Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)

http://swombat.com/2010/11/30/no-new-ideas

by luu • 13 years ago

172 93 13 years ago

lisper• 13 years ago

This is a three-year-old blog post about a three-year-old HN comment about a different three-year-old blog post. Just sayin'.

varelse• 13 years ago

More proof that everything comes in threes. Just like the Ramans...

einhverfr3• 13 years ago

Or my theory on the etymology of Ramen

(La mian from Hokkien meaning hand-pulled noodles -> Ramyun in Korean being a loan word -> Ramen in Japanese, as borrowed from the Korean).

Jormundir• 13 years ago

Hah, I usually don't like when people repost old articles, but I didn't see this comment originally, and it is super awesome.

AznHisoka• 13 years ago

posted by a three-year old!

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

At which point does History become irrelevant or ill suited for discussion? Please aware us all as you seem to hold the key.

johnchristopher• 13 years ago

Well... This is Hacker News not Hacker History.

swombat• 13 years ago

I'm very tempted to write a blog post pointing to this comment, so that it might be reposted in 3 years - but I think it'll be neater if someone else does!

larrys2• 13 years ago

You could also re purpose that old content by updating with further thoughts and a new URL. Similar to what they do on "48 Hours" or with "60 Minutes" on CNBC "we last ran this story in..." [1] Just throw a coat of paint over it and let everyone feast.

[1] Analogies are just repackaged ideas.

larrys2• 13 years ago

That expression peaked a few years ago:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=just%20sayin&cmpt=q

prostoalex• 13 years ago

Google Trends is based on searches, so it implies it actually started up three years ago, and a bunch of n00bs had to find out what it means. It grew into simple and powerful everyday expression that everybody knows a meaning of.

Houshalter• 13 years ago

That just shows how many people were searching for it, not how many people are using it. And most those people were probably searching for the song, not the expression.

iopq• 13 years ago

And it's about every idea being old! So fitting!

misnome• 13 years ago

Thanks, that confused the hell out of me.

HeyLaughingBoy• 13 years ago

And his blog post is just as relevant now as it was then; what's your point?

unono3• 13 years ago

Current thinking on this matter is to avoid the tired old web 2.0 hipster stuff. The current batch of YC is all about solving real problem for real people. Spoonrocket got the most applause ($6 meals delivered within 10 minutes).

untilHellbanned• 13 years ago

i'm all for real ideas but the 7000th web food delivery service shouldn't get people that excited, especially not the most select group of entrepreneurs in the world.

unono3• 13 years ago

Spoonrocket is pretty unique. You'd have to go to the 3rd world like India to get similar levels of service.

Spoonrocket's cars have builtin heaters that keep food warm, only 2 menu items a day, and really quick delivery. If they actually expanded nationwide they'd kill burger/pizza joints, or at least force them to innovate.

bliti3• 13 years ago

I reason all YC batches have been about solving real problems for real people. Though they seem to be focusing more on solving business problems. I did make that change from consumer to business and am pretty happy about it. Might even apply to the Winter batch.

knowtheory• 13 years ago

Derek Siver's observation back in 2005 that ideas are a modifier on execution is a slightly better recounting of this point: http://sivers.org/multiply

People can bitch and kvetch about elevator-pitch/vision level descriptions of products, but such analyses are always shallow, and particularly for interesting products almost always miss the point.

Always look to the execution.

(on the flip side, the flaws of poorly executed projects can often be very easy to sum up)

phreanix• 13 years ago

Does YC have a collection if post mortems for their failed startups? I would find that very interesting.

Xcelerate2• 13 years ago

Assuming your goal is to have a successful startup company, I've often wondered what the optimal trade-off between time-per-startup idea and number of startup attempts is.

For instance, I could spend a year working on two really big, elaborate ideas that I have, but if they fail (likely), then I've wasted ("learned what not to do" if you're the optimistic type) a year working on only two ideas.

Or... I could invest my time in a bunch of little startup ideas. Make one simple webapp a week, and out of 52 of them, one should stick, right?

But the problem is that in general, the more time and effort you invest into any particular idea, the higher quality the product of your idea will become, and the better a chance it has for success.

