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Show HN: I built a 100% free startup idea generator

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Re: Show HN: I built a 100% free startup idea generator

#2
Ideas are cheap. Ask ChatGPT and it will give you dozens. Heck, ask almost any random person, and they will have business ideas.

What's hard is (a) finding a good idea, (b) investing the time and effort to make it reality, and finally (c) marketing it successfully.

Re: Show HN: I built a 100% free startup idea generator

#3
It's great that you are thinking about this. Here is another potentially more valuable tool to consider: a problem generator.

The goal is to identify problems, tunable complexity from mundane to moonshot, in a selectable field. You also select the customer, a tunable value for the customer (low to high), and the field/industry.

You could prototype this with a well-developed prompt in your favorite AI and discover other parameters that could be important, e.g. now vs. future or something like production vs delivery vs support vs etc.

For example: suppose you select "bakery" as the field/industry, "medium" as the complexity, "high" as the value and "delivery." You might get potential problems such as:

- low cost direct to customer delivery - rapid point-of-sale - improved warmth of baked goods upon delivery - etc.

This approach could of course be applied to all sorts of fields.

Re: Show HN: I built a 100% free startup idea generator

#4
Not being snarky: has anybody ever actually generated profitable startup ideas from one of these tools?

I mean: a person who otherwise wouldn't have come up with something that good or that easily, uses a generator tool, picks an idea, builds a business and all goes well.

Does this ever happen? Does it happen fairly regularly?

Re: Show HN: I built a 100% free startup idea generator

#5
I got this. Juicy marketing-speak!

    DataNet Connect — People-Centric Networking Solution
    A networking solution that prioritizes people connections over traditional
    network protocols. It offers a human-centric approach to networking
    technology, enabling seamless communication and efficient data transfer
    between individuals and organizations. This technology aims to enhance
    collaboration and productivity in diverse work environments.
But how do you prioritize people connections over network protocols?

Clearly, not a time to worry about our AI overlords yet

Re: Show HN: I built a 100% free startup idea generator

#6

It's great that you are thinking about this. Here is another potentially more valuable tool to consider: a problem generator. The goal is to identify problems, tunable complexity from mundane to moonshot, in a selectable field. You also select the customer, a tunable value for the customer (low to high), and the field/industry. You could prototype this with a well-developed prompt in your favorite AI and discover oth…

Paul Graham's article How to Get Startup Ideas [0] is this approach.

> The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.

> The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.

> Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.

His article Schlep Blindness [1] is good too.

> There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task.

> The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe's idea. For over a decade, every hacker who'd ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. Why? Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world's infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments.

[0] https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html [1] https://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

Re: Show HN: I built a 100% free startup idea generator

#7
I love it, I think this one has legs.

> HealthWealth Analytics — Bioinformatics Wealth Management Integrating bioinformatics and financial data to provide wealth management solutions tailored to individuals' health profiles, enabling proactive financial planning in the face of potential health risks.

Re: Show HN: I built a 100% free startup idea generator

#10

It's great that you are thinking about this. Here is another potentially more valuable tool to consider: a problem generator. The goal is to identify problems, tunable complexity from mundane to moonshot, in a selectable field. You also select the customer, a tunable value for the customer (low to high), and the field/industry. You could prototype this with a well-developed prompt in your favorite AI and discover oth…

Paul Graham's article How to Get Startup Ideas [0] is this approach. > The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. > The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yah…

I don't see the difficulty as finding the problem (schlep blindness) or an idea of the solution. Rather, it's always imagining realistic ways of implementing a solution.

In payments, for example, the problem is never "building the thing". It will always be gaining permission (whatever it means for your application) of hooking into the system. It might require depositing some amount of capital; and it's usually an amount larger than any startup can reasonably get. Most such barriers are there by design.

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