Ask HN: Those of you who started companies. Where did you get your idea?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17486010

by tinktank • 8 years ago

8 9 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have started working in Enterprise software and am very interested in soaking up ideas for potential new companies. Where did you guys get your ideas for a company? Did the idea pan out?

smt88• 8 years ago

This is an unnecessarily risky approach. Don't start with ideas -- start with a market.

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

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

jonathan-kosgei• 8 years ago

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

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

tinktank• 8 years ago

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

Jeremy1026• 8 years ago

Oh hey, I use your service for about 10k lookups a day.

kypro• 8 years ago

That's a really cool service.

How did you get the word out when you were starting out? Was it just basics like adwords, etc?

siquick2• 8 years ago

tldr; solved my own problem

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

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

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

site: https://www.soundshelter.net

operatorius• 8 years ago

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

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

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

siquick2• 8 years ago

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

mabynogy• 8 years ago

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

Ask HN: Those of you who started companies. Where did you get your idea?

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