a crowded market and won it by being better than everybody else. The difference is in the level of detail with which you know the market. If from your perspective it appears to be a crowded market and you just need to be better than everybody else, you probably aren't going to be able to build that better product.


If you as an entrepreneur feel that the market is too crowded or commoditized, though, that's a very good signal not to enter it. Not because it actually is too crowded, but because you don't know it well enough to come up with a unique differentiator that will resonate with people actually in that market.

That's a fair point. The key, I think, is understanding when a market is susceptible to entry by another player. But part of making that judgment is understanding the different dimensions along which you can compete, which is why I find The Discipline of Market Leaders so valuable. That was the first book I read that really made the case that it isn't necessarily just about your product. Likewise Crossing The Chasm makes a pretty good case that you can always (well, almost always) segment a market to a degree that there's a place where you can compete.


I agree with this, domain knowledge is underrated. However, sometimes it does take a risk-taking outsider to put several big picture pieces together initially. This isn’t to say one should just stay as an outsider once started. I’m thinking of those like Elon Musk, who have a larger vision and saw an industry as the right fit to make it happen, and then dove deep to learn the domain.

I’m sure there’s something in their diverse backgrounds that intersect in a way that solves a critical problem. For me, the thing that’s missing in their process is actually building a prototype and getting in front of a user to validate what they think they know.


Being afraid of a crowded market is one of those counter-intuitive mistakes most people make. It's much easier to find a niche within a crowded market than to try to build something within a small market.

I entered a huge market as a solo founder with no industry experience and now get about 1% of the traffic that the big players with thousands of employees get, and I make a very decent income from it.


Care to add a bit more detail about what market? I am curious


All I'll say is it's a huge consumer market, tons of competition, tons of consumers. When I told friends what market I was going into, their most common response was "but there's already huge players in that market, how can you compete?"


Why would he say? Zero chance of more customers and nonzero chance of more competitors.


Task/project management is one of them I suppose


+1


This is a great point. A crowded market means there's lots of space for new entrants and that no one has quite figured out how to win the whole thing. Good opportunity to steal and borrow from the best currently in the market and try to consolidate.


Recently read this quote:

There’s a well-known adage that “Having no competition may mean you have no market.” The corollary I’d add is that “Having competition doesn’t mean the market is full.”

Seen here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-backblaze-got-started/


Mark Cuban once said (something like) "If you're looking where everyone else is looking then you're looking in the wrong place."

I think that trumps Parsons. That said, looking at ideas that "didn't work" can be a solid approach. That is, sometimes (for example) the idea was solid but the team failed. The market also changes and some ideas can be ahead of their time (and poorly executed).


I think that trumps Parsons.

I have a tremendous degree of regard for mcuban, and I think his advice has merit. But I wouldn't say either "trumps" the other. These pithy sayings are handy, but there's a lot of nuance to both of them (IMO) and the devil is in the details.

Should Google have decided not to pursue search because of Altavista, Dogpile, Magellan, Northern Light, Yahoo, and DMOZ? Should Facebook have eschewed social networking because of Friendster, Myspace, Livejournal, etc?

Sometime just being better than the other guys really is enough.


Very minor detail, but Yahoo! didn't have a "search engine" when Google came to be. Yahoo! was still a manually curated "directory" at the time.


And should Apple have decided not to build a phone... That market was once pretty crowded too.


True.

But I would counter with...Google wasn't a search company, but an advertising platform. And that's where is looked where others were not.


Google is now an advertising platform. In the beginning, they were no such thing. If Google hadn't essentially stolen the revenue model AdSense is based on from Overture[0], they might be a very different company today.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/overture-sues-google-over-search-p...


To be fair to Parsons, he built a dramatically more successful and larger business than Cuban ever has. Parsons is also a billionaire and worth nearly as much as Cuban.

In terms of sales, GoDaddy is six times the size of the Dallas Mavericks business, and ~20 times the size Broadcast.com was before the dotcom bust.


Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.7B in 1999 (pre-dotcom bust) and Godaddy has a market cap of $7.65B as of today, so I am not sure where you are getting 20x bigger valuation from.


True.

But my sense is Cuban could do it again. Parsons benefitted from timing and is likely more of a one trick pony.

Yes, a great and lucrative trick. But still one trick :)


No, Parsons is at least a 2-trick pony; from Wikipedia:

"In 1984, he founded Parsons Technology in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and began selling MoneyCounts, a home accounting program. In late 1987, Parsons was able to quit his job and focus completely on selling and overseeing growth of MoneyCounts. Eventually, Parsons Technology grew to be a 1,000-employee, privately held company. On September 27, 1994, Parsons completed the sale of Parsons Technology to Intuit, Inc. for $64 million."


If Cuban could do it again, why hasn't he?


Parsons is doing it again in a crowded market.

Check out PXG.com


This. If anything you can save time on market validation if you think you can execute or offer something unique that the existing players in the space lack.


Hits the nail on the head. It's an often cited cliché, but Google wasn't the first search engine and Facebook not the first social network. That works in niches as well if you have the feeling that the current state of the art somehow seems lackluster, i.e. with Adjust in app attribution or Remerge in mobile retarteging. With a lot of mistakes learned but no baggage on board, you can often attack sooner than you'd think with clear focus.

Lastly, if the main battle for a certain segment is over for more than a decade, the incumbents seem to get lazy if they continue dominating the market for too long. Look at eBay for example, or Linked.In - they have stopped innovating and basically get worse with every "Facelift", but there's still considerable demand with a lack of alternatives. It's a long shot, but possible with great execution.


I think that what this team lacks is a comfortable domain expertise in anything other than " making a fortune on wall street" -- which illustrates how little value "money" guys provide...

There is not an SME on their team in any area where they see a problem to fix - they 'only' have money.

they need to augment their team with an SME in an area they are willing to fund

Then here is their next problem:

Who is willing to get behind this team given the statements - There is only one reality - a confident founder who can provide them the vision to build something - and they provide the funding and maybe the CFO... but they may overly think of themselves as "technical" and meddle in the running of such an enterprise - which means doom.

These guys should simply take their funds and invest - not found shit. they will fail and bring down too many people (their employees) if they try...


There are product spaces where one player is seen as having it all wrapped up. Other big players have no stomach to compete but small, agile startups can begin chipping away at their business quite easily. The entrenched single player often treats their current customers and prospective customers like shit.


also: search was crowded when google entered.


Here's my idea. All I ask for is a free one if you use it.

A drone fence. Hear me out.

Problem: Fencing is FUCKING expensive. For many people who want to keep animals out (garden, animals pooping in the sandbox) buying a fence is really cost prohibitive. Plus they don't always work anyways.

Solution: Self driving drones with IR cameras in specific locations. Place a camera or two in strategic locations, and have a drone take off and chase off deer or rabbits. Return to the main station, land, recharge, repeat. Might need to have a squirt gun with some vinegar or something to scare off the more aggressive deer.

But combine some machine vision (don't want to chase children), autonomous flying drones, and some smarts, and you could have a $2000 system that replaces a $X0,000 fence.

Sorta the opposite of an invisible fence for animals.

I would LOVE one of these. I just don't have the capital or talent to make it happen...


This is how the fences in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age work. The drones fly in a honeycomb pattern and are recharged in a mesh network with a few base stations flying around. Whenever a drone has a low battery it steals some power from its nearest neighbor, so the power gets diffused through the network without any of the drones needing to move out of position. If I recall correctly they just bunch up and push you away if you try to walk through them, but otherwise don't obstruct the view. Pretty fun stuff. :)


Pretty good, but also quite niche. I think many people who build fences are not doing it just to keep things out, but also to keep things in, mark territory, provide security against more than just deer, aesthetics, etc.

However, on the fence industry, I could see a shake-up of fence estimation software. Perhaps one that uses ML to take the data necessary for an estimation (geographic data based on asker's location + parameters, materials & prices needed for the job, labor, etc) and create an estimation at the click of a button rather than from human input and calculations? Could help to bring your fence cost down (marginally, but still).

My dad was in this business his whole life, and said the software in the industry right now is shite. Ripe for disruption.


I knew a guy who made a shitload of money with a software program he wrote for carpet stores/installers to optimize cutting different carpet pieces to minimize waste.

It sounds simple and boring, but if you can save people a lot of money, they don't mind sharing it with you.


I remember when I was a catastrophe insurance adjuster, I used Xactimate. It was pretty great at the time, but I think the underlying tech (i.e. getting material pricing) could be greatly improved, especially dealing with things like shortages and increased prices due to demand spikes.


In Norway we have sheep roaming the mountains in summer....and wolves. How many wolves to kill is a huge political issue. Government reimburses sheep killed by wolves.

Building fences around the areas is basically impossible. But I hope some day drone-shepherds can do the job.


This would be cool but then the debate remains almost the same, just how many wolves can the drone guarding the sheep shoot, a wolf has got to eat so some programmers got to randomize a few 'look the other way' actions in.


The thought of the drone shooting didn't even cross my mind. No way anyone would approve military equipment roaming the mountains like that. What if it shot a human?

I was thinking flashlights and sounds to scare them off.


If sheep have evolved to have drone guards, then wolves will just have to feast on deer, elk, and whatnot, until they join forces with the eagles and hawks to take down the drones.


The nice thing about this idea, is that even if it flops you get to have a lot of fun flying drones around!


My grandmother was pretty "anti-tech", and thought that e-mail was just a passing fad, but I think that even she would have tried this if it meant her flowers would have been spared by the deer.


This is kind of already being done by Sunflower Labs. https://sunflower-labs.com/


I was wondering when the "attach guns" part comes up. Wasn't disappointed :-)


Invisible Fence is a fantastic product that gives great value to many people. Seems to me that this could be the same. Note that Invisible Fence offers expertise in install, dog training, etc, over and above the DIY kits.

We recently put a deer fence around about a half acre and it was not inexpensive.

Another upside is that this would be reconfigurable. And there'd be a ton of ML-extractable insights for customer and the company.

PS: Skimming, I originally read the intent as "a fence to keep drones out", which is funny.


mmh ...too much noise pollution. Mammals will learn quickly to visit the area at night.


When I read this, I first thought you meant a fence for keeping drones in (or out). Maybe it zaps them when they get too close. Another idea for OP.


A turret or two seems more practical: http://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2012/militarizing-your-backyard-...


Probably an unpopular question given HN audience, but how does one know a team is great if said team hasn't successfully tackled any problems? Is it similar to my cat being a great pilot because she hasn't crashed any planes?


The fact that they've spent the past year toying around without direction supports your conclusion as well. CVs are just one metric by which to judge a team.


no but one of them made millions in private equity, so...


Are investing in other people's businesses and starting your own translatable skill sets?


I'd say no. Just shows you can manipulate others but have 0 originality of your own. Hence the situation they find themselves in


And there I thought that the ideas were the easy part :-)

Frankly I'm not sure you can succeed if you're just a mercenary (not trying to insult you).

To me it seems you're approaching the problem the wrong way : it shouldn't be about doing like everybody else or trying to be successful just because you think it will make you feel good but it should be about releasing this f* idea that is nagging you since years and that nobody can do better than you.

I have one of those ideas since 2007. One day ... ;-)


Counterexamples: Jeff Bezos, Jeff Lawson(Twilio) contemplated many ideas before starting on one.


Care to say what the problem is that your idea solves?


Frankly I'd rather keep it to myself. I'm baffled that nobody thought about it since 10 years.

But right now I'm working on a back-end code generation tool : the user would just draw a data schema and once done get a database (as a script or as a container or directly in his cloud of choice) and scaffolding for the API.

The data schema is based on a specific method that makes it simple to think about your data without having to grok foreign keys.

I'm not sure I can pull it off but I want to see how far I can go.


Funny, I built this exact thing back in 2007 but couldn't market/sale it. Hope you have better luck &/ now the timing is right!


I'd be curious to know more.


Email in profile


Because great teams seemed more important than great ideas, YC tried funding teams without ideas, but it didn't work.

Market research is deadly, because that's what big companies do. If there's an objectively verifiable opportunity, they are already on it.

This is what's so interesting about Christensen's "disruption" - part of the definition is that the opportunity is not appealing to incumbents. It's too small, not wanted by existing customers, etc.

So perhaps the key thing missing from "great teams without ideas" is the passion (aka craziness) to wholeheartedly pursue something that can't be objectively verified. And then, to discover unforseeable problems and solve them; or, to pivot to a new idea, serenpiditously picked up along the way... the journey provides the destination.

So... just start. "Scratch your own itch" is a good way to identify an unmet need, just something to start with. Don't consider market size etc. Also, don't commit much money to it, just your time, treat it as an experiment.


Good ideas are hard ... sometimes simple and overcrowded markets yield the best results. Facebook is basically usenet with a better UI/UX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet). Amazon was a book store.

What you need is something where you provide a specific solution to a real problem, something people are really willing to pay for.

Network, speak to people, ask them about their problems. What do they wish existed. And if it existed, would they pay for a solution (is it a real business).

I've got some ideas for things from recent life experiences that seem to be common. This is where the best ideas come from. When there is a real need, and those addressing it aren't doing it well, or at all. Look for that gap.

Never hesitate to connect with others either. A good conversation can spur thoughts, and this is where ideas germinate.

Remember, the idea doesn't have to be a killer. Lowering friction in a process to make it faster/easier/cheaper/better goes a long way to turning into something good (think Uber/Lyft/AirBNB), even if the business is old and commoditized.


Your post could easily read: "I've got a killer office space in an amazing skyscraper with catered organic sous vide lunches and a yoga room, but I don't have a business idea to put in this office space. Any ideas?"

The most important aspects of a business are: 1) what you do 2) how you do it. Things like team, capital, etc. are secondary and only matter once you have those two.

It's a bit like you said, "I have a fantastic transmission for a 1977 Jaguar XFT T-Type" but it turns out that car doesn't exist.


Exactly. There are smart people everywhere. If you have a good idea, you can find funding. (and anyway, many businesses are cheaper to bootstrap today than ever).

If you don't have ideas, you don't have anything. I don't think you'd get a good reception saying "I want to get rich, should I become a neurosurgeon or an oncologist or a periodontist", and I don't see why this gets any better a reception.

I get that you're not necessarily asking for business ideas JUST to become rich, there are all kinds of reasons to want to run a startup. I just can't really see what would cause one to put that particular cart before any horse whatsoever.


Comeon, that scenario worked out great for Ion Storm.


While Ion Storm had an extravagant office at the top of a skyscraper, Warren Spector had great ideas and a track record of awesome games. And Ion Storm created one of the very best games ever made, Deus Ex 1, and Thiefs 3 was great too.


Find an un-sexy domain that you have more access to than the average person. Start to build domain expertise in that area as quickly as you can (people are surprisingly willing to talk when you don't want to sell them something, but just learn about how they do things).

Build something (anything!) that uses some cool ML technology (or even just some simple statistics) in that domain. Think of this as an ultra-MVP - something you build part-time in the order of weeks, rather than full time over months. This keeps your "investment" low and makes you mentally ready to accept changes.

Loop back with the people in the un-sexy industry to get feedback. Remember, not all industries are bombarded with technology - you'll need to strike a balance between showing them something sufficiently "fancy" to pique interest, and abstracting away your technology so they focus on a problem it solves.

When my cofounder and I started ~4 years ago, we chose an un-sexy industry that my cofounder knew from years of consulting. This was awesome, but even with his amazing experience, our initial idea for a product didn't take off (which was fine - it doesn't take too many wins to make the weeks of development/sales profitable).

Over the next 4 years, we built another couple of offerings, which sold better than the first. They took hold in various ways, but the insights behind each product were usually driven (or at least influenced) by the people we talked to about our initial product. Which brings me back to the key - build things in a low-cost way and use that to identify tangentially related problems until you think you've found a big enough pain point.


What non software domains are you experts in? There are lots of businesses out there with problems that are solved with spreadsheets for which a focused SaaS offering would be a 10x solution. See procore or gingr for examples (those are just off the top of my head).

But you need the domain expertise (or be willing to acquire it).

Then, you also need to be passionate about it. To avoid the long slow SaaS ramp of death ( http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-... ) you'll want to really, truly have a burning need to solve your customer's problem. At least one of you will have to have this customer empathy.


So how do you get domain expertise?

Sometimes I think the best way to go about it is to become a consultant, look around in companies, and when you've found something, build a product for it.


Hahah, that's the rub. Being a consultant can be a good way to acquire domain expertise, as long as you are vertically focused: "I solve problems for realtors" rather than tech focused "I build web applications" or "I build mobile applications in Swift". Downside: can be scary to specialize, will take some time.

Another way to do that is to actually do the job or take a job in a company that is not a software company but that uses software. I worked for a real estate brokerage for years and now know a lot about real estate. Downside: again, you have to pick a specialty and will take a few years.

A final way is to do some research and talk to people about their problems. This is much quicker, but will require some work that you won't get paid for. Amy Hoy has some great stuff around researching: https://stackingthebricks.com/


That's how I do it.


Just stay in your jobs and don't force it. Without a burning desire to do something and/or domain knowledge, you're looking at years of frustration with likely no results, just to chase the trendiness of doing a startup. The fact that three people with supposed experience are not aware of any problems that need solving is not a good sign. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. You could draw on your investor contacts, likely strike out, maybe manage an aquihire, but why bother. Much easier to stay in a secure job until you're ready.


why would you even found a company without a idea? that makes no sense to me.

just live your life as usual, and when you encounter a problem that you can foresee solving, ask yourself: 0. would i pay someone else to solve this problem? 1. do other people have this problem as well? 2. can i make a profit by solving this problem on scale?

an obvious point but always worth mentioning: a good business proposal should be short, obvious after the fact, and uses no big words (like AI, fintech, Blockchain Technology) (at least internally)


Try working backwards.

Step 1: Pick your customers. Are they small business, enterprise or consumers? Are they in a specific vertical or are you addressing a cross-cutting concern?

Step 2: Start learning. Set up interviews and learn their business inside and out. Perhaps volunteer to be unpaid labor as a way to get an inside look at how their businesses run and where the inefficiencies are.

Step 3: Find the right inefficiency to address. It should be one that people are willing to spend to address, not just one where people should be willing to spend on. Also filter based on whether your team is best equipped to tackle the problem (i.e. don't try solving a really hard problem that, if you're successful, Google or Facebook could bang out in an afternoon with small modifications to an existing product.) Also look for products/services that give you a durable advantage, whether it's because you're the only one with the right data or because switching is particularly painful or a host of other reasons...much has been written on the subject, so read up for more examples.

