What awesome idea did you have that never went anywhere?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6124672

by zacmartin • 13 years ago

12 15 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What was your great idea that no one else liked or never took off?

Jeremy1026• 13 years ago

Mine would be daymealdeal.com. It was going to be a Groupon of lunch specials. I had it about 75% completed, but then I got a new job so it got backburnered, and now it is in the abyss.

rywalker• 13 years ago

I built an internet advertising network like Doubleclick back in the 90s — when they launched, they did it so well that I became discouraged and stopped working on it.

In retrospect, if I had kept it going for the past 15 years, I'm sure it'd be a big business now.

true_religion• 13 years ago

Or you could have been Adbrite.... or AdEngage.

sperm-donor3• 13 years ago

What about that idea involving harvesting energy from people shagging?

sperm-donor3• 13 years ago

But seriously, how about a site that manages agreements between people/companies etc.. we could do away with a lot of lawyers... :-)

sperm-donor3• 13 years ago

How about we had PKI to GPS signals..? That way we could trust they are correct..

fbuilesv• 13 years ago

I built a site called makeitpersonal (http://makeitpersonal.co) where you can highlight, annotate and maybe share song lyrics. Although I use it a lot, I'm probably the only active user (which by the way is OK, I built a tool for myself).

krapp• 13 years ago

I wanted to build a public database of mechanics and motion. Using some web-based 3d modelling script like Copperlicht and (unknwown magic) I would set up a wiki like site with some standard human and machine models and people could add animations for those models, like martial arts moves, or dance moves, or... whatever.

It's either a stupid idea or a brilliant multimillion dollar idea for someone who isn't working off of their mother's old Dell.

robszumski• 13 years ago

I spent a lot of time on http://buildafund.com/ which is a tool to create and track custom mutual funds. The end goal is to allow other users to invest in funds they can see are doing well.

chewxy• 13 years ago

I created edgeyo, which was a kickstarter before kickstarter. It didn't take off because the model was kickstarter + stock exchange made it extremely complicated to use. Then we found out there were laws everywhere about running a stock exchange, and there are laws about company funding... it ended up being too much to handle

rk0567• 13 years ago

I built a site : https://bootstrapthemes.me (offline) it was a marketplace for buying and selling twitter bootstrap themes, but I couldn't get get quality designers in the network, so it failed, probably due to lack of quality themes.

The other one is : http://domainexchanger.net - a site for exchanging unused domain names.

fbnt• 13 years ago

Back in 2004/2005 (pre-youtube era) I created a site with a voting system similar to Digg/Reddit where instead of links or text people could upload video files. My servers were able re-encode any video format into flash, and queue the videos into the voting system. I would grab the videos at the top of the stack (the ones with the most votes) and broadcast it on a streaming video channel shown in the front page. The streaming would've been non-stop granted that I had at least 24 hours of material uploaded each day, and guaranteed to only show the best videos voted by people.

It never took off because I was a scrappy student in the middle of nowhere (Italy) and 180$+/month for a dedicated server somewhere in PA was hurting my savings. I ran the prototype for a few months and then I decided to go back to my engineering classes. Sometimes I have the feeling that if I were born in SV I could've built something serious out of it.

alockj• 13 years ago

Thought my mate and I had a winner with http://www.ultimategiftlists.com - basically create your own wishlist (by adding any item you stumble on across the web) and then share a link so people can buy it. But it never really flew..

stevoo• 13 years ago

i have build http://cygamerentals.com/ Although i have a few customers it is nowhere near a successful as i would want it to be. I blame my partner as he did absolutely nothing. I designed, redesigned, advertised (ads,social), told people about, personally delivered games while he did nothing.

This is where a good partner would have helped a lot !

codegeek• 13 years ago

I own ekfolio.com domain. The idea was to be able to create a single page professional bio/profile. i know many others are doing it even though I have always wanted to do it just for me. Never took off though.

What awesome idea did you have that never went anywhere?

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