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Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

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51–60 of 580 posts

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#51
Take a problem that you have and provide the world's strongest solution. The problem exists because it imposed some kind of cost or inconvenience upon you and valid solutions are absent or unacceptable.

Only you can form a valid startup idea, because it is entirely dependent upon what you are capable and willing to execute upon. It is the difference between a great idea and a product.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#52
What's a problem that you (or one of your partners) have that you wish there was a good solution for?

Aside from that, I'd like to see the social stigma around mental health eliminated. It's viewed as a positive thing to care about, and work toward, better physical health. I wish that were true for mental health. I wish improving your mental health was as normal as going to the gym.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#56
I would pay, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for an APP that can build me a house (all costs included). I am not alone.

Obviously, this idea is overly ambitious. But, can you take a moonshot idea like that and break it down into smaller pieces? Perhaps, work on one small piece of a really difficult problem. In the example I gave, perhaps a zoning ordinance voting platform that makes zoning change paper work easier. I realize most of the housing problems are entirely Political. But, you gotta realize, those are problems too - and they are big ones!

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#57

The few product ideas we came up with following the above process we dropped, often because we discovered that that space is ultra crowded or commooditized. GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons once said something like (paraphrased slightly) "never be scared to enter a crowded market. Just be better than everybody else". Something to think about. Beyond that, consider that your product is not the only dimension on which you c…

This. If anything you can save time on market validation if you think you can execute or offer something unique that the existing players in the space lack.

Hits the nail on the head. It's an often cited cliché, but Google wasn't the first search engine and Facebook not the first social network. That works in niches as well if you have the feeling that the current state of the art somehow seems lackluster, i.e. with Adjust in app attribution or Remerge in mobile retarteging. With a lot of mistakes learned but no baggage on board, you can often attack sooner than you'd think with clear focus.

Lastly, if the main battle for a certain segment is over for more than a decade, the incumbents seem to get lazy if they continue dominating the market for too long. Look at eBay for example, or Linked.In - they have stopped innovating and basically get worse with every "Facelift", but there's still considerable demand with a lack of alternatives. It's a long shot, but possible with great execution.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#58
Tough love:

You've done too much reading on the subject already and will learn nothing from reading even more by indulging yourself in the comments here.

And although good teams can find good ideas they have to "try and fail" at things, not just "consider and not try" things. I'm not sure how long you've been at this and which ideas you have considered and rejected and for what reasons, but if it has been longer than a couple of months, you don't have the right team makeup. You need someone with a strong product background immediately to find the intersection of product market fit and what you all are actually good at and will be passionate about building.

I'd love to hear more about what you've thought of and dismissed.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#59
My intuition is that you should leverage your strengths, rather than try to fit your talents into someone else's idea. It sound like you have a broad array of talents, which can be a blessing for some businesses and a curse for others.

Consider not even creating a new new business. Do someone else's better than them. And there are several companies that seem to grossly overvalued by the standard of "if I gave you [their market cap], could you make a better version of them?" Since one of your strengths is an endless flow of capital, get $1b and make a better Twitter (or whatever).

Maybe just follow Josh Levine's blueprint for $100mm?

https://wp.josh.com/2017/10/23/adventures-in-autorouting/

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#60
I'm sure it must be out there already in some form, but you might want to give a shot at "uber for day laborers". It seems to me like there are opportunities on both the supply and demand side. On the supply side there its lots of room for improving gig hunting and payment assurance for laborers. Staffing agencies are of course in this space, but are pretty inefficient and catch only a small fraction of potential gigs relative to something like craigslist (which of course, has the downside of potentially unreliable payments). On the demand side, there are definitely niches for short term gigs where a company needs to scale up or down quickly (last minute work, no shows, etc). These quick changes can be hard for staffing agencies to fulfill, largely due to inefficiency in recruitment, even when the laborers are already in the talent pool. If you don't have any experience with this area, its really easy to do so: try to find some ditch digging on craigslist and see how many gigs you can do before you get stiffed or otherwise mistreated (won't take long). Also, use that pile of cash you have in the bank to try to find contractors to paint a house, clean some toilets, etc. and you'll start to get a sense for problems in the labor pool.
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