Step 4: Go back and try to work up a demo of a product idea. It doesn't have to actually work (read do things that don't scale), it just has to show your vision.

Step 5: More interviews with potential customers. These aren't sales calls, they're a chance to gauge interest and get feedback on features and potential pricing.

You'll have a good idea whether you're ready to move forward or back to step 4, 3 or even 2 at that point, but if you hit on something, then your tech starts coding and your non-tech starts trying to find launch customers using the demo. At this point, you've probably read enough about the next steps to take.

Good luck!


I'm sure it must be out there already in some form, but you might want to give a shot at "uber for day laborers". It seems to me like there are opportunities on both the supply and demand side. On the supply side there its lots of room for improving gig hunting and payment assurance for laborers. Staffing agencies are of course in this space, but are pretty inefficient and catch only a small fraction of potential gigs relative to something like craigslist (which of course, has the downside of potentially unreliable payments). On the demand side, there are definitely niches for short term gigs where a company needs to scale up or down quickly (last minute work, no shows, etc). These quick changes can be hard for staffing agencies to fulfill, largely due to inefficiency in recruitment, even when the laborers are already in the talent pool. If you don't have any experience with this area, its really easy to do so: try to find some ditch digging on craigslist and see how many gigs you can do before you get stiffed or otherwise mistreated (won't take long). Also, use that pile of cash you have in the bank to try to find contractors to paint a house, clean some toilets, etc. and you'll start to get a sense for problems in the labor pool.


There are lots of people who need jobs and need someone to tell them where to go and what to do. This could be a real winner. Call it "Slaves 2.0".


Your comment made me lol. But also made me think :)

Indeed its not hard to imagine how "uber for day laborers" could increase worker exploitation. In particular the possibility of somehow skirting around worker's comp insurance by arguing that it only facilitates transactions is an obvious starting point. However, I think such a technology could also be used to mitigate exploitation. The one thing that I already mentioned was payment assurance. In general socializing the risk exposed to laborers as part of the service could be a great benefit in growing the service.


It could mitigate, but VC money will not ROI itself.


20% off the top for basically running a directory service would, though.


The irony here is that this also characterizes the OP. They have a team and finding, but need a task. My own thought would be "get a job" but it seems unhelpful.


Speaking from the experience of someone who has hired general heavy labor and skilled trades... This has literally existed since the gold rush, chances are 60-80% of the labor involved in building your house came from an organization like this. They are a unique niche of staffing agencies that only staff same day labor. Many of organizations are nation-wide. Also, lots of skilled workers ask to be paid in cash, so they wouldn’t want a paper trail anyway... you pay 50% upfront and 50% when the job is done to spec. Just doing a few jobs on Craigslist and hiring some laborors won’t make you in any way even close to expert enough to tackle this field.


Correction you can also hire them for weeks at a time. Onus for workers comp, etc is on the agency.


Unchecked capitalism beat ya to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery


The slavery we know from history, i.e. the triangular trade between the Caribbean, Liverpool and Guinea, that was actually 'Slaves 2.0'.

Before 'Slaves 2.0' there was 'Slaves 1.0'. This existed in Africa and before white men and guns were involved it wasn't a bad system at all. If you did something seriously wrong then you were not sent to prison, instead you were sold into slavery. The idea was that you worked off your debt - however much you were sold for - and then when the debt was done you could go back home.

The triangular trade changed that. People were being shipped off forever, the deal of 'slavery' had changed from a reasonable system for maintaining the rule of law to true heart of darkness stuff.

In 'Slavery 1.0' people didn't have the right to do whatever they wanted with their slaves, they could not rape and kill them, as white man did.

I would actually prefer 'Slavery 1.0' to the legal system and prison, none of which is really being judged by your neighbours. If I could sell my lazy friend that owes me money into slavery, e.g. to the coffee shop down the road, with the coffee shop owner taking my friend on as a slave and giving me the money owed then that could work for me. I doubt the coffee shop owner would really want to rape/kill/beat up my friend, but he might want him working really hard from really early in the morning until quite late in the evening.

Or, without the benefit of 'Slavery 1.0' I could take my friend to court and then when he doesn't pay he could end up in prison. I would still not get my money back. The coffee shop would not have a slave, they would have to hire a wage slave instead.

So let's think more positively about 'Slavery'. What could 'Slavery 3.0' be like and is there an app for that?

What if I could put my friend up on the 'slavery app' with my price? I just want £3K-5K back. How can the small print in the EULA that my friend/slave-to-be signs up to have legal consequence? If my friend cannot be bothered pouring beverages all day and does a runner, then some lucky Pokemon player that finds him should be rewarded somehow, with my friend sold on to a 'riskier' slave market, perhaps picking coffee beans in Kenya where he is unable to find his way home.

Much like 'Slavery 1.0' the slave is not humiliated or deprived of the basics, all needs are met but no luxuries or pay are given. Instead the person that sold the 'slave' gets that.

So go for the app, but call it 'Slavery 3' and make it a lot more fun than the misery of this VC funded Uber/AirBnB sharing economy nonsense. Poke fun at capitalism, the world of work, the legal system and our idea of history whilst doing it and every small child will be wanting to sell their sister's pet hamster into slavery for some perceived valid reason. Maybe make the app step in for the 'tribal elders/jury' so part of 'Slavery 3' could be to do with voting whether someone should be allowed to be 'sold' or not.


What you described is what already is supposed to happen, although it doesn't always due to corruption of the system. You're not supposed to go to prison based on debts, especially civil debts. Instead, either have assets seized or you work off your debt, by having the court garnish your wages.


I concur. I needed a ditch dug a couple of weeks ago, and everyone was recommending that I drive to Home Depot and pick some guys up waiting for work. There has _got_ to be a better way. Note that this felt different to me than hiring a handyman or any other skilled trade, which feels like a semi-solved problem. Sometimes I just need some extra hands, and learning the unspoken rules around how to hire guys on a street-corner is not something I'm interested in.


Your problem isn’t hiring people, it’s hiring illegals willing to work for cheap in the Home Depot parking lot.

Finding legal casual labor is tough because good workers with strong backs move up quickly, and you’re left with illegals and drunks.


Not sure what the current going rate is but doesn't a service like People Ready solve this? A while back I hired a couple guys through them to help with a move and they were a couple bucks an hour over minimum wage.


Don't forget transportation


I moved last year and ended up using some street corner guys. Cost me the same as pros, more or less, but just easier for me personally. They're largely undocumented workers and a strictly cash business, though, so app-izing them would be difficult if not impossible.

However- I did also learn that it's easy to hire professional movers to just help you load a u-haul for a couple if that's what you want. Working with those companies and app-izing that labor is something that should be possible.


However- I did also learn that it's easy to hire professional movers to just help you load a u-haul for a couple if that's what you want. Working with those companies and app-izing that labor is something that should be possible.

It is: https://www.uship.com/

(There's even a reality show around it, that's how I know about it)


> and learning the unspoken rules around how to hire guys on a street-corner is not something I'm interested in.

Classic SV/SF “I want this service, without having to interact with poor people” next step up from bus as a startup laundry delivery as a startup etc


I support this idea. I developed myself an app for handymen to post their ads but never published it. I know there is a huuuuge market for that and the few options available are good enough.


In the Bay Area the Day Worker Center of Mountain View does that to an extent. For people who aren't comfortable hiring day laborers out of the Home Depot parking lot it give some measure of quality and safety.

http://www.dayworkercentermv.org/


In Argentina there is an app that does exactly that:

https://www.iguanafix.com.ar


Isn't that sort of work paid cash in hand and part of the black economy I am sure the IRS would be interested in your data :-)


This is what Labor Ready does, and they're a godsend to people who need a days work on short notice.


There's plenty to be done in the bank risk management space. I was part of a group a few years ago that tried to approach this space; however, family issues forced me to leave software and go back to banking.

There's a piece of software, produced by a company called QRM, used within the treasury group of a lot of large banks. This piece of software is both slow (one run at a decent-sized bank can take several hours even spread over hundreds of CPUs) and incredibly user unfriendly (you cannot do any analysis within the software itself; everything must be dumped to Excel first).

Everyone I have talked with in the industry says this software must be replaced; however, it will take quite a long runway to get things up and going.

While I doubt that this piece of software could be implemented as SaaS for bigger banks, I definitely think if you pitched a solution to smaller banks and built up a group able to conduct the type of analysis you would do with this software, you would have a winner. Also, if your CMU guy is looking to come back to Pittsburgh, I might be able to get one or two other people together for an in-person conversation.

If you are interested in learning more, please provide an email address, and I will reach out to you.


A crowded market can be great because the demand has already been validated, but nobody else has emerged as the market leader yet. That's where YOU step in, with your wisdom and insight about this market, to show the existing constituents how your viewpoint of the world makes life better for them.

So if you don't have any ideas, it means you don't have any wisdom or insight about any market. Therefore, you don't have a great startup team. Full stop.

If you have competent designers and engineers, you could maybe open up a consultancy, and provide implementation services for other entrepreneurs with ideas of their own...

The thing is: smart, creative entrepreneurs see ideas everywhere. They wake up in the morning with a hundred new ideas, lacking only the human bandwidth to pursue them all.

I'd venture to say, if you don't have ideas, you're not really living in the world. You're just looking for a leprechaun with a pot of gold you can claim.

Try just being a fully-formed person in the world, with hobbies and interests and passions and relationships and struggles and obligations and complicated logistics, and see what problems you encounter while living that life.

You'll have a hundred ideas by the end of the day.


I'm tempted to ask to join your group, but I'm finishing my PhD myself (in the spring), so I'm a bit busy! :)

My most important suggestion is the simplest: Come up with more ideas. Take a look through this guy's posts: https://medium.com/@x0054. Specifically, he set a goal to come up with 10 random ideas a day for a month. They are all over the place in terms of quality and practicality. Some of them are silly; some are outstanding. If you do this for a month (as do each of your partners, individually), you will have close to 1,000 ideas to comb through. Something will rise to the top.

Creativity is a habit. Creativity is a skill.

As for myself, I have several ideas that have risen to the top (out of hundreds) that are definitely money-makers, but I don't (yet) have the resources to pursue by myself. The hardest part for me is to find others who are motivated enough to bootstrap a business! It sounds like you have a good group, though, and for that I congratulate you and wish you luck!


It sounds like the three domains you guys have experience in are software, biz Dev, and private equity.

I would stay the fuck away from software because it's an incredibly crowded field, that is notoriously cheap.

But private equity and biz Dev are great domains to be in. People will easily write big checks to solve small problems in those domains.

Have those two guys on your team talk to everyone they know in their respective spaces about what problems they have that they'd be willing to spend money on.

Basically your goal is to find out what problem keeps VPs in those respective domains up at night. And then brainstorm some way to make them worry a little less. Then shop it out to those same guys to see if anyone is willing to buy or help fund the app. Do this over and over again until you find an idea that works.


I would pay, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for an APP that can build me a house (all costs included). I am not alone.

Obviously, this idea is overly ambitious. But, can you take a moonshot idea like that and break it down into smaller pieces? Perhaps, work on one small piece of a really difficult problem. In the example I gave, perhaps a zoning ordinance voting platform that makes zoning change paper work easier. I realize most of the housing problems are entirely Political. But, you gotta realize, those are problems too - and they are big ones!


Manufactured homes are already a thing. An app to streamline the process of a custom build would be fighting against the (undeserved) stigma, but it'd be interesting to see.


That's no-where near a finished product we can use. You have to worry about getting land, plumbing, electricity, not to mention it's illegal in many places. Often, The fit and finish isn't very nice and the size would be alot smaller than most people want. But, they're probably heading in the right direction, they just have a lot of problems to solve.


I'm pretty confident you'll hit up upon potentially viable ideas based on pain points described by the community in past "Ask HN" threads like the ones below (newest first):

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576236

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007

Also, there was a Show HN nearly a year ago for http://patentsexpiringtoday.com/ which is a service for exploring ideas whose patent protection have expired.

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309025


Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

Low cost stickers that can be activated then placed on items in the refrigerator to indicate how much time has passed. Should be feasible to develop for a qualified team and would save People a lot of food. Maybe the design exists and just needs proper marketing.

Easy, cheap, hassle free batch scanning of photographs. How many people have boxes and boxes of family photos that they only see once every 5-10 years? Get those things digitized and organized now cheaply and easily.

You know those people who fly over peoples houses, take nice photos, then try to sell them to the owner? Why not offer people a digital copy of their houses/property? Lots of applications for that. From games to interior decorating to planning renovations.

Methane can be produced using electricity from solar power. Which could be run in cars without much modification. This could reduce fossil fuel usage without having wait for internal combustion engine vehicles to be retired. Maybe a unit installed at home could provide fuel for an individuals commute at near zero cost after it's paid off? If not maybe large facilities could make and ship the fuel to be sold at gas stations. Some people would be willing to pay a premium for liquid fuel produced by solar(At least I would). It could become even more desirable if proper carbon regulations ever kick in.

A wikipedia for DIY things. Instructibles sucks. It would be nice to have a well organized and very large corpus of information on how to do things from the very general to the very specific. From various methods to repair a hole in sheet rock to replacing brake pads on a 1997 Volvo to gardening with lots of various individual plans for different home projects like Halloween costumes, knitting, and woodworking. The hard part is getting a large community of people to contribute to the making of it.

I could go on all day. Anyone can. figuring out which idea in the sea of available ideas floating around, then executing it. That's the hard thing.


Ooh. How about a stock market for making movies? You can invest 500 dollars in a 10,000,000 dollar movie and get 1/19,000th of the actual profits. Anyone can become a movie producer. It makes secret plot twist impossible, but could be good for many kinds of movies.


At home anaerobic digesters that turn food, yard, and bodily waste into fuel to heat water/furnace/make electricity, etc


Right, but the question asks about good ideas, and that's a problem - how do you tell it's good? Yeah, I know about market validation, but you can't literally validate every idea you come up with. Especially if you have to build an MVP to do it.


I do "idea validation as a service" by asking the target group of an idea what they think about it: http://www.ideacheck.io


You can't know for certain if an idea is good ahead of time. You can identify some bad ideas that look good with a little research, but the only sure way to tell is to do the thing. Hell even if it is a good idea they might just fail to execute it properly. I wonder if they're just too risk averse. Looking for a sure thing when there's no such thing.


For me, I wouldn't say it's looking for a sure thing, but feeling like I'm probably wasting my time. Like you said, one can easily come up with dozens, possibly hundreds of ideas. Chances are most are duds. Without any good way of ranking them, what are the chances you'll hit on a good one?

Doing this kind of "idea lottery" just sounds like a recipe for frustration.


For them it's got to be frustrating. It's fun for me. I like brainstorming.


Would it be possible for your team to start a small VC firm instead of a startup? Wouldn't that be a better fit for a team that has lots of capital, one technical partner, and one sales partner, but currently doesn't have an idea?


I was thinking this too.

I was going to say it might be worth looking for projects that have been validated by sales and then looking to grow them both with the team and capital.

Having something like a space with a couple ideas/ startups in it that have already been validated would lower your risk and expose you to more opportunities while growing the business. I assume.


If they don't have enough interest (meaning knowledge) in any market to have lots of ideas already, how will they know how to vet potential investments?


What a garbage idea -- you don't want to move into venture capital; the risks vs (potential) rewards are out of touch with reality. The chances of ending up achieving good returns as a VC are slim (read: it's really really hard. Given the odds and effort required, I don't understand why anyone even tries).

That said, PE has plenty of opportunities within tech though. Which is essentially what you described.


Website & terminal integration that reads last ~30 lines of stdout&stderr and suggests a solution/elaboration with links back to stackoverflow/forum post that it came from. Launch as open source and sell to enterprises that want to incorporate internal knowledge bases (extract Q & A from chat logs is huge) without leaking data outside the company.

Program that takes an AST and valid transformations, learn what kinds of ASTs humans prefer and offer a high quality auto restructure code tool that guarantees no side effects.

Company that I can pay a small subscription to that works to protect my attention, ad blocking has been done fairly well for free, but that is far from the only attention hog. Most app's notifications are just distractions and should be batched, only to be looked at at the end of the day. Should be easy to take a picture of paper spam mail and have the company get it to stop. Stuff like that.

Company that picks up anything from junk to valuables and either charges or pays you based off of the value of the stuff. As a customer I'd like to take a picture of the items, receive an estimate of cost or price and only have to interact with the company, no coordinating with craigslist rando.

IoT company that produces cheap place-and-forget devices that monitor long term potential problems in houses (major changes in how vibrations carry through the walls, moisture in basement)

EDIT more:

A purely audio interface to email, specific goal being usable while walking/driving to work.

Text preprocesser that estimates what you already know (tracks what articles you read, how much of them you read) and greys out/deempahsises stuff you likely already know. Having an estimate of what someone already knows could be huge for manipulating the forgetting curve & estimating the likeliehood of understanding what is in a piece of text.

Reddit/HN like site that ranks based off of amount of work done on the item, try to be more popular than bitcointalk. Plenty of ads targeting crypto holders.


It's simple. Add another person to the team who has a brilliant, world beating idea but no working capital, great team, etc. You can talk to several to see who has the "best" idea. For a start on this process you can contact me :-)

PS: I use google's email service and have the same id there as I have on YC.


Definitely, just going through YC rejects there must be at least one that has a great idea :) .


A text-book case of analysis paralysis! I get the feeling you're inability to get something started may stem from trying to over optimise on your options.

The opportunity cost of selecting any particular path is real (and scary), but you have to take the plunge! I have had a few reasonably successful start ups (link to my latest one is in my profile), and I can tell you that if you are careful to start small, the opportunity cost is not so big.

With a small startup, you don't really need to commit till you see traction. Try this (I've done this in the past, and it's quite useful):

1) All of you sit down together to jot down a few ideas you have floating around your minds.

2) Pick the best one at that moment, and think about who your potential customers could be. Google a few actual companies - say 5 or 10.

3) Without writing a single bit of code, think about logistics and give the idea a bit of structure (how it would work, how much it would cost etc).

4) Call the potential clients from step 2 and try to sell them the product. It doesn't exist yet, but they don't know that. They will probably tell you "no", or "we use xyz to do this already" etc

5) Use their responses as valuable data points - if all of them don't need your service, maybe the idea's a dud. If they already have something doing the same thing, and they pay for it, it may be worth exploring to see how you can improve on the existing experience.

