4 ms·

Startup ideas you’re not using and probably won’t

1 points by barry-cotter 8y ago

There are many, many possible business ideas that you might have that you are certain would make someone a good living or possibly wildly rich but you’re not doing them for some reason. Post each idea below as a separate comment and let’s see what excites the HN hive mind’s interest.

barry-cotter 8y ago
Starfall.com but updated regularly. It’s a website to teach phonics and basic math that was built in the 90’s and it has been the best website for teaching that since then. It’s updated twice a year if that. It’s still using Flash, in 2019. The most valuable, useful content is free but there’s a bunch of extra content for supporters. They have App Store apps which might be where they make their money or the prices they charge for a whole school licence may be high. I don’t know. I have only the sketchiest idea of how long it would take to replicate its functionality and to have a bigger library of content but I sincerely doubt it would take one decent programmer who can draw as well as the average 10 year old longer than three months.
barry-cotter 8y ago
Baselang.com for languages other than Spanish. Baselang has an amazing business model. They offer one on one Spanish tuition, up to four hours a day for a subscription fee of $149 or $199 per month depending on the package you want to buy. They use a video conferencing software, Zoom, and they have the best guide to learning Spanish on the internet, as content marketing. All the Spanish teachers are professional teachers with good English who follow their well designed on house curriculum. I think their major innovation is in the subscription. If you get one hour of lessons a day that’s good value. At four hours a day it’s anazing value, you’ll be fluent in Spanish in three months. But I doubt most subscribers even use five hours a week. It’s the gym model. The people who swear next month is going to be different, they’ll actually use the service, subsidise the small number of heavy users and are where all the profits are made. For no reason I can understand they don’t plan to teach any other languages. If you can find a decent curriculum and buy the rights to it, hire some good teachers and set up zoom you can do this for Portugese, French, Russian, Arabic or Chinese. Italki.com is an inferior model.
barry-cotter 8y ago
Pinboard.in with reliable and timely support. By all accounts pinboard’s core functionality works fine but apparently the owner goes months without reading or replying to emails.
anoncoward111 8y ago
Outline.com except it's a browser and you don't have to input specific URLs every single time Alternatively everyone can just stop making 5MB websites. My 1kb/s mobile Verizon connection can't handle it
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  How does that make money?
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    Would gladly pay $5 a month if needed. Technically you could release this as client-side, no? For example, I use Dillo on my Linux laptop. Anything that is not formatted for HTML is completely rejected. I would prefer to set how stringently filtered I want sites to be. Try browsing zerohedge.com or any local news site. It is an abomination of autoplay video ads, forced scrolling, 70% toolbars covering screen, photos every 5 sentences... And like 40kb of text.

1 points by barry-cotter 8y ago

barry-cotter 8y ago

Starfall.com but updated regularly. It’s a website to teach phonics and basic math that was built in the 90’s and it has been the best website for teaching that since then. It’s updated twice a year if that. It’s still using Flash, in 2019. The most valuable, useful content is free but there’s a bunch of extra content for supporters. They have App Store apps which might be where they make their money or the prices they charge for a whole school licence may be high. I don’t know. I have only the sketchiest idea of how long it would take to replicate its functionality and to have a bigger library of content but I sincerely doubt it would take one decent programmer who can draw as well as the average 10 year old longer than three months.

barry-cotter 8y ago

Baselang.com for languages other than Spanish. Baselang has an amazing business model. They offer one on one Spanish tuition, up to four hours a day for a subscription fee of $149 or $199 per month depending on the package you want to buy. They use a video conferencing software, Zoom, and they have the best guide to learning Spanish on the internet, as content marketing. All the Spanish teachers are professional teachers with good English who follow their well designed on house curriculum. I think their major innovation is in the subscription. If you get one hour of lessons a day that’s good value. At four hours a day it’s anazing value, you’ll be fluent in Spanish in three months. But I doubt most subscribers even use five hours a week. It’s the gym model. The people who swear next month is going to be different, they’ll actually use the service, subsidise the small number of heavy users and are where all the profits are made. For no reason I can understand they don’t plan to teach any other languages. If you can find a decent curriculum and buy the rights to it, hire some good teachers and set up zoom you can do this for Portugese, French, Russian, Arabic or Chinese. Italki.com is an inferior model.

barry-cotter 8y ago

Pinboard.in with reliable and timely support. By all accounts pinboard’s core functionality works fine but apparently the owner goes months without reading or replying to emails.

anoncoward111 8y ago

Outline.com except it's a browser and you don't have to input specific URLs every single time Alternatively everyone can just stop making 5MB websites. My 1kb/s mobile Verizon connection can't handle it

barry-cotter 8y ago
How does that make money?
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Would gladly pay $5 a month if needed. Technically you could release this as client-side, no? For example, I use Dillo on my Linux laptop. Anything that is not formatted for HTML is completely rejected. I would prefer to set how stringently filtered I want sites to be. Try browsing zerohedge.com or any local news site. It is an abomination of autoplay video ads, forced scrolling, 70% toolbars covering screen, photos every 5 sentences... And like 40kb of text.