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Show HN: Idea Minr – Business Ideas Aggregator

173 points by stevematzal 8y ago

iamben 8y ago
Pretty useful. Suggestion based on me looking at this on a phone (I'm unsure how this looks on desktop!) - left align the titles and the copy for each section. Would make the list much easier to scan. Well done for releasing!
- O_H_E 8y ago
  Readability could go a long way on desktop. Advice: - Make two text columns vertically. - Chose better colours. Either learn colour readability, or pick a palette from a generator.
- galacticdessert 8y ago
  Agree, on the desktop the readability is also quite poor. And you seem to have some issues in the CSS, as gigantic icons appear while loading. Keep it simple, align to the left and put some margins to center the content.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Also make the text a hyperlink, in honor of the 30 year anniversary of this hypertext platform, rather than sticking a small link icon to the side that's an inconvenient click target.
- stevematzal 8y ago
  Thanks for the suggestions guys, they are all very good ideas for improvement, I'm not really a front-end guy. I thought about making columns but this would probably affect the readability. Hyperlink idea: especially good considering the anniversary :)
owens99 8y ago
Very cool. Just too bad ideas don’t matter and execution is everything! I wish the world has more people with technical chops and less “idea guys.” Knowledge of customer and ability to build the minimum viable product is worth more than 100k ideas.
- simonrobb 8y ago
  It takes a whole lot more to build a business than technical chops.
- arcturus17 8y ago
  Never bought into how that saying diminishes the value of good ideas, particularly that of a unique domain-specific insight. I'm rarely excited by "the new Facebook" or "like X, but with AI", but when I hear someone say something like "an app that creates layouts for solar plants, saving energy consultants hundreds hours of work", that tickles my senses. That's a real example from a meetup I went to the other day. Two solar engineers who were tired of drawing these solar plant plans and realized a computer would do it faster and better. They're killing it. Many software engineers rely on domain experts to come along with good ideas to execute on. Maybe ideas matter immensely after all.
  - zipzap324 8y ago
    Exactly, how many thousands of very strong engineers are there in SV and most of them are not coming up with great businesses.
- snaky 8y ago
  Well, that's why we all should build yet another calculator or weather app for Android.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  Ideas alone don't matter. That saying exists to deter procrastination, obsession with being first, being secret and other mistakes people make. But ideas do matter. Google AdWords' bidding model was an idea (I think overture had the first quality implementation at scale). That idea was/is responsible for adding 0s to Google's as income.
- jnicholasp 8y ago
  Ideas don't matter (assuming the set of ideas you're choosing among are roughly equal in quality, and that the average quality of the set is well above outright stupidity). Which is to say, ideas matter a lot, but no one who subscribes to the saying has ever noticed that they're auto-rejecting bad and terrible ideas constantly, and have also never had a great idea.
yitchelle 8y ago
Great lists. Now, is there an algorithm that would mix these ideas for a mesh up for something totally original and market worthy?
- montenegrohugo 8y ago
  That's the users job :)
- newman8r 8y ago
  I've done that before using markov chains. It works, and some of the "ideas" can sound interesting, but I never used any of them to work on actual projects. Fun though.
- stevematzal 8y ago
  Thanks, I thought about it but for now I'm thinking that the human mind is more intuitive in what actually makes an idea applicable and feasible. It's like Kasparov playing chess against Deep Blue, AI might come up with a lot of calculations per second but it has none of the insight and intuition a chess master has. However, there is a startup idea generator at https://startup-gen.surge.sh/ https://startup-gen.surge.sh/ if you want to check it.
pedro1976 8y ago
Kudos for the effort. How do you plan to curate that list? Maybe a git based approach is more future proof, so not everything is on your sholder, like awesome-tech-ideas or so.
- stevematzal 8y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion Pedro, I'm testing the waters for now, there is the possibility that I might add curation in the future.
O1111OOO 8y ago
I wasn't aware that there were so many places/communities that focused on this sort of thing. I knew of only a couple. It's exciting to look through it all. Love the list format without all the fancy images that make scrolling and eyeballing data so difficult. sidenote: opened up the main page to hunt for RSS (or similar). Though none exist, surprised that everything was on a single line. My poor (lightweight) external editor stopped loading the page at the 50k character mark (hard limit for allowed characters per line).
