6 ms·

Ask HN: Business Ideas, Profit Off Trump Presidency

15 points by gist 10y ago

With the new administration it seems that there is and will be tremendous upheaval as well opportunity over the next 4 years. I am wondering what business ideas people have (whether they plan to implement them or not is not the issue) as a result of a change that is unlike any other we have seen. [1] . Thoughts? Ideas? Not looking for a political discussion but startup ideas which take advantage of people's uncertainty and/or hope for the future. [1] Iphone release in 2007 pales by comparison.

omilu 10y ago
pro trump / anti trump t-shirts is first to come to mind.
- hxnjxn 10y ago
  Im sure this is already happening
- tmaly 10y ago
  He must have some sort of trademark on the name
vntok 10y ago
A fact-checking platforms' checking platform?
patrics123 10y ago
- a platform to publicly present all business affiliations (and side-earnings) of any politician. (Probably not-for-profit / donations, If it something like this does not already exist) for more transparency - an autonomous wall-construction-bots business ;-) - anything which takes advantage of rising sea levels (like boats, waterproof housing on smaller areas, natural desaster warning and evacuation systems for private people or gvt) and something to handle the following mass migrations
- blunte 10y ago
  - Your business affiliations idea would be great, but people like Trump (and basically anyone rich and motivated to hide information) have so may strategies to employ to create multiple layers of opaque barriers that it would be nigh impossible to do this with provable accuracy. And besides, as we are seeing right now, "the people" can't be bothered with such concerns. Just let a guy be rich and do what he wants, right? - Your wall building idea is good though! Mix up some self driving AI with manufacturing robots that 3d print blocks out of whatever local resource they can grind and collect, follow some GPS waypoints, and you've got an anti-alien wall builder! You almost certainly could get that company funded, and you probably would secure some contracts. And if we're all lucky, your tech would get used by more mundane (and useful) projects like building low cost housing for poor people in desolate lands. - I forget where I read this recently, but I read a good expose about the people who profit from the global refugee crises. So if you just want money, then I'm sure there are opportunities to commercialize and scale the relocation of refugees. Maybe you could approach it like the doctors/lawyers who created the boom in scooters (or Rascals, if you're a SouthPark fan). They figured out how to work the disability or medicare system, and some of them operated legally while making a ton of money. Or take the US auto makers as example back when they pushed the business deduction loophole which essentially started the large SUV business. Suddenly you wanted your vehicle to be heavier than necessary so you could meet the loophole requirements for gross vehicle weight. Now what I would do is try to combine fear, exclusivity, and disaster preparation into a product that would be attractive to rich people. I mean, they already have financial assets distributed offshore and in ways that provide relative security during volatile times, but their personal physical safety is still always a concern (unless they choose to live in a bunker.) I understand that they are flocking to New Zealand as a haven - it's far away from all the dangerous poor people, and it's just a beautiful place that is generally for sale. So maybe create an emergency evacuation insurance business. They pay a small monthly fee (say 10k), and when the local shit hits the fan you whisk them away to a nice safe place. It's probably best to actually work out the details of how this could be accomplished, but on the other hand you could just roll like big businesses and just apologize and take a small financial judgement when you fail to deliver on your promises.
codegeek 10y ago
Financial Tech companies are buiding apps to track DJT's twitter feed and based on his tweets, they may go long/short on stocks. For example, he talked about Pharmas "getting away with murder" and this happened: https://twitter.com/CNBCnow/status/819220410340405248/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/CNBCnow/status/819220410340405248/photo/...
- EdwardMSmith 10y ago
  This got me thinking - Would it be illegal for Twitter to institute a delay between when Trump's tweet was "Sent" and when it is actually published, and in the intervening time, do something with that information?
bsvalley 10y ago
Not nesseceraly more business ideas. I would say for sure, fewer taxes will lead to more opportunities and more money back in our pockets. Which means more investment opportunities for up coming ideas.
- blunte 10y ago
  He said he wasn't looking for a political discussion. But since you insist on repeating the lower taxes = more opportunity, I would suggest you look at historical American tax rates relative to growth and income. Or you could research the last four years of California vs Kansas to see how taxes can affect economic performance.
  - bsvalley 10y ago
    Comparing California to Kansas is indeed a smart thing to do...
stephancoral 10y ago
The Trump administration is giving bloggers and other online 'news outlets' previously unheard of press access and credentials. I would find these blogs and 'news' sources (I personally find their journalistic pedigree laughable) and aggressively track their headlines and content. Scrape all data and train neural networks on them to generate headlines and content. Either hire a cheap college student to do some quick once-over editing or do it yourself. Then, automate a publishing pipeline - it could be as simple as Lua script that samples from the NN and then pushes to a wordpress or blog. You can do all of this on a $750 dollar computer (just splurge on the GPU). The real trick is crafting the facebook posts. So I would watch to see what breaking news alerts happened and then tweak the generated content based on that and then dump a few dollars to promote the post that had a great headline + FB commentary, not to mention a catchy picture. Once you build an audience, ad money will roll in and I don't just mean AdWords. Focus on native content and tweak your generation algorithm for each brand sponsor you acquire (trust me, if you have a few thousand uniques a day you'll have people knocking on your door esp if its a conservative slant since more small business owners in America tend to lean that way). I've played around with generating Breitbart headlines and the results are sometimes scarily close to home. It's also key to generate "think pieces" and other opinion material so that way you can produce content that isn't necessarily "news" (and thus less reliant on 'timely' data which is expensive to acquire since it takes time to train the NN on new data) but are still able to propagate repeatable viewpoints/headlines i.e. 'facts' in our time, which is how you build your audience and revenue stream. The genius part of this is that even if your cover is blown, you will be hailed as a thought leader because of your subversive enterprise. It has all the requisite crossover buzz: machine learning, fake news, alternative facts, 'bubbles', distrust of media etc. You can easily pick up some television and other media spots not to mention the tell-all piece for Vice or Esquire. For inspiration and more information, read up on Vladislav Surkov. Also check out the latter half of the videogame Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, which not only predicted the rise of memes as political discourse, but also does an excellent job examining media disinformation techniques (in this case, the hysteria of Y2K) and the use of AI to control public conversation. Have fun.