So, I'm not sure what the best route is. If you look at which companies have historically been successful (FB, Twitter, Instagram), you see that the founder spent almost all of their time on that one idea. But, this may be an example of selection bias. It could be the case that the biggest successes require a huge time-investment in one project, but the probability of success for any random project is very low. In a sense, they won a lottery of a sort. Perhaps your chance of success -- but not mega-success -- becomes more realistic if you focus on many smaller ideas.

namenotrequired2• 13 years ago

Hopefully you've found one of the 52 ideas awesome enough to spend a little longer on. How enthusiastic / passionate you are about it is a big factor in how successful will be.

icpmacdo• 13 years ago

I really like the idea of making a web app every week and seeing whats sticks. Its seems like it would be a much more diverse learning experience.

cstejerean2• 13 years ago

I think you're right. Building the next twitter would require a huge gamble that's unlikely to pay off. But from what I can tell neither of Twitter, Facebook, Google started out with the intention to be the next big thing. All of them started as something much smaller and focused, even though they eventually grew into behemoths.

no_gravity• 13 years ago

"If you look at which companies have historically been successful (FB, Twitter, Instagram), you see that the founder spent almost all of their time on that one idea."

Where does that info come from and what do you mean with "all of their time"?

I would expect that the first iteration of those websites have been coded in a few days or weeks.

Xcelerate2• 13 years ago

Where does that info come from and what do you mean with "all of their time"?

It came from my memory of various articles I've read; but that's certainly a fallible source, so correct me if I'm wrong.

And with "all of their time", I didn't literally mean "all of it". I meant, with time appropriated towards working on a star-up, it was spent on only one idea rather than multiple ones.

radley• 13 years ago

Twitter was not a founder-focused idea - it was a side project for a video service.

schuylerlarson• 13 years ago

Actually it was a founder-focused idea that jack had thought of first in 2000 but decided to shelf it. Also it was a failing podcast platform called Odeo.

lifeisstillgood2• 13 years ago

That certainly seems to be the trend - succeed once and diversify. You simply take the diversify first.

It's a nice idea - 52 startups.

gbog• 13 years ago

No, your chances of success are extremely low whatever how you do it, so better do something you like.

And the most relevant bias here is not selection bias, it's the one that makes every driver believe they are above average drivers. The same happens with mergers too: the boss believes he will better than the other one, and forget about all the difficulties and costs of a merge.

I think that if you really need the money you probably should work in a big corp.

ethanazir• 13 years ago

No two ideas are ever the same; in the details... Sure Abraham Lincoln filed for a patent on the essence of 'friendster' and other followed suit; but the details make the difference.

jonnathanson• 13 years ago

True, though the Abe Lincoln social-networking thing was a hoax.

(Lincoln held a patent, but it was for a method for helping boats navigate sandbars).

cstejerean2• 13 years ago

It's interesting that both Twitter and Facebook evolved quite a bit from where they started. The newsfeed and chat have both altered how I use Facebook and made it much more like twitter for me. When twitter first came out though I don't really see how anyone could have claimed it was a Facebook clone.

pestaa• 13 years ago

By this logic... Facebook is actually a Twitter-clone? My head spins.

7Figures2Commas5• 13 years ago

The problem with so many "startup ideas" is that they are a solution to the problem, "I want to create a startup and don't have an idea." Not surprisingly, this tends to produce copycat concepts, products with no real market fit, services that target sexy but oversaturated markets, etc.

There are lots and lots of problems that are either unsolved or are being solved in ways that are less efficient and cost-effective than they could be, particularly outside of the consumer space. In many cases, these problems can be solved with relatively unsophisticated applications. But the folks who sit around thinking about the usual consumer internet suspects (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) never discover these problems because more often than not, they have no domain expertise.

Sadly, it seems to me that many technical wantrepreneurs have no real interest in developing domain expertise because they believe there's more value in mastering the framework du jour than focusing in on a vertical and developing a real understanding of it over time.

joshhart• 13 years ago

Yes, of course if you have domain expertise and there is a need you can recognize a niche to fill with a company. I think getting domain expertise is easier said than done and could probably require quitting one's day job to go work in industry X for 5 years. Possibly just to find out that filling a niche is hard.

Spearchucker• 13 years ago

Not that difficult. Instead of starting a start-up when you come out of school, go work in a few IT departments. You will find something that is needed somewhere.

7Figures2Commas5• 13 years ago

1. I didn't suggest that domain expertise is easy to develop. Nobody gains expertise overnight. That's the point.

2. You don't have to quit your day job to develop domain expertise. Be strategic and try to make sure your day jobs are related to a specific industry. Far too many people hop from random startup to random startup. That's not surprising: the pay can be excellent, you get to work with the latest and greatest technologies, and you get a lottery ticket in the form of equity. But many of these jobs won't provide enough exposure to a vertical to actually gain meaningful knowledge of it.

