I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas

#61

Post by scrollaway » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 7:04 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #56

scrollaway wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

1, 3, 4, 5, 15, 17, 18, 19¹, 20, 23, 24, 25

¹ Arguably uncertain about this one so willing to bring it down to 11.

I can see some flaws in this list though. For one thing, anyone who ticks 1 will also tick 23 for example. 16 ("Is 100x better than any current product or service.") is also very subjective.

I didn't tick "Cannot be easily replicated" and, for the reasons you mentioned, that's essentially untickable. Google cannot be easily replicated, but that's because Google's been around a decade.

Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas

#62

Post by krisgenre » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 7:04 AM UTC

bobby_9x wrote: post #24

sivers wrote: post #21

Love 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.

It takes immense commitment to bring an idea to life. If someone had asked me to build an app that can send disappearing messages, being a technical guy, I would have immediately dismissed it saying its impossible. But SnapChat worked, turns out people aren't too worried about taking screenshots.

Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas

#63

Post by Cshelton » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 7:18 AM UTC

graham1776 wrote: post #46

danieltillett wrote: post #42

There 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'm a lead developer for a well funded CRE asset management SaaS company. We are launching this year and have sold a lot. A good number of the big...and biggest, names are our clients. I guess we would mostly fall into the 'mint for CRE' category, except property/assets are just a piece of it. We go all the way up through loans, deals, equity, the cap stack for each thing and the entire portfolio. All with realtime reporting/analytics, data integration from anywhere (extremely simple to use, unlike most systems...), chart of accounts roll ups, etc. It has been a TON of development time (close to 3 years now) and is a massive system.

I think we'll see some more adopted standards in data schemas and APIs with governmental organizations that will really change the CRE world. Underwriting and securitization is a huge opportunity for when that becomes more widely adopted. I'm sure you're quite familiar with the securitization process of today and how crazy it seems...excel workbooks and binders full of reports everywhere is a nightmare.

Argus is such a big player, however they won't get disrupted all at once in my opinion. So many processes, reports and data is intertwined in it, it'll take some time to unravel...but yes, big opportunity.

All in all, many of the 'ideas' in CRE are well known, it's getting the industry on a macro and micro scale to adopt new practices and solutions that are actually good. For example, think of all the CRE loans out there...to get detail information on them ( thousands and thousands..) you really have to pay big money to someone like Intex or something. And then parsing that data even more to be useable at scale is a whole other undertaking.

I'm interested to see how the 'crowdsourcing' CRE world develops. That space is pretty wide open with big but unestablished players.

I've got many ideas for stuff I want to do down the road, let's talk.

Note: I didn't edit this at all, it's probably filled with grammer errors...but it's late and don't care =p

Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas

#64

Post by tezza » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 7:21 AM UTC

The "Talk to the Picutres" books already exist[1].

A good one is Welcome to the Zoo by Alison Jay[2].

Also wordless picture books are popular amongst Rudolf Steiner teachers.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/wordless-picture-books

[2] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Welcome-Zoo-Alison-Jay/dp/184011973X

Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas

#65

Post by hanyoon » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 7:35 AM UTC

Awesome stuff! Glad to see that we had a handful of very similar ideas.

Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas

#66

Post by cookiecaper » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 7:53 AM UTC

shostack wrote: post #59

cookiecaper wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They're usually hidden behind layers of LLCs and DBAs, so not really; there's not a big website that says "Hey, we just steal whatever we can". If you trace the threads back to "online lead generation experts" or "internet marketing specialists", you'll find lots of such enterprises.

In my case, most of the active properties I knew are offline (though their proprietors are still rich). One guy was trying to be Tim Ferriss and had a membership site that promised to teach users how to get rich working no more than 4 hours a day. He had about 2 dozen other sites generating some income here or there, but I don't remember any others. They were hosted on a rack with 3 FreeBSD servers running in the corner of his office that some contractor had set up years earlier.

One guy was selling really bad eBay listing management software. He also had sites meant to ease the process of applying for government grants, a site that referred patients to audiologists for new hearing aids (which resulted in a lawsuit from the competitor that he had ripped off), and others.

Although all of these projects were objectively terrible and not competitive with the good products in each field, these guys almost undoubtedly made way more money than the programmers of the products they're trying to copy because they had much better SEO and spam game. While the dev who builds decent products is spending his free time thinking of the amazing features he's going to build and how much his users will appreciate them, the career spammer is thinking about which of his spam sites he needs to swap links with next so that Google doesn't detect the link ring and decrease the PageRank, and how he needs to add another minimum wage lackey to keep up with all the astroturfing they need to do.

I know of several similar schemes. They aren't the edgy startups we hear about here on HN, but the proprietors end up making quite the pretty penny off these things, despite the fact that none of them have any interest in the subject matter, nor any technical skill. They spam and rake in the dough, getting their tech work done by offshore contractors on oDesk if they can't find a naive local student who'll work only for promises of equity.

The moral of the story is that devs need to spend their time getting access to a network of sites that make it easy to gain PageRank for any desired term and tapping good astroturfing resources instead of working on features. It's really discouraging as a tech entrepreneur trying to provide quality products.

Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas

#67

Post by simonebrunozzi » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 7:55 AM UTC

sivers wrote: post #21

Love 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…

Derek! Nice to have found you here! Keep writing that stuff, you're great and I'm a big fan of yours.

Also, a note: EVEN IF someone steal your idea and becomes rich with it, it doesn't necessarily mean that you would have been able to.

An example I come out with is Orkut vs Facebook. Orkut didn't go anywhere, Facebook did very well. If Mark Z stole the idea (don't know if he did) or not, would not have changed Orkut's fate by much.

Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas

#68

Post by sago » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 8:02 AM UTC

marincounty wrote: post #25

I liked the hacker news for moms. I throw in hacker news for Horologists. (I'm working on this now.) Hacker news for collector car enthusiasts. Hacker news for Jewelers. When I was younger, I wanted to make/sell a chewing gum that that had an alkaline natural substance in it; something that would neutralize the acids in you mouth. Something you could use after eating lunch, or something sweet? I imagine just chewing…

> Hacker news for X

Isn't this reddit? Subreddits, in particular. Sure mainline reddit can be banal and toxic, but there are a lot of valuable subs.

Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas

#69

Post by hellofunk » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 8:03 AM UTC

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #67

sivers wrote: post #21

Love 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…

Derek! Nice to have found you here! Keep writing that stuff, you're great and I'm a big fan of yours. Also, a note: EVEN IF someone steal your idea and becomes rich with it, it doesn't necessarily mean that you would have been able to. An example I come out with is Orkut vs Facebook. Orkut didn't go anywhere, Facebook did very well. If Mark Z stole the idea (don't know if he did) or not, would not have changed Orkut'…

To me, a more compelling question is if Orkut would have succeeded if Facebook had never been invented?

Re: I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas

#70

Post by onion2k » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 8:22 AM UTC

There's a whole website dedicated to ideas like these: http://www.halfbakery.com/ Some of them are very funny, some might actually make good businesses.