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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

#271

Post by breakyerself »

Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

Low cost stickers that can be activated then placed on items in the refrigerator to indicate how much time has passed. Should be feasible to develop for a qualified team and would save People a lot of food. Maybe the design exists and just needs proper marketing.

Easy, cheap, hassle free batch scanning of photographs. How many people have boxes and boxes of family photos that they only see once every 5-10 years? Get those things digitized and organized now cheaply and easily.

You know those people who fly over peoples houses, take nice photos, then try to sell them to the owner? Why not offer people a digital copy of their houses/property? Lots of applications for that. From games to interior decorating to planning renovations.

Methane can be produced using electricity from solar power. Which could be run in cars without much modification. This could reduce fossil fuel usage without having wait for internal combustion engine vehicles to be retired. Maybe a unit installed at home could provide fuel for an individuals commute at near zero cost after it's paid off? If not maybe large facilities could make and ship the fuel to be sold at gas stations. Some people would be willing to pay a premium for liquid fuel produced by solar(At least I would). It could become even more desirable if proper carbon regulations ever kick in.

A wikipedia for DIY things. Instructibles sucks. It would be nice to have a well organized and very large corpus of information on how to do things from the very general to the very specific. From various methods to repair a hole in sheet rock to replacing brake pads on a 1997 Volvo to gardening with lots of various individual plans for different home projects like Halloween costumes, knitting, and woodworking. The hard part is getting a large community of people to contribute to the making of it.

I could go on all day. Anyone can. figuring out which idea in the sea of available ideas floating around, then executing it. That's the hard thing.

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

#272

Post by samstave »

Uhm - the question NOT being asked here is WHY?

Why do you want to found a company

Why do you think your team is sound?

Why do you feel you can solve a problem that will result in something youre passionate about sticking with?

Why do you think this is the best path?

etc...

WHY do you want to pursue this?

---

With that said - as others have posted: find the problem to solve and then address HOW you can be the best to solve WHICH problem with WHAT and WHO will pay you for such.

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

#273

Post by austinjp »

Start a consultancy business building the ideas that others have.

Also....

You have everything you need, so nothing is niggling your motivation. Some people work best under constraint, with limited resources.

Finally, are you too fussy? Do you analyse every idea to death?

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

#275

Post by samstave »

incendiary wrote: post #215
sixQuarks wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being afraid of a crowded market is one of those counter-intuitive mistakes most people make. It's much easier to find a niche within a crowded market than to try to build something within a small market. I entered a huge market as a solo founder with no industry experience and now get about 1% of the traffic that the big players with thousands of employees get, and I make a very decent income from it.

Care to add a bit more detail about what market? I am curious

+1

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

#276

Post by a_d »

1. The most obvious advice in your case is to revise the heuristic you are using to rule out your ideas. My guess is that you are looking at 'who else is doing this' or some other question that leads to ruling out what you work on. Thinking hard about just that might yield a better result.

2. Instead of looking for problems, I think more about how is the world changing and what can I do about it. I would advise you to do the same. Sometimes something big changes and most people aren't paying attention. For example, Trump's recent XO on healthcare allows businesses to form "associations" (small companies can pool together to get large company rates). In the recent Berkshire meeting, Buffett said that American businesses are going to be increasingly uncompetitive (at the global stage) if healthcare costs keep rising. These are things that are connected - if one is paying attention. The uber thought is from Peter Thiel [1]

3. Instead of thinking about a startup, start an industry [2]. I think Alan Kay's talks are inspiring - but also give a good framework to think about projects.

4. If I could just give you one advice, it would be: Pay attention. Very few people are paying attention to the whats happening.

5. One of the biggest disadvantages that you have is that you already have a team and money. This puts enormous pressure to do something "Big". No good idea is going to survive this test - obvious "Big" ideas are taken (not that you still can't work on them). So when PG says, works on "projects" and don't think about starting companies - he means, just do stuff that you find fun. This is very hard to do in your case.

I have helped several companies when they found themselves in the same predicament as you did. If you think it would be helpful, I would be happy to talk: ad@42.life

Best wishes and Good luck!

To end with a cliche: Stay hungry, Stay foolish

[1] Peter Thiel: pg 114 http://gsl.mit.edu/media/programs/south-africa-summer-2015/m...

[2] Alan Kay at 1:10: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/11

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

#277

Post by samstave »

shostack wrote: post #36
mindcrime wrote: post #19

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.

I think that what this team lacks is a comfortable domain expertise in anything other than " making a fortune on wall street" -- which illustrates how little value "money" guys provide...

There is not an SME on their team in any area where they see a problem to fix - they 'only' have money.

they need to augment their team with an SME in an area they are willing to fund

Then here is their next problem:

Who is willing to get behind this team given the statements - There is only one reality - a confident founder who can provide them the vision to build something - and they provide the funding and maybe the CFO... but they may overly think of themselves as "technical" and meddle in the running of such an enterprise - which means doom.

These guys should simply take their funds and invest - not found shit. they will fail and bring down too many people (their employees) if they try...

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

#278

Post by lsiebert »

There are a lot of ways to make a startup. If you are cynical, you can undermine an existing occupation or skilled trade, either by replacing it with contractors who lack the same job skills but who aren't employees and can't unionize, or commoditizing an industry such that the people or businesses are simply cogs in your machine, where people often pick the cheapest option even if it undermines quality.

If you are less cynical though, you might want a startup that makes the world a better place. So instead of looking for a problem people with money have, you could look for a systemic inequity or market failure that hurts people and keeps them from having money.

My suggestion would be payday loans and credit card debt. There is competition, but there are plenty of ways to go with helping people.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/04...

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