15 points by gist 10y ago

omilu 10y ago

pro trump / anti trump t-shirts is first to come to mind.

hxnjxn 10y ago
Im sure this is already happening
tmaly 10y ago
He must have some sort of trademark on the name

vntok 10y ago

A fact-checking platforms' checking platform?

patrics123 10y ago

- a platform to publicly present all business affiliations (and side-earnings) of any politician. (Probably not-for-profit / donations, If it something like this does not already exist) for more transparency - an autonomous wall-construction-bots business ;-) - anything which takes advantage of rising sea levels (like boats, waterproof housing on smaller areas, natural desaster warning and evacuation systems for private people or gvt) and something to handle the following mass migrations

blunte 10y ago
- Your business affiliations idea would be great, but people like Trump (and basically anyone rich and motivated to hide information) have so may strategies to employ to create multiple layers of opaque barriers that it would be nigh impossible to do this with provable accuracy. And besides, as we are seeing right now, "the people" can't be bothered with such concerns. Just let a guy be rich and do what he wants, right? - Your wall building idea is good though! Mix up some self driving AI with manufacturing robots that 3d print blocks out of whatever local resource they can grind and collect, follow some GPS waypoints, and you've got an anti-alien wall builder! You almost certainly could get that company funded, and you probably would secure some contracts. And if we're all lucky, your tech would get used by more mundane (and useful) projects like building low cost housing for poor people in desolate lands. - I forget where I read this recently, but I read a good expose about the people who profit from the global refugee crises. So if you just want money, then I'm sure there are opportunities to commercialize and scale the relocation of refugees. Maybe you could approach it like the doctors/lawyers who created the boom in scooters (or Rascals, if you're a SouthPark fan). They figured out how to work the disability or medicare system, and some of them operated legally while making a ton of money. Or take the US auto makers as example back when they pushed the business deduction loophole which essentially started the large SUV business. Suddenly you wanted your vehicle to be heavier than necessary so you could meet the loophole requirements for gross vehicle weight. Now what I would do is try to combine fear, exclusivity, and disaster preparation into a product that would be attractive to rich people. I mean, they already have financial assets distributed offshore and in ways that provide relative security during volatile times, but their personal physical safety is still always a concern (unless they choose to live in a bunker.) I understand that they are flocking to New Zealand as a haven - it's far away from all the dangerous poor people, and it's just a beautiful place that is generally for sale. So maybe create an emergency evacuation insurance business. They pay a small monthly fee (say 10k), and when the local shit hits the fan you whisk them away to a nice safe place. It's probably best to actually work out the details of how this could be accomplished, but on the other hand you could just roll like big businesses and just apologize and take a small financial judgement when you fail to deliver on your promises.

