Voting based on what can go right with these ideas + feedback. We can’t evaluate the team with this much information, but that’s what YC interviews are for - they can get grilled by the partners.
YES
Eat my Dust - there us a huge gap in the mindset of consumers here that can be filled lucratively. Products that keep my home and family safe from bad air, water, or particles in my house. If this team can execute, great, if not, another one should. May be a heavy marketing-spend business (they keep us safe so far is not exactly a viral word-of-mouth type of business) and if a startup can’t execute a big company might.
Hacksplaining - Nice approach. Room for selling to users and for reselling vendor offerings, and for shifting education tool to any other market.
AutoMicroFarm - you can build a system and/or you can build a kit that others can use to experiment on their own as well. Finding sustainable backward-farming setup could be a fun social offline game that people can compete against each other on online. You provide lego-like lighting, water supply, dirt choice packets, and an analytics tool/app etc. Consumers configure their kits on your site, receive them, test plants, report online, compete with friends and neighbours working on their own kits.
Cadwolf - could be useful in multiple design industries. Worth a try.
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NO
JuryBoard - Lucrative but sketchy on so many levels (stimulates privacy infringement of unsuspecting citizens who are already forced to be there; cracks a door open to jury tampering; open to abuse by attorneys for non-case related stuff; skews the system further in favour of well-funded defendants). There will be people who try to make money that way, but investors can vote with their money too.
WedWell - no good vendor would put themselves through his - they’d be too busy making money. 99Designs works because digital work can be done in the cheapest parts of the world (Indonesia, Africa, you name it). The broad choice of thousands of designers allows you to get effective competition and surface diamonds in the dust. Wedding vendors that can serve your wedding on your date are a handful and they have better things to do than fill out RFPs for what effectively would be 1 afternoon of billable work.
AuthorInvestments - Huge bias problems for the Authors. Selling futures on finished goods is fine, but a creator’s productivity can be impacted and the quality of the product. They can oversell one item and then put their best work into a different product. If you make it on their entire income, that just reduces their incentive to work and create. I think this could put a damper on potentially productive creators. Would only work if they can release their completed work for investors to front-fund, but even then, distribution can be impacted if the author doesn’t put as much effort into selling the product afterwards.
Skill certification - as an employee, I would hate my employer for using this. As an employer, my people would likely be doing this to candidates one way or the other, so why should I pay?
Gresham Dollar - it’s a social experiment, not a startup.
Wanderlust - Most budget-conscious consumers don’t play roulette with their money and those who have the money, don’t play roulette with their rare time off. However, if you add enough constraints that matter (traveling with children/pets, friends heading in same area,) this would be a wonderful feature for an existing site like Kayak. (hard to make money until a killer-pain-point is solved)
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MAYBE/UNSURE - if the startup wasn’t mentioned in Yes or No, it’s because I don’t know enough or the idea depends heavily on the team’s execution and can go either way.
Brightwork - it’s all about execution. If they can become the CloudFlare of APIs (low latency, guaranteed performance, middle-man that ensures compatibility, etc,) and persist through the sludge that wore off Parse and Kimono, it might work. How passionate is the team?
Pikii / Krewe - I work in this space and don’t see them doing well. I’m testing other iterations of similar problems, so also biased.