Propose HN: Give me an Idea for a Startup

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=752544

by Yruzt • 17 years ago

27 28 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am in a position where I have the time, skill and will to start a new project. However, I cannot think of the next killer application.

Do you have one in your ideas pool which you do not want to implement?

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

there was this thread a couple of days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=747003

If there is nothing in there for you let me know and I'll dig around some more in my attic :)

xelfer2• 17 years ago

You have some great suggestions there, I would love to hear more (simpler ones if you have any, for a person just starting out with web technologies).

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

Ok, I'll do some more digging later (busy now... shouldn't even be here ... hm, that noprocrast starts to look good :) )

morbidkk• 17 years ago

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html good place to start

BearOfNH• 17 years ago

Very nice list, but most of the entries are over a year old. Many replies promised future results in what is now the past. Has any progress actually been made? Has YC funded any promising proposals?

If not, maybe the problems PG listed are "too hard" and perhaps we should build a larger list of simpler projects.

cperciva• 17 years ago

"I have your cold".

1. Get people to tell you when they're sick and what symptoms they have. 2. Get access to their social network (facebook app, email contact list, etc) and figure out who they got their cold from. 3. Tell users who got them sick and what they should expect (e.g., "looks like you picked up Joe's cold, but don't worry -- it's mild and you should recover by the weekend").

Possible future directions: 1. Given enough users, you could do a very good job of tracking influenza or other rapidly spreading infectious diseases. 2. Have people tell you what medicines they tried and what worked / didn't work (very useful in the context of antibiotics).

Monetize via advertising (good rates in the medical field) or by referrals to drug stores which sell cold medicine. Get publicity by publishing statistics (e.g., "looks like the flu season has started in California, but hasn't hit New England yet").

vineet7kumar• 17 years ago

cool Idea and really useful.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

that's a good one!

turtle4• 17 years ago

This is funny to me for some reason, but still a good idea!

Tichy• 17 years ago

I wanted to do that for Twitter, just for fun :-) Wouldn't even require active participation, because presumably most people Twitter about feeling sick anyway.

It should be mentioned that Google already does some kind of flu tracking, too. Too lazy to look for the link, but I think they pick up on increased searches for flu related stuff, and show it on a map and with trend charts.

catone• 17 years ago

That sounds like http://whoissick.org/sickness/ with Facebook Connect.

That site has been around for awhile, and I think the biggest problem is sick people don't generally feel like going online and contributing open data projects. The geekiest among us might, but most people just want to lie on the couch and watch movies and sip ginger ale when their sick -- not get online and log their symptoms and recovery time.

What might work is getting mother's to record data about their sick children or doctors to record aggregate data about their patients. Neither of those groups will want to (or in the case of doctors are legally able to) share specific information about the people who are sick, but the data about what's going around your town could be valuable to you as a parent or as a patient (and to other doctors and the CDC).

nreece2• 17 years ago

  Given enough users, you could do a very good job of tracking 
  influenza or other rapidly spreading infectious diseases

Google already does that using aggregated search data: http://www.google.org/flutrends/

davidw• 17 years ago

Just posted one the other day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750930

laurent_b• 17 years ago

Just create a web application which will answer your question.

Some place where people will come and complain about something they miss. And where needs will be merged and shaped and will finally lead to "the next killer application for a niche".

If it works you will have plenty of fresh ideas for the next time you will have the time ;)

jsonscripter• 17 years ago

How about this? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602606

Create an online AJAX IDE for developing flash using the haXe language. It would be compiled and put together on the server, but the client would be open source and free as a desktop app too, by the magic of haXe. Services could include webhosting and automatic upload of your app, as well as stock flash animation media and sounds.

nreece2• 17 years ago

The "next killer application" is a farce in your mind. Give it some rest, and think outside the box. Go visit your favourite website, and ponder what it is missing? That's a clue to your next "next killer application".

xelfer2• 17 years ago

I wouldn't mind something simple to start on either. I lost my job a few months ago and I've been working on my objective C skills with a few iPhone applications but nothing that will really fall under the 'solve a problem / find something people need' definition HNers have for a successful startup idea.

AlexBlom• 17 years ago

Those who are idealess, why not contact me on alexander D blom (AT) G mail DO-T com.

I'm the opposite, too many ideas, no time to make them all.

nixme• 17 years ago

Why not just post some of your ideas here?

Aschwin• 17 years ago

I've worked for a company a couple of months that hit a hot spot on the mortgage market (oh nooooos....;-). They really compare all the products of lenders and give advice to independent advisors and consumers what to do. It makes all the products transparant and even has an overview of terms and conditions etc.

This has been done in the Netherlands before, but not so thorough as they do. If implemented right, it can be huge in any country. It is based on a subscription model per (part of) year.

tezza• 17 years ago

..:: Twitter[1] Train Station Availability ::..

