Tell HN: Steal my ideas

I've got a few ideas and I'm not sure if they'll ever see the light of day. I'm happy to share them with HN in the hopes that you work on them or they help give you other ideas. Some may already exist, and if so, I apologize!

Idea #1) A scholarship service/site that doesn't suck

You'd think finding scholarships wouldn't be that hard, but you're in for a surprise. My wife is fixing to start graduate studies and I've been pouring over scholarship/fellowship sites for her. I've spent countless hours just looking for ones for her to apply to, and I've visited 20+ scholarship search engines.

They're filled to the brim with scam/"you could win $100,000! sweepstakes" type scholarships. They also have tons of extra offers from paid for profit universities. Lastly, they display scholarships that she isn't even qualified for, despite narrowing the filters to ones that she is supposed to be qualified for.

I've found different scholarships on each site, so there's not even a single site that has all of the same scholarships on it. I'm starting to wish at this point that there was a paid service that someone could just pay $X for. They'd research for you and send you back a huge list of scholarships that were tailored just for you.

For that matter, you'd think there would be a better service out there that would research anything like that. Kind of like Google Answers/MTurk, only for in depth things. For example, maybe I'm interested in opening a bakery and I want someone to do the research for me for all the competitors in the area, what they charge, what they have on the menu, the size of their bakeries, the available properties in the area, the legal requirements of opening a bakery and getting licensed in the city, etc.

Idea #2) An expat job site that actually helps you immigrate, aka overseas recruiters

I've flirted with the idea of immigrating elsewhere for a while now. But the sheer volume of things you'd have to do just to immigrate is mind boggling, not to mention different for every country. Some professions can help you get a green card in X country, but not Y, etc. I wish there was a site that would be designed for hopeful expats that would connect them with jobs from employers in other countries that hire foreign workers. The site could also guide you through the immigration process, kind of like Legalzoom does for creating a company.

Idea #3) Sortfolio for X

Sortfolio is a neat tool because it's a great way to browse web designers visually. There's lots of other things that could benefit from having this, like what about Web/Mobile app developers? Videographers? What about a way to browse local/regional bands for weddings/gigs?

Idea #4) SponsorMe

How many hours in a given week do you spend on Youtube? What about your friends? Tons of Youtube members easily have 10,000+ subscribers. It's true that they can choose to display ads on their videos, but what about cutting youtube out of the equation? If someone has a video series where they review phones, wouldn't it be neat to be able to reach out to the content creators directly and have them mention your app in their video, or wear your company TShirt? American Idol for instance does this with Coke cups drank by the judges (or at least they used to). Think about how much time they get of their product being on screen.

The site could basically be a marketplace that lists both youtube members who are willing to take on sponsorships and possibly their rates, as well as companies looking to advertise their products. You could browse by category to find the best people to partner with. The site doesn't have to stop at youtube, as there are also traditional bloggers out there that might be interested.

Idea #5) "Beat Mine" restaurant, aka the reddit restaurant

A brick and mortar concept for a restaurant. The restaurants menu is driven by the patrons. For example, let's say the restaurant offers a chocolate cake. You try it but you know your homemade chocolate cake is better. You submit the recipe and the restaurant offers it temporarily. If enough patrons vote for it, that chocolate cake takes the place as their chocolate cake. You could offer a tiny percentage of sales of that dish as commission to the recipe submitter. This would provide constant incentive to keep trying to top that item. But who knows, maybe people (and/or the kitchen staff) demand familiarity when they go to restaurants and this would be a horrible failure.

As a student, I can say you're spot on with the first one. A huge challenge, to be sure because applications are scattered across the internet as PDF's, docs and outdated online forms. Still - if you could get even 50% of the legitimate scholarships out there and categorize them in useful ways (undergrad, grad, high school, by interest, etc) - I know I would pay for access to a curated list for me.

Idea #4:

http://www.tadcast.com/ https://mashable.com/2009/01/12/tadcast/

(Also http://www.brandfame.com/ and http://videosponsorhouse.com/)

There are some other startups that focus on placing background music in online videos.

"For that matter, you'd think there would be a better service out there that would research anything like that."

You're asking for the Semantic Web.

No, really: if everyone's data were available as data, so you didn't have to scrape human-readable representations, this would be approximately trivial (at least, it'd be trivial for Google, because they already have this kind of raw computational horsepower, and experience with embarrassingly parallel programming).

Here's my free idea:

An email service provider (ESP) that caters specifically to B2B and B2C newsletters (I'm thinking 100k to 10mil+ messages a month). It's crazy that this doesn't exist.

MailChimp and similar have pricing that does not scale up. Meanwhile MailGun and similar do not have the analytics or list management that publishers need. They are geared towards transactional messages, not newsletters. Lyris/EmailLabs and Silverpop cater to this market, but their products are not very cheap and not very good. (For examples, their APIs are terrible.)

I think there's a huge opportunity to simply layer a bunch of analytics and list management code on top of Amazon SES.