This list is simply impossible to parody. There is way too much easy money in this industry, chasing stupid ideas.
Looking forward to see this thread here next week:
Startup Ideas
401–410 of 470 posts
Re: Startup Ideas
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't agree more. Social networks are deliberately designed to be addictive and can definitely cause problems with self esteem - doesn't seem like something kids should be engaged in at all. Additionally, if anything we should be exposing children to less advertisement, not more. This almost sounds like some sick "hook em while they're young" scheme
> Social networks are deliberately designed to be addictive Social networks are addictive because if they aren't, they fail and cease to be adopted at scale. Somehow we seem to be OK with this happening to ourselves. It is only when it happens to our innocent children that we start to revolt.
Because children are extra gullible. Children will happily sing a catchy tune from a non-interactive, non-personalized TV or radio commercial, even repeating marketing slogans they don't understand. You can win a kid's trust by giving him a candy. Have you ever seen a kid that has to be dragged away from a shop display, kicking, screaming and crying ?
Commercial social media are refined to the equivalent of advertisement cocaine. They are also a con man's wet dream (I refer you to numerous articles about Facebook frauds). It's even more than that, because it's the only drug which changes shape to more effectively get you. You have to be constantly vigilant and watch for new manipulation methods.
Parents watch over children not just because they like them, but because children are not capable of consistently making informed, rational decisions and weighting pros and cons.
I think parents themselves are not adult enough to deal with Facebook and avoid being manipulated or cheated. I think the world hasn't caught up with addictiveness of social media yet. Other drugs are already limited, for example by age. Netherlands doesn't limit access to drugs very much, instead it focuses on informational campaigns and rehab centers, with pretty good results. FB gives people something core to human nature - social contact, so addicts will defend it to the death. Age requirement wouldn't fly, so Netherlands-style approach is the only option left. At least until FB successfully lobbies to ban them or sues for defamation.
The dangers posed by social media are not inherently new, but fraudsters in meatspace have a harder time being completely anonymous, there are witnesses everywhere, your personal profile is not written on your back, and offenders risk local ostracism. FB is more like a private nightclub than real world with laws, courts and police. FB makes it easy to be a creep remotely and anonymously.
Re: Startup Ideas
#403>As I’ve gotten a bit older and gained more experience, I’ve found that valuable startup ideas aren’t actually a scarce resource. In fact, they’re only becoming more abundant — as the world moves faster and more new businesses are created, more novel niches appear for profitable, productive companies. If we define valuable as "profitable, productive companies" then I very much agree that there are plenty of niches ou…
Yes this is the huge disconnect between the "ideas are worthless" and "ideas are everything" camps. Yes "ideas" are as common as muck (and worth as much), but ideas that will build a billion dollar company are as rare as billion dollar companies.
Re: Startup Ideas
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most animals are way more expressive that the average person is able to easily understand and pet tech would easily be a billion dollar market. EDIT: I would also be happy to do this startup if YC adds me to the next batch; already offered to do one for the “Social Network for Children”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15715865
>Most animals are way more expressive that the average person is able to easily understand Is the market the average person though or the person willing to spend several hundred dollars on tech for their pet? My guess is the latter would mostly consist of people who have spent decades in close contact with pets and are able to reliably read the body language of a dog with rather extreme accuracy and nuance. If you've…
People in their 30s without kids are willing to spend considerable sums on their pet.
Re: Startup Ideas
#405>As I’ve gotten a bit older and gained more experience, I’ve found that valuable startup ideas aren’t actually a scarce resource. In fact, they’re only becoming more abundant — as the world moves faster and more new businesses are created, more novel niches appear for profitable, productive companies. If we define valuable as "profitable, productive companies" then I very much agree that there are plenty of niches ou…
> Ideas with the potential to become big are very much THE scarce resource.
They're also almost inherently unknowable. Look back at the history of almost any large, successful SV company. Google was a search company taking on AltaVista. Facebook let Harvard students put up personal pages, taking on MySpace. Amazon sold books, taking on Borders. All of their founders got negative responses at early attempts at VC funding from "experts" who had no idea of what they were looking at, because small companies, by definition, make small products, and usually in markets with some competition by strong incumbents. Would Google have become as big as they did without Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Android? Would Facebook have become as big as they did without Messenger, Events, public pages for businesses and celebrities? Would Amazon have become as big as they did without AWS and Marketplace/FBA?
Execution, not the founding idea, is what turns start-ups into giants.
Re: Startup Ideas
#406This list is simply impossible to parody. There is way too much easy money in this industry, chasing stupid ideas.
Looking forward to see this thread here next week: http://n-gate.com/hackernews/
This is really strange, but on Chrome, and only on Chrome and not in incognito mode, that redirects to https://www.apple.com/ . I wonder if it returned a 301 at one time.
Re: Startup Ideas
#407Earlier 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…
This is an idea that I disagree with so thoroughly that I'm having a hard time articulating why. Every angle I can think of presupposes a world view which would not admit this idea in the first place.
Re: Startup Ideas
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tim…
All great points, and to the meta discussion here of whether ideas are sufficient, I think you just demonstrated that ideas need experience and experimentation more than they need funding :)
That said, I think the fact that some folks misuse factoring in some industries doesn't mean it cannot be correctly used by many folks in other industries, even alongside other capital sources. Lowering the expense could be one way to innovate. Reducing the chagrin factor could be another.
FWIW, I have been at several >$15MM tech companies and in most cases worked directly with the CFO and team, and I don't recall having a FTE doing collections in any of them; sure it was a problem on occasion. The bigger problem was the routine elongation of the receivables cycle. We got paid in full 99.99% of the time - but slowly. We didn't need collections, we just wanted cash faster. Even at >$15MM...in fact more so!
Reminding them wasn't the problem in my experiences - though I'm sure there are many who have this problem - they deliberately engineered delay into their system. They were rewarded to delay. I have been on the other side of that table, doing the exact same thing admittedly, so I know.
Would love to chat 1:1 too, just keeping the ideation here on the thread in the spirit of the OP's goal.
Re: Startup Ideas
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Well I would argue it has all the same goals and steps of a traditional contract, but automated and electronic. Your points are all valid today...but I recall similar points about e-commerce and e-banking circa 1999. I can hardly be considered a blockchain fanboy (I own precisely 1.0 ETH for experimentation only). But I do sense that the problems you mention can and will be solved by someone or several someones with enough time and money since there are real pain points here. Maybe 5 years, or 15. But I think our kids will find this post in the 2020s in their AR equipped Waymo and laugh at how we did things now.
And the lawyers I know personally love to litigate new things in civil court. Like robbing banks, that's where the money is!
Re: Startup Ideas
#410Suddenly I don't really wanna be a part of YCombinator anymore.