Pick a popular site/product and copy it. Aim for some sort of marginal improvement or marginally lower cost. Come with some unique marketing or niche of their users. Ideas don't have to be totally original.
Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
291–300 of 580 posts
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#292Small robots for manufacturing. The market for large robots for manufacturing is full of very capable machines, but small robots could re-use many cheap components from cell phones and other consumer electronics. --- Or, to mashup your own list: MLaaS!
Would you mind elaborating on the small robots idea? What would these robots do?
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#293Your post could easily read: "I've got a killer office space in an amazing skyscraper with catered organic sous vide lunches and a yoga room, but I don't have a business idea to put in this office space. Any ideas?"
The most important aspects of a business are: 1) what you do 2) how you do it. Things like team, capital, etc. are secondary and only matter once you have those two.
It's a bit like you said, "I have a fantastic transmission for a 1977 Jaguar XFT T-Type" but it turns out that car doesn't exist.
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#294A text-book case of analysis paralysis! I get the feeling you're inability to get something started may stem from trying to over optimise on your options.
The opportunity cost of selecting any particular path is real (and scary), but you have to take the plunge! I have had a few reasonably successful start ups (link to my latest one is in my profile), and I can tell you that if you are careful to start small, the opportunity cost is not so big.
With a small startup, you don't really need to commit till you see traction. Try this (I've done this in the past, and it's quite useful):
1) All of you sit down together to jot down a few ideas you have floating around your minds.
2) Pick the best one at that moment, and think about who your potential customers could be. Google a few actual companies - say 5 or 10.
3) Without writing a single bit of code, think about logistics and give the idea a bit of structure (how it would work, how much it would cost etc).
4) Call the potential clients from step 2 and try to sell them the product. It doesn't exist yet, but they don't know that. They will probably tell you "no", or "we use xyz to do this already" etc
5) Use their responses as valuable data points - if all of them don't need your service, maybe the idea's a dud. If they already have something doing the same thing, and they pay for it, it may be worth exploring to see how you can improve on the existing experience.
That should take you about 2-3 hours at most and will at least end up generating some discussion. Clearly, you have time, money and people at your disposal. Unfortunately, it seems, you've locked yourselves away in an echo chamber to the point that the world can't reveal its many problems to you!
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#295My 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…
I strongly agree with this. It is not an uncommon experience for me while working on something (either for work or personal) and hit a problem or annoyance and then go to work looking for the solution.
Occasionally, I can’t find a solution or what I find is either not quite right, too expensive, etc. When I have the problem myself I am genuinely motivated to find the answer and when I can’t... Well - I put that problem on my little list (along with a description of what I’d like the solution to be).
My list is currently over a hundred items long. Most aren’t great - but some of them are quite good. I review the list from time to time and the good ones continue to develop in my mind. I’ve tried some my favorites, and a few have turned into something.
I have also tried (at length) to come of with ideas from the “solution” side (rather than the problem side). It hasn’t lead me to any material success and I feel like I end up mentally circling around remixes of ideas and products that are already well established.
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#296Earlier 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
Why would he say? Zero chance of more customers and nonzero chance of more competitors.
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#297How about an investor service for scoring startups from their pitches? Use historical data from YC applicants over the years to train the fitness function.
Is that data publicly available?
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#298You guys should become angel investors, not entrepreneurs. It's a good way for people with money but no real penchant for entrepreneurship to get involved in the startup ecosystem.
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#299Some advice:
Keep it really simple. There's a tendency to build too much when your only goal is to prove whether there's a market opportunity that you can capture.
Look beyond young people in urban cores.
Don't startup in a domain in which nobody on your team has deep connections. While there have been exceptions, it's foolish to assume that your antecedents were morons.
It's quite possible that the reason you don't have an idea is that your team needs a fourth person that is really passionate about an idea.
One thing you could consider trying is applying your team to an existing team that is having trouble getting traction for an idea you think has legs. Lots of people are working on a product that they have no idea how to bring to market.
Are any of you women? That missing fourth person is almost certainly female. And guess what? There's a lot of things that could be made better in the world for women.
If you start building a platform, I recommend that you skip the platform and build the first product that you'd build using the platform if it existed.
One really helpful lens for idea evaluation is: what current behaviour is this replacing? What do people with this problem do about it today? And are they willing to pay money to do it differently?
I wrote a post a few years back that you might find useful. http://hackertourism.com/how-to-tell-your-friend-that-their-...
Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
#300The problem is you're looking for easy stuff to do. Here's four ideas I just thought of: 1) Write software that uses machine learning to search for tornados in doppler radar signal returns 2) Write software that manages inpatient health care, orders, prescriptions, labs, etc 3) Write software that uses machine learning to route network packets faster 4) Use machine learning to control an engine's ECU to maximize fuel…
This stuff sounds more like R&D than markets to build products for. Way too risky for a company that hasn't even proven they can deliver a product where most of the technical problems have already been solved.
Interesting comment, I assumed all good idea required r&d!