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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#31

Post by diego »

duck wrote: post #26
diego wrote: post #22

"GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month." Ok. Number of Paul Grahams in the world times $600/year = ? Most people on the web are ridiculously stingy. "I would pay for this" is a terrible way to think for an entrepreneur. Believing that what we think represents the masses is a rookie mistake.

I think email needs to be changed from top to bottom, but offering speed alone would be a hard sell to launch with. You can get the Microsoft offering (Exchange Online or packaged with Office 365) starting at $5 a user. Microsoft can afford to spend money on it. I've used it and it is a lot faster than GMail (although it wasn't enough for me to switch).

One thing I noticed is that email is a problem for "important" people who receive tons of messages per day. They must read/answer that one vital email right away. Kevin Rose talked about this a few years ago, and I've heard many high-profile investors complaining about this.

For the vast majority of the people on the planet, GMail is just good enough. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are still doing well.

Perhaps email is perceived as a problem just because it gets tons of "face time" with us every day. I'd leave it alone and focus on one of the countless unsolved problems in the world.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#32

Post by rblion »

"The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one."

The future is uncertain, because each person is a variable and chaos is inherent in nature. However, with the sun as my witness and the earth as my ally, there is nothing that will stop my effort to liberate all beings from suffering through my startup. It's all I got left in the world, there is nothing else that matters to me. I am 22 and there is no job I want in the world, so I will create one through my ideals of universal compassion and scientific method. I will post on HN soon, I hope people understand my vision of leading Homo sapiens to become Homo universalis, that may be the only way we can actually have a type 1 or 2 civilization.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#35

Post by SkyMarshal »

aptwebapps wrote: post #21

The last graph of #6 is great. I hate to stray into politics but my scary ideas revolve around public policy and the various actions people undertake in the public sphere that affect it. More specifically: Is it possible, by providing better tools for publishing and accessing information, to substantially improve public policy debates? Can we reduce the very large rewards for dishonesty and the use of disinformation?…

Interesting idea. I think the most intractable part is that many people believe what they want to believe. They gravitate to a world view for various reasons, backfit it to the data, rationalize the cherrypicking of supporting data and discarding of refuting data, integrate it into their id or ego, fight tooth and nail to protect it, and happily accept the political dis/misinformation you're referring to.

I'd imagine you'd have to identify why people do that, why others don't, and whether it's formalizeable and transferable. Pretty sure psychology has done some work in that area, but brain-fried atm and drawing a blank...

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#36

Post by kamaal »

Donald wrote: post #27

"Google used to give me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter. ... And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to." If you disable Javascript and cookies for *.google.(tld), you'll be greeted with Google circa a few years ago: http://imgur.com/LDBLk .

I think the percentage of users who even know what Javascript is, are negligible to an extent that they don't even matter.

And people who don't know look for a new search engine rather than learning how do disable Javascript.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#37

Post by diego »

skb_ wrote: post #29
diego wrote: post #22

"GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month." Ok. Number of Paul Grahams in the world times $600/year = ? Most people on the web are ridiculously stingy. "I would pay for this" is a terrible way to think for an entrepreneur. Believing that what we think represents the masses is a rookie mistake.

Then what's a good way to think? If you can't start from "I would pay for this", then where do you start? If you wouldn't pay for it, then why would you expect others to pay for it?

Would you pay for computer support, or extended warranties? I wouldn't, but millions of people do.

It really depends on the context. When thinking about something for the masses, you are one very particular data point. You want evidence that lots of people would pay for something.

If you are building something for people like you and:

- there are lots of people like you, and you can make it very cheap

or

- you ARE paying tons of money for it already, and it could be better and cheaper (e.g. travel)

then you may be on to something.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#38

Post by politician »

diego wrote: post #31
duck wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think email needs to be changed from top to bottom, but offering speed alone would be a hard sell to launch with. You can get the Microsoft offering (Exchange Online or packaged with Office 365) starting at $5 a user. Microsoft can afford to spend money on it. I've used it and it is a lot faster than GMail (although it wasn't enough for me to switch).

One thing I noticed is that email is a problem for "important" people who receive tons of messages per day. They must read/answer that one vital email right away. Kevin Rose talked about this a few years ago, and I've heard many high-profile investors complaining about this. For the vast majority of the people on the planet, GMail is just good enough. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are still doing well. Perhaps email is perc…

Perhaps, but as Bentley and Gulfstream discovered, there is a tidy profit to be made servicing the niche needs of high-profile individuals.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#39

Post by shingen »

I'm working on #2, but the solution I've found is not exactly what Paul suggests. I ran into a need while working on my latest startup.

I'm in bed with a large tech investor for my current company, and I'm working on this tech on the side. My term sheet is such that my company owns whatever I create right now, so I'm hoping said large investor isn't too annoyed with me allocating some time on the side; my plan is to ask forgiveness instead of permission.

Aiming to kick it out to the public in a month optimistically.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#40

Post by tobiasSoftware »

I have my own to add which I'll tackle if I ever get smart enough. Code is horrible right now. The problem is that code is written linearly, when in our minds it is a graph. It's usually a bad sign when our minds see things differently than our computers do. I think if we could properly abstract the concepts, and change both our linear list of functions and our unsorted list of files to a single graph structure, we could understand our software so much better. I guess I'm thinking of UML diagrams with code, but in a way that feels natural to code in the first place, even for a beginner, not as a commented afterthought.
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