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Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

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Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#471

Post by icebraining »

breakyerself wrote: post #271

Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard. Low cost stickers that can be activated then placed on items in the refrigerator to indicate how much time has passed. Should be feasible to develop for a qualified team and would save People a lot of food. Maybe the design exists and just needs proper marketing. Easy, cheap, hassle free batch scanning of photographs. How many people have boxes and boxes of family photos that they…

Right, but the question asks about good ideas, and that's a problem - how do you tell it's good? Yeah, I know about market validation, but you can't literally validate every idea you come up with. Especially if you have to build an MVP to do it.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#473

Post by throwaway4532 »

We have a great product, targeted towards enterprises, well tested in the local market, looking to expand internationally (including US). We have a couple of international deployments in our portfolio already. Our product could be categorized as a analytics, planning, data science solution. We've been on the market for 7 years, growing organically.

Currently, we are looking for an investment to fuel sales internationally and create new SaaS revenue channel to target medium and small companies. Your team sounds like a great fit to complement our mission - for example you could steer the US expansion. If you are interested, contact me under awayt764@gmail.com and leave a comment under this post.

I'm sorry for all this anonymity, I'll explain more when we get in touch.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#474

Post by a13n »

nnq wrote: post #439

STOP. Just go work for someone else, please! Pretty please! Find someone with vision, and work for/with him/her instead. Or merge as equal partners. You sound like really competent people, but working under people without their own vision and without their own ideas is a wrist slashing inducing experience... The people with the ideas/vision should be in charge, not ever the other way around! If you're execution peopl…

I can't agree. Sure, founders need to have vision, but they also need to be "execution people". You think they should just raise money and outsource all the hard work to their reports? Gross.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#475

Post by tomatocracy »

reitanqild wrote: post #421
Qwertious wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My simple advice is to stop looking for ideas and to start looking for problems. I concur, and add that HN could really help OP by complaining about random stuff here. Just complain about the first thing that comes to mind that's been bugging you, OP will really appreciate it!

Easily fixable phones and laptops. My phones and laptops are small enough and lightweight enough. Making them bulletproof is too expensive. But making them easier to fix, documenting the process and authorizing repair shops would do be great. PS: I don't need to be able to hot-swap parts. PPS: pro models from Dell and HP at least are often quite easy to disassemble and fix and I think you can often source parts from…

There are many phones out there that are easy enough to fix the common problems with the right tools (heat gun, opener tool, set of small screwdrivers and picks). Replacing a dead screen is about an hour's work for a beginner and there are enough tutorials on youtube that most beginners will get it right first time. Most parts for common phones are commonly available on aliexpress. Most other problems can be dealt with by replacing motherboard/daughterboards or battery rather than needing to bother with reflowing solder.

The real problem is that phones depreciate so quickly that replacement parts (especially displays - Samsung LED screens etc are notoriously expensive) are often more expensive than buying a new second-hand phone on eBay unless you're willing to go down the route of separating bonded LCDs from glass/touch sensors is economically viable but that is much more difficult to do right, even with the right equipment (temperature-controlled hotplate).

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#476

Post by zapperdapper »

Perhaps the problem is lack of industry experience?

I have plenty of ideas. All I see are problems that need solving. There are so many things broken in web/IT that they can't be listed here. I have a file with literally hundreds of problems that need fixing and that's just scratching the surface.

Example, I think someone already mentioned this earlier but have you ever browsed a bunch of corporate websites - I have seen so many websites that are so horribly broken that it's just crazy - there are literally MILLIONS of broken websites out there. You could start by looking into why that is (I've been thinking about it and believe there's numerous business ops just in that area alone)...

I recently wrote about how the first company I worked for ran their entire operation (which was quite complex) with a few dumb terminals and a few Z80s clocked at 4MHz, running something called TurboDOS:

https://coffeeandcode.neocities.org/remembering-turbo-dos.ht...

I once wrote an entire oil rig data acquisition system in TurboBasic in a weekend. You could use ON TIMER to called a routine every second or so, no assembler required. ON KEY and ON TIMER gave you event driven programming (ok primitive but effective). There were things like INPORTB and OUTPORTB (I think) that could write directly to ports for control and data acquisition.

So are we going back in terms of productivity? What can you do about that?

Are you still waiting for someone to come up with a viable alternative to JavaScript?

You could almost come up with something by looking at trends like the move to multi-machine, multi-processor, multi-core, multi-threaded and there are so many things that could be moved to that model for scale. Then there are the tools to help profile and debug those things. Example: Elasticsearch - Lucene was/is a great library for search/indexing, but the Elastic search guy (Shay Banon) saw the opportunity to scale that to multiple machines.

Scale drives a lot of innovation: look at innovative technologies like Redis for example.

Another example - SQL databases. Have you ever set up a MySQL replication cluster and kept it running 24/7? Sure there are excellent services like compose.io and the new kids on the block like Cockroach Labs, but highly scaled database with ease of set up and management is not really a solved problem. Just keeping the darn thing up and running is often a challenge.

Like I said, I could go on and on...

p.s. yes, people are right - a bit of competition is not necessarily a bad thing...

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#477

Post by m12k »

There's an obscene amount of software used in the enterprise that is an absolute pain to use, and inefficent too. Basically nobody in their right mind would use this stuff if they weren't being paid to do so - and if someone created a nicer alternative, the people using it would lobby their bosses to switch. Basically, the design/usability/UX revolution that has happened in the consumer IT space in the past decade has not made nearly as much of an impact in business software (especially when it comes to software aimed at non-IT companies). Companies like Slack have shown that you can make SaaS go almost viral if you address a real pain point in a way that the people on the ground understand and like.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#478

Post by [deleted] »

epynonymous wrote: post #399
epynonymous wrote: post #388

i have plenty of business ideas, but have basically been a one man team, which given my full time work status has been slow to say the least, i'm more of a product developer at heart so am looking for business and tech guys to team up with. message me if you're interested in talking, i would not mind sharing my ideas (not only sports related) and we could take it from there. stephen at madsportslab dot com

forgot to answer the questions in your post: in general, here's what i would suggest, seems like the 3 of you don't necessarily need to work for a living which is a great situation (correct me if i'm wrong). what i'd suggest is to find something that you really enjoy doing, for me, i thought about all these ideas that happened to be popular during whatever time, and though i had plenty of seemingly plausible ideas, a…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#479

Post by dkersten »

nnq wrote: post #439

STOP. Just go work for someone else, please! Pretty please! Find someone with vision, and work for/with him/her instead. Or merge as equal partners. You sound like really competent people, but working under people without their own vision and without their own ideas is a wrist slashing inducing experience... The people with the ideas/vision should be in charge, not ever the other way around! If you're execution peopl…

This went a different direction than I was expecting from the first paragraph. I thought it would go in the direction of "work for somebody else, so you can learn the problems/inefficiencies/pain points in their area and then build a startup fixing those".

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#480

Post by dkersten »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #433
Qwertious wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My simple advice is to stop looking for ideas and to start looking for problems. I concur, and add that HN could really help OP by complaining about random stuff here. Just complain about the first thing that comes to mind that's been bugging you, OP will really appreciate it!

Pain HN? Show HN Pain? Moan HN? i like the idea - we just need a new tag HN Pain Point: that seems more like it

I guess that's the basic idea behind http://oppsdaily.com/ and similar.
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