This is a three-year-old blog post about a three-year-old HN comment about a different three-year-old blog post. Just sayin'.
Thanks, that confused the hell out of me.
Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
51–60 of 108 posts
Re: Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have come up with a lot of ideas to solve business problems, but I am reluctant to implement them for the concern that selling to such businesses would be a far more difficult problem than simply creating something that works better than what they are currently using. Business often make stupid decisions based on relationships with sells people or brand recognition more than merit of the solution. Of course, this p…
In my experience, you have the difficulty backward. It's just fear of the unknown that keeps too many technical people from attempting it. If your product has a demonstrable return on investment, then it is far easier to sell to businesses. Because businesses actually make decisions based on ROI, and consumers mostly don't. Remember that to make a fair comparison, you need to do it per dollar, not per sale. Even if i…
You are mostly right, but then there are other issues to consider: why would a business buy from you who is just starting out? They would like to have some guarantee you will be around after a few years..
Re: Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
#53Current thinking on this matter is to avoid the tired old web 2.0 hipster stuff. The current batch of YC is all about solving real problem for real people. Spoonrocket got the most applause ($6 meals delivered within 10 minutes).
I reason all YC batches have been about solving real problems for real people. Though they seem to be focusing more on solving business problems. I did make that change from consumer to business and am pretty happy about it. Might even apply to the Winter batch.
Re: Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopefully you've found one of the 52 ideas awesome enough to spend a little longer on. How enthusiastic / passionate you are about it is a big factor in how successful will be.
I really like the idea of making a web app every week and seeing whats sticks. Its seems like it would be a much more diverse learning experience.
It's rather tempting isn't it? However it's too crazy. Too fast paced. Certainly for one.
Re: Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
#55Assuming your goal is to have a successful startup company, I've often wondered what the optimal trade-off between time-per-startup idea and number of startup attempts is. For instance, I could spend a year working on two really big, elaborate ideas that I have, but if they fail (likely), then I've wasted ("learned what not to do" if you're the optimistic type) a year working on only two ideas. Or... I could invest m…
Twitter was not a founder-focused idea - it was a side project for a video service.
Actually it was a founder-focused idea that jack had thought of first in 2000 but decided to shelf it. Also it was a failing podcast platform called Odeo.
Re: Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
#56This is a three-year-old blog post about a three-year-old HN comment about a different three-year-old blog post. Just sayin'.
That expression peaked a few years ago: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=just%20sayin&cmpt=q
That just shows how many people were searching for it, not how many people are using it. And most those people were probably searching for the song, not the expression.
Re: Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really like the idea of making a web app every week and seeing whats sticks. Its seems like it would be a much more diverse learning experience.
A web app a week sounds like a pretty brisk pace to me -- but then again my knowledge of web development is rather outdated. What technologies would you use to build a web app in 7 days in 2013?
Perhaps not if you consider they don't need to be polished or great, or (depending on what you're making) perhaps even finished. You just need to work on it enough to get an idea of 1) how enthusiastic you really are about it and perhaps 2) what the market or audience looks like (but mainly 1, because that's what will motivate you or not to spend more time on it).
The might not even be the most time consuming activity, especially if you consider what one can make in a single day (see for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097155)
Re: Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
#58The problem with so many "startup ideas" is that they are a solution to the problem, "I want to create a startup and don't have an idea." Not surprisingly, this tends to produce copycat concepts, products with no real market fit, services that target sexy but oversaturated markets, etc. There are lots and lots of problems that are either unsolved or are being solved in ways that are less efficient and cost-effective…
I have come up with a lot of ideas to solve business problems, but I am reluctant to implement them for the concern that selling to such businesses would be a far more difficult problem than simply creating something that works better than what they are currently using. Business often make stupid decisions based on relationships with sells people or brand recognition more than merit of the solution. Of course, this p…
That's why you need to sell first and build second. You have a good relationship with your first customer, who has a real problem and real money to solve it.
Re: Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
#59This is a three-year-old blog post about a three-year-old HN comment about a different three-year-old blog post. Just sayin'.
At which point does History become irrelevant or ill suited for discussion? Please aware us all as you seem to hold the key.
Well... This is Hacker News not Hacker History.
Re: Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
#60I have a startup idea that I'm not going to execute. I currently live with a senior social worker, and my mother was a social worker. Over the years have been deeply troubled by what I've heard. I think this tool could help them, even if it's a bit creepy.
Social workers in the UK have a big problem. Different teams, professions (police, medical, housing), deal with the same people, and often collect all the pieces required to understand and prevent a tragic situation. But they can't put them together.
There is an obsession with interpofessional meetings to tackle this, but every serious case review shows that the knowledge was there but not put together, leading to dead children. My perception is that often knowledge is mentioned, but when discussing a different related case, or isn't formally written down and passed to the right person.
My solution is inspired by the part of the CALO project that dealt with capturing and exploiting knowledge from meetings. There are some great ideas. If you do this, read up on it.
The product records all meetings, using existing meeting room Teleconference hardware. The meetings are put through automatic speech and speaker recognition on a best effort basis to produce a searchable index for that meeting. So you get something like a transcript and can skip to the point where Mr A is mentioned.
Supervisors, who in that field are criminally liable for mistakes by subordinates, already review minutes for meetings. Now they can search for any mention of Mr A, and see in what context he was mentioned and listen to that part of the meeting. Obviously there would be control of who could listen to what meetings, but these people already have big intrusive databases, so I don't think they are too worried.
Ideally, you could then build graphs from there of who is mentioned together, and do some Palantir style stuff to spot associations between people.
But the start is, very much, implementing a meeting transcriber by sowing together a few brands of speech recognition engine, a web interface for administrating and searching meetings, and selling it into social services.