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Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

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131–140 of 214 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#131
Underground garbage disposal. In Tel Aviv, the garbage gets picked up every day (hot climate), and because of traffic this is done early morning (4-5am).

The system will have dedicated "containers" on corners or squares where you drop your garbage and an underground network of carts delivers it to a central point where it can be picked up. Or even to the dump if possible.

This can be fully automated and I think will save a lot of money in manpower and gas (for driving the garbage trucks through the whole city).

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#132
How about a kickstarter kickstarter?

It seems like you need a lot of money and experience to build a successful kickstarter?

What if there's a different service where a person can put up an idea with minimal cost and flare, and just raise enough funding to hire a video team, PR team, etc to then run a kickstarter campaign?

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#136
post #60

Another one is predicting price rises and optimal time to sell Magic the Gathering cards before rotation. Its like the stockmarket only unregulated Gambling. People, do invest in these cards and flip them. Not for the faint of heart but people love to buy into dreams...

My friend and I kinda do this. We started 8-10 years ago when we were in high school. We pooled ~10k together to buy legacy staples. Since then we've bought some cards, but very minimal compared to legacy cards.

We aim for the cards that will be useful post-rotation as many card sale sites do an okay job estimating release price. Also, we mostly played legacy.

Snapcaster for instance was ~$25-30 on release (although some places sold it for as low as 15). Then it was ~20-30 for a while until it saw a lot of legacy play and jumped up. It is currently 30-35. ROI probably similar to an index fund.

Tarmogoyf was probably our biggest 'buy' since our legacy staples. We didn't buy that many (5 play sets). And sold as soon as the price hit $100-120. This we risked due to rumors of 'modern'.

Force of Will, a legacy staple for a long time. 8 years ago we paid ~$10-15 per FoW. Now they're going for ~$90. The S&P is up ~70%, FoW is up ~566%. We bought 20 play sets (80 cards) for roughly $1000.

We're still holding many of our original collection. But, sold off enough to get our original $10k back. At this point the price keeps going up, many cards fall out of circulation (destroyed/lost/etc). The only "risk" is reprints.

One issue is unloading many cards. With stocks I can create a sell order and sell it for roughly asking price. Whether I'm selling $100 of shares or $100k of shares it will go through instantly. With magic it isn't hard to deal with ~500 cards or so. But, once you scale up it is a full time job. If we bought $10k worth of FoW vs $1k we'd have 800 FoW to try and sell at some point. This would take a long time.

You either pay SCG prices to get cards quick. Or you use ebay for a 10-20% discount. But, takes longer and no guaranteed sale.

As far as logistics we each put in roughly 5k and split the original buy cards evenly. Since then our collections have fluxed. He bought/sold a Black Lotus at one point, I never did. He bought individual power 9 cards and sold a 'power 9 set' (5-10% markup) a few times. I was more passive.

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#137
post #51

A store-to-kitchen cart. I carry it in store, checkout items from within the cart - mos t current carts are clunky, heavy - one that you can push onto your car trunk and carry out into your pantry/kitchen. Basically the iPod of shopping carts. Would save billion of shopping bags, no more "paper or plastic?"

Hahaha, I love it. I had this exact idea this morning! Never expected to see it posted, and so soon after. Great minds... ;)

Was thinking more along the lines of direct to fridge and freezer options. Ideally with cooling or refrigeration properties so cold food can stay cool on the ride home, and the whole thing can pop into the fridge.

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#138

How about a kickstarter kickstarter? It seems like you need a lot of money and experience to build a successful kickstarter? What if there's a different service where a person can put up an idea with minimal cost and flare, and just raise enough funding to hire a video team, PR team, etc to then run a kickstarter campaign?

But then how will I get the idea? I think we need kickstarterkickstarterkickerstarter.com. It literally just sends someone to your house and kicks you until you have a good idea.

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#139

shazam for face recognition? Sometime when you see a movie, you can't make out who stars in it. take a quick picture and shazam it away to get the actor / actress name!

Google play does this when watching certain movies and shows. Not sure if it's added manually or does intelligent recognition. However, it's certainly useful - so I could see generalizing that capability for other movies / plays??


Granted, the movies and shows on Play have at least a context to do the pattern matching with - a cast list greatly reduces the possible matches.

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#140
post #41

An online-only bank (with ATM support of course) that lets you have as many "virtual" accounts as you want, and lets you set up programmatic rules for transferring money in between accounts on certain days/times, or triggered by events ("transfer $100 from B to A if account A goes below $100, and notify me by email"; "on overdraft from A, withdraw from B instead"). Then have a debit card that you can use to charge to…

on another todays post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8267295
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