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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

#521

Post by niko001 »

icebraining wrote: post #471
breakyerself wrote: post #271

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…

Right, but the question asks about good ideas, and that's a problem - how do you tell it's good? Yeah, I know about market validation, but you can't literally validate every idea you come up with. Especially if you have to build an MVP to do it.

I do "idea validation as a service" by asking the target group of an idea what they think about it: http://www.ideacheck.io

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

#522

Post by colordrops »

Jean-Philipe wrote: post #447
nnq wrote: post #439

STOP. Just go work for someone else, please! Pretty please! Find someone with vision, and work for/with him/her instead. Or merge as equal partners. You sound like really competent people, but working under people without their own vision and without their own ideas is a wrist slashing inducing experience... The people with the ideas/vision should be in charge, not ever the other way around! If you're execution peopl…

I so disagree. I've met so many "people with vision" who were far off with reality and ultimately failed miserably. Most successful startups I know, including my own, have pivoted - i.e. they had the wrong vision to begin with and figured out something else along the way. The team was what made them succeed.

Most startups fail. Even if the likely outcome is failure, it's still better to have someone with a vision at the helm even if it's the wrong vision. You'll never find the shore if the boat doesn't move.

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

#523

Post by icebraining »

breakyerself wrote: post #514
icebraining wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the question asks about good ideas, and that's a problem - how do you tell it's good? Yeah, I know about market validation, but you can't literally validate every idea you come up with. Especially if you have to build an MVP to do it.

You can't know for certain if an idea is good ahead of time. You can identify some bad ideas that look good with a little research, but the only sure way to tell is to do the thing. Hell even if it is a good idea they might just fail to execute it properly. I wonder if they're just too risk averse. Looking for a sure thing when there's no such thing.

For me, I wouldn't say it's looking for a sure thing, but feeling like I'm probably wasting my time. Like you said, one can easily come up with dozens, possibly hundreds of ideas. Chances are most are duds. Without any good way of ranking them, what are the chances you'll hit on a good one?

Doing this kind of "idea lottery" just sounds like a recipe for frustration.

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

#525

Post by 0xbear »

icebraining wrote: post #466
TrickyRick wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But (One of) the ambition(s) is usually to make money, thereby increasing inequality. I have yet to find a startup with the ambition to pay everyone median salary and donate the rest to low-income households. Nothing wrong with that, just a fact :)

The company I worked for previously paid decent (but not extravagant) salaries, and profits in the order of the low dozens of thousands annually. Meanwhile, our job consisted of outbidding and replacing SAP and Oracle solutions costing $$$$. Paying $10 to an SMB owner instead of $100 to Bill Gates et all reduces inequality, it doesn't increase it.

Let me guess: you had a heck of a time hiring qualified engineers.

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

#526

Post by tabtab »

Dynamic Relational: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15352786

Release an open-source version, but have a fee-based "enterprise" edition and/or provide fee-based tech support, similar to MySql's and Php's business model.

Organizations often need something dynamic, such as during prototyping, but want to leverage existing RDBMS knowledge, principles, and the SQL language. The Dynamic Relational model can tighten constraints as a customer's project matures. The "NoSql" movement showed that dynamism is a sought-after database trait.

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

#527

Post by breakyerself »

icebraining wrote: post #523
breakyerself wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't know for certain if an idea is good ahead of time. You can identify some bad ideas that look good with a little research, but the only sure way to tell is to do the thing. Hell even if it is a good idea they might just fail to execute it properly. I wonder if they're just too risk averse. Looking for a sure thing when there's no such thing.

For me, I wouldn't say it's looking for a sure thing, but feeling like I'm probably wasting my time. Like you said, one can easily come up with dozens, possibly hundreds of ideas. Chances are most are duds. Without any good way of ranking them, what are the chances you'll hit on a good one? Doing this kind of "idea lottery" just sounds like a recipe for frustration.

For them it's got to be frustrating. It's fun for me. I like brainstorming.

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

#528

Post by pascalxus »

rainbowmverse wrote: post #517
pascalxus wrote: post #56

I would pay, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for an APP that can build me a house (all costs included). I am not alone. Obviously, this idea is overly ambitious. But, can you take a moonshot idea like that and break it down into smaller pieces? Perhaps, work on one small piece of a really difficult problem. In the example I gave, perhaps a zoning ordinance voting platform that makes zoning change paper wor…

Manufactured homes are already a thing. An app to streamline the process of a custom build would be fighting against the (undeserved) stigma, but it'd be interesting to see.

That's no-where near a finished product we can use. You have to worry about getting land, plumbing, electricity, not to mention it's illegal in many places. Often, The fit and finish isn't very nice and the size would be alot smaller than most people want. But, they're probably heading in the right direction, they just have a lot of problems to solve.

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

#530

Post by [deleted] »

pascalxus wrote: post #528
rainbowmverse wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufactured homes are already a thing. An app to streamline the process of a custom build would be fighting against the (undeserved) stigma, but it'd be interesting to see.

That's no-where near a finished product we can use. You have to worry about getting land, plumbing, electricity, not to mention it's illegal in many places. Often, The fit and finish isn't very nice and the size would be alot smaller than most people want. But, they're probably heading in the right direction, they just have a lot of problems to solve.

[deleted]
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