It's wild to realize that this list of like a hundred innovative businesses is just what people are launching today, and there will be a whole new batch tomorrow, and the day after that, and so on. Just today's list is thousands and thousands of aggregated hours of work by hundreds of people for speculative riches with good odds of the businesses failing. And the stuff that gets onto one of these lists is just a small fraction of what gets launched every day!
This site may have been intended to inspire startup founders or side-project hustlers, but it does the opposite for me: it has shown me the folly of trying to make it as one of those!
Going forward I'm sticking to proven, local, likely service-based businesses.
Thanks, stevematzai. Very enlightening site, even if it didn't help in the way you would have liked. :)
Thanks Claudio for the enlightening comment. It's true and I'm feeling a bit like this myself, going over lots of business ideas daily for the past month or so made me realize the same thing and this is why I've started doing some research into what makes an idea more likely to succeed (or not). I don't want to discourage anyone from the process of creation because the act of creation is inherently human and through all this aggregated creative effort we are progressing and improving little by little and this is how, in my opinion, the site should be used, to improve upon existing ideas little by little. On the other side, knowing that there are a lot of creative people out there spreading their ideas should give one more courage to do the same, this is another thing that I realized. I'm thinking of myself as an insignificant little spec of dust in the galaxy and this thought actually gives me courage. We are condemned to be creative, we are condemned to try and fail again and again and succeed some times, we are condemned to progress.
Don't give up on the idea of being an entrepreneur.
Just realize that MOST ideas are iterative and not truly innovative. Nothing wrong with that, but there is going to be a ton of competition when you build a Chrome Plugin that does one neat copy and paste... even if it is very useful.
(Useful Tool Example:) Citationsy for Chrome: Cite anything in one-click right from Chrome
And honestly a lot of ideas might be interesting or funny... but they aren't even good ideas.
(Funny but Stupid Example:) howlongisyourdong.com is now on product hunt: GROW UP YOUR E-PENIS RIGHT NOW :
And some ideas are just wishes for things that obviously aren't going to turn out well in execution.
(Product won't match customer desire Example:) Your mobile app needs a website. I built Flycricket to generate and host a site for you!:
If you come up with an idea that is truly disruptive, that isn't something everyone in your field has been asking for for years. You should pursue it. But it should stand out on a list like this, not fit right in.
Edit: Many people do well building out the extremely obvious ideas that everyone wants. But to do well that way you should be talented, work extremely hard, and be well funded if you want to beat the competition.
Surprisingly, even silly ideas can transform into great business ideas with the proper execution. A guy became a millionaire in the 70's with Pet Rock; you wouldn't think that anyone in his right mind would buy a rock as a pet but there you go, people are predictably irrational when it comes to financial matters.
But the reason we remember the Pet Rock is because it was the silly idea that managed to be successful. No one remembers the thousands of floor tiling businesses that were successful or the thousands of silly ideas that were unsuccessful.
There aren't thousands. There's like 200+ on that list right now.
And if I am understanding this right, a lot of those don't seem like they're "daily"
There's also a lot of pointless and silly stuff in there. For example, the one about a microwave that stops before it rings, or the one that filters top level domains (tlds).
An entire section isn't even real businesses, just wishes for one.
There are only a handful of actual serious businesses that can generate money listed here. Something like ~10. Even assuming this was daily, that would be 3k+ new serious businesses per year. That should be way higher, like 10x as much given how low the barrier to entry is for a modern day business (especially in software).
My point exactly! Legitimate online businesses compete for attention with nonsense and every other legitimate online business. Regardless of the viability of the idea, a new online product is a snowflake competing for attention in an avalanche.
All things considered, it is much easier to get a paying customer with a proven local business idea than an online business.
I wasn't aware that there were so many places/communities that focused on this sort of thing. I knew of only a couple. It's exciting to look through it all. Love the list format without all the fancy images that make scrolling and eyeballing data so difficult.
sidenote: opened up the main page to hunt for RSS (or similar). Though none exist, surprised that everything was on a single line. My poor (lightweight) external editor stopped loading the page at the 50k character mark (hard limit for allowed characters per line).
