In your "Hacker News for Moms" idea description, you say, "Higher quality posts and articles than the dribble that most moms read on their Facebook feeds" (emphasis mine). I believe you mean "drivel" here. Many parents do deal with their fair share of dribble, but that's something else entirely.
I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
121–130 of 147 posts
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#122https://x.ai/ might be similar to Clara Labs.
Clara is an software powered outsourcing company. They price at $200 to $500
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
You sure about that scale? It doesn't seem particularly hard to check off 10 items off that list. I tried a previous failed idea, an idea I didn't follow up on yet and an idea I'm currently working on and got 8, 10 and 12 respectively, skipping some items I don't have an answer for. I mean I would consider all three of those good ideas, but I definitely wouldn't call them brilliant.
What were the 12 that you ticked off? I would love to see an idea that hit 12 of them - I can’t think of an idea in history that has hit 12 if you mark fairly. From my conversations with people about this list there seems to be quite a divergence in how people are marking off if their idea meets a criteria or not. For example, people consider that their idea is not easy to replicate because someone like them could no…
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7¹, 8, 9, 10², 11, 12², 14, 15, 16
¹ not counted, as I'm not the first mover
² debatable
edit: I don't think my Idea is an easy opportunity to make money because of the network effect (which ironically makes tick a few of the points), making it hard to gain critical mass. And It's also hard because of the existing, well defended, monopolies and big players.
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#124If these low-value ideas are worth sharing, then I have 1000 ideas to share.
Looking forward to your post.
Moreover, these kind of ideas are a distraction. People go and implement them as if they were all unique and disconnected from one another. I have known for a while that we need to tackle all of these ideas as a single one.
I'm building a system that will solve 80% of all problems these ideas could ever be solutions to.
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. I didn't tell anyone "my idea", but several people copied it after my site was released (afaik, we were first of kind). One of them eventually eclipsed us, despite our one year head start, by making extensive use of the owner's existing spam and "SEO" network. Their site was a cheap knockoff, and the product was objectively worse in every meaningful category. The only reason one would use them instead of…
> and the product was objectively worse in every meaningful category. Except marketing and sales. You forgot marketing and sales. Most developers do. Even if you're releasing your project free and open source, there is still a marketing and "sales" cycle you have to engage, to convince people to spend their time on your project. If you really care about your projects, you'll stop neglecting marketing and sales. Regar…
I mean, I didn't really "forget" them so much as try to earn them in the "honest" way. I was paying for sponsorships and ads. I was trying to make partnerships. We had a social media presence that was growing and active. We stupidly believed Google's recommendation that the best way to rank is to "just write great content", so we did that without putting a huge amount of emphasis on "link building".
Our competitor had a pre-existing network of spam sites that he used to post links to himself and get increased PageRank. He astroturfed Facebook and Twitter. He spammed niche forums until it didn't matter that they were blocking him anymore because everyone who used them had been exposed to his copycat product (they deleted any post that mentioned us, even after we offered a commission on any sign ups; we basically just accepted that since it was their turf).
Those were all things that I thought were, at best, impolite. But I've now learned my lesson: you can't win doing things the expensive, above-board way unless you have WAY a lot of money and a dedicated PR team (aka "polite spam"). If you're going to be independent and not take outside investment, and CNN isn't going to run a story on you on day 1, you have to undercut the other guy through the same guerilla spam tactics that he would use against you. We had a 1 year head start and still got clobbered by his half-functional knockoff.
We're now paying "SEO consultants" to include us on their network of link spam sites so that we can get PageRank up. I'd be interested in getting an efficient, consistent astroturfing op going, but haven't really found a great way to do it yet. I'm now convinced these tactics are hard necessities if you want to succeed in online business without the external funding needed to pay a big PR firm to get press hits, or to pay 30x more for the same reach from conventional, authorized advertisements.
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mine too, we should talk. I agree after having worked for both small startups and large corporate REITS. Most of my ideas are incremental vs monster changes. Eventually though someone will throw enough money or the government will start to regulate it enough for innovation to start.
I'm a lead developer for a well funded CRE asset management SaaS company. We are launching this year and have sold a lot. A good number of the big...and biggest, names are our clients. I guess we would mostly fall into the 'mint for CRE' category, except property/assets are just a piece of it. We go all the way up through loans, deals, equity, the cap stack for each thing and the entire portfolio. All with realtime r…
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#127i really love the "talk to the pictures" idea! would translate beautifully to a tablet app too, so that you could get a constant stream of new content (ideally creative commons).
A folder on your tablet which you open with the gallery app is more than enough to do this already. and... Why does this need to be an app? I feel that many people are brainwashed by Apple dogma.
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#128Love it. Two years ago I did this, and wrote a little something about it when I started: "Why my code and ideas are public" https://sivers.org/ws I blogged about it to call attention to it for one main reason: I wanted to see if anyone would "steal" the ideas. Because it seems to be many (MANY) people's biggest worry about sharing any ideas: that someone will steal them. See the comments in https://sivers.org/how2hir…
Derek I think you are right about why none of these ideas have been stolen :) As a general rule you don’t have to worry about your ideas being stolen unless you are lucky enough to have a truly brilliant idea [1]. The chance that you have a brilliant idea is very low. 1. By brilliant I mean an idea that checks more than 10 off my list. http://www.tillett.info/2015/08/30/ideas-are-not-cheap/
I blogged about this: http://soundingboard.tv/good-bad-idea/
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
You sure about that scale? It doesn't seem particularly hard to check off 10 items off that list. I tried a previous failed idea, an idea I didn't follow up on yet and an idea I'm currently working on and got 8, 10 and 12 respectively, skipping some items I don't have an answer for. I mean I would consider all three of those good ideas, but I definitely wouldn't call them brilliant.
What were the 12 that you ticked off? I would love to see an idea that hit 12 of them - I can’t think of an idea in history that has hit 12 if you mark fairly. From my conversations with people about this list there seems to be quite a divergence in how people are marking off if their idea meets a criteria or not. For example, people consider that their idea is not easy to replicate because someone like them could no…
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give examples of these types of companies?
They're usually hidden behind layers of LLCs and DBAs, so not really; there's not a big website that says "Hey, we just steal whatever we can". If you trace the threads back to "online lead generation experts" or "internet marketing specialists", you'll find lots of such enterprises. In my case, most of the active properties I knew are offline (though their proprietors are still rich). One guy was trying to be Tim Fe…
Another person I met was the guy who made a certain NSFW video involving a certain cup and a couple girls go viral who was 18 at the time, and drove an M3 that he paid for by cookie stuffing Amazon affiliate links using a fairly savvy approach to avoid detection, and using click hijacking attacks to make people automatically like his FB pages back when that was popular.
As much as I hate that stuff it fascinates me to no end because these people are some of the best "out of the box" thinkers I've ever met. I'd never go into business with one of them, but in general they were all pretty cool guys to drink with.
Any other examples of specific products or things like that you can share? I'm curious if these tend to be more info product-based or if these people are actually sourcing physical products or coders to create a crappy clone to sell.