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Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
191–200 of 580 posts
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#192You should create a peer 2 peer competitive arcade game with its own blockchain, with an instruction set based on RISC-V and a Cuckoo Cycle hash on completed work to adapt mining difficulty. A very short block time and privacy features lifted from Monero. Storage backed by IPFS.
Deposits put in a few blocks ahead to stop cheating. Store rage quits before time is up, to penalise bad behaviour. Count me in.
New physics engine libraries or games altogether could be registered and stored for a fee, on the blockchain. It would be like an app store. Each time such a games was played, the original uploader could earn royalties collected from the deposits.
Even copyright could be encoded, it could be set to expire automatically in 75 years, for instance.
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#193Contact me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabrielpaunescu/
I'm doing something that will blow your mind. I already have customers, time to build a team and scale
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#194I was in your position 21 months ago - loved reading startup books, money in the bank, fantastic co-founder, but no idea! Advice is cheap but I figured I'd share my experience:
Our attitude was to work on something, anything, no matter how stupid. Which requires a pretty deep font of enthusiasm - it's not easy to get people excited about a self-consciously ridiculous idea. Take the startup seriously, but be willing to drop it if a better idea comes along. Here's what we worked on in 2016:
- Retro-Zine: subscription service for Playboy magazines from the '60s and '70s
- Fruit Mistakes (https://twitter.com/fruitmistakes): pre-sliced fruit subscription for startups
- Rat Dog Capital: trying to buy friends' lifestyle SaaS businesses
- Panel Ninja v1: admin panels as a service (think a SaaSified version of https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin)
- Panel Ninja v2: productivity analytics for enterprise customer support teams
Thanks to YC, Panel Ninja v2 eventually turned into Loop Support, our current startup. We're solving a real problem now (customer support as a service for high-RPU B2C companies [1]) - and like you guys, we had very little to show after a year in the woods.
All the same, I'm really glad that my co-founder and I spent a year eating quail and manna - we got really good at working with each other in a lower-stakes, lower-stress environment. Like training wheels and flight simulators. So don't get discouraged :)
[1] If you work at one of these companies, you're likely stressing out over holiday customer support. 1) Get back to work! And 2) I would love to help! My contact info is in my HN profile.
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#195There's plenty to be done in the bank risk management space. I was part of a group a few years ago that tried to approach this space; however, family issues forced me to leave software and go back to banking.
There's a piece of software, produced by a company called QRM, used within the treasury group of a lot of large banks. This piece of software is both slow (one run at a decent-sized bank can take several hours even spread over hundreds of CPUs) and incredibly user unfriendly (you cannot do any analysis within the software itself; everything must be dumped to Excel first).
Everyone I have talked with in the industry says this software must be replaced; however, it will take quite a long runway to get things up and going.
While I doubt that this piece of software could be implemented as SaaS for bigger banks, I definitely think if you pitched a solution to smaller banks and built up a group able to conduct the type of analysis you would do with this software, you would have a winner. Also, if your CMU guy is looking to come back to Pittsburgh, I might be able to get one or two other people together for an in-person conversation.
If you are interested in learning more, please provide an email address, and I will reach out to you.
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#196Look for a macro trend, find a niche within that trend, then ride it. For me, the current big trend is machine learning and machine vision. What new markets does this trend create? What new needs does it expose? I think testing is an under-served niche here, particularly since I think the next big trend/problem will be regulation, compliance and safety of these products. Position yourselves so that if there is a move towards greater regulation, certification etc... etc... you are in a good position to exploit it.
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#197My suggestions: 1. Don't sell to techies. i.e. ignore any ideas about software testing, cloud base load testing, etc. 2. Pick a solid business domain you know really well. There is no substitute for domain expertise. Sometimes things that look really simple are actually mindblowingly complex. And vice versa. But it sounds like you don't have that so... 3. Do something in HR Tech. Every single company on earth compete…
I have an idea related to recruiting, but cannot figure out how to bootstrap the project with products (aka developers). I have a few ideas related to HR, so I like this suggestion. Solve problems.
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#198What pisses you off? What makes you angry?
Go build a startup to change that.
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#199I am in an exact position, I've money, a solid product (paying customers) but no good technical team. I am having difficulty in scaling up the business all tech folks told me that my project will require a complete rewrite.
To some a rewrite sounds like fun. A way to do things better. What kind of product is it?
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#200I'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.
Eh, don't entirely agree with this. Part of the allure of starting a startup is having no boss and being the master of your own destiny. (In reality, of course, you'll have investors and a board to answer to, but it's still very different and more appealing for some people than being a 'regular' employee.) I think it's understandable and reasonable to be a proto-company in search of ideas.