Ask HN: What to work on?

Update: After taking another look at LongCal, I like it. It shows different levels of different events. As someone else has said, "I'm not sure I would pay for it". I tend to agree with that.

Here are some thoughts, even though I'm not sure you asked for it ;)

LongCal: I think there is something there with regards to "long-term thinking". But don't market it as a "calendar app". I believe there is potential in tracking people's long-term goals, breaking them down into tasks, and translating these tasks into chunks of work to build daily schedules and habits. The above is what I currently do in a text editor, and there is no "calendar app" that can do it for me. Don't make another calendar app, the space is overcrowded with Machine Learning powered calendar apps. How to validate? This one is tricky. I'd try customer interviews strategy (dalacv posted a book) to see if people are really unhappy with their current time management apps, and why. No need to build something before you figure out the pain points. Ideally you have a mockup of what you have in mind in order to validate your hypotheses against what people are telling you in interviews. Monetization is an issue you don't usually worry about with these kind of products. If you build a great product then people will come, and with enough people money will come.

uTrim: I'm not sure about this one. I never use URL shorteners unless they are already integrated in a service I'm already using (e.g. Twitter). The bigger opportunity here may be to sell this directly to universities and automatically shorten anything that is posted on university-internal mailing lists and forums and provide analytics on top of that. How to validate? Try to sell it to universities (in particular, certain departments for certain products and then let it ripple through other departments)

Vulgat Library: I'm assuming employees lend stuff to other employees (landing page isn't clear on this)? How to validate? Figure out what segment your customers are in and try to sell it to them. You'd probably need a more exhaustive landing page. This can be consumerized enterprise play where you are selling to individual employees within a company. They can set up the system themselves without needing permission from any higher-ups. They then invite other employees. Basically the Dropbox model. This way you can use consumer marketing strategies instead of needing B2B sales.

Business naming app: I may be wrong but personally I'd forget about this one: 1. Generating good names automatically is extremely difficult 2. I doubt people want to have generated names 3. Don't see obvious monetization 4. One-time use

Wouldn't go as far as calling @amyhoy, @alexknowshtml and @thomasfuchs scammers

Regarding "only actually familiar with selling online scams" – they don't live of www.30x500.com but of http://letsfreckle.com/

https://30x500.com/ looks exactly like every other internet marketing "learn to make money online with our amazing course" that's circulated for the past 15 years. I guess "scam" is a bit hasty but "utter waste of your money" is definitely fitting.

There's gotta be an official name for these. That skinny page with varying font sizes of text images or embedded youtube videos encouraging you to buy/ act now / sign-up for their free newsletter til a big call-to-action at the bottom after scrolling for 10 minutes?

I know several universities already run url shortening services in-house, only providing access for faculty/staff/etc. One of the drivers for this is guaranteed longevity - urls in research papers need to live for a long time, but they also need to be short as papers have page limits.

In fact, finding that the university which employs me has a url shortener was a happy day - the url looks official, but it took a whole 2 lines from a column in the paper I was writing. If you haven't had the "joy" of trying to fit your whole idea into a short page limit, you may not understand how much space that really is... Remember in high school when you would fudge margins and font and so on, and using big words unnecessarily to reach the minimum pages? Similar tricks are often done in reverse for research papers.

If you're going to sell that service to smaller universities that don't run their own, or bigger universities looking to outsource, here's a few things that really matter:

1. Being able to tie into the existing SSO/Federated ID system the university uses.

2. Being able to guarantee lifetimes of the shortened links - perhaps even providing for running the service after the company goes away (if this unfortunately happens). Alternately, providing a way to migrate data to a local machine w/in the university if all else fails.

3. The ability to attach a university affiliated domain name - this lets shortened urls look official rather than shady.

4. The ability to move the shortened url target. Long lifetimes conflict with changes in infrastructure in the customer organization.

5. The ability to notify any/all of: the original poster, the poster's department, and the university it department when target links stop working.

6. (maybe) a caching service in case a long term url goes down - oops the page seems down, but here's a cache of what it last looked like....