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Startup Ideas

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Startup Ideas

#301

Post by jansho »

davidivadavid wrote: post #270

Wouldn't it be helpful if those were reformulated in terms of the real "problem" being solved, or at least the benificial outcome that they're aiming for? As a marketer who's always been interested in tech startups and that has dealt with many engineers, those ideas scream "engineering." The problem is finding startup ideas from an engineering point of view has in my experience been the best way to find a solution in…

Huh, I half-agree with other commentators that the list is almost like a joke. On the other hand, it’s starting the startup conversation here again. The startup world is not exactly at its peak now; less rags-to-riches save-the-world stories, and more like scandals and housing crises and Juicero-dumbo moments. At least, it’s making me think about what AI can actually be useful for, even though I’m mostly not a fan of it and most certainly don’t see its worth in pet interactions.

OP did say it’s an experiment :x

Re: Startup Ideas

#302

Post by arkades »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #277
arkades wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a much bigger problem with overdiagnosis than underdiagnosis, and the latter is not likely to be solved with this sort of scattershot data collection. The former is very likely to be inflamed. The difference is that you actually hear about the Diagnosis X That Was Missed, but you never hear about That Simple Blood Test That Should Never Have Been Drawn but that Showed Positive for a Marker Common In Disease B…

I just finished (the book) Everybody Lies. It seems to me using the doppelganger approach (as mentioned in the book) would at least be helpful. A couple months ago I spent a good number of hours over a couple week at local hospital waiting for a close friend's mum to recover from a stroke. I could be mistaken but the only "data analysis" I noticed was taking place in the heads of the doctors and nurses. The same goes…

That is correct: the analysis of large data sets is opaque to patients, and application of the evidence base to specific patients happens in the heads of physicians.

Patients are not part of the decision making process, and therefore not privy to the analysis, unless there is a decision to be made that requires their input (eg, two reasonable roads forward that depend on their preferences, or on their risk-tolerance.)

The process is made opaque to patients intentionally.

Re: Startup Ideas

#303

Post by gnarbarian »

kls wrote: post #298
taurath wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am probably in the minority here, but it seems that the impetus of most of the problems on this list is what would possibly make the most money, written as if that is the measuring stick of the most societally useful startup. The top 5 problems in my city are more on the level of affordable housing, homelessness, drug use, over-incarceration and mental healthcare. I can't help but feel like we have enough gadgets a…

Drugs are easy, but you would have to be able to run books to fix it, maybe in Vegas. You set up a site where you post pictures and a bio of the drug addict. People then place wagers on how long you think they will stay clean and build odds based on that. Said drug abuser gets a cut of the house at 3 months, 6 months and a year and has to submit to drug tests during that period. This cut allows them to rebuild their…

Could do the same thing for troubled repeat offenders. bet on how long they can stay out of trouble with the law!

Re: Startup Ideas

#304

Post by 52804375092485 »

rficcaglia wrote: post #215
chromaton wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that get you?

it gets me paid in a timely fashion, without human emotion from either party mucking things up. isn't that the goal? traditional: send PDF quote, go back and forth on quoted terms and cost 1..n times, wait for signed PO, call 1..n times reminding them to sign the PO, eventually get signed PO, do work, (at this point client is your BFF and calls you every 5 minutes asking if the work is done yet!), deliver product/ser…

That sounds like all the same problems with defining a "traditional" contract, except now when things go wrong you have to explain what ETH is in civil court, hope the volatility of ETH doesn't make things weird, and also hope your solidity contracts don't include bugs that let people steal your money (or if they do contain bugs, hope you have enough clout to cause a hard fork).

Re: Startup Ideas

#305

Post by ahussain »

vadimberman wrote: post #300
muzani wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soft debt collector is a huge pronlem though. I don't think AR is the best fix, but if someone can do it just slightly better, I'd be willing to throw a lot of money at it. AI communicator for dogs is hilarious though. It follows the (Buzzword) for Dogs pattern everyone jokes about.

"AR" is not "augmented reality" in the post, it is "Accounts Receivables".

ah, that explains a lot - thank you!

