191–200 of 220 posts
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>People too young to go to business school have cashed out of YC companies. Did these people crawl out of the womb with a keyboard in one hand and an apache server in the other? How do you suppose they learned how to program?
Presumably the same way I did. I have 1 semester of school, and I took liberal arts classes.
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It seems like someone did do them! Obvious examples include: 1. basecamp/fogbugz/jira 2. Confluence/Sharepoint 3. django/rails 4. Google Docs 5. Facebook
I think there is a lot further someone could take #3 (crud apps for business). While django/rails are great, I think you could build some more specific tools that would provide a lot more leverage in some cases. (Maybe something like DabbleDB but with some more specifics built in.)
Sample walk-through :: Building a Store Locator type Google Maps app over GAE, using iFreeTools : http://blogs.ifreetools.com/2010/11/building-store-locator-t...
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The ideas are obvious because people want them. Lots of people want a Craigslist alternative that doesn't have the shittiest search interface this side of 2004. Lots of people want a dating site with a 'market' that doesn't heavily heavily favor women. Lots of people want to exercise/lose weight in a fun game-like way. Lots of people want the concept of TripAdvisor but don't feel like they identify at all with the ty…
"Lots of people want a dating site with a 'market' that doesn't heavily heavily favor women." Yeah, they're called men. And given that history tells us that attracting men to dating sites isn't a business-limiting problem, it follows that building a (heterosexual) dating site that appeals to men is not a good business idea.
I hope I don't come across as negative here, but I hate lists like this. Peopel are always raining on each others' ideas "Oh, what, you're going to make a myspace clone? Bahahahaha." (facebook) "Oh, what, you're going to make a facebook clone? Bahahahaha." (twitter) "Oh, what, you're going to make another dating website? Bahahahaha." (Okcupid, plentyoffish) "Oh, what, you're going to make another social bookmarking w…
We just did that for Medical field - "Prognosis", currently at 5th position on iPhone medical apps (after 15 days).
http://www.prognosisapp.com/ http://blog.medicaljoyworks.com/
In my day (I'm only 32), the startup ideas everyone always wanted to do were: 1. A better bug/issue tracking system 2. A custom CMS 3. A code library/platform for easily building Business CRUD apps. 4. A word processing app that has only the 20% features that 80% of Word users use. 5. A better classmates.com
Don't forget about 'better' ebays. I've seen serious money wasted on people thinking they could out-do ebay 7 or 8 years ago. Usually by companies already in the auction space who thought they could bring their experience and contacts to the game and win. Nowadays nobody bothers, but the online auction space was very attractive for a lot of people. ebay still has a lot of flaws but the name is a verb for selling some…
Being a big fish in a small pond can be profitable - these days, its Groupon clones setting up outside the US. I think this stands a higher than average chance of working - simply because the model does require direct interaction with businesses, and therefore local operators are going to have an advantage in terms of cultural/local knowledge.
If you're lucky to win your local market, you'll probably end up getting acquired by Groupon itself.
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Like what cases? Both frameworks support plugins you know.
Sure, but do you really want to mess with low level things like html (or even haml, etc) when all you care about is business logic? Not saying you are wrong, just saying I think there is room in that space for some innovation.
Sure, HTML editing is still required and can be painful, but it is an effective way of branding the final result. I think clickety-click interfaces where you modify the interface through various selections / drag-n-dropping are seriously flawed.
Yes, MS Office is a nice example of what a WYSIWYG interface can do, but that's just for standard documents. As soon as you want to get creative in Word, you'll feel the pain and start wishing for HTML.
Besides ... design, other than replacing a logo / playing with colors / choosing a layout from a predefined set, should be left to people that know what they are doing and there is no way around that, because IMHO the hard part is not the HTML language itself, which is included nowadays in high-school curriculum.
http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/8-stupid-frat-boy-...
But now there is Chegg.
And Chegg is not just Sethi's despised textbook exchange idea -- it started as a Craigslist competitor for campuses! And when it pivoted to its current model in 2007, it first used the name textbookflix.com! And it competes against others on price! So it fits multiple categories from these Ramit Sethi and Elad Gil 'never work' lists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chegg
Estimates are that it'll have more than $100 million in revenue this year and is growing to a dominant position in a large market.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/05/teardown-chegg/
Chegg's final success isn't assured -- especially given the rise of e-textbooks -- but it's passed the point of "tempting but foolish nerd/frat-boy startup idea".
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Yes, business school is a waste. Yes, Java cash register programs are a waste. Yes, doomed Craigslist competitors are a waste. People too young to go to business school have cashed out of YC companies. Aspire to that, not to rationalizing very expensive learning experiences.
>People too young to go to business school have cashed out of YC companies. Did these people crawl out of the womb with a keyboard in one hand and an apache server in the other? How do you suppose they learned how to program?
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"Lots of people want a dating site with a 'market' that doesn't heavily heavily favor women." Yeah, they're called men. And given that history tells us that attracting men to dating sites isn't a business-limiting problem, it follows that building a (heterosexual) dating site that appeals to men is not a good business idea.
I think what he meant was dating sites suck if you're a man since: 1.) Men do all the chasing/initiating contact. 2.) Women get inundated with a lot of messages from a lot of other eligible men that you're competing with your entire neighborhood for a single girl. 3.) Hence women tend to be really picky and chances of her noticing/replying back you are incredibly low.
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How many of these bad ideas are simply nerds looking at facebook saying "you're going down"? I doubt twitter was, and I doubt that whatever eventually topples facebook will be. My point is that this sort of philosophy helps nobody . People who are already successful already know this stuff. At least to me, this sort of list feels like it's being aimed at people who haven't "made it" yet and are still trying to figure…
I don't want to make people feel bad any more than you do. But there are good business ideas and there are bad business ideas, and life is tough that way, and starting a head-on competitor to Facebook with nothing but your ability to learn how to represent a graph in MySQL is a bad business idea .
Like you said earlier, a lot of it is luck, just like winning the lottery. By not playing/trying at all you will most definitely not win any lottery.
Doing exactly 100% the same that is already existing anyway (facebook,twitter,myspace..) doesn't sound like a great idea but improving on that, well why not?