25 Startup Ideas for 2012

26. Get a cookie and do science to it.

I think it's a good list of ideas which sadly will not appeal to most entrepreneurs. You may disagree, but I personally think that founders tend to run away from scientific research and for good reasons. It's very hard to find funding if the service you want to provide doesn't revolve around the generic list of facebook/twitter mashups, mobile apps and SAAS services which solve nonexistent problems. Think about it, you can spend 2 months building a typical CRUD app, make money the first week and keep your investors happy. Or spend years looking for the bright minds who share the same enthusiasm and belief in your scientific research and them (maybe) find enough money to build the final product. This is probably the reason why these things are worked out in university labs, not startup incubators.

I've seen this layout on a few sites linked from HN lately, and it only loads about 50% of the time. The other 50% I just get a blank page. Awful.

Often the path to a discovery is not direct. Facebook stumbled upon social search several years after putting up college yearbook profiles online first...

So I like 7, building a database of biology but to tackle that head on would be impractical (financially). That is the end goal that we have at my startup, but we are starting out by helping labs manage their reagent and chemical inventories first. Sounds mundane but the eventual goal is to get to a crowd-sourced global database for biology. Remains to be seen how it pans out.

My point is that such lists of top X ideas can be useful but often the biggest challenge is plotting the trajectory. And often the path is not a straight line.

There's actually a lot of "AirBnB for Activities." Our company used to be Skyara (http://www.skyara.com). We ended up pivoting to RAVN (http://ravn.com), which is more of a "Amazon for Activities," per se. I think we were definitely one of the first ones to try to enter the "AirBnB for Activities" space but had a very hard time.

While in theory it sounds like a great concept, the key to realize is that no "AirBnB for Activites" can ever be an "AirBnB for Activities." What I mean by that is: the part of the "AirBnB for X" business model that makes it work is the part where you have a very low marginal cost to renting out an existing resource that, presumably, is getting very low utilization. I.e. a car sitting in a garage, an empty couch. The marginal cost of renting those out... is basically zero. However, with Activities, the resource at play is actually time! A person needs to take two hours out of their day to offer a walking tour, cooking class, etc.

Arguably, time is the most scarce resource we have. People value their time highly, which means the marginal cost (in this case the opportunity cost) of them offering an activity is very high. Add to that the fact that individuals do not benefit from any sort of economy of scale, and that most likely means that they cannot compete with businesses on price (which is arguably where AirBnB is winning in its biggest market, NYC).

So of course, I'm not saying an "AirBnB for Activities" is not possible, but some fundamental problems make it significantly more difficult than one might initially expect. Personally I think Vayable is doing a great job, but time will tell...

Oh also, AirBnB took something that already was happening (sublets on Craigslist) and just rebranded/made it better. Not much "Activities" activity going on on Craigslist. It's mostly for services, like painting, plumbing, car mechanics, etc. So you sometimes question if the demand actually even exists?

Anyway, I could write a loooong post-mortem on Skyara but you get my point.