- stevematzal 8y ago
  It's said that an image is worth a thousand words but that it's not always true :) I've kept things simple and without clutter because the idea is that one should be able to parse a lot of data in short time, no one has time to look at a lot of logos that most of the time are not that relevant (for some purposes). Image processing takes a lot of brain computing power :) Sorry for the 'one liner', that's how Gatsby outputs the data.
  - dethos 8y ago
    For parsing this kind of information having a more structured format like the `sidenote` suggests would be a very nice improvement (such as RSS for the new additions).
claudiulodro 8y ago
It's wild to realize that this list of like a hundred innovative businesses is just what people are launching today, and there will be a whole new batch tomorrow, and the day after that, and so on. Just today's list is thousands and thousands of aggregated hours of work by hundreds of people for speculative riches with good odds of the businesses failing. And the stuff that gets onto one of these lists is just a small fraction of what gets launched every day! This site may have been intended to inspire startup founders or side-project hustlers, but it does the opposite for me: it has shown me the folly of trying to make it as one of those! Going forward I'm sticking to proven, local, likely service-based businesses. Thanks, stevematzai. Very enlightening site, even if it didn't help in the way you would have liked. :)
- Vivtek 8y ago
  I'm honestly glad not to be alone in getting that same feeling.
- stevematzal 8y ago
  Thanks Claudio for the enlightening comment. It's true and I'm feeling a bit like this myself, going over lots of business ideas daily for the past month or so made me realize the same thing and this is why I've started doing some research into what makes an idea more likely to succeed (or not). I don't want to discourage anyone from the process of creation because the act of creation is inherently human and through all this aggregated creative effort we are progressing and improving little by little and this is how, in my opinion, the site should be used, to improve upon existing ideas little by little. On the other side, knowing that there are a lot of creative people out there spreading their ideas should give one more courage to do the same, this is another thing that I realized. I'm thinking of myself as an insignificant little spec of dust in the galaxy and this thought actually gives me courage. We are condemned to be creative, we are condemned to try and fail again and again and succeed some times, we are condemned to progress.
- ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
  Don't give up on the idea of being an entrepreneur. Just realize that MOST ideas are iterative and not truly innovative. Nothing wrong with that, but there is going to be a ton of competition when you build a Chrome Plugin that does one neat copy and paste... even if it is very useful. (Useful Tool Example:) Citationsy for Chrome: Cite anything in one-click right from Chrome And honestly a lot of ideas might be interesting or funny... but they aren't even good ideas. (Funny but Stupid Example:) howlongisyourdong.com is now on product hunt: GROW UP YOUR E-PENIS RIGHT NOW : And some ideas are just wishes for things that obviously aren't going to turn out well in execution. (Product won't match customer desire Example:) Your mobile app needs a website. I built Flycricket to generate and host a site for you!: If you come up with an idea that is truly disruptive, that isn't something everyone in your field has been asking for for years. You should pursue it. But it should stand out on a list like this, not fit right in. Edit: Many people do well building out the extremely obvious ideas that everyone wants. But to do well that way you should be talented, work extremely hard, and be well funded if you want to beat the competition.
pedro1976 8y ago
Slightly OT, does anyone of you know some idea resources outside our IT bubble, e.g. renewable energy, recycling... ?
- kickopotomus 8y ago
  Not exactly analogous but if you are looking for some inspiration, there are some interesting data sets to browse though on data.gov[0], and innocentive[1] has "challenges" in a variety of areas. [0]: https://www.data.gov https://www.data.gov [1]: https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/browse https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/browse
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
  Sure. Browse Upwork or Freelancer.com and see what the buyers are asking for. They may be delusional in terms of what they want to pay, but at least those are examples of needs people have that they are willing to spend money on.
tomc1985 8y ago
Reading that list feels like browsing an aisle at Big Lots, or those tables of cheap stuff at Fry's