Twitter <--> HTML Status Page gateway so that commuters on twitter (lets say Streeters ) can tweet which stations are closed, or how long journeys are taking.

Streeters tweet to a protocol e.g. ::

  @tubechannel: s:Canary Wharf e:Bond Street 50m

would say my journey from Canary Wharf to Bond Street took 50 mins (normal 20).

If you gave Streeters Karma, you could filter out the trolls (hope above experience)

Other commuters read your Status Page and see Google Adsense advertising.

---

[1] I don't use twitter, please forgive any slight format unrealities

webignition• 17 years ago

An enterprise-level application called SITS is heavily used by UK universities and colleges to manage courses, degree programs, student records and timetabling (for classes and exams).

SITS is cumbersome, expensive and has a truly appalling user experience. It is painful to use.

SITs is a very bad system but is deeply entrenched. Making something that is better should be very, very easy. Getting UK universities to switch should be very, very difficult.

Solve this and make many millions.

pageman• 17 years ago

Stackoverflow in [pick a language other than English i.e Chinese]

Kaizyn• 17 years ago

Why not build a market where startups can trade computing resources... Since not every startup wants to host their sites/services on someone else's cloud, why not create a market where they can trade computing services? Later, you can add an option for trading money for computer time/storage. Call it CloudMart or something like that.

stevesmith155• 17 years ago

Where are you located? I'm looking for a hacker... stevesmith155//nospam//@//nospam//gmail.com

known• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems

embeddedradical• 17 years ago

"Neighborhood searches." I implemented it in my own hackerish way for myself, and does a good job. Unless my search is really out there, I go to my personalized search engine before I go to google...that's saying a lot.

I think it would benefit other people, but I do not have any interest in creating a business around it and since it's a search related technology, it would probably attract lots of traffic if it's any good - and then I'd have to figure out how to afford it/monetize it.

Here's how my implementation works and then some ideas how to take it further:

In my app you add 'buckets' but better named 'neighborhoods' and one is 'Design', another 'Om Philosophies', another 'Business' and another named 'Design Assets'.

Let's say I'm looking for new icons/inspirations of minimal dark design. Normally I'd either google search (lots of misses), or try to think of one of the design sites that post a lot of them and do a "site:" search in it...but now I go to this app and go to Design Assets and search there. Then many links appear underneath like 'smashing magazine' 'six apart' etc; places that have inspiration/asset posts that are generally pretty good. Each of those links is a link to google with my keywords plus the "site:" tag added.

I toyed with google custom searches, but it wasn't as convenient.

My business 'neighborhood' has hacker news, serial entrepeneur, seth godin, personalmba and a bunch of others.

The benefit here is that I don't have to search the entire web (Google/DuckDuckGo). I'm searching a 'pre-selected neighborhood of places that have already proved value to me'.

It'd be neat if I could share the ones I have made with other people, or if my friend who is a molecular biologist could make me a neighborhood for searching on bio stuff. It'd be cool if I could browse some publicly shared ones, but mainly, get the ones my friends have; and even cooler yet, if we can have collaborative neighborhoods where any of us can add sites.

Of course the step after this would be to do the searches yourself (instead of linking to google), so there'd be less clicks but hehe, I don't know if you want to get into it that far...the duck duck go people thought it was worthwhile making new search engines, I don't know though....

I hear searches are the one area of online content where it's easy to make money on advertisement (since people are searching), even if you were just a meta that linked into google in specific ways, perhaps you can monetize that way.

I haven't thought out the business/monetization/complexity of making a search engine ..because my version works for me...saves me lots of time, and I like it. I think other people would like it too, but to share it with them I'd need to put it up on a site, make it so you can't edit it so easily, have not it not be one global list of neighborhoods but instead user-selected ones, maintain that site, figure out where to host it, and frankly, I don't care that much, because I got what I needed...and somewhere in my head I think google/duckduckgo/someone will do this, or something like this...where you can create subsections of the web of your own making, based on your own criteria, and constrain your searches to them, and not just one site like the "site:" filter as is, but neighborhoods of sites.....eventually someone will do this....

...and you can be that eventually, if it sounds worth it to you. i'd prob use it, unless your registration/privacy/other aspects sucked.

k0ban• 17 years ago

not mine idea exactly, but like it.

service for not-yet-known book writers. right now the process of publishing your book is very complicated. It is almost impossible to publish your book and get rewards for it. Publishers are like vc, usually say no, since it is risky task to choose what to publish.

So writer will start writing a book. it will publish first 100-150 pages of the book on site. if people will like this book, they will pay fee to author, so he finishes the book. once author collected required money he finishes book. Publishers will get right idea about popularity of the book and author.

Business model is "read 80% free and pay for the last 20% if you want"

Propose HN: Give me an Idea for a Startup

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