4 ms·

Can anyone build a site for sharing startup ideas?

8 points by mojuba 20y ago

mojuba 20y ago
(1) If I have an idea but don't have the time to implement it, let someone pick it up through this site. (2) If I have an idea but I'd like to "check the waters" before implementing it. (3) Any brainstorming. Most of us shouldn't be afraid of sharing ideas openly, because the value of what we do mostly is in how we do it.
- ido 20y ago
  That sounds like a neat idea - but why don't you just use a wiki?
  - mojuba 20y ago
    Wiki sucks in many respects, including lack of true parallelism, while a simple reddit-like system with discussions would work better, perhaps with some modifications.
  - Leonidas 20y ago
    You could just put up a simple forum and people can just enter their "Idea" as a topic on the forum.
    - mojuba 20y ago
      True, but doesn't voting add some dynamics to a simple forum?
      - sbraford 20y ago
        Have you guys heard of The Business Experiment? It was trying to do a lot of what's being described here. I also tried to do something similar back in the day, a kind of "human capital investment group." What any "group" that gets together like this will inevitably find is, 99% of people, or more, will just want to put up ideas. The people who would actually implement them (like myself and other entreprehackers on here), already have way to many ideas of their own that they don't have enough time to pursue.
        mojuba 20y ago
        Looks like TheBusinessExperiment.com is currently down. Can you tell us please what was that about?
        sbraford 20y ago
        hey mojuba, sure. it was kind of like what's being described in this thread. the difference was that the creators wanted to somehow compensate (with stock) both all of the people who submitted ideas / feedback. you can't do that though without coming very very near to violating SEC regulations. (Agloco will surely run into this issue as well) Net result: The Business Experiment had a hard time finding anyone to actually code up the ideas. While their first idea was still in development, a competitor came out that totally demolished their potential app's functionality. The idea was something like Google Answers meets Wisdom of Crowds.
    - mojuba 20y ago
      In fact, YCnews is perfect, except it doesn't take into account voting that's going on inside a post. That is, if there are good comments under a post from many people (the more the better) that post should get a higher rank. Well, hm, like this one :)
      - akkartik 20y ago
        news.yc doesn't allow searching ideas either. Also, we need some way to search only 'idea' posts. Perhaps if news.yc had tags that would suffice, but otherwise this may deserve a different namespace. Not something one reads everyday but more of a tool to submit or search for ideas.
danielha 20y ago
Paul Graham did. What was that site again...
jward 20y ago
You might also want to look into Cambrian House. http://www.cambrianhouse.com/ http://www.cambrianhouse.com/
- plusbryan 20y ago
  Saw this the other day. Pretty similar to an idea I presented to PG way back when. I still have PG's whiteboard post: "but some startup ideas need be kept secret"
  - andreyf 20y ago
    I still have PG's whiteboard post: "but some startup ideas need be kept secret" I have a problem with this - why? And is there a good litmus test?
waleedka 20y ago
How about submitting it to this site with the prefix [IDEA]? Mailing lists commonly use [ANN] prefixes for new announcements. There is no reason we can't use something similar. For example: [IDEA] A web site for sharing startup ideas. [STARTUP] www.shareyourstartupidea.com. Comments welcome.
- mojuba 20y ago
  I think this is Ok, except some improvement is needed on news.yc. Comments should somehow affect the rank of a post. And it's not the number of comments that matters, but rather the number of people involved, possibly taking into account their karmas. And of course this should be recursive and should be applied to comments themselves (subcomments affect the comment).
jaggederest 20y ago
Working on something like this right now, kind of a jobs/talent thing. Thought it might be useful. Will post when I've got something worth looking at (this week) Planning on making it kind of an 'Ideas wanted' or 'People wanted' or 'Money wanted' site, so people can interface. Putting my money where my mouth is with some distributed karma systems as well.
- jaggederest 20y ago
  it'll be at http://jobs.jaggederest.com/ http://jobs.jaggederest.com/
  - jaggederest 20y ago
    SVN is up. http://www.jaggederest.com/jobs/svn/ http://www.jaggederest.com/jobs/svn/
    - Sam_Odio 20y ago
      Be careful about your database.yml file :)
      - jaggederest 20y ago
        No database there for that, and pg_hba.conf is set up to not allow outside connections, but aside from that, my host uses mysql and I develop on postgres. Heh. I'm a bit amped.
bootload 20y ago
Matt Jaynes (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattjaynes) http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattjaynes) had a great idea with YFratinator (http://groups.google.com/group/yfratrinator) http://groups.google.com/group/yfratrinator) but went cold on the idea. Have a chat to matt and see if you can resurrect the idea.
omouse 20y ago
Who wants to work on this idea? I may have some free time in a few months if anyone wants to team up and build it :P
- Sam_Odio 20y ago
  It looks like there are several different users who want to build this (or something similar). I definitely think collaboration would work best - if the site is going to be used by the community it needs all of our support. It can't be a one man show. Personally, I envision a site with several different tools: idea feedback, find cofounders, find shared office space, demo new apps, a how-to resource archive, wiki, etc. I think one News.YC reader has already built a site that can be used to find cofounders. Jamie, Sumon and Timmmah built a site to demo apps (demomyapp.com). Justin is building a basic idea feedback site. John Leung is trying to organize a shared office/startup hub website. I'm building a resource archive. What if we all collaborated on one site that did it all?
  - omouse 20y ago
    That's a good idea, and the first step is organizing. My email's omouse@gmail.com and my name's Rudolf.
  - Sam_Odio 20y ago
    Some of the features could have different URLs (for example, demomyapp.com wouldn't have to move) - but it'd be cool to run we all off the same server w/ the same theme/layout and same user authentication process. Kind of like google accounts w/ google/gmail/google analytics/etc.
    - jaggederest 20y ago
      if PG put up a facility for openID on here, we could hook it up that way.
- Tichy 20y ago
  Funny, because I just registered a domain for something like that, ideasbin.com, one day before this thread started. It was a direct inspiration by YC, too: since everybody keeps going on about ideas being worthless, why not "throw away" your idea? It could also be a place to mourn your ideas that you'll never make come true. My plan was to start simple, though (perhaps reddit style ideas submission, a wiki page for the idea, 'social net' in that people can collect their favorite ideas). Seeing the ideas taking form here, I guess ideasbin would not be too successful (should have picked a more serious domain name). But anyway, in general I am interested to work on this, although actual time available might be limited. Email in my profile.
Goladus 20y ago
What about having the focus on identifying problems, rather than brainstorming ideas?
- akkartik 20y ago
  hear, hear
wammin 20y ago
Guys, I'm building a collaboration application called Wamily that would be perfect for this. I just set up a group for this purpose. It has a wiki, and threaded conversations, and eventually more tools. Sign up at http://wamily.com http://wamily.com with invite code ZMYWVX and you will automatically be added to the group
davidw 20y ago
Are lots of meta sites about startups an indication of a bubble? When will we see a site about creating sites about startups?
Readmore 20y ago
In the amount of time you spent talking about this you could have already built the site.
maurycy 20y ago
http://startupideatr.com/ http://startupideatr.com/ With all problems mentioned here: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16270 http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16270