codegeek 10y ago

Financial Tech companies are buiding apps to track DJT's twitter feed and based on his tweets, they may go long/short on stocks. For example, he talked about Pharmas "getting away with murder" and this happened: https://twitter.com/CNBCnow/status/819220410340405248/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/CNBCnow/status/819220410340405248/photo/...

EdwardMSmith 10y ago
This got me thinking - Would it be illegal for Twitter to institute a delay between when Trump's tweet was "Sent" and when it is actually published, and in the intervening time, do something with that information?

bsvalley 10y ago

Not nesseceraly more business ideas. I would say for sure, fewer taxes will lead to more opportunities and more money back in our pockets. Which means more investment opportunities for up coming ideas.

blunte 10y ago
He said he wasn't looking for a political discussion. But since you insist on repeating the lower taxes = more opportunity, I would suggest you look at historical American tax rates relative to growth and income. Or you could research the last four years of California vs Kansas to see how taxes can affect economic performance.
- bsvalley 10y ago
  Comparing California to Kansas is indeed a smart thing to do...

stephancoral 10y ago

The Trump administration is giving bloggers and other online 'news outlets' previously unheard of press access and credentials. I would find these blogs and 'news' sources (I personally find their journalistic pedigree laughable) and aggressively track their headlines and content. Scrape all data and train neural networks on them to generate headlines and content. Either hire a cheap college student to do some quick once-over editing or do it yourself. Then, automate a publishing pipeline - it could be as simple as Lua script that samples from the NN and then pushes to a wordpress or blog. You can do all of this on a $750 dollar computer (just splurge on the GPU). The real trick is crafting the facebook posts. So I would watch to see what breaking news alerts happened and then tweak the generated content based on that and then dump a few dollars to promote the post that had a great headline + FB commentary, not to mention a catchy picture. Once you build an audience, ad money will roll in and I don't just mean AdWords. Focus on native content and tweak your generation algorithm for each brand sponsor you acquire (trust me, if you have a few thousand uniques a day you'll have people knocking on your door esp if its a conservative slant since more small business owners in America tend to lean that way). I've played around with generating Breitbart headlines and the results are sometimes scarily close to home. It's also key to generate "think pieces" and other opinion material so that way you can produce content that isn't necessarily "news" (and thus less reliant on 'timely' data which is expensive to acquire since it takes time to train the NN on new data) but are still able to propagate repeatable viewpoints/headlines i.e. 'facts' in our time, which is how you build your audience and revenue stream. The genius part of this is that even if your cover is blown, you will be hailed as a thought leader because of your subversive enterprise. It has all the requisite crossover buzz: machine learning, fake news, alternative facts, 'bubbles', distrust of media etc. You can easily pick up some television and other media spots not to mention the tell-all piece for Vice or Esquire. For inspiration and more information, read up on Vladislav Surkov. Also check out the latter half of the videogame Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, which not only predicted the rise of memes as political discourse, but also does an excellent job examining media disinformation techniques (in this case, the hysteria of Y2K) and the use of AI to control public conversation. Have fun.