That should take you about 2-3 hours at most and will at least end up generating some discussion. Clearly, you have time, money and people at your disposal. Unfortunately, it seems, you've locked yourselves away in an echo chamber to the point that the world can't reveal its many problems to you!


So .. a bizdev guy who has never found any business problems and a PE guy who has never discovered any PE problems? Either you're overthinking it or just doomed: you don't have a team.


so harsh yet so true. off the top of my head i can think of a few PE problems that warrant a product. For instance, Facebook just released a Locations API for over a million locations. Which means you can find the number of checkins for stores like BestBuy and Target everyday. This can be a goldmine for financial analysts. Your team needs to stop screwing around.


I was in your position 21 months ago - loved reading startup books, money in the bank, fantastic co-founder, but no idea! Advice is cheap but I figured I'd share my experience:

Our attitude was to work on something, anything, no matter how stupid. Which requires a pretty deep font of enthusiasm - it's not easy to get people excited about a self-consciously ridiculous idea. Take the startup seriously, but be willing to drop it if a better idea comes along. Here's what we worked on in 2016:

- Retro-Zine: subscription service for Playboy magazines from the '60s and '70s

- Fruit Mistakes (https://twitter.com/fruitmistakes): pre-sliced fruit subscription for startups

- Rat Dog Capital: trying to buy friends' lifestyle SaaS businesses

- Panel Ninja v1: admin panels as a service (think a SaaSified version of https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin)

- Panel Ninja v2: productivity analytics for enterprise customer support teams

Thanks to YC, Panel Ninja v2 eventually turned into Loop Support, our current startup. We're solving a real problem now (customer support as a service for high-RPU B2C companies [1]) - and like you guys, we had very little to show after a year in the woods.

All the same, I'm really glad that my co-founder and I spent a year eating quail and manna - we got really good at working with each other in a lower-stakes, lower-stress environment. Like training wheels and flight simulators. So don't get discouraged :)

[1] If you work at one of these companies, you're likely stressing out over holiday customer support. 1) Get back to work! And 2) I would love to help! My contact info is in my HN profile.


You find ideas by digging for them in the dirt. This observation might be a little more focused towards programmers, however.

Explore spaces where change is rapidly occurring, and build things with those technologies/platforms/markets. You'll encounter problems along the way, be they legal, technical, distribution, etc. Some of those problems will be experienced by others and so you may stumble across a viable market. But you'll only know that by walking down those paths, rather than gazing from afar.


If you can spare an hour I highly recommend listening to this talk that Tom Kelley of IDEO gave on innovation and identifying problems as part of Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders program:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts/2054/Young-at-Heart-How...

The TLDR is to be aware of what is going on around you. He gives examples of that in action including a couple that stuck with me regarding the turnstiles at the Paris airport and children's toothbrushes. Things that are so obvious in retrospect but it takes stopping and observing in order to identify the problem.

My favorite quote from the talk, "Be childlike as often as possible. Be childish as little as you can."

(If you're looking to do something in financial services I think there are still a lot of problems that need to be solved and tons of opportunity over the next decade as demographics shift. Just think of what has happened in the past fifteen years. People used to do their banking in person. Now people even considering going to an ATM an inconvenience. Let's talk.)


You really can't come up with a single workable idea? I find that hard to comprehend. Maybe just invest in others for now, see where that takes you.

If you're really desperate to do it yourselves though, you need to get out of whatever bubble you're in and start finding opportunity in more frequently-overlooked spaces.

Here's an easy one. Seattle just started piloting dockless bike shares. The competitors are kinda unimpressive, and nobody has offered an electric-powered fleet yet. The minimum electric fleet size is only 10 IIRC. Seattle is super hilly, and electric bikes would be great, but they are harder to make and repair, and may be more likely to get stolen (at greater cost to replace as well). However, traffic is so freaking terrible here that that bikes can easily be the fastest means of transportation at certain times. There are lots of amazonians with disposable incomes who would prefer to avoid the bus to get home, but can't justify the inconvenience taking care of a bike and riding uphill.

Figure out something cool to do with that. You'll have GPS data for all movements that you can apply ML to estimate demand and determine the most valuable places to leave them around town. Incentivize riders to drop them off in valuable spots with ride credit. Maybe partner with Postmates or DoorDash to make it a low-expense delivery vehicle for couriers who don't own cars.

Seattle is just one of the first to allow this model. Other cities and college campuses (especially ones less dense than Seatle, that may not get much out of traditional bike shares) will follow soon. There is a ton of room to grow. And the sooner you start collecting that data and interpreting it, the bigger advantage you'll have due to being able to make ML-driven optimizations.


Solve some real life problem like:

1) Cancer , heart disease health related problem. 2) Depression 3) Poverty 4) Violence (how about a magic shield)

etc etc .. there are tons of real life problem that are yet to be solved and NEED to be solved for survival of human kind. Just open your heart and eyes and you will find.


I have been doing the big company thing for a number of years now after exiting successfully as employee number one of a small startup and having to shut down a larger and better funded startup where I was CTO. Since then, I've done quite a bit of thinking about how to be successful should I choose to do a startup again.

The conclusion that I have reached is that the best approach is to find a boring problem. There are so many legacy industries out there that haven't changed in decades. If you can improve one of those, you're basically printing money. This was what Uber did for Taxis. A couple of examples of startups that I've run into lately that are doing this:

ripcord.com: record storage is a multibillion dollar industry in the US alone and is largely controlled by one company that is a hundred years old and has not modernized. spruce.co: title insurance is also a huge industry that is dominated by old companies with zero technology. If you've gone through the process of buying a house you know how ridiculous the signing and title transfer is.


Are you looking for an idea or a “sexy” idea?

You could build an Ecommerce and sell stuff. Spend a few grands on some products and see which one converts the best. Or create the landing of some of your ideas and see if people will leave their info by buying some advertising on Facebook/Google.

A crowded market doesn’t necessarily mean that you have no chance. The key here is positioning your product to make it look different. If you have cash to spend you can actually test a lot of “boring” ideas by differentiating them (e.g. another to-do app that does X or is made for Y).

Even better, which problems do you face daily?


The problem is you're looking for easy stuff to do. Here's four ideas I just thought of:

1) Write software that uses machine learning to search for tornados in doppler radar signal returns 2) Write software that manages inpatient health care, orders, prescriptions, labs, etc 3) Write software that uses machine learning to route network packets faster 4) Use machine learning to control an engine's ECU to maximize fuel economy or power via valve timing, spark degrees/timing, fuel/air mixture, injection timing, compression ratio, etc


This stuff sounds more like R&D than markets to build products for. Way too risky for a company that hasn't even proven they can deliver a product where most of the technical problems have already been solved.


Interesting comment, I assumed all good idea required r&d!


That's the mindset of an engineer at work. Engineers want hard, sexy problems to chew on. Businessmen want stable, predictable tech with large margins (low production costs and a high selling price). This is why a lot of people talk about converting an excel spreadsheet into a SaaS business. It's ridiculously easy, low cost, stable, predictable revenue that companies will happily pay for to not have to deal with their excel spreadsheets ever again.


I fail to see how those are competing objectives...


Make this. Somebody make this. Maybe it's not the obnoxious, catch-phrasey SaaS bulls*t you wanted to do, but it will change the world and you can be proud that you made it. There are millions of blind people in the world. They shuffle around with rudimentary technology. Literally sticks. But they still have ears. Synesthesia. Process the visual 3D world with a camera. Use head tracking. Convert it into an immersive three-dimensional auditory world. A curb sounds like a stream. A tree sounds like rustling leaves. A pole is an electric arc. Traffic lights are pings. Red lights, walk signs all have a distinctive sound replicated in 3D auditory world that maps as closely as possible to the actual world. We have the technology. You can build it. Not only would it radically improve the lives of blind people, it would be a blast for the sighted to design and refine. Like a real life video game that actually matters to someone.


Wouldn't that interfere with echolocation? Most of us do it at a rudimentary level [1], but some people have become quite proficient at it [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation

2. https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kish_how_i_use_sonar_to_nav...


My friend made exactly this (https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/2016/5/soundvisio...) but it ended up not being marketable so they abandoned it and sadly never opensourced the code.


Is there anything out there close to what you're describing?


I've gotta say this seems to be putting the cart before the horse.

This means that you want to be in business for the sake of it.

I've always wanted to be in business but it's always on the back of a driving sense of something that I want to do / make happen.

Just seems strange to have assembled all the ingredients without a recipe.


Eh, don't entirely agree with this. Part of the allure of starting a startup is having no boss and being the master of your own destiny. (In reality, of course, you'll have investors and a board to answer to, but it's still very different and more appealing for some people than being a 'regular' employee.) I think it's understandable and reasonable to be a proto-company in search of ideas.


i also don't agree, they have found a group that likes to work together, likes to solve problems together. i think that's a primary motivator. sometimes i see my colleagues more than i see my family so it better be people that i enjoy working with.


"I'm a big believer that great ideas find you, you don't find them. Without a unique insight, you shouldn't start a company. You have to be authentic to the problem." -andy rachleff

https://pando.com/2012/12/11/what-makes-for-a-great-entrepre...


There's an obscene amount of software used in the enterprise that is an absolute pain to use, and inefficent too. Basically nobody in their right mind would use this stuff if they weren't being paid to do so - and if someone created a nicer alternative, the people using it would lobby their bosses to switch. Basically, the design/usability/UX revolution that has happened in the consumer IT space in the past decade has not made nearly as much of an impact in business software (especially when it comes to software aimed at non-IT companies). Companies like Slack have shown that you can make SaaS go almost viral if you address a real pain point in a way that the people on the ground understand and like.


Ask yourself why you want to start the business first. Provided making money isn't the only motivator, start talking to people in the spaces that excite you and your team. Design/mock some simple concepts, show them to people, get feedback. Find pain points, offer hypothetical solutions, let the market shape your ideas/thinking. Get that feedback engine in place, and the ideas will flow.


How about an e-commerce service to layer environmentally sensitive and/or humane shopping on top of traditional retailers like Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, grocery chains and Amazon?

You could sign people up for grocery/sundry subscriptions, just like Amazon, etc, and fulfill through those retailers.

Just starting with weekly groceries that omit single use plastics, by choosing glass peanut better jars and cardboard detergent boxes.


Acquire a small business with market validation and good potential and scale it up.


One of the better comments in this thread


You should create a peer 2 peer competitive arcade game with its own blockchain, with an instruction set based on RISC-V and a Cuckoo Cycle hash on completed work to adapt mining difficulty. A very short block time and privacy features lifted from Monero. Storage backed by IPFS.

Deposits put in a few blocks ahead to stop cheating. Store rage quits before time is up, to penalise bad behaviour. Count me in.

New physics engine libraries or games altogether could be registered and stored for a fee, on the blockchain. It would be like an app store. Each time such a games was played, the original uploader could earn royalties collected from the deposits.

Even copyright could be encoded, it could be set to expire automatically in 75 years, for instance.


I can give you one idea for something I would really love if it existed, but I don't have the resources to do it myself:

A marketplace for sales people and SaaS products. Every sales agent can sell any product and get commission. This way, an agent walks to a business, and instead of offering him 1 product he doesn't need, he can offer him from dozens of products a few he really needs.


Great idea. Is there any similar product live?


Sounds like you're talking about something like ClickBank or ShareASale with a focus on software as a service.


First accept the fact that your team - despite their vaunted achievements in many areas - is not competent in ideation. Ideation is more than just pulling a rabbit (you've probably pulled one or two already, despite your collective lack of skill). It's akin to pulling a rabbit egg out of a hat, fertilizing it in a petri dish, and shepherding its development into a furry, scampering critter). It's a process of vision.

Your options are 1) develop this skill; 2) find someone who has. Weigh the effort and palatability of personal transformation vs setting aside the signal-detection machinery that has thus far excluded competent ideators from your circle.


So here's a nice idea I had that I don't have time to implement:

A specialized debate forum. Basically, two people decide to debate on an issue. They are the featured debaters. They write positions and submit them, and then they try to knock down the other person's positions.

Watchers can comment on specific points they make, annotating them and giving points for them. I imagine a system kind of like RapGenius.

Eventually, in the best case, the best arguments float to the top, and the more common arguments will have a home on the net where people can point to them instead of rehashing them over and over again. Leading to more intelligent discourse and a perfect society.


Considering you guys can start with a blank check and work on IP heavy ideas (CMU PhD), it is safe to assume that you guys don’t want to go in something which isn’t less than a billion dollar thing in 5-7 years.

So look for pilot projects in such industries where entry barriers are high, defence, insurance, banking, health, oil &gas, etc. Wall Street connections will come in handy to find the right folks to call. As of now the plan should be to convert pilots into products. If need be do two or more pilots at the same time and then take a call later based on what is most beneficial, the amount and type of risk, comfort factor of the team, etc.


Reading through this thread with great interest, I actually have to wonder what the OP's criteria really are. I'd guess that lokendrachauhan's assumption is probably valid, but that is somewhat based on my stereotypes (and being currently involved in a venture that is driven by these kinds of aspirations on the part of the CEO, not always to good effect, IMHO).

@OP, what are your general guidelines for a "good idea"?

Look at the range of approaches discussed: from Dane Maxwell's approach to focused SaaS solopreneur to selling to big industries or the government (long lead-times). Plus, some of the ideas mentioned are stunning. Ideas per se are not lacking. $B+ ideas with low-risk and high differentiation might be ;)

Also, you description of "great team" sounds a lot like "bankable resumes", but it is unclear what experience you guys have that would actually be accretive to building an early-stage startup. There are a lot of smart people who want to be involved in big deals. If your PE guy is not actually serving as an SME for a finance-related product, and primarily brings a rolodex and smell of money on his CV, then maybe he should be an investor or perhaps on the board instead?

Consider also your tech SME, and that you've only 1 tech person of 3. Although I do not assume a doctoral degree means no practical skills (I think there's actually some discrimination against doctorates out there), does this guy also have practical experience in small SW efforts? It seems a red flag that he doesn't have ML application ideas.

I don't intend this to sound mean, in fact I identify with your situation in a few ways, I'm just reflecting some honest thoughts after 3 startups.

Have you considered choosing something, even if it isn't perfect, to use as a "forcing function" to get the juices flowing in your group and vet them as a good team? I understand the opportunity cost of time, but actually doing something might galvanize your thinking.

Good luck!


The problem is it's almost impossible to put together a functional team from people who don't know each other for years. I have a solid idea and need 3 guys with exactly the background you described, especially the SaaS+ML interest, but it doesn't matter because of this. The trust issues are usually covered by a patchwork of NDAs, equity splits that turn out to be arbitrary, vesting schedules that turn out to be unfair, and at the end of the day, someone gets screwed anyway. So I'd love to see that problem solved first - not sure that's also a business "idea" though :-) Good luck anyway.


I'd suggest you and your team go to a bunch of Startup Weekend/Hackathon events. When I've gone I've found a lot of cool people come to those who have the other side of your problem, good idea but no tech/bizdev/capital. It's also a great test to see if 54 hours of dedicated work on the problem yields something that is interesting... if yes great... if not you may be on the wrong path? (Note: there are some important rules about IP at these events you should research/understand fully).

I'd also change your thinking/language from looking for an "idea" to looking for a problem. The distinction may seem slight but it is important + helpful. The idea is really the solution, which often isn't clear until after a lot of sustained thinking/experimenting around the problem.

I'd try to find problems that genuinely personally piss you off. Building a company always takes longer and is harder than anticipated... so you have to be completely committed.

Finally, sell it in person right away... like day 1. Go sell it to people you don't know for real money even if it's not ready yet. When you go around asking people for money you'll either get it or get a lot of really brutal feedback on why not. Either outcome is helpful at this stage.

Good luck!


Look at technologies that are either at the Peak of Inflated Expectations (on the Gartner hype cycle) or in the process of plunging into the Trough of Disillusionment, and figure out what needs to happen for them to climb the Slope of Enlightenment to the Plateau of Productivity.

Alternatively, build the world's best To Do list app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355029


Have you taken a look at ClickUp (clickup.com), they're pretty new and they have an answer to most of what you want. I recently interviewed for them and they have all but 2 of your requested features currently implemented. Dependencies are on the roadmap for this winter http://docs.clickup.com/features/roadmap

You might also want to look at todoist business which is also formidable: https://en.todoist.com/business

Are there any other features you would add to the list today? This was my requested mix of features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10997561


I highly recommend taking the time (2+ weeks) to travel as a team or even better, individually. Think southeast Asia or Latin America. Limit yourselves to a very small amount of money (outside of transportation) and experience life differently.

As many others have suggested, meeting other people and opening yourselves to different experiences will help. Maybe by meeting people and having experiences though a different cultural lens will help break the thought patterns holding you back.

Best of luck.


I think that the general advice of "find something that bugs you and then fix it" is a particularly bad way of building a business because you run a very high risk of building something that nobody else wants. In general, "you" != "your customer".

My advice would be to go out and find some group of people/companies and then ask them what problems are they currently facing that are not currently ideally solved (stressed out moms, small businesses, etc. It really doesn't matter, just a large accessible group who may have problems that could be solved via ML).

This way, you don't need to know really anything about the domain because the interviewees will know the space well enough and will tell you what's wrong with it (and will most likely list ideas on how to fix it.) This will also remove your worry about the space being crowded because even if it is, if your interviewees are saying that there is still an unsolved problem, then there is still opportunity for you.

Another idea is to attend a startup weekend and learn how to quickly test assumptions/prototype and then try and replicate the process during the week. (e.g. run one full validation sprint per week, every week on different ideas until something gains traction.)


Similar to the advice about trying to find problems rather than solutions, I would look at existing businesses that are doing well, but aren't executing well. The computer world is full of dominant products that were second to the market (despite what people think). Often teams have great ideas without great execution. You can capitalise on that and eat their lunch.

And like others comments have said, I would also start thinking very critically about your self assessment of having a "great team". I could give you 10 viable business ideas before breakfast (actually, it is before breakfast for me!) Ideas are cheap to the point of being worthless. If you don't realise that, it's because you are likely inexperienced. This is not a criticism, just an observation. I would start by cashing one of those "blank cheques" and go looking for someone with experience who can help you. You are looking for someone technical who can give you sound advice about how to execute well building a product from end to end.