8 points by mojuba 20y ago

(1) If I have an idea but don't have the time to implement it, let someone pick it up through this site. (2) If I have an idea but I'd like to "check the waters" before implementing it. (3) Any brainstorming. Most of us shouldn't be afraid of sharing ideas openly, because the value of what we do mostly is in how we do it.

ido 20y ago
That sounds like a neat idea - but why don't you just use a wiki?
- mojuba 20y ago
  Wiki sucks in many respects, including lack of true parallelism, while a simple reddit-like system with discussions would work better, perhaps with some modifications.
- Leonidas 20y ago
  You could just put up a simple forum and people can just enter their "Idea" as a topic on the forum.
  - mojuba 20y ago
    True, but doesn't voting add some dynamics to a simple forum?
    - sbraford 20y ago
      Have you guys heard of The Business Experiment? It was trying to do a lot of what's being described here. I also tried to do something similar back in the day, a kind of "human capital investment group." What any "group" that gets together like this will inevitably find is, 99% of people, or more, will just want to put up ideas. The people who would actually implement them (like myself and other entreprehackers on here), already have way to many ideas of their own that they don't have enough time to pursue.
      - mojuba 20y ago
        Looks like TheBusinessExperiment.com is currently down. Can you tell us please what was that about?
        sbraford 20y ago
        hey mojuba, sure. it was kind of like what's being described in this thread. the difference was that the creators wanted to somehow compensate (with stock) both all of the people who submitted ideas / feedback. you can't do that though without coming very very near to violating SEC regulations. (Agloco will surely run into this issue as well) Net result: The Business Experiment had a hard time finding anyone to actually code up the ideas. While their first idea was still in development, a competitor came out that totally demolished their potential app's functionality. The idea was something like Google Answers meets Wisdom of Crowds.
  - mojuba 20y ago
    In fact, YCnews is perfect, except it doesn't take into account voting that's going on inside a post. That is, if there are good comments under a post from many people (the more the better) that post should get a higher rank. Well, hm, like this one :)
    - akkartik 20y ago
      news.yc doesn't allow searching ideas either. Also, we need some way to search only 'idea' posts. Perhaps if news.yc had tags that would suffice, but otherwise this may deserve a different namespace. Not something one reads everyday but more of a tool to submit or search for ideas.

danielha 20y ago

Paul Graham did. What was that site again...

