Coshx Labs is giving away $50k of development. No strings attached.

http://competition.coshx.com/

by btaitelb • 12 years ago

37 35 12 years ago

competition.coshx.com

Awesome! Any idea how public the public voting will be? i.e will a large community (4chan) be able to vote for their own idea and win easily?

owenthethird4• 12 years ago

Thanks so much for the interest (Owen from Coshx here). The voting will be 100% public for the first round in order to pick the 5 finalists. If an individual or team can get the entire 4chan community behind them, then I call that market validation and more power to them! Official rules will be sent out soon and they state that an individual or team must be behind the concept, but that operating companies are excluded from getting free work. We want to help someone launch and idea, not reduce costs for a profitable company.

dangrossman• 12 years ago

Being able to get 4chan to vote on something is probably more correlated with meme creation skill than validation of a market for any product. This type of contest often measures the size of participants' networks and their ability to leverage it, not the things being voted on. Lots of them run by large brands end up being won by people like teachers who can convince their boss to ask all the students in the district to vote for their teacher because they know him/her, regardless of the idea submitted.

Cassandra108• 12 years ago

Gotta spread the word on this one!

mpeg• 12 years ago

US-only ?

saganus3• 12 years ago

Same thing I was going to ask. They say the contest rules will be published when the competition starts if I'm not mistaken.

gkop• 12 years ago

Nope, this is not limited geographically.

darkFunction• 12 years ago

Clever. So they get lots of great app ideas, pick the 4th or 5th best idea as the winner, build it, and then get to work on the actual best idea submitted for themselves.

wasd• 12 years ago

ideas have very little value. what really matters is the execution team.

mildtrepidation• 12 years ago

People love to say this, but it just isn't true. Ideas can be very valuable, particularly when they come from a well-informed perspective in an untapped niche/market.

Of course an idea isn't useful without execution, but without the idea, you have nothing to execute.

nilkn• 12 years ago

Having the right idea at the right time is one of the main differences between billionaire programmers and 9-5 salaried programmers.

onion2k• 12 years ago

So submit things that will be more for the public good than things that could make you your fortune. Although, of course, the two aren't mutually exclusive.

owenthethird4• 12 years ago

Not a bad idea, but also not in the spirit of our company or this competition. Anyone can view the ideas that are submitted, not Coshx alone. Certainly this well keep some people from submitting, but it will not keep us from helping someone launch their idea.

Thedavek• 12 years ago

I'm a developer at Coshx. We'll have full details on the rules and such when the contest starts. Will also see if someone can answer questions here but I don't know the answers to these offhand. Thanks for your patience and interest. :)

saganus3• 12 years ago

I tried sending an email to competition@coshx.com but I got a mail delivery subsytem error:

"We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (competition) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group".

Maybe there's a misspelling somewhere? has anyone tried to send an email there as wel?

mintone• 12 years ago

It appears not to open until the 15th April according to their timeline.

btaitelb2• 12 years ago

Sorry about that, we had the permissions set too strictly. It's fixed now, and I want to thank you for bringing this to our attention before the competition starts.

saganus3• 12 years ago

Great!

manishsharan2• 12 years ago

Why post this on HN ? We are mostly programmers , techies or in tech business and s/w is not difficult for us. Why not advertize/post this on Business magazines or trade publications for Dentists , Doctors , Plumbers and such ?

AlexMcP• 12 years ago

Surely the idea of a one-off crowd sourced mini incubator is at least a little interesting to someone who writes|plans|sells software.

Immediate reactions from me include "Should my company get on board with something like this?", "I wonder what the equity split is like", "Could there be a platform for voting up ideas to work on based on customer validation?", "Should I build that platform to bubble up ideas with a verifiable userbase?"

owenthethird4• 12 years ago

Why not advertise on both? People at HN have already asked some great questions and even offered helpful insights, and we appreciate that.

manishsharan2• 12 years ago

You are right; my post was not phrased well. What I meant was that Dentists, Doctors and Trades people etc. would appreciate this offer as well or even more. And to publicize this offer to them, you may have to advertize in their publications.The downside is that the cycle would be much longer.

korzun2• 12 years ago

"We can build the technology, that is the easy part. Turning a product into a sustainable business is the challenge."

Technology is 'easy' if your portfolio ( http://www.coshx.com/projects) consists of applications such as poll management and event scheduling.

In reality if you are going to build something awesome, it's not going to be easy.

jmathai• 12 years ago

In reality if you are going to build something awesome, it's not going to be easy.

Turning a product into something that people like and use is nearly impossible (statistically speaking). Once you solve that then turning it into a sustainable business is easy.

Seriously, it's all hard. Only people who haven't tried to do it believe it's easy.

korzun2• 12 years ago

Agreed, I just wanted to point out how silly that line is given the projects their company build.

"Let's build a new search engine, easy stuff! We build a to-do application just the other day!'

btaitelb2• 12 years ago

You're right, if the winning idea is "build the control software for a self-driving boat that can search for a missing airplane," then the tech certainly will not be easy (and would be pretty awesome). What we were getting at with that line was that there are lots of great business ideas that can be prototyped without solving monumental technical challenges, and having a solid prototype isn't enough for a startup to succeed - it's only the beginning.

dang• 12 years ago

This sort of contest announcement is not really Hacker News material, even though it is an appeal to the HN demographic. The trouble is that such posts are not themselves intellectually interesting. If something cool gets built as a result, that would be interesting, and well worth posting here.

Coshx Labs is giving away $50k of development. No strings attached.

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