4 ms·

Do you have any spare startup ideas worth building?

3 points by jrwit 11y ago

mindcrime 11y ago
Probably, although nothing sitting at the forefront of my mind right this minute. Still, if anybody is looking for a startup idea, there are a few things you can use to help kickstart your thinking. 1. Look at pg's / yc's "RFS" (Request for Startup) posts. https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-requests-for-startups http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-requests-for-startups 2. Something I experimented with for a while, but eventually quit (much to my detriment, probably) is this: try to think up 10 ideas a day, every day. Write them down. Yeah, probably most of them will be shit, but if you're doing 10 ideas a day, you'll probably hit on something good just by the law of large numbers. The question, of course, is can you distinguish the good idea from the not-so-good ones? 3. Read the news, pay attention to what's going on around you, and keep asking "how could I apply some tech that I know something about, to help this situation"? 4. Doodle. Draw boxes and arrows and just try to connect things. Do this in conjunction with (3) above. 5. Here's one of my favorites: read about OLD tech. Go back in time. In tech, there's a strong and noticeable "what's old is new again" theme. Old ideas go out of vogue and come back into vogue in a slightly altered form. Look for some tech idea that was trendy 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years ago, and ask yourself if it could be revisited now and made more useful due to Moore's law, the Internet, "big data", whatever. Or, on a related note, sometimes ideas come out that are actually good ideas, but they fail because they were simply too early. The environment wasn't right, but maybe it is now. Find something that failed and see if conditions have changed enough to make that old, failed idea into a viable idea. OK, here's a free startup idea for you... take everything I said above, add your own ideas to the mix, and then build a tool / service for helping people come up with startup ideas. Text mine old news articles, books, manuals, alongside current news articles and research papers (look at arXiv.org and other pre-print servers) and identify a way to extract useful startup ideas from that morass.
krapp 11y ago
I do not. If I did, I would be building them. The closest thing I think I had to what might be an interesting idea lately was a tool that automatically detected and translated Japanese text in videos. But it's technically way beyond my abilities, and I have no idea how I would actually make money at it if I could do it well at all, and if Google can't do it already, I definitely can't. I don't even know where Grimsby is.

3 points by jrwit 11y ago

Probably, although nothing sitting at the forefront of my mind right this minute. Still, if anybody is looking for a startup idea, there are a few things you can use to help kickstart your thinking. 1. Look at pg's / yc's "RFS" (Request for Startup) posts. https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-requests-for-startups http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-requests-for-startups 2. Something I experimented with for a while, but eventually quit (much to my detriment, probably) is this: try to think up 10 ideas a day, every day. Write them down. Yeah, probably most of them will be shit, but if you're doing 10 ideas a day, you'll probably hit on something good just by the law of large numbers. The question, of course, is can you distinguish the good idea from the not-so-good ones? 3. Read the news, pay attention to what's going on around you, and keep asking "how could I apply some tech that I know something about, to help this situation"? 4. Doodle. Draw boxes and arrows and just try to connect things. Do this in conjunction with (3) above. 5. Here's one of my favorites: read about OLD tech. Go back in time. In tech, there's a strong and noticeable "what's old is new again" theme. Old ideas go out of vogue and come back into vogue in a slightly altered form. Look for some tech idea that was trendy 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years ago, and ask yourself if it could be revisited now and made more useful due to Moore's law, the Internet, "big data", whatever. Or, on a related note, sometimes ideas come out that are actually good ideas, but they fail because they were simply too early. The environment wasn't right, but maybe it is now. Find something that failed and see if conditions have changed enough to make that old, failed idea into a viable idea. OK, here's a free startup idea for you... take everything I said above, add your own ideas to the mix, and then build a tool / service for helping people come up with startup ideas. Text mine old news articles, books, manuals, alongside current news articles and research papers (look at arXiv.org and other pre-print servers) and identify a way to extract useful startup ideas from that morass.

krapp 11y ago

I do not. If I did, I would be building them. The closest thing I think I had to what might be an interesting idea lately was a tool that automatically detected and translated Japanese text in videos. But it's technically way beyond my abilities, and I have no idea how I would actually make money at it if I could do it well at all, and if Google can't do it already, I definitely can't. I don't even know where Grimsby is.