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Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#41

Post by nardi »

An online-only bank (with ATM support of course) that lets you have as many "virtual" accounts as you want, and lets you set up programmatic rules for transferring money in between accounts on certain days/times, or triggered by events ("transfer $100 from B to A if account A goes below $100, and notify me by email"; "on overdraft from A, withdraw from B instead"). Then have a debit card that you can use to charge to any of your accounts, and an app that lets you configure which account it's drawing from.

This would make "budgeting" very easy. Have a "food" account, an "entertainment" account, etc. Do weekly or monthly budgets by transferring money into your mini-accounts, and denying transactions for each account when it goes over budget. (Or let the transaction go through from a backup account, but notify you that you went over budget.)

Also, have an API that anyone can write apps for.

Of course, I'll never do this because starting a bank is really hard.

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#42

Post by frankdenbow »

farmerinthecity wrote: post #25
jonbischke wrote: post #10

A couple of years ago I proposed an idea for "AirBnB for self storage" on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Collaborative-Consumption/What-is-the-n... Still seems like a massive opportunity. $24 billion market in the US. Inconvenient locations (for many people). People have (collectively) a massive amount of under-utilized space. Not without its challenges but neither was AirBnB when it started.

Makespace is doing this, at least in NYC. They have all my stuff that I'm almost ready to get rid of.

I use it too. Has been super convenient while traveling/moving.

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#44

Post by digikata »

Order while you wait infrastructure at restaurants. Basically pull up the menu via wifi while waiting for your table to clear. Take the order, and maybe even pay ahead. Orchestrate the order so that the food is available shortly after you sit down.

This lets the restaurant increase their profits by serving more parties through their tables at peak times - maybe 10-15 min per table that uses the order system.

Some variant of this might also work for busy bars too.

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#46

Post by guywithabike »

thebenedict wrote: post #36
booruguru wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. I thought the main selling point of an iPad is that it's even easier than a Mac. I mean, how much easier could a tablet be?

A lot. My parents and I recently bought my 93 yo Grandfather an iPad, and even though he's smart and has owned a desktop mac for 15 years he still struggles with things like email and photos on the iPad. Senior-oriented features/ui, and maybe family remote control help, would be neat. It's also possible that 93 is just too old for some people to learn new technology. Tangentially relevant: watching a nontechnical sen…

The problem is that to simplify an interface further after a certain point, you need to remove features. But the features you remove will be inessential to some people but absolutely essential to others. Even if you've reduced your target market to "the elderly who want to use email to send and receive pictures", you've still got a huge pile of features that you'll never reduce far enough to make it simple for everyone.

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#47

Post by ams6110 »

digikata wrote: post #44

Order while you wait infrastructure at restaurants. Basically pull up the menu via wifi while waiting for your table to clear. Take the order, and maybe even pay ahead. Orchestrate the order so that the food is available shortly after you sit down. This lets the restaurant increase their profits by serving more parties through their tables at peak times - maybe 10-15 min per table that uses the order system. Some var…

The restaurant chain Chili's does something close to this at least where I live. There's a wireless device at each table where you can order as soon as you sit down. You can pay your check also so there's no waiting for the waiter to bring a paper check and you never have to give up posession of your credit card.

They don't do while you wait ordering AFAIK. Well maybe they do if you "wait" in the bar!

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#48

Post by dbarlett »

seanmccann wrote: post #6

What Dropbox did for storage, but for CPUs. The classic business example would be that you have to to process a large Excel doc and are willing to pay extra to speed it up. With fast internet connections and cheap online storage, it could be opened up to a growing number of tasks like video rendering.

That was the idea behind PiCloud [1], which was acquired by... Dropbox [2].

[1] http://www.picloud.com/

[2] http://www.wired.com/2013/11/dropbox-piclou/

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#49

Post by gordon_freeman »

I am fed up with all those warranty cards I am getting with every equipment I buy like juicer,external HDD,etc. so thought what if I can make a smartphone app with open API which other manufacturers can use to link their warranty info.

Through the app, you can apply for warranty , see when it is expiring etc.

Re: Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

#50

Post by michaelbuckbee »

seanmccann wrote: post #6

What Dropbox did for storage, but for CPUs. The classic business example would be that you have to to process a large Excel doc and are willing to pay extra to speed it up. With fast internet connections and cheap online storage, it could be opened up to a growing number of tasks like video rendering.

There have been a couple attempts at this: and the general consensus is that the bandwidth issues tend to swamp the costs of what you'd pay to handle it internally.
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