jward 20y ago

You might also want to look into Cambrian House. http://www.cambrianhouse.com/ http://www.cambrianhouse.com/

plusbryan 20y ago
Saw this the other day. Pretty similar to an idea I presented to PG way back when. I still have PG's whiteboard post: "but some startup ideas need be kept secret"
- andreyf 20y ago
  I still have PG's whiteboard post: "but some startup ideas need be kept secret" I have a problem with this - why? And is there a good litmus test?

waleedka 20y ago

How about submitting it to this site with the prefix [IDEA]? Mailing lists commonly use [ANN] prefixes for new announcements. There is no reason we can't use something similar. For example: [IDEA] A web site for sharing startup ideas. [STARTUP] www.shareyourstartupidea.com. Comments welcome.

mojuba 20y ago
I think this is Ok, except some improvement is needed on news.yc. Comments should somehow affect the rank of a post. And it's not the number of comments that matters, but rather the number of people involved, possibly taking into account their karmas. And of course this should be recursive and should be applied to comments themselves (subcomments affect the comment).

jaggederest 20y ago

Working on something like this right now, kind of a jobs/talent thing. Thought it might be useful. Will post when I've got something worth looking at (this week) Planning on making it kind of an 'Ideas wanted' or 'People wanted' or 'Money wanted' site, so people can interface. Putting my money where my mouth is with some distributed karma systems as well.

jaggederest 20y ago
it'll be at http://jobs.jaggederest.com/ http://jobs.jaggederest.com/
- jaggederest 20y ago
  SVN is up. http://www.jaggederest.com/jobs/svn/ http://www.jaggederest.com/jobs/svn/
  - Sam_Odio 20y ago
    Be careful about your database.yml file :)
    - jaggederest 20y ago
      No database there for that, and pg_hba.conf is set up to not allow outside connections, but aside from that, my host uses mysql and I develop on postgres. Heh. I'm a bit amped.

bootload 20y ago

Matt Jaynes (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattjaynes) http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattjaynes) had a great idea with YFratinator (http://groups.google.com/group/yfratrinator) http://groups.google.com/group/yfratrinator) but went cold on the idea. Have a chat to matt and see if you can resurrect the idea.

omouse 20y ago

Who wants to work on this idea? I may have some free time in a few months if anyone wants to team up and build it :P

Sam_Odio 20y ago
It looks like there are several different users who want to build this (or something similar). I definitely think collaboration would work best - if the site is going to be used by the community it needs all of our support. It can't be a one man show. Personally, I envision a site with several different tools: idea feedback, find cofounders, find shared office space, demo new apps, a how-to resource archive, wiki, etc. I think one News.YC reader has already built a site that can be used to find cofounders. Jamie, Sumon and Timmmah built a site to demo apps (demomyapp.com). Justin is building a basic idea feedback site. John Leung is trying to organize a shared office/startup hub website. I'm building a resource archive. What if we all collaborated on one site that did it all?
- omouse 20y ago
  That's a good idea, and the first step is organizing. My email's omouse@gmail.com and my name's Rudolf.
- Sam_Odio 20y ago
  Some of the features could have different URLs (for example, demomyapp.com wouldn't have to move) - but it'd be cool to run we all off the same server w/ the same theme/layout and same user authentication process. Kind of like google accounts w/ google/gmail/google analytics/etc.
  - jaggederest 20y ago
    if PG put up a facility for openID on here, we could hook it up that way.
Tichy 20y ago
Funny, because I just registered a domain for something like that, ideasbin.com, one day before this thread started. It was a direct inspiration by YC, too: since everybody keeps going on about ideas being worthless, why not "throw away" your idea? It could also be a place to mourn your ideas that you'll never make come true. My plan was to start simple, though (perhaps reddit style ideas submission, a wiki page for the idea, 'social net' in that people can collect their favorite ideas). Seeing the ideas taking form here, I guess ideasbin would not be too successful (should have picked a more serious domain name). But anyway, in general I am interested to work on this, although actual time available might be limited. Email in my profile.

Goladus 20y ago

What about having the focus on identifying problems, rather than brainstorming ideas?

akkartik 20y ago
hear, hear

wammin 20y ago

Guys, I'm building a collaboration application called Wamily that would be perfect for this. I just set up a group for this purpose. It has a wiki, and threaded conversations, and eventually more tools. Sign up at http://wamily.com http://wamily.com with invite code ZMYWVX and you will automatically be added to the group

davidw 20y ago

Are lots of meta sites about startups an indication of a bubble? When will we see a site about creating sites about startups?

Readmore 20y ago

In the amount of time you spent talking about this you could have already built the site.

maurycy 20y ago

http://startupideatr.com/ http://startupideatr.com/ With all problems mentioned here: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16270 http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16270