3. If you get involved in an industry, you should take the time to establish relationships, especially with folks who are non-technical. If you nurture those relationships and keep your eyes open, you will often meet highly-knowledgeable, well-connected non-technical individuals who make for perfect non-technical co-founders. These are not the "non-technical co-founder seeking technical co-founder" wantrapreneurs with no domain expertise of their own who you run into all the time in Silicon Valley.

4. If you're not prepared to invest the time in understanding a specific market, that's fine. Be the best engineer you can be, try to maximize your income and consider whether it's worth continually beating your head against a brick wall to find an "idea" so that you can create a "startup."

dreamfactory• 13 years ago

Write articles and go and interview people as a journalist/researcher. You can do that in your spare time and you will get good access to decision makers and find out all about industry perspectives and pain points.

amorphid• 13 years ago

I agree that domain expertise is often lacking in startup founders, especially the "business" founder. For several years I wanted to form a recruiting startup without having built up a solid understanding of how recruiting works. After I had several years of recruiting under my belt, I was able to build a reasonably successful small business (originally a startup that couldn't scale) that exploited a nice little niche in the recruiting world. That small business wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't known a lot about recruiting.

ensignavenger• 13 years ago

I have come up with a lot of ideas to solve business problems, but I am reluctant to implement them for the concern that selling to such businesses would be a far more difficult problem than simply creating something that works better than what they are currently using. Business often make stupid decisions based on relationships with sells people or brand recognition more than merit of the solution. Of course, this problem exists in the consumer space as well, but the market is so much larger (everyone is a consumer, not everyone makes decisions on what solutions to deploy in a business).

ef42• 13 years ago

In my experience, you have the difficulty backward. It's just fear of the unknown that keeps too many technical people from attempting it.

If your product has a demonstrable return on investment, then it is far easier to sell to businesses. Because businesses actually make decisions based on ROI, and consumers mostly don't.

Remember that to make a fair comparison, you need to do it per dollar, not per sale. Even if it's 10x easier to sell to one consumer than one business, if a business customer pays 100x more money, then it is still vastly easier to sell to businesses.

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

That's why you need to sell first and build second. You have a good relationship with your first customer, who has a real problem and real money to solve it.

7Figures2Commas5• 13 years ago

First, it should be noted that if you're actually in the industry you're targeting, chances are you have relationships that you can leverage. Your comment seems to imply that you're an outsider with no domain expertise who believes he has ideas to solve problems in various markets. If that's the case, you have the aforementioned domain expertise shortcoming.

Second, far too many technical folks seem to believe that they have to sell what they've built. That's almost never the case. There are people who make a living selling all sorts of products and services in established B2B markets. If you have a product or service of merit, chances are you'll be able to find somebody with sales experience who will be interested in selling for you.

Now here's the key: you must be prepared to invest money into your sales efforts. You're probably not going to find many good, experienced salespeople who will work on commission only. And depending on the market, you'll most likely need to budget for tools that will help your salesperson succeed (trade shows, etc.).

Bottom line: it takes money to make money. If you're not willing to put cold hard cash on the line to sell your solution, you have no reason to expect results.

skarmklart• 13 years ago

FWIW, I am writing a book to get you some part of the way to your goal: http://www.howtofindsaasideas.com

It's about finding/extracting ideas (from domain experts) and then testing them quickly.

(Apologies for the terrible landing page)

nutanc• 13 years ago

Very valid point. That's why even in Hacker news we see a lot more items talking about frameworks instead of domain related topics.

bayesianhorse• 13 years ago

There are fewer frameworks than there are domains out there, so audience of hackernews tends to connect over frameworks rather than domains.

pajop• 13 years ago

We recently had a hackathon with a multilateral rice science nonprofit - they had very focused challenges http://rice-hackathon.irri.org/challenges using their domain expertise - the results of the hackathon was eye-opening!

bliti3• 13 years ago

I stopped looking for ideas, and focused on solving problems. There is a difference. Ideas come with a lot of fluff. Meaning that under the right conditions they might work. Solving problems focuses on talking to people who have problems, and figuring out a way to solve it. I now spend at least an hour every week talking to people who have problems I want to solve: people who can pay. (:

abrichr2• 13 years ago

How do you choose whom to talk to, and where do you find them?

bliti3• 13 years ago

1. I realized that a product is not built in a vacuum. Meaning that I had to go out and figure out what products where needed. This led me to reach a simple understanding: I would focus on building products that made people money. Selling such products seems to be simpler (I am still testing this at the moment).

