Going to start a company in May 2020. What should I build?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21359919

by free2chill • 7 years ago

12 21 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Please comment below with ideas or problems you need solved.

smt882• 7 years ago

This is not a good way to start a company.

In May 2020, the timing will be perfect for some ideas, but not for others.

You're also not likely to succeed if you start with an idea or a problem and then try to find customers. Start with the customers -- people who trust you enough to buy something from you, even though you're just starting out.

That's the real barrier to sales for most startups: no one wants to be your first customer or your guinea pig. They know there's a 99.9%+ chance you'll go out of business.

People rarely take that leap unless they know and like you already.

core-questions• 7 years ago

Pretty aggressive timeline for someone with no big idea.

OK, how about a digital "yarn board" for crazy conspiracy theorists to collaboratively piece together things?

teilo2• 7 years ago

Why would I tell you? If I had the next big idea, I'd keep it to myself and start my own damn company. Seriously, what kind of a question is this?

jaredsohn2• 7 years ago

Maybe there is something you personally want to exist but you are not able to build it yourself (don't have the skillset, don't want to take the risk, don't see enough of a payoff for building a company around it, already have other commitments, etc.)

teilo2• 7 years ago

Please. The poster is literally planning to start a business but has no idea what business he wants to start, so he comes here for free ideas from other people. If I had a problem I needed solved, a problem that I presume other people also needed to solve, then I could turn that into a business whether or not I had the skills to solve the problem. So same answer.

tyzerdak• 7 years ago

Create imgur/google plus clone that is fast

codegeek• 7 years ago

I am going to sound like an idiot but why May 2020 ? Do you know you will be alive then ? Why not start today ? What is stopping you today ? There is never a good time to do anything tough. I say start now, start today. Even if you do it on the side. Sorry I don't have ideas for you but thought to comment about your very interesting timeline.

sdan• 7 years ago

Possibly has school. I'm trying to do the same thing as well (although I'm working on bootstrapping my startup before we launch)

buboard• 7 years ago

I m gonna win a prize next year. What prize should i win?

fortran77• 7 years ago

I would take the two hottest technologies right now --Blockchain and Haskell -- and do something with the combination of them. Like a new digital currency that's implemented in Haskell. Investors will surely jump on it!

Also, Rust is very hot. You will get investor confidence if you tell them your back-end is in Rust because then they'll know it can never crash or have bugs.

tcbasche2• 7 years ago

Don't forget to run it multi-cloud

vpEfljFL2• 7 years ago

I'm toying with couple of ides:

- niche, saas, privacy first search engine (for developers, lawyers, any profession)

- paid search engine for quality websites only, such as hobby, personal blogs and non for profit in general, also company blogs can match that criteria, i.e. exclude websites with ads (like reddit), popups (medium, quora) and so on

- I feel like we have a place for one more "not evil" git hosting tool without telemetry :)

- email maid easy like all in one written from scratch on high level language like python, ruby, etc.

Maybe I'll do them all when I can sustain myself enough to work fulltime on side projects. Search engines are quite capital intensive though.

Also as many wrote here, you don't have to wait for one year, just start today with general planing, work on the business model, talk with customers, talk couple of agreements in advance to reach later when you'll have a product and so on.

sethammons• 7 years ago

Can you go into more detail on "email made easy"?

vpEfljFL2• 7 years ago

Right now email is like kubernetes, you can do it yourself but most likely better buy it from service providers like gsuite etc. I think sosciety in general will benefit with all in one simple to host package written in high level language.

Email right now is extrimely complicated ("s" in smtp is for "simple" btw) and in order to do it yourself you need to understand many parts of it like dmark reports, constant monitoring of delivery, spam, spf, dkim etc.

There are couple of bare-bones opensource solutions to host it yourself but if you do it from scratch you will go either with postfix or exim. They are written in "low-level" languages like C where extremely hard to write proper software without buffer overflows and so on.

I think there is a place for innovation for better security and user experience as well. You can sell additional services like better spam and malware detection or delivery monitoring and support for enterprise.

I wish I can do it myself but I'm already occupied with too many side projects :)

muzani• 7 years ago

Just pick an idea that has hundreds of thousands of users, maybe even some of the unicorns, and do it better. I'd still like a high speed note taking app that syncs on mobile, and I'm willing to pay for it.

m3tr0s• 7 years ago

One of these: https://unawaz.github.io/stochastic-hill-climbing/tasks/

el_dev_hell• 7 years ago

51. Conduct raids and order detention of witnesses and suspects for questioning.

U WOT M8?

anonu• 7 years ago

Sounds like a hammer looking for a nail.

You should probably get real world experience. Problems looking for a solution will come to you much more organically than asking HN.

tcbasche2• 7 years ago

This is why we have so much crappy pointless software clogging up the internet

edit: maybe invent a crappy pointless software removal tool

Going to start a company in May 2020. What should I build?

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