Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

In my senior projects class at CU-Boulder I have been given the go ahead by the professor to forego the standard curricula of CSCI 4308 and create my own project as long as it has "substantial business influence". This of course directly translates to building a startup.

I have six months, a team of five senior cs-majors, and the support of the university, but there is still a glaring hole.

I don't believe I have a good enough idea to run with.

Some that I have been contemplating are a comedy-mashup site (basically a last.fm for stand up comedians), a Haskell web development framework (which I asked for feedback for in a previous post and was pretty much told not to do it) or trying to edge my way into point of sale restaurant software/hardware.

I am not sold on any of these and am looking for some inspiration because I only have a couple more days to write a formal proposal or else I default into the standard class and must take a project from the industry.

Any ideas that are within the scope of this project?

It is a music related (think dj / nightclub) suite, including a mobile app, web site, desktop app. Primary goal would initially be mobile app/desktop app.

Perhaps this is something we could get together on as my partner who was the lead tech for us is now far too busy to work on the project.

I live in Westminster CO. Maybe we could talk more about it if you have interest in helping each other... blairbryngelson@yahoo.com

I.E. a suite of tools for startups to see how close they're coming to achieving ramen profitability and what else they need to do to get there. Also some tools to help grow the startups. Working with partners like 37signals/lesseverything/and other startups.

The business model could be something like this: offer the tools to the startups at a freemium rate model, make commissions each time they sign up with different partners...

As I was hoping to build this some day (but will realistically never get around to it) - I will mention that I own the domain RamenProfit.com and would be more than willing to contribute my design skills to the project.

Let me know if you're interested. (email is in my profile)

The best ideas are ones where there is pain you can relieve.

Here's one: Web development sucks profoundly. People actually write CSS and HTML by hand, using text editors. That is a complete indictment of the state of web development tools. We've got decent stuff for web apps, but nothing for html building. Cappucino and Sproutcore are starting to provide interface builder apps for javascript based apps. But still nothing that works.

I think an Interface Builder for the web would be revolutionary and profitable.

I'm tempted to say that if you don't have a bunch of ideas then you shouldn't be leading this thing-- but on the other hand, you have the presence of mind to recognize that those three ideas are all poor and that, my friend, is extremely valuable. So at this stage, pick the best idea from here or from the other people who will work on it and go for it.

For anything you do-- see if you can find 4-5 people who are not engineers who will honestly say "Yeah, if you could build that, I'd buy it for $X" or that their company would.