You may be thinking that the technical person on your team is who you need. But what ever the academic credentials and how ever smart the person is, execution relies on having done it all before. It relies on having failed a hundred times before finally finding the one way that works.

Finally, no matter if you follow my previous advice or not, begin by beginning. Like I said, good ideas are so common that they are worthless. You will either succeed through good execution or good luck. So start. Follow this advice: http://wiki.c2.com/?PlanToThrowOneAway


If you have a hard time coming up with ideas, you probably shouldn't start a company.


This is harsh, but true. I've never heard a successful founder say "I don't know, I just wanted to start a company with my friends and get rich." Every dang middle-schooler in the US wants that. Companies are a means, not an end. Successful ones always start with someone who's passionate about a very specific problem.

This really comes out in corporate mission statements. Even if you're Xerox, your mission statement is something like "Improve the rate of business communications by creating the world's most excellent copy machines."

If you don't have an idea for a startup, you're missing the key ingredient. The team literally cannot exist without that visionary person who knows exactly what they're after.


> I've never heard a successful founder say "I don't know, I just wanted to start a company with my friends and get rich."

I could not disagree more. Companies are started by all sorts of people: some founders have a definite idea that is a perfect fit for the market(Stripe,Heroku), some go over many iterations of their original idea and may even end up abandoning it for something entirely unrelated(Reddit), the last type of founder simply wants to be in business and does not even know what his product is yet(Steve Jobs before he joined Pixar). The only trait all founders share is drive and ambition.


An open problem that's "sexy" but may be intractable is that of fact checking.

Can you determine which articles in a corpus of news, or other documents, agree/disagree with one another? Can you cluster and sub-cluster along statements of fact being made? Can you then trace a statement of fact back to it's "original source" based on when that entry was acquired?

There's a lot of opportunity in that space...


People care about facts that go their way and ignore the others.


Its a momma duck problem. Once they've accepted something as fact, they have a hard time parting ways with it.

But if you could interject at this moment of initial assimilation and provide some legitimacy or point out the lack thereof, you could provide a very useful service.

It would also help people change their minds, although as you mentioned, that is harder to do. But at least now you have better tools to do it.

Finally, not EVERYONE is completely disinterested in having their misconceptions corrected.


Exactly.

"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend." - Henri Bergson


There are a lot of ways to make a startup. If you are cynical, you can undermine an existing occupation or skilled trade, either by replacing it with contractors who lack the same job skills but who aren't employees and can't unionize, or commoditizing an industry such that the people or businesses are simply cogs in your machine, where people often pick the cheapest option even if it undermines quality.

If you are less cynical though, you might want a startup that makes the world a better place. So instead of looking for a problem people with money have, you could look for a systemic inequity or market failure that hurts people and keeps them from having money.

My suggestion would be payday loans and credit card debt. There is competition, but there are plenty of ways to go with helping people.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/04...


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Love the list! :)

for the OP of this list, this idea "Crowdsourced Air-Traffic-Control" is a good idea if changed to traffic light control. One thing that REALLY bugs me is inefficient traffic lights because their timings are off. But the trick is not direct control of traffic lights, but track a consensus to change timings.

Bonus, revolutionize traffic lights through vision and adaptive control to create best average trip times for everyone, adapts to accidents / blockage etc :)


> IP over Carrier Pigeon Hahaha, that's funny.

> Yelp for the dark web Oh, that just got dark... no pun intended.


"Phone app that cries when the phone is left alone" for a bounus ,starts whining at you if you use it too much. I'd call it "Millenial Anxiety Simulator"


1. Give all of the money to charity 2. Ask the investors for more money 3. Goto 1


Start a consultancy business building the ideas that others have.

Also....

You have everything you need, so nothing is niggling your motivation. Some people work best under constraint, with limited resources.

Finally, are you too fussy? Do you analyse every idea to death?


Like others have said, try to solve problems instead of looking for ideas.

If you want a list of over 30 ideas (one of which I've been working on and recently got accepted to interview at YC for), feel free to email me and I'll send you my list. I write them down as they come to me, as crazy as some might sound. lxc5296 [at] gmail.

Here's one:

Why don't you come up with a startup that helps people find ideas? Clearly it's a problem you yourself have, as well as many others. It seems impractical, but most great things are until someone comes along and does it right.

How it could work: people can call into a center and talk with people that specialize in certain topics and have conversations that lead to ideas. The expert can get a feel for the callers interests and find an intersection between them and problems that need to be solved.

Or, it can be strictly software based.

Eventually it can turn into a platform for people that don't know what direction to go in in their life to seek help and get guidance. Trust me, there's a lot of those people in the world (basically all millenials). Huge market.


There are tons of problems to solve.

- Invest in some products or teams that already exist and learn their problems and come up with a solution that is needed or partner with them.

- Reinvent a common pain point in business with service or automation, pay or observe people in industries you want to enter and their problems.

- Find a problem you have or know about maybe in private equity, computer science or bizdev that you have experienced.

- Innovate/iterate on a solution in the market that needs progression, this might even be a crowded market or a commodity that may be easier to change due to the lack of interest there. There are no new ideas under the sun but there is lost of improvement that can be made.

- Find a passion project, create a tool that targets a niche area of something you like to keep your interest i.e. movies, art, games, finance, sports etc. Spend enough time there and problems will be self-evident.

- The problem you are having right now, maybe make a solution to that, finding an idea that is marketable for a well funded team (a great problem to have).


Redfin and Zillow might have beat you to it but real estate has a lot of old-fashion practices. I think there is a lot of space in that industry to improve.

One anecdote I have a friend (~30) who works in real estate appraisal. He says the industry is run on excel. While it might not make you a unicorn, you could definitely make money having a better solution.


Fully agree with you on that.


I have one idea that I will probably never have time to do (I have 3 childs and a fulltime job). It is an app to manage fuel consumption. The idea is that some people use a notebook to write each time they buy fuel (I did until I bought a Nissan Leaf). If the application is as handy as a notebook (maybe a simple picture of the gaz pump would be enough to fill in the data), some people will use it and you will start to collect the price and location of all gas stations. Once you have enough data, you can provide additional service to find the best gas station taking into account your position, current destination, remaining fuel, ... Gas stations may want to pay you some advertising, ... The application may grow further to take into account maintenance of the car. Maybe it is a silly idea, but if you build it, I would use it (for my second car).


It seems some other people had the idea http://appcrawlr.com/android-apps/best-apps-fuel-tracking. A couple of years ago (when I had the idea), there was nothing barely usable.


After looking at the screendumps of current apps, it seems they still are awful. IMHO, a good UX is to have one click to take the picture of the pump, then you can check the fields. The mileage field is automatically filled using your average consumption, you just need to fix the last digits if you want, then press OK. It should work fine even offline and synchronize latter.


Stop trying to make the perfect product: make something small and fail/succeed fast.

Once you stop being an external observer and commit to delivering a product, your understanding of the wider market will improve... before long you'll see profitability in places you didn't know existed.

There's nothing wrong in delivering something simple first. Most of the consulting businesses out there simply 'solutionize' Excel spreadsheets (i.e. add a web or mobile frontend to an internal process). Take the post room in my building as an example: they've just upgraded to an electronic system dispensing with the time consuming/error prone ledger entry and paper slip delivery. Someone sold them a 'CMS' with a package input form and email alert... As scope increased they added bar code scanning and a check-digit shelf allocator.


Yes, I do have a suggestion that will seem outlandish, but even if I set you thinking I would have achieved my goal.

The problem of human health and aging. ( isn't it the biggest problem ALL of us face?) On the face of it you may think that there are plenty of people working on it but there aren't. Most of main stream research is aimed using the conventional approach: Finding a 'cure' for a disease just like it's done for an infectious disease.Example: cancer. This is a fundamentally flawed approach. If you think of it older people have a higher probability than younger people of cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc. So the more rational approach would be to target ageing itself.

The SENS foundation is one such entity that has this approach (http://www.sens.org)


FWIW, my partner and I were in a similar position after winding down our first company together ~1.5 years ago. We decided to just interview our friends and friends of friends companies asking about their biggest pain points. This gave us two things:

1. A common pain point across a sample of ~10 companies (the pain point was customer support, which lead us to the problem of automating first responses to customer support queries and our solution is https://ada.support)

2. A group of early, paying customers to help us build the product they needed. Paying because we wanted to make sure what we were building was actually valuable.

I don’t know if my partner would be comfortable with me disclosing our financials, but I’ll just say we’re close to being profitable with a team of 16.

Hope that helps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Last year one of my friends said: “Not only are all the good ideas taken, but all the bad ideas are taken too.”


Here's a great idea: bitcoin settlement, custody, and clearing for institutional investors. There is a huge first mover advantage to be had signing up to prime broker every hedge fund's bitcoins and help settle OTC transactions. I know people who need this. Good luck.


Disrupt Standardized Testing

We spend ~2 billion on standardized testing in the U.S.; however, perceived drawbacks in how these tests are structured and administered prevent more widespread adoption (though expansion would provide valuable data that is currently unavailable to front line educational staff). The need for standardized testing is largely predicated on a lack of trust in the assessments that classroom instructors are creating and administering, but these untrustworthy assessments are being created in the millions every year. It is a classic 'business that still uses filing cabinets' as the collective value of these materials is largely silo'ed within the binders/file cabinets/'05 Dell Inspiron of the teachers who made them.

Provide a platform that is structured around the creation and administration of assessments BUT the test contents are made available for use by other instructors. The value to the instructor centers on four attributes: immediacy, authenticity, accessibility, and personalization. Immediacy in that an assessment can be created simply by building an appropriate request (e.g. 'comprehension' 'to kill a mockingbird' 'grade 9' 'ten questions'). Authenticity in that this generative model pushes the instructor to rapidly curate their provided assessment elements as appropriate to their lessons (accepted questions remain, rejected questions are replaced: much faster than creating from scratch). Accessibility in that as instructors modify assessment elements (e.g. for an ELL student) those modifications become available to all instructors in the future. Personalization in that the platform could provide any number of assessments that the teacher distributes according to the needs of their individual students, this distribution could likewise be automated to react to past assessment results and further extend the teacher's capabilities.

At the metal, it's one sliver of a Content Management System paired with a Cognitive Tutor. You would need a process for vetting the validity of individual assessment elements, but the teacher curation may offer an initial path (as judging the validity of assessment items would be an implicit element of the workflow). On the back end, you would be in a place to sell assessment data to school districts that is poorly provided by current testing services. You could also sell certified results for higher education, talent identification, and so on. Further on, this platform would be well positioned to create a marketplace for educational content, games, and domain specific tools.


This is a bit like saying "disrupt the federal contracting business, so much money for such crap software!"

Standardized tests are a highly political product, and in most states the creation of a standardized test has very little to do with creating an optimal (or even good) assessment.

The idea of using teachers as part of the vetting process for questions is a nice one, but your actual customer sit in state capitols, not classrooms.


I don't think you're entirely wrong, there is political pressure behind standardized testing; however, this is largely because the alternative was no trustable testing. Making teachers' assesments trustable is politically palatable to teachers while also fulfilling the administrative goals that standardized testing has been asked (and largely failed) to resolve.


My idea is that you should combine ML with something that is highly reliant on human labor--especially where that reliance is starting to be the key bottleneck preventing new capacity from starting up. A good example of this would be slaughterhouses in the US; the pork processing business for example. Get some experienced workers from an existing facility to wear google glass type cameras, put sensors on the base and tip of their electric knives, and project a grid of red laser dots on the carcasses, and record the process of carving them up from start to finish many times with many different carcasses. Get enough labeled data that way and you could replace human workers in a dirty/dangerous/low-paid industry.


I have an Agtech startup I've been working on for the past year, but am stepping away from it for personal reasons. It's R&D heavy, so I haven't got customers yet, but I believe there is real opportunity (said every customer-less startup founder ever). It's in an emerging market (agriculture) with booming investment dollars available. Right now the product is largely IoT, but there is scope for a lot of machine learning and blockchain in the near future which would keep your PhD interested.

I've put a lot of hard work into this and would love to see it in somebody else's capable hands rather than going to waste - would you like to talk it over more? Drop me an email at sajrobb at gmail dot com.


I have an idea and a prototype - there’s interesting capital gain tax discount laws in UK and Australia and for investors who buy and sell shares there is always a way to minimise their gains but it’s not straightforward for accountants to calculate it matching the buying and selling transactions if there are many of them for the same stock. The target market is DYI investors and tax accountants. I don’t have the time or capital to keep it going, but I have used the prototype to save myself thousands in taxes and have talked about it to a couple of accountants and let another investor use it with some promise. Feel free to take the idea. If you want an explanation just leave me an email address.


Dynamic Relational: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15352786

Release an open-source version, but have a fee-based "enterprise" edition and/or provide fee-based tech support, similar to MySql's and Php's business model.

Organizations often need something dynamic, such as during prototyping, but want to leverage existing RDBMS knowledge, principles, and the SQL language. The Dynamic Relational model can tighten constraints as a customer's project matures. The "NoSql" movement showed that dynamism is a sought-after database trait.


Everyone makes it so complicated.

Armchair opinion, for all that it's worth (so probably stop reading here): what can you do to provide a lot of marginal value to people, without requiring them to do much?

All kinds of things - how about something with clean water or reliable power generation/storage? There is no shortage of ideas out there, richie rich. If you're REALLY hurting for something like an idea, it's going to show, and you're gonna get grifted. What are you expecting to accomplish here, opening a can of meat in a swarm of piranhas?


Stick to private equity, it's a better business and is evolving--plenty of good ideas remaining.

If you're doing a software startup, your team should be 3 engineers, not 2 business guys and 1 engineer.


Just this morning I was wondering if you could take a bed like the sleep number bed and combine it with AI for a mattress that constantly adapts to your sleep pattern, rhythm, position etc


Sleepspam... that would introduce a new level of super-evil :-)


You guys should become angel investors, not entrepreneurs. It's a good way for people with money but no real penchant for entrepreneurship to get involved in the startup ecosystem.


Maybe consider acquiring a small SaaS that is already modestly successful but has a ton more potential.


Group buys for real estate rentals. NYC is perfect for it.

Remember how in college, you'd fill in your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. housing options and get a match? Do that with groups of friends who are all graduating college at the same time and moving to NYC. Landlords would love you, as you'd rent out entire floors/buildings all at the same time.

Then build an ongoing matching service to fill the spots of individuals who move out.

NYC real estate is physically shitty, so you can add value by focusing on the social aspect of living.


There's an awesome service that is executing on this idea in NYC and other similar markets, and is growing pretty quickly: https://roomiapp.com/


Some advice:

Keep it really simple. There's a tendency to build too much when your only goal is to prove whether there's a market opportunity that you can capture.

Look beyond young people in urban cores.

Don't startup in a domain in which nobody on your team has deep connections. While there have been exceptions, it's foolish to assume that your antecedents were morons.

It's quite possible that the reason you don't have an idea is that your team needs a fourth person that is really passionate about an idea.

One thing you could consider trying is applying your team to an existing team that is having trouble getting traction for an idea you think has legs. Lots of people are working on a product that they have no idea how to bring to market.

Are any of you women? That missing fourth person is almost certainly female. And guess what? There's a lot of things that could be made better in the world for women.

If you start building a platform, I recommend that you skip the platform and build the first product that you'd build using the platform if it existed.

One really helpful lens for idea evaluation is: what current behaviour is this replacing? What do people with this problem do about it today? And are they willing to pay money to do it differently?

I wrote a post a few years back that you might find useful. http://hackertourism.com/how-to-tell-your-friend-that-their-...


Let me humbly offer my advice, based on my last 10 years in startups (with 2 years interruption working for big G):

1. Figure out what kind of company you want to build and which spaces you feel most comfortable with. B2C or B2B? Software? Saas? Hardware? Services? How long would you like to be involved? 2 years? 5 years? 15 years? Any different combination will require a different approach. Find alignment on these points with your co-founders early.

2. Align yourself with larger tech trends and figure out which ones you actually believe in. As a reader of HN (or your favorite tech blogs) you should have a good idea about the trends and hypes du jour. Pay special attention to where BigTechCo is allocating resources. Proper alignment with a larger trend (+ the right timing) is a major success factor in startups (but way too often gets lost in the discussion noise).

3. Figure out if there's an area within a general trend you believe in where you can get one step ahead of everybody else (e.g. because of skills/expertise/connections of team members).

4. Within that area, start talking to people.

5. If that sequence doesn't yield any good results, start over. Only commit to an idea if everyone has a great gut feeling about it. If your gut tells you no then don't do it.

Happy to talk more.


Let me put this into financial terms.

Currently your team is 'fundamentally' worthless (in market terms it can be quite valuable). Despite being well-funded, it has no market in which it can make money. The investors who are putting a dollar value on it are mistaken, because its fundamental value is $0. (There is a mismatch between its valuation and its fundamental value.) The investors are idiots. (By comparison, they probably wouldn't invest in many very valuable startups at the seed stage, again, because they're idiots.)

Well all right, you can get blank checks. Now you just need to add some value to the business. So you're writing a check of your own. You're writing this check:

https://imgur.com/a/QnTgb

And, ideally, will use it to pay for $1 billion in value: the new amount your team will be worth.

The thing is, you can't really get anyone to take your check. "I Just want to pay $0 and get $1 billion in value. Why is this so hard?"

Put in these terms, can you think of any reasons it might be hard?

(The actual reason is that the market misprices ideas, and although the market prices them at $0, you cannot buy them for zero: the market does not 'clear'.)


Hey, I have great idea but not capital. I'm sure there are many from the YC rejects batch that feel the same, and a few that are probably correct. Perhaps you should call for those, and see if there's an idea that got passed on, not due to a bad idea, but rather to perhaps lack of a solid team. I'm a solo founder working part time on my idea and don't have a team, so I'm sure that contributed in me getting rejected.


Why not any of the ideas here: https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/


I think selling to consumers is tough, B2B level is much better area. Boring stuff like hotel staffing, facilities management, insurance claim processing, car fleet servicing, large building power conservation, commercial swimming pool maintenance, hospital supplies. All that stuff that most people never see so don't even know it exists. If you have PE friends find out what is surprisingly expensive and annoying from management POV.


Ha ! I've heard before of the "great team + capital" story so I am not surprised. A great execution team is a really good competitive advantage imo.

I'm already creating a business, but I have tons of ideas. I wouldn't even want a share of the companies you could build from these - ideas are cheap, right ?

