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Thank you for this thorough and thoughtful response! Lots to soak in here. I agree, I am certainly not Elon Musk, there is no ego here. I'm just saying that the

Thank you for this thorough and thoughtful response! Lots to soak in here. I agree, I am certainly not Elon Musk, there is no ego here. I'm just saying that the problem spaces I want to help with (environment, health/fitness/healthcare) don't seem like the problems I can effectively tackle because, as I mentioned before, I can't seem to find a way to divide-and-conquer into a smaller idea I can execute on. Do you have any thoughts behind that? I guess maybe talk with people in those spaces and see what problems they are having that could benefit from some tiny innovation?

growt 9y ago
Let me try: How about a variant of your "selling food to neighbors idea"? Build a platform where people can organize local "cooking clubs" (like meetup.com for cooking). You can find other people in your area who like to cook (sometimes) and everyone in the group makes a meal for the rest of the group, taking turns. That way, if and what is cooked is not your business (no regulation), you're just facilitating the meetups and schedules.
- pryelluw 9y ago
  Your heart is in the right place, but that idea will fall flat when compared to existing social networks.
  - avip 9y ago
    Vizeat runs on 1.5M ARR. funded in the 5M. Bought EatWith. Good thing they didn’t ask for forum advice just built and iterated.
- bkcreate 9y ago
  At that point why not just organize a meetup and charge admission instead of reinventing the wheel?
pryelluw 9y ago
Map, filter, and reduce your ideas. Health, fitness, and healthcare all fall into the same bucket. However, the money is in helping companies operate more efficiently. Lots of great opportunities in the area of automation. I would start talking to people who work in healthcare companies about how they process their data. They still rely heavily on copying and pasting from excel spreadsheets. To give you an idea, I just built a system to do such thing at work. Took me a 2 days. It could easily be replicated and sold as a sass or onetime purchase. Plus it is selking shovels because no one likes to process data manually. Environment wise, I'd say that there is opportunity in the data collection side (this would make you a middleman). Lots of orgs need a way to CRUD localized enviromental data. Look into it. About dividing and conquering. Again: map, filter, and reduce. Map your ideas to business models (money making functions). Filter them to remove the ones who don't have a clear path to revenue. Reduce down to the one you can execute. Take your time.
- isseu 9y ago
  Is efficiency/automation what company wants? I am in the process of selling a inventory SAAS for medium size retail companies that helps them reduce a lot of labor everyday but I have trouble selling it. The companies don't see the value, they already have people doing this labor and I have seen that they are much more interesting in selling more that efficiency in the process. This at least for medium size companies.
  - pryelluw 9y ago
    It's hard to answer your question without knowing more about your marketing and sales pitch. Feel free to email me if you want to talk more about it.
  - cableshaft 9y ago
    The corporation I work for is in business process automation (specialized in healthcare and insurance, but not exclusively that). All companies want business process automation, but none of them want to pay enough for it, or have their shit together enough to work with us, usually. We still manage to get enough business to make money, but we've had lots of clients that absolutely needed something done by a certain date drag their feet about signing contracts to the point where we did free work expecting the contract to be signed, then they still don't sign the contracts or say they couldn't get their data ready to send to us so we could do what they wanted with it, or their IT department decides they can do what we do (and then ends up failing miserably because their culture is slow and awful), or all sorts of things. It's quite a mess, but there is money to be made in it. Our corporation alone has billions of dollars in revenue from it every year, so the industry as a whole has to be pretty big.

growt 9y ago

Let me try: How about a variant of your "selling food to neighbors idea"? Build a platform where people can organize local "cooking clubs" (like meetup.com for cooking). You can find other people in your area who like to cook (sometimes) and everyone in the group makes a meal for the rest of the group, taking turns. That way, if and what is cooked is not your business (no regulation), you're just facilitating the meetups and schedules.

pryelluw 9y ago
Your heart is in the right place, but that idea will fall flat when compared to existing social networks.
- avip 9y ago
  Vizeat runs on 1.5M ARR. funded in the 5M. Bought EatWith. Good thing they didn’t ask for forum advice just built and iterated.
bkcreate 9y ago
At that point why not just organize a meetup and charge admission instead of reinventing the wheel?

pryelluw 9y ago

Map, filter, and reduce your ideas. Health, fitness, and healthcare all fall into the same bucket. However, the money is in helping companies operate more efficiently. Lots of great opportunities in the area of automation. I would start talking to people who work in healthcare companies about how they process their data. They still rely heavily on copying and pasting from excel spreadsheets. To give you an idea, I just built a system to do such thing at work. Took me a 2 days. It could easily be replicated and sold as a sass or onetime purchase. Plus it is selking shovels because no one likes to process data manually. Environment wise, I'd say that there is opportunity in the data collection side (this would make you a middleman). Lots of orgs need a way to CRUD localized enviromental data. Look into it. About dividing and conquering. Again: map, filter, and reduce. Map your ideas to business models (money making functions). Filter them to remove the ones who don't have a clear path to revenue. Reduce down to the one you can execute. Take your time.

isseu 9y ago
Is efficiency/automation what company wants? I am in the process of selling a inventory SAAS for medium size retail companies that helps them reduce a lot of labor everyday but I have trouble selling it. The companies don't see the value, they already have people doing this labor and I have seen that they are much more interesting in selling more that efficiency in the process. This at least for medium size companies.
- pryelluw 9y ago
  It's hard to answer your question without knowing more about your marketing and sales pitch. Feel free to email me if you want to talk more about it.
- cableshaft 9y ago
  The corporation I work for is in business process automation (specialized in healthcare and insurance, but not exclusively that). All companies want business process automation, but none of them want to pay enough for it, or have their shit together enough to work with us, usually. We still manage to get enough business to make money, but we've had lots of clients that absolutely needed something done by a certain date drag their feet about signing contracts to the point where we did free work expecting the contract to be signed, then they still don't sign the contracts or say they couldn't get their data ready to send to us so we could do what they wanted with it, or their IT department decides they can do what we do (and then ends up failing miserably because their culture is slow and awful), or all sorts of things. It's quite a mess, but there is money to be made in it. Our corporation alone has billions of dollars in revenue from it every year, so the industry as a whole has to be pretty big.