Re: Startup Ideas

#306

Post by panamaniac »

rficcaglia wrote: post #224
brianbreslin wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesorio

I looked at them [0] but I don't see anything to do with "get me paid faster" (aka collections or factoring) but they seem to have a "demo wall" to get any meaningful info. I assume what they do is show you data you already have but maybe don't appreciate fully, e.g. if BigCo pays you on average 30 days late you can see that before you embark on some new project. Cool, but not necessarily getting me paid faster. Help…

Thanks for the shout-out brianbreslin. I’m co-founder & CEO of Tesorio (YC S15) and in the past I founded a factoring company. Factoring solves the collections problem in a way but it can be expensive and may send mixed messages to your customer that your cash flow wasn’t strong enough to wait for payment. We started Tesorio because we kept seeing folks misuse factoring as a source of financing, not as a point in time solution to a working capital gap. It gets expensive fast, it’s like payday lending for business.

Collections in the B2B world is more broadly defined as the process of reminding your customers to pay you, not so much the breaking knees part. Most companies over $15MM in revenue have at least one person doing this.

We see the collections process as the final step in a good customer experience… so we’ve built a product that combines the best parts of sales CRM and customer engagement tools. Our website showcases our active products (Forecasting, Forex, & Analytics), but we’re currently in Beta with the Collections tool and would love to show you it and get your feedback.

Feel free to reach out to me directly: carlos[at]tesorio.com

Re: Startup Ideas

#307

Post by ahussain »

rockmananoff wrote: post #293
ahussain wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why you think AR would be a good way to solve this problem. I feel like I'm missing a few links in the chain.

By "AR" he's talking about Accounts Receivables. I believe you're thinking of Augmented Reality :)

yup, sorry I was too far into the tech rabbit hole myself there

Re: Startup Ideas

#308

Post by ams6110 »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #286
arkades wrote: post #205

Re Smart Bathroom: Every time I hear about all-knowing toilets, I continue to feel it’s putting the cart way ahead of the horse. There’s a rule in medicine: don’t order a test whose outcome doesn’t change your decision. That’s not about cost-savings, it’s about avoiding false positives that make no sense in clinical context but raise flags that must be chased down. This sort of thing is literally promising to just co…

>“More data” is not inherently good. Without a framework of information for interpretation of that data, it will do far more harm than good. There's an episode of Star Trek: Voyager about this[1]. Seven of Nine absorbs months worth of data (way more than a human could actually process) from the ship's computer, and "discovers" that both half of the ship plans on mutinying and that the Captain wasn't actually trying t…

However she does also make the useful and correct deduction that photonic fleas have infested the plasma conduits.

Re: Startup Ideas

#309

Post by jozzas »

jotux wrote: post #177
blizkreeg wrote: post #75

I've thought about the firefighting idea as well, especially after the recent Sonoma and Napa fire. Sprinkler systems for indoor fires are not that uncommon now. Why aren't there sprinkler/fire retardant systems for the perimeter/external part of a house? In a wildfire, I can't imagine a better way to fight the fire from spreading through a neighborhood than a system that auto-deploys when it senses smoke on the peri…

I've thought about this as well. My idea was to bury a 10k gallon tank in the yard along with a compressed air tank. Run sprinklers around the perimeter of your house and drip lines across the eves of your roof. When a fire is near you turn a valve that pressurizes the tank and pushes water out to the sprinklers for ~8 hours.

Most houses burn down due to embers igniting in the roof, subfloor or against the side of the house. You need to actively protect the roof with sprayers. There are systems that already do this, as well as ember-proof subfloor vents.

Re: Startup Ideas

#310

Post by codingdave »

kcorbitt wrote: post #2

Hey HN! I'm a software developer at YC and the author of this post. This post is actually a bit of an experiment. We're trying to find better ways to get prospective startup founders (which includes many of us in the HN community) in contact with problems that really ought to be solved. We have lots of different ideas for ways to do that, but a list of ideas seemed like an easy one to try out first. Please let me kno…

I think this list isn't the way to go -- some (not all) of these ideas seem frivolous to me... solving first world problems at best, and just bad ideas at worst. Judging from the comments, I am not alone. But I don't know if I am in the minority or majority in these opinions... therefore, I think a more productive approach would be a small app for people to vote on ideas, letting the best ones bubble to the top of an interactive list.

If you really want to get crazy, the resulting list could be integrated into your application process -- "We're team A, with a proposal to solve Problem X, but also have ideas for problems Y and Z."

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