You know hat ? I'll give you two very good ideas for free, and if you like them I'd be down to selling you two excellent ideas ;)


Education.

Help improve your public school system. Help teach teachers. Teach other people, yourselves -- start with your neighbour's kids, neighbourhood schools, nearby orphanages and children's remand homes. Help scale great initiatives that don't have the brand pull of Khan Academy and the ilk. Fund scholarships, if nothing else.

It will be a drop in the ocean, but an extremely high-leverage one, IMHO.

And one that leaves a legacy. I'm sure many noble people will be willing to write large cheques for legacy-creating initiatives.

OR,

Resurrect something that died an untimely death.

(edit) OR, Help turn around good businesses teetering on the edge.

Many companies and business models died ~15 years ago, in the dot-com bust, only to become wildly successful in the last 5 years.

I bet many otherwise-reasonable businesses died for dumb reasons, in the recent 5 years (like forgetting to be frugal).

If we believe that the market turnover cycle has accelerated; which businesses died before their time, and could be resurrected over the next 5-7 years (about the time to make a business viable)?

https://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/

http://startupgraveyard.io/

http://autopsy.io/

---

(edits: minor sentence tweaks)


Funny, i have 2-3 really good ideas that i feel are genuine and have large profit potential, yet i have no team and hardly any programming skills to launch them.


There are many programmers and programming teams for hire out there. Don't let that stop you


Have you pitched them to anyone honest enough to tell you how bad they probably are?


yes, and i got good feedback. actually from 3 people one of which is my boss who basically said nice idea but good luck (no programming experience) and 2 friends who said they were down to program but wont really do anything until i get some groundwork started.


AREAS -------- Software Quality or Fintech. Don't waste a good team on something like a Kale Smoothie Delivery Service For Beardy Hipsters. Software Quality is a huge, growing issue - we have more and more young/new coders arriving, massively increasing demand for code, and yet no government enforced standards (such as those found in Law, Architecture and Accounting). The industry is suffering the exact same issues that Fred Brooks wrote about 50 years ago, despite all our modern frameworks and IDEs, because we're just doing more stuff with fewer people. Starting points: The Open Group (and TOGAF), ITIL, MinistryofTesting.com

INSPIRATION ------ Hari Seldon, hero of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, was deliberately put into a wide variety of situations and experiences to inspire his imagination and fuel his emotional responses. Get out of starbucks, do crazy shit and get uncomfortable - allow it to fuse emotion and desire for change, because that's where motivation comes from. (related: read Think and Grow Rich if you haven't already)

FROM IDEA TO BUSINESS --------------- Read 'The E-myth revisited' and 'The Lean Startup'


> Hari Seldon, hero of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, was deliberately put into a wide variety of situations

This refers to the books Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1993).


I've been a subscriber of opps daily for a while. I've started to realize one of the problems isn't that the technology to solve these niche problems doesn't exist... but rather most people either aren't searching for solutions or they don't understand how to apply existing technology to solve them.

I think there's a huge business opportunity in marketing/modifying existing software for new applications.


What I will say may be old. But that's what I feel everyday I use any piece of software/service. Since I did some startups before years ago. I may just say something only obvious to anyone who have tried them.

1. What kind of stuff do you feel pain?

2. Do all the existing solutions on the market solve that pain?

3. Can you come up something that may be better so users will put their time and money on your idea?

4. Fail, why?

5. Traction, why?

6. Repeat, continue, 1,2,3 [4|5] until you decide to leave the industry.


Find an under served niche and then build something to service that specific niche.

I do just that about four years ago and have a stable client base of about a dozen clients who are all on our subscription based billing (instead of the costlier hourly billing) we have. Because of what we bill out, and the ability to work with my partners remotely even though we all live in the same city; we have zero overhead which increases our profit margin considerably.

We started with websites and SEO. Now we're building enterprise level apps for these firms and they can't get enough of it. The industry we're in is also a tight-knight small community so once word starting getting around about the stuff we did and how we helped these other firms, we started getting a lot of calls. When we started, it was all cold calling, doing local industry conferences, and reaching out to their professional organizations and doing educational seminars and talks to increase exposure.

Start small and then go after the big stuff. Otherwise, you're diving into a huge pool for competition. Focus on a small niche, own it, then duplicate that model to other industries.


You are looking for a problem. It should be a problem that a) a lot of people have, b) you can fix, and c) people are willing to pay real money for.

Have you found anything that meets all three of these conditions? That would be something to jump on with both feet. But not a lot of opportunities like that come along. So how about a two out of three, with the third question being unknown? That might be worth trying, at least.


I would highly recommend "Jump Start Your Brain" by Doug Hill. On page 88 there is a "Eureka" formula you can use to generate ideas. (#of good ideas = ((number of stimuli)^(diversity))/fear) Once you have an idea, just pull the trigger and start working on it. It sounds like you have a lot already, but are holding yourself back for some reason. Just take some action! Pick something.


What problem are you trying to solve is the only question you should be asking. Given your background and given that you are useless in terms of building products, you need to excel at connecting with users and if you want a SaaS company then you need to work within industries you know well.

Second question is, how big is your market. That is the only question that really matters to serious VCs.

I'll be honest though the fact that there are two "business guys" and only one developer is a big red flag and I would not get involved with this company. "Business guys" tend to not care for or understand technology and the reality is that in the tech space you win with technological advantage. Period. All best tech cos were started by developers (Google Facebook, Microsoft, all SaaS companies I know of even if the founders were not coding at the end they were developers by training - marc benioff, Larry Ellison) or had genius developers coupled with brilliant sales people (Apple).

The best technologists are driven and are not usually fond of "ideas" from business people. Also, remember that ML is an area that will be conquered by large companies, FANGs. It's not worth wasting your time on, if you are not a technology person.

Given what you mention about your background, I would focus on creating a company that is based on a problem the industry at least one of you knows really well, and have light technology because you are not going to win in the tech space if you have two business founders (my true honest opinion) not nowadays. Something like consulting, something where sales matters more than tech. Business people HAVE to be good at 1. strategy and 2. market so if you're not that's a red flag. Maybe you guys like hanging out, a business partnership is not a great idea.


I don't think you should drop an "idea" just because the space is crowded or commoditized so long as the problem in the space has not been "solved."

Consider that there were many search engines before Google and many social networks before Facebook and so on.

All spaces are crowded but there is still lots of room for improvement. Even a simple todo app doesn't do quite all the things everyone needs. You can imagine super versions of a todo that automatically uses your calendar to allocate time to the tasks. Then when people want to meet with you, it show you options that are spaced so you have time for your tasks and then analyzes the tasks you do and don't get done, and notices what the differences and then allocates the right time for the right task (morning for creative, night for braindead, lunch for meetings) or whatever.

The problems are the same problems. Just look at the current solutions and you can see they are lacking. Then the question is, can you find a good way to solve them. (You code up the above solution and simply doesn't work, for example. )


The one thing I am never short of is ideas.

I used to think they'd stop coming but always new ideas come and I write them down in a list now. Too many to execute.

Some good, some probably not so great.

The accepted wisdom is that ideas are worth nothing but I strongly disagree. I think most ideas are worth nothing, but some ideas are incredibly valuable so I don't give my ideas away in case I want to make use of them one day.


You may end up taking your valuable ideas to the grave.


Ideas have no value, the value is entirely in the execution.


I have a Billion dollar idea. What I lack is team and funding. I hold down a full time job and have had several small victories, check my profile. What I lack is what you have. There are people sadly at both ends of the spectrum. I am looking for funding quite badly. I know several willing to join my team, only if we can find someone to invest.

If you are or can be a funder, find my info in profile.


My suggestion would be to run sprints (Check out the book "Sprints"). The process of validating a market via leads and/or customer feedback shifts your team from theorizing to exploring. One founder mentor of mine said it well, "all startups are inevitable narratives in reverse, with a confusing reality of constant reinventions on the way there." That's what your team needs practice in - being a team in the midst of uncertainty. As a captain of several startups I can tell you the art is in navigating with a team, not possessing the conviction yourself. You guys have the financial background so do what you do best: pull data from mattermark, angellist, and accelerator acceptance announcements. Make a list of concepts you like and run sprints. Pit your ideas against the ones you test. You'd be surprised how much faster you'll get on your third sprint vs your first. At your stage of learning competitors are irrelevant. Building something people want is all that matters.


I have a proven, novel means to gain insight about System1 response. Issued a patent for it (which I think is reasonably well written). Worked great applying it improve response to P&G's branded ads (then was part of McD's SG&A cuts). Would love to use it to improve romantic outcomes (better than survey response measures; e.g. "love at first [System1] sight" would make Kahneman/Tversky proud). Etc. Same coin, opposite side. If I was you, I would hang around some grabybeards who are 50+ and have been working in logistical positions for corporations, expand your network, and hire a great salesman. The GB's will have ideas, but not the where-with-all to act -- notably if they have a family HC plan. The network (also a good GB win), and your sales team are more important than a great idea. You really just need a "good enough" idea, execution, plus sales to get started, then adjust. HTH.


I really, deeply, do not understand the issue here.

It is beyond me how anyone can be technologically savvy with an engineering mindset and look out on the world as it exists today and not see innumerable ways that it can be improved.

Is your roadblock simply that you're trying to look for the easiest ways to make money? Or the sexiest? Take a look at the world and start coming up with problems that need solutions, and potential ways that technology could serve. Imagine things that you, yes you yourself, wish existed but don't yet. Imagine things that you simply wish were better. Keep iterating on those processes until you have a huge list of problems that should be solved and things that should exist but don't. Then filter your list down to only the subset of problems that your team could potentially tackle well and that have some sort of possibility for monetization in the near term, then pick one or a few and run with it.


GitHub for X. Construction is taken [1]. UI/Product is taken [2]. I'm sure there are more document types.

[1]: https://www.plangrid.com/ [2]: https://zeplin.io/


My intuition is that you should leverage your strengths, rather than try to fit your talents into someone else's idea. It sound like you have a broad array of talents, which can be a blessing for some businesses and a curse for others.

Consider not even creating a new new business. Do someone else's better than them. And there are several companies that seem to grossly overvalued by the standard of "if I gave you [their market cap], could you make a better version of them?" Since one of your strengths is an endless flow of capital, get $1b and make a better Twitter (or whatever).

Maybe just follow Josh Levine's blueprint for $100mm?

https://wp.josh.com/2017/10/23/adventures-in-autorouting/


I'd love to talk to you but probably best not publicly. I'm looking for groups like you describe, and have ideas to spare (many of which have a great deal of development behind them but could use a team and possibly some funding to get launched properly). I'd love to give you a demo or two.

rjbrown at gmail


If you're interested in doing more ML work, here's an interesting thought experiment to guide your research towards an idea: ML is currently widely used for things like speech processing and synthesis, music, as well as vision. All of this is sensing and reacting to stimuli at various frequencies. But there is much more... So from the lowest to highest practical frequencies, what do we use each band for, and what would it mean to see in it?

Some examples:

- Single digit Hertz: seismic observations. Could you build a better earthquake predictor? How about an active control system for shifting building loads during an earthquake?

- kilohertz: Lightning detection systems.

- kilohertz to low megahertz: traditional FM/AM radio. Is there a better way?

- gigahertz: think your good old-fashioned microwave oven. What if it could automatically learn what it's cooking and how to best heat it evenly?

- gigahertz: could you build a smarter Wi-Fi network (or cell network) if devices reported their location when they didn't have coverage and the network could automatically adjust?

- tens of gigahertz: we now have object sensing systems in cars. what other parts of life might that kind of technology be useful for?

- infrared: what happens when a ML-based vision system wants to see in the dark?

- above the visual spectrum: ML + medical imaging (x-rays, other scans? what could be learned?)

There are lots of fun research questions to be answered and new technology yet developed. The wonderful part about doing some really structured research along these lines is that you might have to ask about "who knows about this" and run into the PhD student who's working in this area -today- but isn't yet developing a product. There is a ton of university research that could lead you towards an interesting new product: the idea doesn't have to be your own, or even come from the typical "ideas" person.


I have the opposite problem, I work as an analyst, I have a ton of ideas, and understand the tone of the industry, but I have no capital and limited team. I'd love to work on one of my ideas with a team, if you're interested let me know, I'll comment my email. Thanks, and good luck.


My suggestions:

1. Don't sell to techies. i.e. ignore any ideas about software testing, cloud base load testing, etc.

2. Pick a solid business domain you know really well. There is no substitute for domain expertise. Sometimes things that look really simple are actually mindblowingly complex. And vice versa. But it sounds like you don't have that so...

3. Do something in HR Tech. Every single company on earth competes for talent, and the HR software industry is already worth many 10s of billions, and is not remotely built out. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of startups in this space already. Also, in HR software you're dealing with people, so there will never be any "one right approach" - you can always sell your crazy HR software product to at least a few wide eyed early adopters somewhere.


I have an idea related to recruiting, but cannot figure out how to bootstrap the project with products (aka developers). I have a few ideas related to HR, so I like this suggestion. Solve problems.


I would like to have a quick chat with you about your idea.. your expertise in ElasticSearch might be a powerful tool for something. If interested, please ping me


Good luck! Even within recruitment there are many subfields, e.g. hiring developers has almost nothing whatsoever to do with hiring baristas to work in your cafe.

So much goodness waiting to be tapped!


We have a great product, targeted towards enterprises, well tested in the local market, looking to expand internationally (including US). We have a couple of international deployments in our portfolio already. Our product could be categorized as a analytics, planning, data science solution. We've been on the market for 7 years, growing organically.

Currently, we are looking for an investment to fuel sales internationally and create new SaaS revenue channel to target medium and small companies. Your team sounds like a great fit to complement our mission - for example you could steer the US expansion. If you are interested, contact me under awayt764@gmail.com and leave a comment under this post.

I'm sorry for all this anonymity, I'll explain more when we get in touch.


As chuck McM said, start looking for a problem, rather than an idea but i would like to add this caveat:

1) Look at the background of you 3 guys, and list out problems which were being worked around in the areas of your business development or private equity or the domain of your phd friend.

There is a much higher probability of you guys having domain expertise in the areas you have been exposed to in the past, and a lot of business contacts as well - and solving a problem in those areas means that you will be able to address problems you have personally faced before - through a combination of software and services.

Note that there is no dearth of problems to be solved, but problems you have faced before personally can be a much more fruitful area for automated solutions.


You need to identify the next big waves and decide which one you're most passionate about, and where you can add value. You shouldn't shy away from a crowded field. If the opportunity is large, a lot of people will enter the field before/after you so you need to figure out how to differentiate your product.

Here are a few tsunamis to think about:

1. Self-driving cars - which part of the value chain can you make a difference? Manufacturing, tech, ride hailing, financing, or others?

2. OTT TV - eventually, all content will be streamed. Where would the new value be created? What is the ideal experience in a world where you can watch anything, anytime on any device?

3. VR gaming/entertainment.

Everyone can see the big waves on the horizon. Not everyone knows how to ride them well...


You should give the money to a startup with a product, traction and excited users that is founded by (a) non-dudebro(s).

Because those founders don't get the capital they need, because folks like you unfairly do.

This is because the system is zero-sum and wack, but such as it is, what I suggest is a much better place for the money to go, in terms of profitability (as well as for other obvious reasons).

From there, you should get a job at an established tech startup in a BD role.

The last part is what is likely to happen anyway, after you guys give up within the next 2-4 months. But it would be so much cooler if you did the first part before that happens.

With Good Intentions, A Non-dudebro Founder Not in Need of Capital Because of My Ability to Build Product/Traction with Little Funding

peace


"We have read EVERYTHING on how to come up with startups ideas"

Have you understood them 8)

Sorry, couldn't resist it but as many have pointed out here: a business generally develops from solving a problem and monetizing it.

Problem -> Ahah! -> I can charge for this -> Business

Almost certainly you lot are already aware of that basic fact. For now I would personally suggest that you might want to consider what the basic premise implied by your post (in my head anyway):

Profit == Purpose

... means.

You imply money at the moment isn't an issue - you cool kids have already been successful financially in previous endeavours. Why not help fix a small part of society in some way? I suspect that will lead to a financially successful <something> in the long term.

That's what I'm going to do.


How about buying a category killing .com domain name, and use that as inspiration to build a business? The domain name can be your guide.

Here's one: Glowstick.com .. it's currently at auction. http://www.namejet.com/pages/auctions/standarddetails.aspx?a...

Go buy it, and create an online ecomm store selling stuff to party folks, halloween folks, safety folks, etc.

Or hire a domain name broker like MediaOptions.com or Evergreen.com to handpick a domain - that way you have an unfair advantage out of the gate, and a somewhat business direction already baked in..


Tunnels. I'm not kidding. Much cheaper tunnels would completely restructure real estate, so there are trillons of dollars at stake. Yeah you're not the perfect team for that, but you can hire the perfect team for that.

Examples:

- at 200kph, a 50km commute takes 15 minutes. Draw a 50km circle around San Francisco (all the empty land near Walnut Creek or in Marin County now "local" to downtown)

- at 1000kph, transporation between cities becomes better and faster than private jets, for everyone (no need to drive to the airport)

Edit: Tunnels are still the most underrated big idea out there. Of course those numbers come from Elon. "Without tunnels, we'll be in traffic hell forever" - Elon Musk.


Elon beat you to it: https://www.boringcompany.com/


If you are really short of ideas, just check one of the existing popular services which you use and see if you can offer the same at a cheaper rate. For ex: if a 'package delivery service' is charging $1 for delivering a package, see if you can provide the same service 50 cents cheaper, while maintaining the quality of service.

You don't necessarily need to burn cash / offer insane discounts to achieve it. Cost reduction can also be achieved by improving the supply chain to make it more efficient, thereby reducing cost. For ex: replacing paid software with free/open source alternatives, automating some of the mundane tasks etc.


I had this exact problem - I wanted to know how to find problems. I'd tried Customer Development and concluded that interviewing potential customers is not the way to go. People don't walk around with lists of their biggest pains and interviews become easily biased.

I got then introduced to Amy Hoy's Sales Safari technique where instead of interviewing people you observe them. You find out where your audience hangs out online and listen what they talk about. After you do this enough you start to see patterns. And these patterns are the raw material for figuring out problems to solve. I highly recommend Amy's 30x500 course.


Email me at stestodrud@hvzoi.com (throwaway email address to avoid spam), and I'll throw a couple concepts at you that our group wants to support, but doesn't fully have time for because of an overabundance of opportunities.


