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

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281–290 of 580 posts

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

#281
Things I would love to make but I cannot find time to:

* Syntax-tree aware version control system. Do merges taking into account the syntax tree of the code being managed.

* Real time stats of the judicial system by real-time analisis of the sentences.

My standard ideas license is: the first $100 millons you make, are yours. I want 1% of the rest. If you make less than $100 millons, you owe me nothing.

Good luck!

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

#282
> An interest in SaaS and ML

Maybe try a match matching endeavor?

ML might be useful in some specific niche where it isn't being leveraged.

It sounds like you have generic contacts and expertise in "ML".

Find a promising business niche leader and pair them with one of your ML contacts. The business niche people won't know ML, but they'll know the unsolved problems.

Like, for example, an airline centric niche company that does not currently leverage ML. Or maybe healthcare, or whatever.

Make the marriage and fund the ML part.

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

#283

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…

Mark Cuban once said (something like) "If you're looking where everyone else is looking then you're looking in the wrong place." I think that trumps Parsons. That said, looking at ideas that "didn't work" can be a solid approach. That is, sometimes (for example) the idea was solid but the team failed. The market also changes and some ideas can be ahead of their time (and poorly executed).

I think that trumps Parsons.

I have a tremendous degree of regard for mcuban, and I think his advice has merit. But I wouldn't say either "trumps" the other. These pithy sayings are handy, but there's a lot of nuance to both of them (IMO) and the devil is in the details.

Should Google have decided not to pursue search because of Altavista, Dogpile, Magellan, Northern Light, Yahoo, and DMOZ? Should Facebook have eschewed social networking because of Friendster, Myspace, Livejournal, etc?

Sometime just being better than the other guys really is enough.

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

#284
We're on to something here:

1) A great early product ( SaaS, ML, AI ), made up of a solid partnership and early paying customers.

2) We have investors interested in funding this product but only managed to raise six figures seed.

3) Cash is running fine but we need more to grow the team and product to win it all.

4) An big interest in scaling a SaaS product for enterprise and a ton of customers waiting to discover the new enterprise.

-Things that we don't have:-

1) More cash and a winning team to bring home the trophy.

Email me so we can change the world together: tohk1@hotmail.com (my old active hotmail)

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

#285

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…

>My simple advice is to stop looking for ideas and to start looking for problems. I concur, and add that HN could really help OP by complaining about random stuff here. Just complain about the first thing that comes to mind that's been bugging you, OP will really appreciate it!

Humanity is on a sure collision course with ecological disaster and potentially billions of deaths. Do something about climate change. Anything. Every new startup should be addressing the fact that we are on the Titanic and the iceberg is getting closer.

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

#286
I really, deeply, do not understand the issue here.

It is beyond me how anyone can be technologically savvy with an engineering mindset and look out on the world as it exists today and not see innumerable ways that it can be improved.

Is your roadblock simply that you're trying to look for the easiest ways to make money? Or the sexiest? Take a look at the world and start coming up with problems that need solutions, and potential ways that technology could serve. Imagine things that you, yes you yourself, wish existed but don't yet. Imagine things that you simply wish were better. Keep iterating on those processes until you have a huge list of problems that should be solved and things that should exist but don't. Then filter your list down to only the subset of problems that your team could potentially tackle well and that have some sort of possibility for monetization in the near term, then pick one or a few and run with it.

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

#287
You don't know your a good team until you've built something good. Good teams are defined by their output not by how the members feel, how smart the team is or how much experience it has. That said, output includes how the members and partners feel.

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

#288

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…

also: search was crowded when google entered.

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

#289

Probably an unpopular question given HN audience, but how does one know a team is great if said team hasn't successfully tackled any problems? Is it similar to my cat being a great pilot because she hasn't crashed any planes?

The fact that they've spent the past year toying around without direction supports your conclusion as well. CVs are just one metric by which to judge a team.

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

#290
A crowded market can be great because the demand has already been validated, but nobody else has emerged as the market leader yet. That's where YOU step in, with your wisdom and insight about this market, to show the existing constituents how your viewpoint of the world makes life better for them.

So if you don't have any ideas, it means you don't have any wisdom or insight about any market. Therefore, you don't have a great startup team. Full stop.

If you have competent designers and engineers, you could maybe open up a consultancy, and provide implementation services for other entrepreneurs with ideas of their own...

The thing is: smart, creative entrepreneurs see ideas everywhere. They wake up in the morning with a hundred new ideas, lacking only the human bandwidth to pursue them all.

I'd venture to say, if you don't have ideas, you're not really living in the world. You're just looking for a leprechaun with a pot of gold you can claim.

Try just being a fully-formed person in the world, with hobbies and interests and passions and relationships and struggles and obligations and complicated logistics, and see what problems you encounter while living that life.

You'll have a hundred ideas by the end of the day.

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