968. Make a Triple Snuggy. What exactly is that? I'm scared.
Considering there is also the "double snuggy", this idea is pretty much 7 minute abs.
The magic number is 6, not 7.
Business ideas: proving ideas are a dime a dosen
51–60 of 68 posts
Re: Business ideas: proving ideas are a dime a dosen
#52> A village in china that paints portraits of pop culture icons as various dog breeds. Look, Obama as a GreyHound! If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen.
> If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen.
Conversely, people who believe ideas are a dime a dozen tend to focus on shallow ideas. The lack of deep interaction with technology (and whatever a pivot is supposed to be) forces you into businesses with a more social rather than technical role: web design, blogging, social networks, etc. I don't see much of HN's advice working well for a company developing asynchronous CPU chipsets. In theory they should be the same; the advent of fabless semiconductor shops and hardware synthesis languages lets someone design chips in their garage in Iowa, but the depth of technical knowledge required makes it a much different game than starting up "a distributed Facebook" or "a Foursquare but for X."
Re: Business ideas: proving ideas are a dime a dosen
#53> A village in china that paints portraits of pop culture icons as various dog breeds. Look, Obama as a GreyHound! If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen.
How does selling ringtones of a frog singing to club music sound as an idea to you? Let me introduce you to Crazy Frog: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Frog Retarded ideas make money too.
So does running a successful bagel shop. The "ideas are worthless" people place your neighborhood bagel shop, Crazy Frog ringtones, and Qualcomm in the same group: businesses you can totally run as long as you know how to 'hustle.' Somehow I think Andrew Viterbi would frown on that.
Re: Business ideas: proving ideas are a dime a dosen
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's kind of the main reason why you start a business, you know, to make a lot of money. Otherwise you're talking about charities.
Really? I've talked to a number of entrepreneurs who are in it because they have an idea they'd like to see happen or they think it's fun or to try to leave a mark on the world or a number of other reasons where the money is only a side effect.
Well put, money happens when you scratch an itch that is keeping you from sleeping basically. Many people got lost somewhere in the way and think of ideas as machines that will squeeze wallets and make them rich. All people I know that made money actually solved a personal necessity or where so excited about wanting to see something happen that their own genuine excitement attracted natural attention from people that where at the same time excited to see that.
Re: Business ideas: proving ideas are a dime a dosen
#55For what it's worth, here is the subset of the ideas I came up with from that list: http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/68-free-bus... The point of the exercise is that most people think of five or ten ideas, and then go with the first decent idea they come up with. But if you actually force yourself to come up with 100+ ideas then it's more likely that your idea will legitimately be a good idea. Which i…
Quickly scanning the list, I see we did #712 as an intern project: http://www.elmoreclub.com/ I'll be looking for Fred's steps soon!
Re: Business ideas: proving ideas are a dime a dosen
#56I have read a couple of hundred of them and thats the most useless ideas I have ever seen. Most of them seem to be a solution to really mundane everyday consumer quirks. None of them attempts to use basic human needs such as need for communication and approval. Its just "somebody could do my laundry" and "somebody could write something on a website".
They are only useless if your goal is to address one of the basic human needs you mention and even then maybe they do.
"Someone could do my laundry so I can complete my research paper on curing cancer"
Re: Business ideas: proving ideas are a dime a dosen
#57My favorite, #469: "A YouTube VC firm, that will invest money in people who are willing to do stupid stuff on video in hopes that the video will go viral and they will make a profit." Could happen, in today's angel investment climate...
I love this idea- like a cross between Kickstarter and "I'll eat a bug for a nickel".
Re: Business ideas: proving ideas are a dime a dosen
#58Rent-a-wife – a woman who cleans, cooks, does laundry, picks up dry cleaning, mail, etc but without the emotional relationship. I'd rent...
This made me lol. They interchanged 'maid' and 'wife.'
Re: Business ideas: proving ideas are a dime a dosen
#59> A village in china that paints portraits of pop culture icons as various dog breeds. Look, Obama as a GreyHound! If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen.
"If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen." There is actually a town in china where the entire village makes their money painting caricatures of monkeys. Not saying it's a good career move, but at least that's the context for where the idea came from. Interesting enough, the majority of the world's oil paintings come from this one tiny village with 5,000 painters who spend all day slavishly copyin…
Or in the streets of Montmartre, sold as genuine Parisian paintings...
Re: Business ideas: proving ideas are a dime a dosen
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does selling ringtones of a frog singing to club music sound as an idea to you? Let me introduce you to Crazy Frog: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Frog Retarded ideas make money too.
I sure as hell didn't think limiting people to 140 characters was going to make sense.
I believe that was originally a technical limitation, and only later did it become evident that there is a business value in offering partially-literate individuals a medium that caters to, while providing plausible deniability for, their slow reading and writing speeds.
Twitter has little or no technical reason to be so limited, of course, but doesn't want to alienate the tldr crowd.