I have a proven, novel means to gain insight about System1 response. Issued a patent for it (which I think is reasonably well written). Applied it working with P&G to improve response to their branded ads. Would love to use it to improve romantic outcomes (better than survey response measures). Etc. Almost too old and tired now after a decade+ of having proven I am a terrible salesman. Same coin, opposite side. If I was you, I would hang around some grabybeards who are 50+ and have been working in logistical positions for corporations. They will have lots and lots of idea, but no where-with-all to act. HTH.


what is the PhD’s research area, specifically? seems like this might help narrow things down, at least.

what industries has the PE person done deals in? in those industries, are there any sources of very large costs for businesses? think about ways to get in the middle and lower those costs.

there are probably also some spaces where existing solutions are mediocre because access to capital is more important than quality to get a business going. since you have access to capital you might be able to compete.

it’s possible to do a startup that is tech heavy while also being B2B. the classic image of a consumer facing website chasing user engagement isn’t everything.


I read somewhere about a curious service(not in US). They offered Listeners. Someone who would just listen to you. I assume the cost would be far less expensive than a psychologist while the benefits would be not much different.

There most be a way to provide some kind of similar service that could close the gap (at least in the US) between the people in need of such services and the high costs.

Mental Health services in general have a problem: high cost. To make it cheap, some just prescribe drugs, which in the long run probably do more harm than good. Most people just need to talk, but one or two hours a week is simply not enough.


I wouldn't try to build A startup.

Instead I'd focus on being a 'special forces team' for people who have a good idea and some product &/or traction but need more people with your skill sets and access to capital.

You would then be essentially super hands-on investors, who could add significant value (although that really depends on you - you could also be super disruptive).

Over time you'd pick up a portfolio of companies that you've worked in and on, then exited and allow the initial team and new members you brought in to flourish.

While you rinse and repeat and slowly build network effects and improved learnings along the way.


Do exactly this, and read the book "Rework".


There's a really simple idea that's kind of a... why hasn't anybody done this yet? A simple abstract surveillance fence. A weave of drones + infrared + vision and other such tech (perhaps directional mics?) could create a highly secure border around an area. Uses would include states/nations, private households, company facilities, public works, maybe even things like sea observation (navy please stop running into things, preventing illegal fishing / human trafficking / drug trafficking / etc) and so much more.

Seems like it would be a really fun problem to solve as well.


Cool. Make software that enables easy time series analysis and regression on multi dimensional map data. Specifically, data from drones and micro satellites with color dimensions, shadows, etc. There are no obvious friendly to use tools for exploring this kind of info. Most map analytics tools that are available are limited to one map at time (using ML to find what’s in the map, e.g. The value in this data is time series (crop growth, trends, change) but the target users are not super sophisticated analysts and programmers, nor are they GIS power users.


I wish I had the capital and resources to conquer the world with my ideas, every year I see them being implemented by others. please ping me @tomerbd1 twitter, let's see if you find any of them useful.


Instead of spinning your wheels trying to come up with something for no reason, why don't you address a problem that already exists?

Give the money to charity, if you have it, and then do something inherently worthwhile.


I have a couple of ideas. I know everyone thinks they are an “idea” person when they aren’t, but I actually have some pretty decent validation over a long time frame that my ideas have a better than average hit rate.

If I believed in the team I would probably just give away my ideas for free, or for the pleasure of being an advisor. I have almost no interest in going through the steps of doing a startup myself at this juncture.

I would love to see a couple of these come in to the world through any route.

If that sounds plausible feel free to reach out at me directly and I’d be happy to chat.


Look for a macro trend, find a niche within that trend, then ride it. For me, the current big trend is machine learning and machine vision. What new markets does this trend create? What new needs does it expose? I think testing is an under-served niche here, particularly since I think the next big trend/problem will be regulation, compliance and safety of these products. Position yourselves so that if there is a move towards greater regulation, certification etc... etc... you are in a good position to exploit it.


We're a Blockchain company who recently did a $13.5m token sale. We have an abundance of ideas and not enough time to work on all of them. We're currently working with two other teams and would be interested in talking with you and giving you awesome ideas, if you don't need hand holding through the entire process (which it sounds like you don't). Contact us through the contact form on our site http://blockmason.io/


We're on to something here:

1) A great early product ( SaaS, ML, AI ), made up of a solid partnership and early paying customers.

2) We have investors interested in funding this product but only managed to raise six figures seed.

3) Cash is running fine but we need more to grow the team and product to win it all.

4) An big interest in scaling a SaaS product for enterprise and a ton of customers waiting to discover the new enterprise.

-Things that we don't have:-

1) More cash and a winning team to bring home the trophy.

Email me so we can change the world together: tohk1@hotmail.com (my old active hotmail)


My search results for "cola subscription service" is still disappointing.

You can get a beer of the month and a wine of the month subscription, how about colas from around the world?

Less regulatory mess too.


Talk to someone that isn't your stratified group of well educated, affluent people.

Ask them what problems they need fixed in their life or what things they thing are crap and could be improved.


Try a two-step process here.

1. Passion - what area excites the team the most? Health, AI, FinTech, Hardware? You are going to spend a few years building a brand, company, and product. The more connection you have to it the better.

2. Network! Be inclusive. You are basically saying you can build at scale quickly. Ideas come easily from interaction. Plan the next 30 days to scour every event you can and go. Listen, don't build. See what pops for the team. Iterate from there until something bubbles up.


Personally think that the best ideas come out of solving problems for yourself or that you feel no one else can solve better. I also wouldn't be too worried about crowded and/or small markets, especially if there is an opportunity for the space to grow.

It seems a bit forced to look hard for an idea, its usually a process, not something you just come up with overnight. Not to be a downer but it might be better to look for some work until you find something you truly care about.


We were at this situation a few months ago.

We are a great team, backed by great investors, but could not find a good idea (after we pivoted from the last one).

It took us 2 long months. But we finally made it (hopefully).

My conclusion is pretty simple - take a "fast moving water" area, and build a product with proved market fit around this area. If you can't recognize this "fast moving water" area, use VCs and investors to understand what they are excited to invest in, what sound sexy for them.


Check out effectuation.org - built networks of people who trust you/you trust, and solve problems for them. Keep solving problems, and you'll find, in 6-12m one or more problems that are worth solving at scale, because they are massive problems for large numbers of people. In this process, don't take funding, keep your runway as long as possible. This is the method used by expert entrepreneurs, when they take an idea and convert it into a business.


Here's my two cents, hopefully I can make a dollar back. I've been working on an web app to let small businesses create/design logos. My idea is to build a bot that translate requests in natural language to actions. For example, enlarge the icon by 5 percent. Or move the text a little to the left. Basically I want to cut down the time and cost of making minor changes that clients go through with designers over emails. Good match for your #4.


Read everything at http://onemodel.org . Make a better user experience (UI and installer) and flesh out some of the features planned (especially "sharing"), then $ from hosting, selling binaries, bespoke features, consulting, or ~patreon etc. Send me some of it. :) I have detailed plans & priorities (not on the site) but have been slow getting it done lately.

[edited a couple of times...]


> An interest in SaaS and ML

Maybe try a match matching endeavor?

ML might be useful in some specific niche where it isn't being leveraged.

It sounds like you have generic contacts and expertise in "ML".

Find a promising business niche leader and pair them with one of your ML contacts. The business niche people won't know ML, but they'll know the unsolved problems.

Like, for example, an airline centric niche company that does not currently leverage ML. Or maybe healthcare, or whatever.

Make the marriage and fund the ML part.


Seems you have everything beside idea. I have a file on my laptop that I keep collecting all ideas I believe might be of a value eventually once I get to your comfortable situation (team + financials). The one idea I like especially is Uber-style but nothing to do with taxis. Huge potential. But I don't want to share it with everybody here. Too bad you removed contact email address from your profile; I could just send it to you.


I'm not sure if you realised yet or not but this post itself is an idea on it's own - "Help potential great team without ideas finding ideas".


Yah, I realized this too a while back when I was doing the "what problem do I have?" exercise... "well, clearly I have a problem finding an idea." :)

I had some ideas on how to go about this but I think the major blocker to scale is the "functional fixedness" bias. At least that is where I got stuck.


Problem with a lot of interest in a solution: writers seeking to grow their audience. My investment into the solution spans a five years. I've built two working solutions. Solution #1 has been sales tested for a month during which it generated $20,000 from a handful of customers. If interested in a conversation, let me know. I'm taking solution #2 to market in a few weeks and have ready leads. @robotkdik


> The few product ideas we came up with following the above process we dropped, often because we discovered that that space is ultra crowded or commooditized.

Pick one and execute a MVP. You'll learn about your ability to make it happen as a team. Part way through, you'll probably come up with a better idea.

I find walking our dogs in the woods or driving leads to thinking, which usually leads to ideas. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail.


I like your pitch. And, you've got a ton of response here on HN.

I'm a bit late to the game here, but maybe we can jive. I have various ideas in the cryptocurrency space. Solo founder, working for 3.5 years on various ideas. I'm into private fund growth and market data/pipeline sales. Willing to meet about my recent pivot (to market data sales) and the need for partners on my end.

Drop me a line: brandon.lawrence.bradley at gmail dot com

Cheers!


1. The most obvious advice in your case is to revise the heuristic you are using to rule out your ideas. My guess is that you are looking at 'who else is doing this' or some other question that leads to ruling out what you work on. Thinking hard about just that might yield a better result.

2. Instead of looking for problems, I think more about how is the world changing and what can I do about it. I would advise you to do the same. Sometimes something big changes and most people aren't paying attention. For example, Trump's recent XO on healthcare allows businesses to form "associations" (small companies can pool together to get large company rates). In the recent Berkshire meeting, Buffett said that American businesses are going to be increasingly uncompetitive (at the global stage) if healthcare costs keep rising. These are things that are connected - if one is paying attention. The uber thought is from Peter Thiel [1]

3. Instead of thinking about a startup, start an industry [2]. I think Alan Kay's talks are inspiring - but also give a good framework to think about projects.

4. If I could just give you one advice, it would be: Pay attention. Very few people are paying attention to the whats happening.

5. One of the biggest disadvantages that you have is that you already have a team and money. This puts enormous pressure to do something "Big". No good idea is going to survive this test - obvious "Big" ideas are taken (not that you still can't work on them). So when PG says, works on "projects" and don't think about starting companies - he means, just do stuff that you find fun. This is very hard to do in your case.

I have helped several companies when they found themselves in the same predicament as you did. If you think it would be helpful, I would be happy to talk: ad@42.life

Best wishes and Good luck!

To end with a cliche: Stay hungry, Stay foolish

[1] Peter Thiel: pg 114 http://gsl.mit.edu/media/programs/south-africa-summer-2015/m...

[2] Alan Kay at 1:10: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/11


Make an internet connected toilet that compares and analyzes specimen data of all connected toilets and warns it user(s) of life threatening disease.


With that setup why not just take over some early company and 10x it?

Most have ideas, some have MVP and some have early customers. Pick the third one and bigulate it.


That sounds like a great idea for the OP. Although any company with some traction won't be so easy to take over.


"Those who can't, teach". Why not start an incubator? Sounds like you have the perfect skill set to help and support teams with ideas.


This is a long shot but here goes. I'm the single founder and developer of gympro.com. Recently announced that we will be shutting up shop in January next year. Would the fitness space be something of interest? I'm looking to hand over the Gympro brand to someone that is willing to make it work, or has some pivot ideas. Can send more details to anyone interested: aleks at gympro dot com


Send me an email, let's chat for a half hour and I'll give you several ideas that I'd use and pay for in my industry if they existed.


Lots of advice here is to go after pain points, or enter competitive markets, or to question your team dynamics. I have a different perspective:

Set up a studio, where the team builds a new "thing" every 2 weeks. Then, 2 months later you have 4 things, and you can pick the one that inspired the team the most.

Given your cash position, you should be able to easily float 2 months while building a bunch of different things.


There is the inevitability of paying for stuff with our watches, (ala Apple Pay but global, not just 1% of market share) so there is a small chance for a newcomer to disrupt a multi-trillion dollar market. And for those who don't use watches, then a small pocket device, be it a ring, cell phone or something like old Motorola pagers.

Those who miss the boat will blame themselves not being the next Whatsapp.


"And for those who don't use watches, then a small pocket device, be it a ring, cell phone or something like old Motorola pagers."

You mean like a credit card...?


Sit together in a room. Talk about one thing that pisses you off. The more annoying and impossible or even insane it seems, find a fix, sell it.


Let's build an Operating System!


Send an email to justin@nugget.one

I'll give you free access to nugget. We have over 500 SaaS startup ideas in there.

You probably won't find your final idea but it's very inspiring stuff.

Skimming through that much stuff can help spark or grow ideas you were previously thinking about or you can think through the ideas in another business domain.

Of course, there are just some great ideas in their own right and you might pick one of those.


What's a problem that you (or one of your partners) have that you wish there was a good solution for?

Aside from that, I'd like to see the social stigma around mental health eliminated. It's viewed as a positive thing to care about, and work toward, better physical health. I wish that were true for mental health. I wish improving your mental health was as normal as going to the gym.


Would you consider to build a platform using AI to connect ad pro's to gigs/ jobs? link is below. I put this landing page up to test then got busy with my other idea that's making money. Let me know. I have a bunch of emails from providers. http://tryoldster.com/

Goal MVP / validation /


It sounds like you're spending too much time in focus mode and not enough time in diffuse mode. A lot of people are suggesting your team is just incapable of diffuse thinking, but I would say it's a skill like any other.

Travel, read fiction, daydream, write down ten bad ideas right after waking up... play a bit looser than you're used to, and some new connections should form.


Take a problem that you have and provide the world's strongest solution. The problem exists because it imposed some kind of cost or inconvenience upon you and valid solutions are absent or unacceptable.

Only you can form a valid startup idea, because it is entirely dependent upon what you are capable and willing to execute upon. It is the difference between a great idea and a product.


I have an idea called Check Your Bias which is basically to make readers more attuned to detecting bias in news they are reading by selecting words they think convey the authors opinion and gamifying “guessing” how right or left an article is. I ran a very basic MVP. I’m pursuing a different idea right now but would be happy to share all my learnings and docs with you :)


Funny how life is... we have great idea, tons of people on a waiting list, companies waiting for beta but no money and an ok team.... :-)


We picked up ideas from our clients. If you've got a niche or area of experience - offer consultancy services or pick up some projects and dig into the pain points of your customers.

See where they're having problems and then do the research to see if it's a problem for others in the same industry. If it is you have your idea and probably your first couple of customers.


You need a framework, something that'll help you now and later. Feel free to check out this essay, which I wrote years ago and has many holes but might be useful in your case: https://medium.com/@oped/innovating-repeatedly-f4ab14ef228e


If we can agree that the problem defines the solution, then you will have to work backwards to a problem that your team has unique competency at.

Restated, it is impossible to have a great team without the constraints of a problem statement. It is similar to those who claim C++ is the best language. With out the context of the problem to be solved, it is merely an opinion.


Things I would love to make but I cannot find time to:

* Syntax-tree aware version control system. Do merges taking into account the syntax tree of the code being managed.

* Real time stats of the judicial system by real-time analisis of the sentences.

My standard ideas license is: the first $100 millons you make, are yours. I want 1% of the rest. If you make less than $100 millons, you owe me nothing.

Good luck!


> Real time stats of the judicial system by real-time analisis of the sentences.

I think the main problem with this idea is where to get data for analysis.


If you see this and you’re open for ideas to be developed ping me here. I have a bunch of them, and I have the ability to execute them, but I need a good team. I haven’t had much luck in the past (and present) with partners. I’ve started some startups which are running, but for a particular project I need a smart team. Let’s talk. Regards


In Indonesia, e-commerce is growing, a lot of people trade items online, the problem with so many e-commerce platform is we have to insert our product to those platform one by one.

I wanted to implement something like Buffer, but for posting product on e-commerce platform. However, not all e-commerce platform in Indonesia provides API for you to do so.


The way I see it, you can make a business from a ToDo app, so it's just a matter of sticking with it for a while and doing the bizdev magic.

If you want an idea, here's one: I'm looking at Cloud-based load testing based on JMeter (maybe more frameworks later) A few companies in the field, but not many. Plenty of room!


If you are in the Pittsburgh area, there is a startup weekend coming up in two weeks which I am super excited for as there will be tons of great ideas tossed around. You may be able to get some great ideas through the prototype phase. Otherwise maybe join a startup weekend or something to that effect in your area.


Start consulting in ML. Contact businesses and talk to them. How could they benefit from ML? What kind of data they have that could be used? Do they want to predict something from old data or do they need realtime systems? You'll make money and maybe find something productizable as a SaaS in the process.


Baby's first Bitcoin: an online platform for parents to introduce their babies to the world of cryptocurrency.


Got a number of quite specific ideas and capital, but not a team to work on them yet. You should provide a throwaway email address and we can connect, or just email me at temporarythrowaway930@gmail.com. Couple of ideas regarding decentralization ( where it makes sense and not just as a buzzword ).


I have products that need built for days. It all starts with science. You are in an incredible position that I never have been. Had to self fund everything myself and all ultimately failed due to lack of capital even with traction. Hold on to what you have. It’s the most valuable thing ever.


Hi.

I have been working on a startup that would disrupt a few industries, but it turned out I bit off more than I could chew and I got burned out. Have a bunch of paying beta testers, crazy stick rate, but have moved onto simpler things for now. Have pitch deck ready and would be happy to discuss in private.


Give the money to charity and get a job.


I want to upvote this 30 more times.


Competition isn't in the number of vendors in a space, but rather who reaches a market the best. I wonder if some of those ideas would look a little different.

Another source for uncovering pain is consulting - less about the income and more about uncovering needs and gaps tied to marketplace needs.


Just wanted to say good luck!!

I always wanted to start my own thing, thought about many ideas, started a couple just for fun, not full speed, because they were not great ideas.

I was a bit where you are.

Then I met someone with a great idea needing help, and I was ready to jump. I did, it worked. So it's possible, so good luck!!


You're missing what I call a "spiritual purpose". You can't actualise until have one. You need to think about what wrong in the world you want to right. I have a free 1hr course that expands on this concept further.

