I have plenty of ideas that I’d give away for nothing or almost nothing. I’d say at least one or two are viable. You can contact me if you’re interested and I can share via email. Would mostly just like to see an idea of mine become real. Could be worth five minutes of your time.
Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
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Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#72I find it hilarious that everyone is offering advice and not ideas. Unfortunately I don't have an idea for you, but a suggestion:
Sponsor a hackathon where you provide a few categories of problems to solve. For instance:
- ML used as a personal tool - SaaS solutions for connecting Healthcare data sharing (that one should be interesting given HIPPAA restrictions alone) - None currency uses for Blockchains
And just see what develops. You may find ideas that you can delve into further.
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#73What non software domains are you experts in? There are lots of businesses out there with problems that are solved with spreadsheets for which a focused SaaS offering would be a 10x solution. See procore or gingr for examples (those are just off the top of my head). But you need the domain expertise (or be willing to acquire it). Then, you also need to be passionate about it. To avoid the long slow SaaS ramp of death…
So how do you get domain expertise?
Sometimes I think the best way to go about it is to become a consultant, look around in companies, and when you've found something, build a product for it.
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#74[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#75[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#76Ha, I think you have found a perfect problem to work on: finding ideas.
Your company could provide consultancy services to other businesses, and as such you could collect problems, and sell them to other businesses!
:)
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#77Sounds like you are missing a domain expert in a domain you care deeply about.
Find such a person and identify a few immediate "pain points" in the space that can be quantifiably measured.
If I could humbly suggest a few: obesity, student loan debt, and US elder care.
Good luck.
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#78Just this morning I was wondering if you could take a bed like the sleep number bed and combine it with AI for a mattress that constantly adapts to your sleep pattern, rhythm, position etc
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#79I'd suggest you and your team go to a bunch of Startup Weekend/Hackathon events. When I've gone I've found a lot of cool people come to those who have the other side of your problem, good idea but no tech/bizdev/capital. It's also a great test to see if 54 hours of dedicated work on the problem yields something that is interesting... if yes great... if not you may be on the wrong path? (Note: there are some important rules about IP at these events you should research/understand fully).
I'd also change your thinking/language from looking for an "idea" to looking for a problem. The distinction may seem slight but it is important + helpful. The idea is really the solution, which often isn't clear until after a lot of sustained thinking/experimenting around the problem.
I'd try to find problems that genuinely personally piss you off. Building a company always takes longer and is harder than anticipated... so you have to be completely committed.
Finally, sell it in person right away... like day 1. Go sell it to people you don't know for real money even if it's not ready yet. When you go around asking people for money you'll either get it or get a lot of really brutal feedback on why not. Either outcome is helpful at this stage.
Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#80Write an evolutionary ML bot network that trades stocks in 5 minute intervals. Don't try to compete on the nanosecond micro trading end, just try to beat the market by making "good" decisions in a reasonable, human timeframe.
The question your bot is trying to solve is, "should I buy or sell this stock?" And the criteria is, "will this stock be up or down in the next X minutes."
Let the bots play in a fake market until they start to make money. It should be enough to give each bot a pot of money ($10k?) and call it dead when it goes broke or call it "good" when it makes good bets.
This is a good space for ML because the inputs are fairly well understood (stock tickers and a small set of common stock metric values). You can add in some novel inputs, like weather data in all of the trading capitals of the world (NYC, Toyko, etc).
The two tricks are this:
1) You need a community of bots that are all communicating with each other. Meaning, each bot knows what the other bots think, and how much money they have.
2) You need to let each individual bot's neural network evolve. Meaning, let the "best" performing bots "breed" with each other. Also meaning, let the values in the neural network set themselves through evolution/random rather than bothering with backpropagation.
This toy [1], showing an evolutionary neural network "learning" to follow a maze should be inspiring. Or, imagine a version of Agar.io [2] where you had to decide if a pellet (a stock) was a good idea to eat/purchase.