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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

#512
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to say what the problem is that your idea solves?

Frankly I'd rather keep it to myself. I'm baffled that nobody thought about it since 10 years. But right now I'm working on a back-end code generation tool : the user would just draw a data schema and once done get a database (as a script or as a container or directly in his cloud of choice) and scaffolding for the API. The data schema is based on a specific method that makes it simple to think about your data withou…

Funny, I built this exact thing back in 2007 but couldn't market/sale it. Hope you have better luck &/ now the timing is right!

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

#513
Ha ! I've heard before of the "great team + capital" story so I am not surprised. A great execution team is a really good competitive advantage imo.

I'm already creating a business, but I have tons of ideas. I wouldn't even want a share of the companies you could build from these - ideas are cheap, right ?

You know hat ? I'll give you two very good ideas for free, and if you like them I'd be down to selling you two excellent ideas ;)

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

#514

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.

You can't know for certain if an idea is good ahead of time. You can identify some bad ideas that look good with a little research, but the only sure way to tell is to do the thing. Hell even if it is a good idea they might just fail to execute it properly. I wonder if they're just too risk averse. Looking for a sure thing when there's no such thing.

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

#516
post #429

I can give you one idea for something I would really love if it existed, but I don't have the resources to do it myself: A marketplace for sales people and SaaS products. Every sales agent can sell any product and get commission. This way, an agent walks to a business, and instead of offering him 1 product he doesn't need, he can offer him from dozens of products a few he really needs.

Sounds like you're talking about something like ClickBank or ShareASale with a focus on software as a service.

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

#517

I would pay, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for an APP that can build me a house (all costs included). I am not alone. Obviously, this idea is overly ambitious. But, can you take a moonshot idea like that and break it down into smaller pieces? Perhaps, work on one small piece of a really difficult problem. In the example I gave, perhaps a zoning ordinance voting platform that makes zoning change paper wor…

Manufactured homes are already a thing. An app to streamline the process of a custom build would be fighting against the (undeserved) stigma, but it'd be interesting to see.

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

#519

Would it be possible for your team to start a small VC firm instead of a startup? Wouldn't that be a better fit for a team that has lots of capital, one technical partner, and one sales partner, but currently doesn't have an idea?

I was thinking this too. I was going to say it might be worth looking for projects that have been validated by sales and then looking to grow them both with the team and capital. Having something like a space with a couple ideas/ startups in it that have already been validated would lower your risk and expose you to more opportunities while growing the business. I assume.

If they don't have enough interest (meaning knowledge) in any market to have lots of ideas already, how will they know how to vet potential investments?

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

#520

Funny, i have 2-3 really good ideas that i feel are genuine and have large profit potential, yet i have no team and hardly any programming skills to launch them.

Have you pitched them to anyone honest enough to tell you how bad they probably are?
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