2. With #1 in mind, I focused on what businesses need to make money: clients. Thus, I set out to learn how business generated new leads, or followed up on clients.

3. Now that I had focused on solving a type of problem (lead generation and client follow up), I set out to research markets. Every business out there needs leads. But some can be easily automated. Using patio11's appointment reminder app as inspiration, I started to ask people how such app would help their business. Turns out there is a big demand for such a simple application. Who knew that sending text messages and making automated phone calls would be such a life saver?

4. Who did I talk to? Well, who needs to keep constant contact with their client list? Dentists, insurance agents, private schools, auto mechanics, etc.

5. Once I knew the who, finding the where was as simple as looking in my cellphone. I called my dentist, and insurance agent to talk about the application (before writing any code). They gave their feedback and I set out to write it.

muratmutlu• 13 years ago

I saw a talk recently called 'everything is a remix' which said that every idea is formed in some part by something that's been done before

http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/

oscargrouch• 13 years ago

somebody, somewhere must come with something for the first time.. this copy/mix stuff is more reasonable in more common line of thinking (average people)

how many people would be thinking at relativity when einstein did, or calculi for newton(actually two with ), or marx thougts in "the capital", a music piece by mozart or a painting by van gogh..

they created great things because their toughts were above average, and they where not losing too much time with ordinary things.. like "what will i eat?" "were are the kids" .. "i wanna a big iate" .. etc.. etc..

this kind of tought, that nothing is really original, only diminish the human nature.. and if we mix and copy.. the problem are ourselves.. we can do better, and improve with effort.. than some day.. that something really original, that no human being could ever thought can come into reality

if people wanna think different things, they must first start to look to different horizons, where nobody or almost nobody are looking at..

the innovations starts in the way you think.. you need to observe yourself thinking, and be your own harsh critical

dpanah• 13 years ago

Another smart twit. So he thinks.

igorgue2• 13 years ago

My advice is, chill, have fun, you don't need to be an entrepreneur.

I really don't understand why being an entrepreneur is so "sexy" (only to other dudes, being sexist for a moment here) these days, it's lame.

P.S. I know, wrong forum to say that.

sergiosgc2• 13 years ago

It's the thrill of creation. You see, many people are creators. They feel a need to pour their imagination into something that lasts, possibly something that outlasts themselves. There are quite a few routes for fulfilling this desire: arts, engineering, parenting, and, you guessed it, entrepreneurship.

And yes, this being a hacker forum, where everyone is the creator kind of person, the percentage of possible entrepreneurs here is bound to be high.

igorgue2• 13 years ago

It's not the only way to create stuff, I make music on the side, and hack on open source project. You don't need to be a CEO to make something.

powerpuffgirls2• 13 years ago

How is that even remotely interesting? wtf.

shubb2• 13 years ago

I have a startup idea that I'm not going to execute. I currently live with a senior social worker, and my mother was a social worker. Over the years have been deeply troubled by what I've heard. I think this tool could help them, even if it's a bit creepy.

Social workers in the UK have a big problem. Different teams, professions (police, medical, housing), deal with the same people, and often collect all the pieces required to understand and prevent a tragic situation. But they can't put them together.

There is an obsession with interpofessional meetings to tackle this, but every serious case review shows that the knowledge was there but not put together, leading to dead children. My perception is that often knowledge is mentioned, but when discussing a different related case, or isn't formally written down and passed to the right person.

My solution is inspired by the part of the CALO project that dealt with capturing and exploiting knowledge from meetings. There are some great ideas. If you do this, read up on it.

The product records all meetings, using existing meeting room Teleconference hardware. The meetings are put through automatic speech and speaker recognition on a best effort basis to produce a searchable index for that meeting. So you get something like a transcript and can skip to the point where Mr A is mentioned.

Supervisors, who in that field are criminally liable for mistakes by subordinates, already review minutes for meetings. Now they can search for any mention of Mr A, and see in what context he was mentioned and listen to that part of the meeting. Obviously there would be control of who could listen to what meetings, but these people already have big intrusive databases, so I don't think they are too worried.

Ideally, you could then build graphs from there of who is mentioned together, and do some Palantir style stuff to spot associations between people.