Http://learning.krmmalik.com

The course is called Idea to Launch


Contact me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabrielpaunescu/

I'm doing something that will blow your mind. I already have customers, time to build a team and scale


Are you sure the idea as dropped only because it was crowded or commodity? It wasn't because you thought it was not the next Uber or Facebook? The problem is there are tons of smaller problems with niche market but not exactly the next unicorn. Start with those.


Many great tech startups began because the founders had the protection of doing whatever they wanted (fb, goog, snap) without worrying about other stuff. You guys had a year to figure this out. Startups tend to happen naturally and they aren't for everyone.


What I have been doing, to some success, is just finding products that have a lot of demand. If I can do something that's 10x better in a brief period of time, I do so. It's usually really easy to tap into an existing market than building from scratch.


Find a problem to solve by asking people on their way out of an industry.

https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4...


You don't know your a good team until you've built something good. Good teams are defined by their output not by how the members feel, how smart the team is or how much experience it has. That said, output includes how the members and partners feel.


Valuable function for a niche.

Function ideas: scheduling, workforce mgmt, payments, commerce, task management, workflow, ordering, marketing/advertising, customer mgmt

Niche ideas: restaurants, dentists, construction, financial advisors, teachers, parents, event planners, handypeople


https://medium.com/evergreen-business-weekly/how-to-get-good...


Spend some time travelling. Around the country or the world. Talk to people outside your normal social class. So many people these days have cellphones and internet access (worldwide). Make their lives easier then find a way to make some money with it.


Are there no problems in any of your personal lives? No healthcare issues or financial needs?


Transportation is a big problem, especially when it comes to commuting from a suburb to a city. I would love to have more options outside of aging and overcrowded mass transit. Are there solutions to this problem? Are there any killer carpool apps?


With your expertise and connections, why not start a consulting firm?

You'll see problems people have across different domains and maybe discover some problems with opportunity for solutions. You can also make small experiment projects as part of your firm.


I have a couple of ideas if you are interested. I am working on an application to Y Combinator, but I have no experience and no contacts (yet) that can help me through the process. I would rather not post the ideas publicly. Can I email you?


I have two projects: rating-system.com - ran for years(profitable), can be scaled and tailor-fitted.com - just launched(lots of work to scale). I do not mind to share with the right team. You can find contact details on rating-system.com


Solve one of The world’s biggest problems using FOSS https://80000hours.org/career-guide/world-problems/


Sounds like you are missing a domain expert in a domain you care deeply about.

Find such a person and identify a few immediate "pain points" in the space that can be quantifiably measured.

If I could humbly suggest a few: obesity, student loan debt, and US elder care.

Good luck.


I have a great business model but I'm looking for a team to pair up with. Please contact me if you wanted a software engineer to join your team, and bring a great business model.

I've had successful exits in the past. BryanStarbuck@gmail.com


how about building a social platform and further learning site for serial entrepreneurs?? Serial entrepreneurs get together to test ideas, projects, etc... They learn mainly by seeing what others are doing and sharing thoughts. I go to sites to learn something, it is designed for someone just starting out. I want to talk to fellow serial entrepreneurs who are looking at various ideas, but don't know where to meet them and how. Even sharing of visions and opportunities that serials entrepreneurs see could be really insightful not only for themselves, but for anyone who are looking at what is going to happen next.


If you need that, check out https://DoerHub.com


Thanks. Looks good, will definitely check it out.


It sounds like y'all are an up-and-coming VC fund waiting to happen. Find some niche of founders that traditional funds have a habit of overlooking - minorities, women, etc - and help them build some rocket ships!


Off-topic but I admit I find myself wondering how much 'a fortune' is.


Look for people with their hair on fire. Figure out how to put out the fire. Check this out. http://oppsdaily.com/

Don't overthink it. Good luck.


My 2c . Start consulting/contracting in a domain of your choice. Once you've worked with 10 companies you'll probably see a pattern emerge of something they're failing at.

Do that thing well and charge for it.


Solve these and then we'll give you some ideas: - global warming / environment - jobs / gentrification - education/empowerment - food / health - space exploration / colonization


I’m no expert, but I would recommend build something—anything. This will test how the team thinks and works together creatively and ideas might come along in the process as pain points or aha moments.


Small robots for manufacturing.

The market for large robots for manufacturing is full of very capable machines, but small robots could re-use many cheap components from cell phones and other consumer electronics.

---

Or, to mashup your own list: MLaaS!


Would you mind elaborating on the small robots idea? What would these robots do?


I have a list of ideas and need a team to build them :) You can reach me here: https://www.andybrewer.com/


Contact me https://www.linkedin.com/in/alain-richardt/

would like to chat in private! :)


I am a machine learning reseacrher at IIT Bombay,India and there are lot of startup ideas and potential here for the local population. If interested, please mail me : mallu.baba003@gmail.com


I'm a big fan of solving your own problems. Your problem seems to be coming up with problems to solve. Perhaps you could work on something that helps people to find problem to solve?


Why not tackle some of the problems on the Requests for Startups list?

https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/


Based on your team I would build an AI driven contact manager to send email/reminders/calender/schduler that hooked into slack and facebook using bots to issue commands.


Look us up and get in touch @ http://invanti.co if you're looking for a group that has a problem-first approach


Ha, I think you have found a perfect problem to work on: finding ideas.

Your company could provide consultancy services to other businesses, and as such you could collect problems, and sell them to other businesses!

:)


There's already one of those: https://nugget.one/


I want to see some success stories (with references to real companies, not the abstract "they helped us start our company and it's a big success now" that I see in the testimonial section)


Make a note taking app that doesn't suck.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474609


PM if you're interested in chatting. We have something we're working on that might be a good fit for the right group. I'm always happy to chat at the very least.


Roomba for rodents. Build a small robot which can act like a mechanical cat to kill small household pests like mice and rats. (I've had rats getting into my garage lately.)


What about a crowdfunding platform for science? Especially for replicating previous controversial results. It seems to me that traditional scientific funding fails at that.


Don't look for ideas, look for problems you want to solve.


You are being too conservative. You need to be willing to fail.


Just attack a "red ocean". For example, 50$ for agent for month at Zendesk for a simple ticketing system is way too much, that market is ripe for disruption.


I've got an idea, and some basic code. I need engineers, blank checks, and passion for the idea. Can we talk? - Deb Levine linkedin.com/in/deblevine


You've perhaps thought of this already, but it's worth putting out there: don't focus on making something new but rather in making something great.


I have a great idea that might interest you. I don't see a way to message on HN so reply to this if you want me to share it. Then I'll lost my email.


What pisses you off? What makes you angry?

Go build a startup to change that.


Start a fund. Spread your capital and let others do the heavy lifting. Use your experience and connections to improve the chances of those that you invest in.


i have plenty of business ideas, but have basically been a one man team, which given my full time work status has been slow to say the least, i'm more of a product developer at heart so am looking for business and tech guys to team up with. message me if you're interested in talking, i would not mind sharing my ideas (not only sports related) and we could take it from there. stephen at madsportslab dot com


forgot to answer the questions in your post: in general, here's what i would suggest, seems like the 3 of you don't necessarily need to work for a living which is a great situation (correct me if i'm wrong). what i'd suggest is to find something that you really enjoy doing, for me, i thought about all these ideas that happened to be popular during whatever time, and though i had plenty of seemingly plausible ideas, at the end of the day, i really didn't care too much about those, sure there would be challenges to tackle and things to learn for a few years, but i would get tired of it really quickly. for me, i got lucky and figured it out, albeit later on in life. from a child, i loved watching and playing sports, i used to read the paper every morning as a kid just to look at all the stats, i could figure out the progression of games just from the numbers. obviously you'll have to figure this out for yourselves, but the fact that you seemingly have the financial security issue resolved, you could start thinking about things in the upper layers of maslow's hierarchy of needs, scratch that, even if you don't have financial security figured out, go for what motivates you. i think elon musk is a great example of someone that goes after the big problems even when there are huge precedents or incumbents in the way, this is the stuff that legacies are made from, solving the potentially unsolvable, he's really leaving his mark on society and since time is severely limited, go for the big things that you care about, the proverbial world hunger type problems if that's your thing. i'm sure whatever comes of it will fully enrich your lives and i'm not necessarily talking about money even though there's plenty of potential for that.


How about an investor service for scoring startups from their pitches? Use historical data from YC applicants over the years to train the fitness function.


Is that data publicly available?


This sounds like a really interesting opportunity for someone with a ton of ideas (solution) to join a talented, well funded team. Where does One sign up?


You know, a great team with capital's a little like the mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it!


We have the idea and are working towards its validation. We would soon look towards building a team and seeking funding. Maybe we should join forces?


You could build a very generic product that would act as a problem detector.

Talk with your early users. Once you've detected a pain point, pivot and double down on it.

Good luck!


"The wise man speaks because he has something to say. The fool speaks because he has to say something."

(See also: comments by idlewords, pkw2017.)


What about general-purpose software? I've been toying with a software idea for years that has as guaranteed a user base as you could get.


Travel booking for corporations Scheduling automation Expense approval software health care billing Hiring dashboards from job post to hiring


Do something about nlp+social network -> Russian fake news detection. Sell it to Facebook/twitter so they can shut down propagandists


I have acted as a Technical Advisor for teams like yours in the past (one of them got acquired by Google). Contact me if you need some help.


I hope the three of you get equally excited about whatever idea you choose. That’s the real issue. You need passion, not thought exercises.


I have ideas every 2nd day. Here is one: Your own highly individualized, probiotic and noncancerous toothpaste. Professionally attuned towards your taste/mood and hygienic needs. Send a cheek swab. Get the lab results. Taste the samples. Order your own mix. Colorize it. Share recipes online. Order retro toothpastes. Order bloody vampire toothpaste. Mix it at home. Put them on the blockchain. Make toothpaste fun again. Who wants to revolutionize toothpaste with me?!? Oh gawd, I can't stop.


"Make toothpaste fun again" - I'm in :)


I've always wanted there to be an app that find me coffee shops with comfortable couches and chairs. Might be a good starting point!


You could just launch an ICO, doesn't seem to really matter what it does. A platform that helps launch platforms that launch ICOs?


If you look at problems, look at the problems of people or companies who have money to spend. Don't simply look, talk with them.


Idea: build a job agency for (groups of) great developers that want to work from home or their own office.

You could be your first customers :)


You need one more team member. Go out into the start-up community, go to pitch meetings events etc, and find that person.


I find it hilarious that everyone is offering advice and not ideas. Unfortunately I don't have an idea for you, but a suggestion:

Sponsor a hackathon where you provide a few categories of problems to solve. For instance:

- ML used as a personal tool - SaaS solutions for connecting Healthcare data sharing (that one should be interesting given HIPPAA restrictions alone) - None currency uses for Blockchains

And just see what develops. You may find ideas that you can delve into further.


Are you open to hearing ideas? I have a couple that I think have value, but lack the bravery and means to pursue them.


Disregard what others are doing. (Richard Feynman)

Imagine something that must be here 30 years from now. Invent the future. (Alan Kay)


Childhood education in the States. Find some teachers in your area and ask them what they could do with x in y time.


Happy to share a dozen great ideas I’ve seen that lack team and capital. Linkedin.com/in/lunarmobiscuit


I would really like a simple NLP algorithm that combs candidate profiles and identifies undervalued candidates.


Hey, I work for YC and would love to talk to you about this -- feel free to reach out to kyle@ycombinator.com.


Bring the Inferno OS to the IoT. Unify all the protocols that are out there by implementing 9P2000 on them.


How do I get in touch with you?

I have a couple of ideas with legit legs. I am also pretty competent at implementing stuff.


Golf Course Tee Time Booking.

There are hundreds of apps out there, and they all suck.

A really compelling app could sweep the market.


I have tons of ideas and I'm also looking for partners.

Feel free to reach me @gmail or on rizon with the same nick.


Find an entrepreneur with a great idea and join her founding team as raise muscle or fund her venture.


Build a platform that fixes the hiring procedure and help experienced older programmers to find a decent job like they deserve it.

Think of it as a lightweight version of LinkedIn, FaceBook, and Github combined as one.

No one should have any trouble finding any sort of job or whatsoever.

This platform should be implemented in such way that any country out there should be able to offer jobs to nearly all their residents.


Hey @Obsidian, I might have something interesting for you. PM me on Twitter (@teckays) if you will.


The marijuana industry is only growing, you might want to see what opportunities lie in that space.


I think there is room for a full service solar company. Feel free to email me for the full rant.


I have a great person who have amazing idea but need the team send me a mail maihillel@gmail.com


I have a venture, ping me about it. It is a SaaS and ML play in the marketing automation space.


ML + SaaS is an overplayed space.... too many competitors and they all dream the same stuff.


So Normal, Lucky and Smart walk into a bar ...

... and after a year still can't find a punchline.


Make a wikipedia, but for implementations of algorithms written in a literate style.


If you don't come up with anything I'd love to chat with the CMU person.


Everything is going to be crowded these days. Are you guys based out of New York?


Watch star trek

Figure out how to get from here to there

implement


Did you look under the couch?


I have at least 2 ideas that are very worth it. Find me on twitter arisalexis


Make the technology for flying cars. Like the one in the movie Blade Runner.


I have plenty of ideas that I’d give away for nothing or almost nothing. I’d say at least one or two are viable. You can contact me if you’re interested and I can share via email. Would mostly just like to see an idea of mine become real. Could be worth five minutes of your time.


Make a chemical process modeler that isn't stuck 15 years in the past.


Do contract work as a mini agency. Seeing others problems may be helpful.


Decentralized content-addressable network parallel to the internet.


1. Give all of the money to charity 2. Ask for more money 3. Goto 1


Interested in FinTech for Impact? email me: cjbenedikt@gmail.com


Big things have small beginnings. Focus on small. Really small.


Find an entrepreneur with a great idea and fund her venture.


Pick a popular site/product and copy it. Aim for some sort of marginal improvement or marginally lower cost. Come with some unique marketing or niche of their users. Ideas don't have to be totally original.


0bsidian - Would like to reach out, is there a good email?


Just make sure you have Block or Coin in project name.


How much are you willing to pay for original concepts?


What was the PhD working on before joining your team?


Scratch your own itch - make an idea sharing website.


https://www.demandrush.com/


This same post was up a few months ago, suspicious.


I've got at least one genuinely new idea that has not been done before that could change the study and popular understanding of human history. Feel free to get in touch.


Perhaps the problem is lack of industry experience?

I have plenty of ideas. All I see are problems that need solving. There are so many things broken in web/IT that they can't be listed here. I have a file with literally hundreds of problems that need fixing and that's just scratching the surface.

Example, I think someone already mentioned this earlier but have you ever browsed a bunch of corporate websites - I have seen so many websites that are so horribly broken that it's just crazy - there are literally MILLIONS of broken websites out there. You could start by looking into why that is (I've been thinking about it and believe there's numerous business ops just in that area alone)...

I recently wrote about how the first company I worked for ran their entire operation (which was quite complex) with a few dumb terminals and a few Z80s clocked at 4MHz, running something called TurboDOS:

https://coffeeandcode.neocities.org/remembering-turbo-dos.ht...

I once wrote an entire oil rig data acquisition system in TurboBasic in a weekend. You could use ON TIMER to called a routine every second or so, no assembler required. ON KEY and ON TIMER gave you event driven programming (ok primitive but effective). There were things like INPORTB and OUTPORTB (I think) that could write directly to ports for control and data acquisition.

So are we going back in terms of productivity? What can you do about that?

Are you still waiting for someone to come up with a viable alternative to JavaScript?

You could almost come up with something by looking at trends like the move to multi-machine, multi-processor, multi-core, multi-threaded and there are so many things that could be moved to that model for scale. Then there are the tools to help profile and debug those things. Example: Elasticsearch - Lucene was/is a great library for search/indexing, but the Elastic search guy (Shay Banon) saw the opportunity to scale that to multiple machines.

Scale drives a lot of innovation: look at innovative technologies like Redis for example.

Another example - SQL databases. Have you ever set up a MySQL replication cluster and kept it running 24/7? Sure there are excellent services like compose.io and the new kids on the block like Cockroach Labs, but highly scaled database with ease of set up and management is not really a solved problem. Just keeping the darn thing up and running is often a challenge.

Like I said, I could go on and on...

p.s. yes, people are right - a bit of competition is not necessarily a bad thing...


Did you research on blockchain technology?


A webpage to store all media for families.


Pensions are a really shit experience.


Social fart app.

You can share your farts with others and vote on the 'best' fart in various categories (temporal,geolocation) with leaderboards.


Here is a pitch I wrote for an idea I am working on. I think the ML/NLP space still has a huge run in front of it, even if it now seems crowded.

There is a much longer version, of course, but I had to cut 75% of this before Hacker News would allow me to post it.

-----------------------------

SUMMARY:

For many years I've worked with startups involved in data mining, so I've gotten to know how the current crop of these firms operates. The companies that I've worked with rely on Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). All of the startups that I've worked with so far, and all of the one's that I've read about, fall into 2 categories:

1.) they got into a business where they thought they could use humans to do data aggregation, and now they are desperately trying to build ML/NLP stacks to automate the work.

2.) they were certain they didn't need humans, because their Deep Neural Network was magically effective, but now they are having to rethink their business model because their Deep Neural Network has been less of a magical breakthrough than they expected.

There is a great deal of redundancy in the current efforts to find the right balance of ML/NLP and humans. One company might use Spark to ingest documents about medicine, another analyzes advertising using a Hadoop cluster, another scans the web to pull in millions of articles that it runs through Storm, where it parses the data and then stores the final results in Cassandra. Each company stumbles through a painful process of trying to figure out where it should use humans to patch the failures of its ML/NLP techniques.

In particular, there are specific patterns of using Mechanical Turk to vet those items where ML algorithms could not reach a high level of confidence. A given item can be sent to 5 different people on Mechanical Turk, and we can accept a vote of 4 or 5 as representing a high level of confidence. But if the vote is 3 or less, then we need to escalate that item to an even higher level or review. I've seen multiple companies build similar processes, which is why I think this should be a business of its own.

It's important to be aware of the limits of startups such as Bigml.com. Most of the time, data analysis is just the starting point of a longer process that involves much interpretation on the part of humans. But much of that later human vetting can be standardized, and so firms should outsource the work.

LONG VERSION:

Let's start by talking about one particular industry, which is firms that sell data about privately-held companies. There is a great conversation on Quora that summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of most of the enterprises in this field:

"How do CB Insights, PrivCo, DataFox, Owler, Tracxn!, Mattermark, and Venture Scanner compare for private company research?"

https://www.quora.com/How-do-CB-Insights-PrivCo-DataFox-Owle...

