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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

#161

Post by wysiwyg3826 »

You need to identify the next big waves and decide which one you're most passionate about, and where you can add value. You shouldn't shy away from a crowded field. If the opportunity is large, a lot of people will enter the field before/after you so you need to figure out how to differentiate your product.

Here are a few tsunamis to think about:

1. Self-driving cars - which part of the value chain can you make a difference? Manufacturing, tech, ride hailing, financing, or others?

2. OTT TV - eventually, all content will be streamed. Where would the new value be created? What is the ideal experience in a world where you can watch anything, anytime on any device?

3. VR gaming/entertainment.

Everyone can see the big waves on the horizon. Not everyone knows how to ride them well...

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

#163

Post by albertgoeswoof »

sauwan wrote: post #107

Here's my idea. All I ask for is a free one if you use it. A drone fence. Hear me out. Problem: Fencing is FUCKING expensive. For many people who want to keep animals out (garden, animals pooping in the sandbox) buying a fence is really cost prohibitive. Plus they don't always work anyways. Solution: Self driving drones with IR cameras in specific locations. Place a camera or two in strategic locations, and have a dr…

The nice thing about this idea, is that even if it flops you get to have a lot of fun flying drones around!

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

#164

Post by XR0CSWV3h3kZWg »

Website & terminal integration that reads last ~30 lines of stdout&stderr and suggests a solution/elaboration with links back to stackoverflow/forum post that it came from. Launch as open source and sell to enterprises that want to incorporate internal knowledge bases (extract Q & A from chat logs is huge) without leaking data outside the company.

Program that takes an AST and valid transformations, learn what kinds of ASTs humans prefer and offer a high quality auto restructure code tool that guarantees no side effects.

Company that I can pay a small subscription to that works to protect my attention, ad blocking has been done fairly well for free, but that is far from the only attention hog. Most app's notifications are just distractions and should be batched, only to be looked at at the end of the day. Should be easy to take a picture of paper spam mail and have the company get it to stop. Stuff like that.

Company that picks up anything from junk to valuables and either charges or pays you based off of the value of the stuff. As a customer I'd like to take a picture of the items, receive an estimate of cost or price and only have to interact with the company, no coordinating with craigslist rando.

IoT company that produces cheap place-and-forget devices that monitor long term potential problems in houses (major changes in how vibrations carry through the walls, moisture in basement)

EDIT more:

A purely audio interface to email, specific goal being usable while walking/driving to work.

Text preprocesser that estimates what you already know (tracks what articles you read, how much of them you read) and greys out/deempahsises stuff you likely already know. Having an estimate of what someone already knows could be huge for manipulating the forgetting curve & estimating the likeliehood of understanding what is in a piece of text.

Reddit/HN like site that ranks based off of amount of work done on the item, try to be more popular than bitcointalk. Plenty of ads targeting crypto holders.

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

#165

Post by Gargoyle »

TheTaytay wrote: post #87
gajomi wrote: post #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 gig…

I concur. I needed a ditch dug a couple of weeks ago, and everyone was recommending that I drive to Home Depot and pick some guys up waiting for work. There has _got_ to be a better way. Note that this felt different to me than hiring a handyman or any other skilled trade, which feels like a semi-solved problem. Sometimes I just need some extra hands, and learning the unspoken rules around how to hire guys on a stree…

I moved last year and ended up using some street corner guys. Cost me the same as pros, more or less, but just easier for me personally. They're largely undocumented workers and a strictly cash business, though, so app-izing them would be difficult if not impossible.

However- I did also learn that it's easy to hire professional movers to just help you load a u-haul for a couple if that's what you want. Working with those companies and app-izing that labor is something that should be possible.

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

#166

Post by hguhghuff »

I've gotta say this seems to be putting the cart before the horse.

This means that you want to be in business for the sake of it.

I've always wanted to be in business but it's always on the back of a driving sense of something that I want to do / make happen.

Just seems strange to have assembled all the ingredients without a recipe.

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

#167

Post by skanga »

It's simple. Add another person to the team who has a brilliant, world beating idea but no working capital, great team, etc. You can talk to several to see who has the "best" idea. For a start on this process you can contact me :-)

PS: I use google's email service and have the same id there as I have on YC.

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

#169

Post by segmondy »

Hey, I have great idea but not capital. I'm sure there are many from the YC rejects batch that feel the same, and a few that are probably correct. Perhaps you should call for those, and see if there's an idea that got passed on, not due to a bad idea, but rather to perhaps lack of a solid team. I'm a solo founder working part time on my idea and don't have a team, so I'm sure that contributed in me getting rejected.

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

#170

Post by ChuckMcM »

My simple advice is to stop looking for ideas and to start looking for problems.

Look for the pain, and to do that talk to people.

The challenge will be that most people accommodate the pain in order to get something done, but they don't like it.

A recent pain point I came across was that 501.c(3) organizations are good at organizing but often poor at "the Internet". That suggested that if you talked to a half dozen charities you could probably find a way to offer them a 'internet presence service' that would be a combination of tools to do calendaring, outreach, donor management, payment/donation processing, testimonial pages, event landing pages, Etc. Think of it as a mashup of Calendar, Wordpress, PayPal, Salesforce, and Quickbooks online. You make their interface to the site both simple to get to (suggest a hardware token) and the web sites appearance to be professional to people visiting.

If you architected it right you could also make it a onestop 'election' website (similar sorts of things and similar reporting requirements for donations etc)

Find folks who would like to get more out of the Internet or have trouble with it, and solve their problem in a way that saves them real money or real time. Then sell that to people in the same situation.

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