But the start is, very much, implementing a meeting transcriber by sowing together a few brands of speech recognition engine, a web interface for administrating and searching meetings, and selling it into social services.

frozenport• 13 years ago

Sounds like a good idea, but i'm not sure how this relates to conversation.

mcintyre1994• 13 years ago

Without relevant domain or speech recognition expertise, it seems that names might be one of the more common areas to get errors while transcribing using such a system, particularly if the system isn't trained for a name and/or it is said by many different voices?

jlgreco• 13 years ago

If you are relying on teleconference hardware made by other companies, I suspect that you will have those companies cloning your software for their hardware.

I mean, I assume Cisco Telepresence stuff doesn't already record/transcribe meetings... If your idea starts to take off, I would bet that it will for sure in the near future. That seems like exactly the sort of functionality you would expect from that sort of hardware.

shubb2• 13 years ago

Well CALO yielded SIRI, as in on the iphone. That project had a number of parts, one was an AI personal assistant, another was meetings, and another was some kind of integrated battle control center.

Anyway, it yielded a lot of high grade speech recognition research and AI research, which companies are battling to license. If you recall Yahoo's weirdly overvalued purchase of Sumly, that was part of a deal to acquire a license for this kind of tech.

I suspect the most credible opponents to this startup would be MS bundling this kind of functionality into Outlook, or some other big company exploiting this expensive but already licensed tech.

But what you get here, is first to market, and attack on specific verticals (i.e. social services, and later related services). You can't be scared off by 'what if we have a competitor'. If you don't have a competitor, your market probably doesn't exist. That is what I'd worry about here.

graycat• 13 years ago

As I pointed out before, there are no new ideas. Everything of value has been done before in one form or another.

Let's see: Take idea some X and the set A of all efforts for idea X. Then take the effort in set A that was earliest in time (probability of exact ties 0). Call that effort T. Then when T was done, idea X was a "new idea" and not "done before" in contradiction to the quote.

For there being "no new ideas", the research libraries are stuffed with journals of peer-reviewed original research, and the usual standards for publication are "new, correct, and significant". So, those libraries are stuffed with "new ideas" that the quote says don't exist.

Are there new ideas in business? Sure: The transistor, the integrated circuit, the Multics processor architecture (heavily borrowed since), security via capabilities, access control lists, and authentication, the microprocessor, RSA encryption, speculative execution, out of order execution, penicillin, cardiac stents, and on and on.

'Nuff.

Lerc• 13 years ago

Continuing in the face of a stream of "Your idea sucks" presents quite a challenge. You can tell yourself that the best ideas and most successful ventures had similar detractors, but it doesn't always help. You are aware of your own project more than the casual observer. The weaknesses and hurdles to pass are more apparent to you, and you can't help wondering if the comments are insightful and your project really does suck and you are just too invested in it to see the truth.

I have done a lot of things where upon presenting them to people, they would say "What's the point?", "That can't be done", or commonly "There's no point in an alternative to X. Even if it does work, people won't change from X". I have even had "that's the stupidest thing I have ever seen"

The chances of those things becoming enormous successes are tiny, and I'm aware of that. But the chances for those who _did_ become enormous successes were also tiny.

It's a hard road, but only people who walk the road have a chance. Please, rather than criticize the attempt, or the implementation, or the presentation, or their use of apostrophes. Try offering directions that could help them in the direction they want to be going. There's no point in saying "Turn back now." Even if you think they are going in the wrong direction, they have made their choice and the journey will be informative.

einhverfr3• 13 years ago

I would suggest a slightly different framework. Never say "turn back now." However, I try to divide my criticism into three groups:

1. Major show-stoppers need to be discussed and brought to light early on. The point is not to say "don't get started" but rather to say "do you have any idea what you are up against?" Having an idea is the first step to planning, and planning is mostly valuable for mapping out obstacles and potential solutions.

2. Once one is past the commitment and planning phase, I think it is fine to criticize implementation. The goal here is to bring up problems that might not need to be solved right away but need to be on the radar.

3. These need to be coupled with constructive support. Heavy criticism along with solid support is golden. Heavy criticism without solid support is like a lead weight.

novaleaf• 13 years ago

looks like the OP couldn't take the heat, and removed the original content.

Weak.

deerpig• 13 years ago

Most of the comments here are twice as long as the original post, which wasn't so much a post, but just a comment, on.... HN comments....

Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)

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