Danielle Morrill has written a great blog post about how and why she created Mattermark ("The Deal Intelligence Company"):

https://medium.com/@DanielleMorrill/introducing-mattermark-t...

According to Crunchbase, she has so far raised $17 million to build out her company. Samiur Rahman, the lead data engineer at Mattermark, has given a revealing interview about how NLP helps Mattermark pinpoint data about deals that companies may be arranging:

https://www.techemergence.com/how-natural-language-processin...

Anyone who tries to scour the Web for information about companies, either publicly held or privately owned, immediately runs into a few problems, including the fact that any given company may have dozens of subsidiaries with similar names. The law, or a regulatory agency, might have forced the company to break up. So, for instance, German law has forced Deutsche Bank to set up different companies for loans and investments. As a consequence, one finds the following names on the web:

Deutsche Bank - Corretora de Valores S.A. Deutsche Bank A S Deutsche Bank AG Deutsche Bank GmbH Deutsche Bank S.A. Banco Alemao Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas Deutsche Bank Trust Company Delaware Deutsche Bank Journalists tend to misspell these names, or just use the generic "Deutsche Bank," which makes it difficult to discern which incarnation of Deutsche Bank is the subject of the article.

Samiur Rahman says he is a fan of "word vectors" and "paragraph vectors", and then he uses the Nearest Neighbor algorithm to figure out which companies are similar to each other. As the interview makes clear, Mattermark got into a business where they thought they could use humans to do data aggregation; now they are desperately trying to build ML/NLP stacks to automate the work. (In my taxonomy, they're a Category 1 firm.)

...Some customers buy from several of these data-analysis companies. Some buy from both CB Insights, which has the best data about deals, and also CB-Mark, which has the best estimates on revenue. The customers are often sales teams hoping to find new customers for their own companies, but sometimes the data is also used for research (as at the universities) and sometimes the data is used for VC investments, as Danielle Morrill made clear in her history of Mattermark. Right now there are something like 30 companies in this field (selling data about private companies), though I assume this will eventually consolidate to something like 3 or 4 companies.

THE HYBRID APPROACH USES BOTH HUMANS AND ML/NLP

For the foreseeable future, the best approach to data mining is a mix of ML/NLP plus humans. The ML/NLP scripts can be calibrated to produce an estimate of confidence. When there is high confidence, the entire ingestion process can be automated. When there is low confidence, the item-of-data needs to be flagged for human review.

The process I'm working on needs two levels of human review, but I'll also talk about a third, if only to dismiss it.

1.) low-level: for tasks that don't need much context, yet still can't be automated, the item-of-data should be sent to 5 different people using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. If at least 4 of these people come to the same conclusion, we can assume that this was data that low-skilled people were successful at categorizing. For instance, if an article had an ambiguous mention of Deutsche Bank, but 4 out of 5 people came to the same conclusion about which Deutsche Bank was under discussion, then we can consider this item-of-data categorized, and the rest of the ingestion process can proceed automatically.

2.) medium-level: this level of skill is needed if people with low-level skill failed to agree on how to categorize an item-of-data. If something was sent to Mechanical Turk but 5 people each reached 5 different conclusions, the data clearly needs a much closer inspection. Medium level skill review would also include large parts of medical and legal data sets, where data can be read from context by a person who lacks specific medical or legal training. "While I worked at Google I downloaded all of Google's documents for self-driving cars and now I'd like Uber to finance my new self-driving car startup" is a sentence that can be understood by an untrained layman, though the realization that this describes illegal activity is still beyond the ability of a pure ML/NLP approach. People of medium-level skill would be people who work directly with my startup. They could do the work remotely, but they would require some training, so I would have a long-term relationship with them.

3.) high-level: this is a different market, and so I'm not going to consider this. Data that requires high levels of skill might be items of medical or legal knowledge that a person needs extensive training to understand. Trying to deal with this kind of data would require a completely different business model. I'm not considering this as part of my current project.

WHO ARE MY CUSTOMERS?

My customers would be every group that:

1.) needs the output of NLP scripts...

2.) ...applied to a data source they specify...

3.) ...vetted to a high level of confidence

The market for ML and AI startups might seem crowded, but I think there is still many opportunities there, in particular, regarding standardizing the process whereby humans review the output of ML and NLP scripts.


As others have said, merge


How to connect with you?


tackle IRA investments. include me if you like the idea.


Call me...0544912978


.. said no one ever


Lets connect.


Hie might have tried but your information has been redacted :)


I'd like to argue something contrarian in this thread: you could be on the right path. Some facts to keep in mind:

- There are on the order of 20,000 new startups each year; most of the other people in this thread are from this pool.

- Only 2-5 of those 20,000 startups will end up mattering (i.e., will reach a high enough valuation/impact on the world to move a needle).

- Of these 2-5 startups that matter per year, almost none of them were pivots (Twitter is LoudCloud are the only examples I can think of).

- The conventional wisdom is to take an incremental idea and run with it; "ideas don't matter and execution is everything"; run sprints and use the Lean Startup methodology to pull the market out of an idea (or pivot), and reach a local maxima.

- This will only get you the result that 20,000 startups a year typically get: incrementalism, small victories, and/or failure.

- There's also lottery ticket mentality to this conventional style of thinking: you're no different than anyone else, so stop ideating and start doing, and maybe you'll get lucky.

If you've been at it for a year and haven't found anything good enough to give your life to, it could mean you are different than the average HNer. It could mean you have a calling to think bigger than most people do.

Here is some material you may be interested in which bolsters this viewpoint:

- Alan Kay's "The Future Doesn't Have to be Incremental": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o&t=1830s

- Peter Thiel's book Zero to One. Among other things, this book discusses the importance of avoiding competition and commoditized markets (unless you have something 10x better; i.e., Google's Page Rank).

- Listen to interviews with Elon Musk, who claims he started by thinking about HUGE problems that humanity faces and worked backwards. Instead of thinking incrementally, Musk thinks extremely large and seems to plan for years in advance: https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j...

At some point, of course, you have to interact with reality, and that could involve interacting with negative people on HN (and especially real customers, etc). When Reid Hoffman started LinkedIn, he talked with dozens of people in his network and more than 2/3 said negative things about his idea. It's part of the process of getting calibrated with reality. But this shouldn't be your starting point; it should be what you do after you find something that actually moves you.

Finally, I want to say that me and a friend were in a similar boat to you and your friends several months ago: we had been reading about technologies and problems for months and had rejected incremental ideas that didn't move us. It looked like we had just fucked around for several months and had nothing to show for it.

We ended up working on a experimental VR Window Manager as an attempt to bring Linux to a new computing platform (i.e., VR): https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula

Here was our rationale for this idea when we started: https://gist.github.com/georgewsinger/46ea8d6b16fb8bf3249358...

It's very much in the spirit of the advice I just gave you. Lord knows we could be wrong, but one problem we don't have is in doubting whether our project could matter if we pulled it off.

Good luck.


For any such project, the best input is luck!

Setting luck aside, the most important step to success is the first one, project selection.

Currently, broadly the best projects are from (A) information technology or (B) biotech. Of course, some projects could be some of both. Why? Because (i) the basic technology has not yet been nearly fully exploited and (ii) earnings per dollar of opex can be fantastically high.

I prefer (A) information technology because the basic technology has been improving so much so quickly and because we can exploit applied math, old or original, heavily neglected by current information technology business. Why math? Because broadly we take in data, have computers manipulate it, and report the results. For more powerful manipulations, proceed with applied math likely with advanced pure/applied math prerequisites. Not many people are doing this, and this fact is part of the opportunity.

The computers are good at doing what we tell them to do, and the math tells us what to tell the computers to do.

Here I concentrate on information technology.

(1) Problem. Want to find a problem where the first good or a much better solution will be a "must have" for enough people and revenue per person to make a successful business.

(2) Solution. For the first good or much better solution, get some advantages, e.g., from some math. The advantages can be the key to the "first good" or "much better", that is, blow the doors off, knock the socks off, present and likely future competition. And the advantages can be secret sauce, proprietary intellectual property, with trade secret protection, and a technological barrier to entry, i.e., a "Buffett moat."

(3) Use the Internet to deliver the solution. The users can have mobile apps and/or Web browsers.

Okay, I've done (1)-(3). For the problem, currently there is no good solution, and the first good solution will be a "must have" for essentially everyone on the Internet in the world, smartphone to desktop, now and for at least decades to come.

For a fast, first-cut, round-number, back of the envelope, ballpark estimate, based on the above and some other solid, public financial data, the company should grow quickly to be worth $1 T.

Currently the production quality software is in alpha test. To the users, the solution is just a Web site with just a few, simple Web pages that are easy to use and load very quickly (400,000 bits per page with only old HTTP, HTML, and CSS and nearly no JavaScript).

I'm the solo founder, did all the work, and am 100% owner.

I have a long background in computing, especially for science and engineering, and a long background in business. My Ph.D. is in the applied math of stochastic optimal control from one of the world's best research universities.


As a person who has studied geniuses of various sorts (Hokusai, Feynman, Einstein, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Shannon), I can tell you that genius appears to be the combination of natural talent, opportune environment and very hard work. If you find such a person, and that person is hungry and honest, then you should be able to become their patron and reap the benefits of stimulating them and reflexively being stimulated by them.

If you and your team are honest and honorable, I would be more than happy to share my projects with you, at least one of which is most certainly genius. Without question, I most certainly share the most important factor in geniuses of all varieties: my simple curiosity and love of knowledge. It is also my natural naivety and lack of concern for money and my utter lack of the mindset that most people have in its pursuit that has left me at the mercy of the greedy and ruthless (but also with a very happy, normal family life and the ability to sleep soundly). As such, I have very little means to pursue my ideas, even though I have achieved enough to be able to provide hard proof that my ideas are still years ahead of their time, and are based upon my experience in dealing with practical needs of modern software development projects, which my resume will demonstrate more than adequately.

Like I said, if you are honorable and intellectually honest about what you don't know (that is a fundamental key to greatness), and you want to work as a team where each member is respected for the uniqueness that they bring to the table, then let's figure out how to chat.

I am deadly serious about this. And while I'm not a fan of TDD as a strict discipline (because I am already a particularly belligerent software tester myself that feels that TDD is a bit over-the-top in terms of structure), I do understand the necessity of setting specific, testable goals. As such, I feel that our world society has failed to create a proper goal for our achievement as a unified human race. I propose that we declare "done" to be "Lasting peace and happiness for all human beings."

My goal, therefore, is to somehow utilize my life's work in information systems to help promote and achieve that definition of "done". I understand that we could engineer such systems to create that society for all human beings, irrespective of ethnicity, form of religion (or lack thereof), sexual orientation or gender identity. While I respect money's ability to measure any endeavor's value to the society producing it, I do despise the love of money for its own purpose while so many human beings suffer in poverty and the Earth is being destroyed due to short-term profit being pursued at the expense of the long-term health of the Earth and its peoples.

I believe that it is my loving perspective on helping others that has given me insights into next-gen technology endeavors. I would love to share my perspective with your team and let you judge me for yourselves. In any event, I'm not feeling very eloquent tonight, but I can share with you my belief that if you make a Bodhisattva Vow or somesuch commitment to facilitating the transformation of this world such that it becomes "On Earth as it is in Heaven", you will receive all necessary inspiration to achieve your goals and far, far more. I wish you all success in your endeavors.

I would enjoy speaking with your team and sharing what I have learned and the kinds of information projects I have already envisioned. My question here is how do we connect without our doxing ourselves, for I have no website to point you towards.


Call me.

David Cornelson


scratch your own itch


world peace solve homelessness, starvation save puerto rico


i mean srsly, you know who's REALLY drowning? PUERTO FUCKIN' RICO


Make art, not money.


Coming up with ideas is easy:

- make a robot vacuum cleaner that doesn't require maintenance

- design a system which allows a robot vacuum cleaner to move between floors

- make a robot vacuum cleaner that doesn't require one to empty the dust bin.

- make a robot to plaster my walls for a fixed fee with insurance that if you fail to deliver I can get it done fully paid by my previous guy with escrow money in the bank if you fail to deliver

- install solar panels automatically (too challenging? I thought you had a "great" team)

- automate kitchen staff in restaurants using smaller or equal space

- build a machine which can take a message and optimize it for the target audience; e.g., by making it simpler to understand or more politically aligned.

- build a machine that cheaply figures out whether the fish/meat you are serving up in a restaurant contains toxins

- revolutionize space travel using far out ideas you probably wouldn't understand

- figure out what could potentially be built in space cheaper than on Earth, patent it, and give Elon a call.

- build a quantum computer (some startups do this already)

Your problem likely is that you want to get a "great" startup without the required capital and resources. You literally have one guy according to my count, because a money guy is worthless (below a billion dollars to burn) and business development people are a dime a dozen.

If you don't have domain expertise to know how something could be done better, the probability of failure is going to be enormous.

In principle, I could probably help all of the above happen, but all of them require a lot of capital, people, and patience.

Take for example MAPPER Lithography. This is an example of an innovative company, a startup if you wish, but it started 17 years ago. If you really want to make something of value, that's the kind of commitment you should have. If not, try to create the next Snapchat (still no idea why it's worth anything).

Until that time, get a job. Having a job is not the worst thing in the world.


I was a CEO of 3 successful startups. I am a developer (Python, Go, JavaScript not a very good one or devs here on HN with ML/AI or other experience). I don't have any formal education either. I just pursue whatever interests me. I am more focused on the technical side, sales and marketing, and customer service. I did all this at my previous startups. I never raised any funds and the previous companies mostly did 1-5M in yearly revenues and were bootstrapped with my own savings (which I got through selling apps when it was relatively quite easy). This time I've found a new 50MM USD annual revenue opportunity as per my very conservative estimate. The idea is sketchy but all my previous successful products had some evil bit in them. I can see and feel it but can't bring it to reality. I'll need a couple of blockchain experts, lots of salespeople, good copywriters. I write my own marketing angels but need someone to present my words to the audience as I am not a native speaker.


Given you're outsourcing your ideation to the public why not just form a seed fund and invest in other people's ideas?


Uhm - the question NOT being asked here is WHY?

Why do you want to found a company

Why do you think your team is sound?

Why do you feel you can solve a problem that will result in something youre passionate about sticking with?

Why do you think this is the best path?

etc...

WHY do you want to pursue this?

---

With that said - as others have posted: find the problem to solve and then address HOW you can be the best to solve WHICH problem with WHAT and WHO will pay you for such.


IF you guys activate on this idea - let me know. I'll work for no salary (but equity) and I have an extremely strong vision of how this should be -

build an augmented reality app to help people with basic car repairs - start out with small jobs like replacing lights and air filters and move into more complex tasks and gear for technicians. Eventually you can expand out into a wider variety of machines.


Work for a boring telecomm corporation for a few years and you'll have a bazillion ideas for services and products to streamline things.


This thread is getting a little crowded, but mail me contact information and I might be able to hook you up with some really one-sided mathy competitive advantages. Algorithmic stuff: same output for the same input, but game-changingly faster.


Implement Industry 4.0 for dairy products like cheese or yogurt. People provide a recipe, you provide the production facility. Allow people to sell there own "family" recipes via your shop- become the steam of old family recipes.


I am in an exact position, I've money, a solid product (paying customers) but no good technical team. I am having difficulty in scaling up the business all tech folks told me that my project will require a complete rewrite.


To some a rewrite sounds like fun. A way to do things better. What kind of product is it?


Ping me, email in profile.


You dont find ideas, ideas find you.

It happens when you do some work and suddenly need some tool that could "do this or that" but all you find is complicated solutions or no solution at all


This is bizarre.


Come up with ways to allow nude pics on facebook


I have many good ideas and domains to match.

contact me at HN AT opendomain dot org


What is your goal to get rich or to change the world? If your goal is to get rich then just start an algo/AI hedge fund. Might have to add a couple quants, but sounds like you have the perfect initial team for it. However, if you want to change the world than you should focus on everyday life. Change the way we humans, sleep, drive, eat, fly, love, workout, etc. Focus on the simple things in life, and integrate your ideas into it. Simple things are what change lives


Truth to be told, I think the web is mostly built out at this stage; not that there aren't any more websites to be built, but I have genuine doubts as to whether there are more websites to be built that would generate enough profit to justify venture capital investment. Would you consider ideas that would entail recruiting hardware engineers?

That that having been said, my best shots at the question as asked:

A local reviews site where you make a long play and your selling point is being serious about tackling the accuracy of reviews.

A stackoverflow competitor where you don't let the deletionists take control of the site.

A browser fork where you make a bunch of little quality-of-life improvements like killing sticky headers, and make those happen automatically by default.


Obsidian! Love your exciting post. I’m known as the ‘Ideas Man’ (name of my first book too). Ideas and creativity are my areas of expertise. I have two ideas at the mo that I’m looking for a Team to work with on. Even if you don’t like either, maybe I can help you find an idea you adore. Please contact me via my one of my websites www.ShedSimove.com or www.MotivationalSpeaker.biz xxx


Write an evolutionary ML bot network that trades stocks in 5 minute intervals. Don't try to compete on the nanosecond micro trading end, just try to beat the market by making "good" decisions in a reasonable, human timeframe.

The question your bot is trying to solve is, "should I buy or sell this stock?" And the criteria is, "will this stock be up or down in the next X minutes."

Let the bots play in a fake market until they start to make money. It should be enough to give each bot a pot of money ($10k?) and call it dead when it goes broke or call it "good" when it makes good bets.

This is a good space for ML because the inputs are fairly well understood (stock tickers and a small set of common stock metric values). You can add in some novel inputs, like weather data in all of the trading capitals of the world (NYC, Toyko, etc).

The two tricks are this:

1) You need a community of bots that are all communicating with each other. Meaning, each bot knows what the other bots think, and how much money they have.

2) You need to let each individual bot's neural network evolve. Meaning, let the "best" performing bots "breed" with each other. Also meaning, let the values in the neural network set themselves through evolution/random rather than bothering with backpropagation.

This toy [1], showing an evolutionary neural network "learning" to follow a maze should be inspiring. Or, imagine a version of Agar.io [2] where you had to decide if a pellet (a stock) was a good idea to eat/purchase.

[1] http://ml-games.tomasz-rewak.com/ [2] http://agar.io/


Or, first read A Random Walk Down Wall Street.




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