It's said that an image is worth a thousand words but that it's not always true :) I've kept things simple and without clutter because the idea is that one should be able to parse a lot of data in short time, no one has time to look at a lot of logos that most of the time are not that relevant (for some purposes). Image processing takes a lot of brain computing power :) Sorry for the 'one liner', that's how Gatsby outputs the data.
For parsing this kind of information having a more structured format like the `sidenote` suggests would be a very nice improvement (such as RSS for the new additions).
Kudos for the effort. How do you plan to curate that list? Maybe a git based approach is more future proof, so not everything is on your sholder, like awesome-tech-ideas or so.
Not exactly analogous but if you are looking for some inspiration, there are some interesting data sets to browse though on data.gov[0], and innocentive[1] has "challenges" in a variety of areas.
Sure. Browse Upwork or Freelancer.com and see what the buyers are asking for. They may be delusional in terms of what they want to pay, but at least those are examples of needs people have that they are willing to spend money on.
Very cool. Just too bad ideas don’t matter and execution is everything!
I wish the world has more people with technical chops and less “idea guys.” Knowledge of customer and ability to build the minimum viable product is worth more than 100k ideas.
Never bought into how that saying diminishes the value of good ideas, particularly that of a unique domain-specific insight. I'm rarely excited by "the new Facebook" or "like X, but with AI", but when I hear someone say something like "an app that creates layouts for solar plants, saving energy consultants hundreds hours of work", that tickles my senses.
That's a real example from a meetup I went to the other day. Two solar engineers who were tired of drawing these solar plant plans and realized a computer would do it faster and better. They're killing it.
Many software engineers rely on domain experts to come along with good ideas to execute on. Maybe ideas matter immensely after all.
Ideas don't matter (assuming the set of ideas you're choosing among are roughly equal in quality, and that the average quality of the set is well above outright stupidity).
Which is to say, ideas matter a lot, but no one who subscribes to the saying has ever noticed that they're auto-rejecting bad and terrible ideas constantly, and have also never had a great idea.
That saying exists to deter procrastination, obsession with being first, being secret and other mistakes people make.
But ideas do matter. Google AdWords' bidding model was an idea (I think overture had the first quality implementation at scale). That idea was/is responsible for adding 0s to Google's as income.
Edit: for those who haven’t seen this before (talking to you idea guys), I was shared this formula by one of the top VCs in New York almost 10 years ago.
When it comes to ideas and execution, Derek Siver's multiplication guide is quite the "North Star" in helping entrepreneurs to orient themselves guesstimate if they are on the right path.
I don't know how you equate knowledge of customer with technical chops. I see tons of list like these with site and coding etc done but no clue on how to build a sustainable business.
Thanks, I thought about it but for now I'm thinking that the human mind is more intuitive in what actually makes an idea applicable and feasible. It's like Kasparov playing chess against Deep Blue, AI might come up with a lot of calculations per second but it has none of the insight and intuition a chess master has. However, there is a startup idea generator at https://startup-gen.surge.sh/ if you want to check it.
I've done that before using markov chains. It works, and some of the "ideas" can sound interesting, but I never used any of them to work on actual projects. Fun though.
Pretty useful. Suggestion based on me looking at this on a phone (I'm unsure how this looks on desktop!) - left align the titles and the copy for each section. Would make the list much easier to scan. Well done for releasing!
Also make the text a hyperlink, in honor of the 30 year anniversary of this hypertext platform, rather than sticking a small link icon to the side that's an inconvenient click target.
Thanks for the suggestions guys, they are all very good ideas for improvement, I'm not really a front-end guy. I thought about making columns but this would probably affect the readability. Hyperlink idea: especially good considering the anniversary :)
This site may have been intended to inspire startup founders or side-project hustlers, but it does the opposite for me: it has shown me the folly of trying to make it as one of those!
Going forward I'm sticking to proven, local, likely service-based businesses.
Thanks, stevematzai. Very enlightening site, even if it didn't help in the way you would have liked. :)