I actually did Stumble Upon for Ecommerce recently http://sovayn.com
This is great exactly what I was thinking of! Keep expanding and get it out there!
I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
51–60 of 147 posts
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#52The sqwiggle for moms one is easyish with WebRTC. I made one in an afternoon. https://github.com/respoke/yodude
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#53Love 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…
People always say that it's about the 'execution' and not the 'idea', but it's still not a good idea to share your good ideas until you are sure you either will not use it or have already gone past the initial execution stage. Why? There might be a person that has way more resources than you do (or is just better at executing) and will beat you to the market.
Maybe I don't understand what you mean, but I'd argue that if your competitive advantage is that slight, you'll likely get killed even if you make it to market first.
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#54The sqwiggle for moms one is easyish with WebRTC. I made one in an afternoon. https://github.com/respoke/yodude
So spend the next ten afternoons selling it ... am told that's the hard part
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
People always say that it's about the 'execution' and not the 'idea', but it's still not a good idea to share your good ideas until you are sure you either will not use it or have already gone past the initial execution stage. Why? There might be a person that has way more resources than you do (or is just better at executing) and will beat you to the market.
It's pretty unlikely that such a productive person or company would not have their own ideas on which they are already working. The only people who are interested in stealing ideas are people who don't know anything about building things. Lacking that constructive knowledge means they lack the basic foundation on which to riff ideas.
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 us is because they didn't know about us, which eventually became the case more often than not.
A lot of tech people in the SV bubble are oblivious to it, but there is a tech scene out there in flyover country where wealthy salespeople and marketers just do a bad job of ripping stuff off with cheap labor from oDesk and then use spam tactics to overcome the other guy, who is usually a developer slaving over something in his off hours and spends most of his free time trying to improve his product, and therefore does not have an extensive spam network to exploit.
Aside from this actually happening to me, I personally know 2 guys who have gotten rich from doing this, I accidentally interviewed at a place that does it, and I have a couple of friends who work for people that do it or something approximating it.
If you have an online business that's starting to do well, I think it's a good idea to get working on a patent for it before the filing deadline (1 yr from public disclosure) and before these guys notice you.
There's kind of this myth in the tech scene that you need to be productive and creative to make something that does well. Maybe that's true if you're going to take your company to a $10B market cap, but there are plenty of people doing 10s of millions, in and out of tech, without any of that on stuff that you probably don't even notice or think about.
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
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 not easily replicate it, not what a well resourced team could do. It is very hard to find an idea that can not be easily replicated with the right resources. I should do a follow up post on how to do this so you don’t fool yourself into think your idea is better than it really is.
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#57> COLIVING - Like WeWork but for living.
Already implemented at http://www.buildcampus.com/
> STOP SLACKERS - Logs all employees use, anonymously. Found http://www.rescuetime.com which does this awesomely
Already implemented at https://wakatime.com/
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#58Kudos. It takes a ton of courage to be open and share your ideas.
It also shows that the ideas may only be words on a screen.
Execution is everything.
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's pretty unlikely that such a productive person or company would not have their own ideas on which they are already working. The only people who are interested in stealing ideas are people who don't know anything about building things. Lacking that constructive knowledge means they lack the basic foundation on which to riff ideas.
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…
Can you give examples of these types of companies?
Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
#60There are some good things on this list. The real estate industry is a bit of a hobby of mine and the problem with trying to bring it into the 21st century is there are some very powerful vested interests who want to keep things as they are. It is also very local which makes it hard to scale. You have to unlock a lot of value or have very good local connections to get any where.
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 would love to talk (my contact details are in my profile).
My experience is in Australia where the real estate market is very different to the USA. Each state here is quite different to each other, but the more fragmented the market the more opportunities there are.