The shopping thing seems ripe for fraud. Put in a fake order, get a discount.
Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me)
11–20 of 47 posts
Re: Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me)
#12i like the golf course concept. drop me an email, i'd be willing to give it a shot
love golf, would love to be a part of this and help design the UI/UX
feel free to shoot me an e-mail
Re: Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me)
#13i like the golf course concept. drop me an email, i'd be willing to give it a shot
This would be great, but keep in mind that this project is more about sales and execution than software development if it's going to be used anywhere. No rock stars required to develop this system, but you'll need a crack-sales-team. This sort of thing may still feel like rocket science to many of your pro-shop guys taking tee times over the phone - and they are probably the gate keepers when it comes to sales and im…
thats one of the reasons why i like it and wouldn't mind working on it :) its not a complex problem to solve or a timesink project, and that fits appropriately into the bit of free time i have.
Re: Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me)
#14The golf one sounds easy, but most of those web sites are directly integrated with POS systems. A lot of courses buy it all together as a package. Plus the biggest golf course management software vendor in my area aggregates all the golf courses they serve into a single web site, so you only have one account. Also, as much as I love Open ID, trying to get your average Joe Schmoe golfer to use it is not going to work.
The easiest way for people to remember their logins for sites is not to USE logins. Use EMAIL ADDRESSES instead. Then, if they forget their login, they just enter their email address and it auto-generates a "reset password" link.
Open ID is cool and all, but it's nowhere near frictionless enough for average people yet.
Re: Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me)
#15Problem you'll run into with scanning bar codes displayed on mobile phones - it won't work. In general, barcode scanners can't scan digital screens for barcodes.
Re: Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me)
#16I used to work for a online golf tee time company, and you're absolutely correct in saying that building a better online reservation system wouldn't be that hard (the bar is pretty low). I'm not sure about what smaller providers give the course, or how they charge, but the bigger ones also:
1) Provide a 24-hour call center, so no one at the golf course is answering reservation calls much anyway.
2) Provide POS systems, which means that almost all revenue is reportable through one interface.
3) Have rewards and tournament management built in. And also something to report scores to golf associations.
And instead of being paid in totally in cash, they're also paid in tee times, which the company resells itself.
But those are the big guys. I'm sure there are plenty of courses using simple webapps to manage tee times that are horrible. It'd be a good thing to shake that up.
Re: Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me)
#17The golf one sounds easy, but most of those web sites are directly integrated with POS systems. A lot of courses buy it all together as a package. Plus the biggest golf course management software vendor in my area aggregates all the golf courses they serve into a single web site, so you only have one account. Also, as much as I love Open ID, trying to get your average Joe Schmoe golfer to use it is not going to work.
The integration is the hardest part of this idea. There are a couple of different ways to go and I'm still not sure exactly which is best. I'm debating between integration with other software suites, building a small POS layer or making it easy for courses to handle it manually themselves. I'd like to do one thing really well, but we may need to broaden our horizons a bit. You're region is lucky then. In my region ev…
why require an account?
with respect to the POS system, i'm curious on how opentable operates. does it interact with the various restaurant POS systems? seems like whatever they're doing works, and might be something to consider trying to emulate.
Re: Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me)
#18real time shopping is interesting
Flight tickets come to mind.
Re: Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
The integration is the hardest part of this idea. There are a couple of different ways to go and I'm still not sure exactly which is best. I'm debating between integration with other software suites, building a small POS layer or making it easy for courses to handle it manually themselves. I'd like to do one thing really well, but we may need to broaden our horizons a bit. You're region is lucky then. In my region ev…
why require an account? with respect to the POS system, i'm curious on how opentable operates. does it interact with the various restaurant POS systems? seems like whatever they're doing works, and might be something to consider trying to emulate.
the main reason for an account is to allow edits, maybe there is a way around accounts though.
you're right about opentable, i'll take a look.
Re: Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me)
#20I used to work for a online golf tee time company, and you're absolutely correct in saying that building a better online reservation system wouldn't be that hard (the bar is pretty low). I'm not sure about what smaller providers give the course, or how they charge, but the bigger ones also: 1) Provide a 24-hour call center, so no one at the golf course is answering reservation calls much anyway. 2) Provide POS system…
In the beginning, I would go after the smaller golf courses as well as large courses that realize that this portion of their suite sucks, and they want to use something else in conjunction with it.