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Ideas for Startups (2005)
- xcoding 10y agoWhat is your next idea for startup?
- perardi 10y agoHard to say, now that the "sell out to Yahoo!" business plan is off the table.
- JackTheReacher 10y agoHow about a dating app where people post daily pictures of themselves right after they've woken up. Upload one daily to keep using the app. The idea is to have more authenticity from everyone... Just a thought.
- brianwawok 10y agoWhat if there is a rando next to you in the picture?
- 50CNT 10y agoThat's signaling you're an attractive mate other people will sleep with right there! I think we're onto something.
- amorphid 10y agoThis app must be called Bedhead.
- jimmytee 10y agoSounds like fun, but imho people would still fake it.
- jozzas 10y agoCamera permissions only, no storage? Unless they take a photo of a photo
- mathnode 10y agoA regional Condom Drone Delivery Service. - "Rubber up 'bruv", in the UK. - "Rubber a brother" for the US. Expand to CAAS (contraceptives as a service) when applying for second round, pre-ipo.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jlebrech 10y agowhat about a swooning service, you get the rubber, an uber to the hotel and a bottle of champagne.
- thesehands 10y agoUber to an airbnb. It shall be called accommo-dating
- mathnode 10y agoNo, "do one thing well". However with a premium delivery purchase, the drone will also work as an 'applicator'.
- malloryerik 10y agoHaircut drone.
- samcheng 10y ago
- hienyimba 10y agoVery true classic. Its mind-blowing to imagine this advise still holds water 11 years after.
- CalChris 10y agoI'm deeply skeptical of anyone who wants to start a startup. I'm very respectful of people who have great ideas. One thing about startup first is that it ends up with a lot of duplication. Granted Google and Facebook were duplicates. And so it's fitting that they are in essence aggregators. But I'm an engineer (and not a VC) and I have a natural inclination towards the Woz approach. The magic happens in the process of work. It doesn't happen in office hours at an incubator. I think a more useful article would be Ideas For Founder Teams. But that's some hard thinking.
- dasmoth 10y agoOne reason to want to do a startup (in the abstract) is because you're unhappy with the degree of autonomy at most 9-5 jobs. I somewhat think a bootstrapped-profitable business might be a better route though, if you can manage that.
- Tharkun 10y agoIt's true that a lot of startups have, well, a "startup vibe" at first. I many cases that seems to disappear as soon as external capital is poured in :-(
- k__ 10y agoWell, besides "what" you sell in the end, running a company is a job of its own. And you can only learn it by running a company... So if you want to be a "Professional Company Runner", you got to start somewhere. I mean its as legitimate as being a professional programmer or a professional artist, etc.
- thewhitetulip 10y agoI met with a "startup" founder who wanted to "disrupt" hiring. His idea was to provide a platform for hiring which would be audio/video based and would use some magic to connect companies and people. As if parsing a resume wasn't enough and like recruiters don't know how to use Skype. All the time we were talking, he was explaining more about "disruption" rather than talking concretely about the idea itself. Sam Altman, in the startup course in Stanford said a nice quote, " don't start a startup just because you want to start one, work on something and if it clicks, then start a startup"
- fiatjaf 10y agoImagine what Leibniz would say of this.
- pascalxus 10y agoAnyone can think of ideas. I'm sure we've all got entire documents with lists of ideas we never followed up on. The hard part is finding opportunities to create value for others (making stuff people actually want). Generally speaking, people already have the stuff they want that they can have. Now, I'm sure Paul Graham would say people's desires are infinite and there's still many unmet needs and wants. For All the stuff they don't have but want: well, there are major barriers to entry for those business ideas (flying cars), the exception being those ideas that were just recently enabled by another innovation (a Rare treat indeed). I think we've had this conversation before.... And, as he said in another post: you've got to be at the forefront of any industry. Live in the future. Meaning, use the latest tools and gizmos of any particular industry in order to help understand where things are and get a feel for them.
- murukesh_s 10y agoAdding to that I would say it's a little bit luck with an eye for disruption. Look at slack. We thought people had all the stuff they wanted but slack came out of nowhere. We thought skype/sms/gtalk was good enough and came WhatsApp. And snapchat, now it might look like a neat idea, but imagine that couple of years back. There is always room for disruption. Few categories of products are almost like fashion. There is no additional value they are bringing to the table. And there is no logical reasoning or no proper prediction possible on what becomes the next big thing. Then there is this room for replicating similar succuccessful ideas in emerging markets. Hundreds of ideas waiting to be explored in hundreds of markets. Then the unexplored beast of enterprise software. Not the makrt of consumer products rebranded as 'for' enterprise but actual tools or services that improves existing ones, many of which are decades old. But you need to be deep inside the domain to disrupt here. And of course finally the innovative ones. Which are the hardest but perhaps the most publicised making an impression that startups are all about innovative ideas.
- Can_Not 10y ago> We thought skype/sms/gtalk was good enough Nooooo we didn't. Skype is garbage (on Linux and in general), sms is fast and unreliable and expensive (to the consumers) but effectively free (to the gate keepers), gtalk was cancelled in favor of hangouts, which has lots of room for improvement (both in general and for organizations). Snapchat and WhatsApp are priming for their big sell outs where they transform into some nightmarish shitware/spyware/adware. IRC is cool for underground hacking circles, but without a good GUI and reliable offline messages, IRC is dead on arrival if you need non-techies involved in a serious work environment. If anything, this market has been screaming and begging for disruption.
- brian-armstrong 10y agoI actually think there's still potentially room for a new phone OS, though maybe only just barely. iOS is in dire need of new UX patterns. Take the text selector for example, which felt like a stopgap when it was made and hasn't been changed since its release. There a ton of papercuts like this in iOS. I don't use Android regularly so I can't speak as much to its weaknesses, but I believe there's a lot of room for improvement there as well, e.g. app discovery and distribution There's a photo floating around of Paris Hilton holding 5 phones. It's comical but I think it also shows what's lacking. It'd be great if phones had sandboxed profiles, completely isolated from one another in true multiuser fashion. There are a lot of opportunities either for greenfield ideas or adopting existing computing ideas to phones. You might find at least enough market for a niche use capable of supporting a small to medium business
- grzm 10y agoiOS is in dire need of new UX patterns. Take the text selector for example, which felt like a stopgap when it was made and hasn't been changed since its release. I'm not familiar with touch alternatives to iOS' text selector. Do you know of better ones, or have ideas how it can be improved?
- brian-armstrong 10y agoI have to admit that I'm not, but I do think that iOS's is deeply flawed, especially considering its snap to behavior which has no overrides or disambiguation for where to snap. I'm not a UX person and my mind doesn't naturally work on that domain, and yet I'm confident that UX people could improve the process. One concrete idea comes to mind - why not a modal dialog that only has selection abilties. If the default behavior works, then use it and if not, move up to the modal
- grzm 10y agoI'd love to hear more about your idea. Care to expand with an example of how it would work? What kind of overrides are you thinking of? What would the role of the modal dialog be?