173 points by stevematzal 8y ago

Pretty useful. Suggestion based on me looking at this on a phone (I'm unsure how this looks on desktop!) - left align the titles and the copy for each section. Would make the list much easier to scan. Well done for releasing!

O_H_E 8y ago
Readability could go a long way on desktop. Advice: - Make two text columns vertically. - Chose better colours. Either learn colour readability, or pick a palette from a generator.
galacticdessert 8y ago
Agree, on the desktop the readability is also quite poor. And you seem to have some issues in the CSS, as gigantic icons appear while loading. Keep it simple, align to the left and put some margins to center the content.
pjc50 8y ago
Also make the text a hyperlink, in honor of the 30 year anniversary of this hypertext platform, rather than sticking a small link icon to the side that's an inconvenient click target.
stevematzal 8y ago
Thanks for the suggestions guys, they are all very good ideas for improvement, I'm not really a front-end guy. I thought about making columns but this would probably affect the readability. Hyperlink idea: especially good considering the anniversary :)

owens99 8y ago

Very cool. Just too bad ideas don’t matter and execution is everything! I wish the world has more people with technical chops and less “idea guys.” Knowledge of customer and ability to build the minimum viable product is worth more than 100k ideas.

simonrobb 8y ago
It takes a whole lot more to build a business than technical chops.
arcturus17 8y ago
Never bought into how that saying diminishes the value of good ideas, particularly that of a unique domain-specific insight. I'm rarely excited by "the new Facebook" or "like X, but with AI", but when I hear someone say something like "an app that creates layouts for solar plants, saving energy consultants hundreds hours of work", that tickles my senses. That's a real example from a meetup I went to the other day. Two solar engineers who were tired of drawing these solar plant plans and realized a computer would do it faster and better. They're killing it. Many software engineers rely on domain experts to come along with good ideas to execute on. Maybe ideas matter immensely after all.
- zipzap324 8y ago
  Exactly, how many thousands of very strong engineers are there in SV and most of them are not coming up with great businesses.
snaky 8y ago
Well, that's why we all should build yet another calculator or weather app for Android.
dalbasal 8y ago
Ideas alone don't matter. That saying exists to deter procrastination, obsession with being first, being secret and other mistakes people make. But ideas do matter. Google AdWords' bidding model was an idea (I think overture had the first quality implementation at scale). That idea was/is responsible for adding 0s to Google's as income.
jnicholasp 8y ago
Ideas don't matter (assuming the set of ideas you're choosing among are roughly equal in quality, and that the average quality of the set is well above outright stupidity). Which is to say, ideas matter a lot, but no one who subscribes to the saying has ever noticed that they're auto-rejecting bad and terrible ideas constantly, and have also never had a great idea.

yitchelle 8y ago

Great lists. Now, is there an algorithm that would mix these ideas for a mesh up for something totally original and market worthy?

montenegrohugo 8y ago
That's the users job :)
newman8r 8y ago
I've done that before using markov chains. It works, and some of the "ideas" can sound interesting, but I never used any of them to work on actual projects. Fun though.
stevematzal 8y ago
Thanks, I thought about it but for now I'm thinking that the human mind is more intuitive in what actually makes an idea applicable and feasible. It's like Kasparov playing chess against Deep Blue, AI might come up with a lot of calculations per second but it has none of the insight and intuition a chess master has. However, there is a startup idea generator at https://startup-gen.surge.sh/ https://startup-gen.surge.sh/ if you want to check it.

pedro1976 8y ago

Kudos for the effort. How do you plan to curate that list? Maybe a git based approach is more future proof, so not everything is on your sholder, like awesome-tech-ideas or so.

stevematzal 8y ago
Thanks for the suggestion Pedro, I'm testing the waters for now, there is the possibility that I might add curation in the future.

O1111OOO 8y ago

I wasn't aware that there were so many places/communities that focused on this sort of thing. I knew of only a couple. It's exciting to look through it all. Love the list format without all the fancy images that make scrolling and eyeballing data so difficult. sidenote: opened up the main page to hunt for RSS (or similar). Though none exist, surprised that everything was on a single line. My poor (lightweight) external editor stopped loading the page at the 50k character mark (hard limit for allowed characters per line).

stevematzal 8y ago
It's said that an image is worth a thousand words but that it's not always true :) I've kept things simple and without clutter because the idea is that one should be able to parse a lot of data in short time, no one has time to look at a lot of logos that most of the time are not that relevant (for some purposes). Image processing takes a lot of brain computing power :) Sorry for the 'one liner', that's how Gatsby outputs the data.
- dethos 8y ago
  For parsing this kind of information having a more structured format like the `sidenote` suggests would be a very nice improvement (such as RSS for the new additions).

claudiulodro 8y ago

It's wild to realize that this list of like a hundred innovative businesses is just what people are launching today, and there will be a whole new batch tomorrow, and the day after that, and so on. Just today's list is thousands and thousands of aggregated hours of work by hundreds of people for speculative riches with good odds of the businesses failing. And the stuff that gets onto one of these lists is just a small fraction of what gets launched every day! This site may have been intended to inspire startup founders or side-project hustlers, but it does the opposite for me: it has shown me the folly of trying to make it as one of those! Going forward I'm sticking to proven, local, likely service-based businesses. Thanks, stevematzai. Very enlightening site, even if it didn't help in the way you would have liked. :)

Vivtek 8y ago
I'm honestly glad not to be alone in getting that same feeling.
stevematzal 8y ago
Thanks Claudio for the enlightening comment. It's true and I'm feeling a bit like this myself, going over lots of business ideas daily for the past month or so made me realize the same thing and this is why I've started doing some research into what makes an idea more likely to succeed (or not). I don't want to discourage anyone from the process of creation because the act of creation is inherently human and through all this aggregated creative effort we are progressing and improving little by little and this is how, in my opinion, the site should be used, to improve upon existing ideas little by little. On the other side, knowing that there are a lot of creative people out there spreading their ideas should give one more courage to do the same, this is another thing that I realized. I'm thinking of myself as an insignificant little spec of dust in the galaxy and this thought actually gives me courage. We are condemned to be creative, we are condemned to try and fail again and again and succeed some times, we are condemned to progress.
ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
Don't give up on the idea of being an entrepreneur. Just realize that MOST ideas are iterative and not truly innovative. Nothing wrong with that, but there is going to be a ton of competition when you build a Chrome Plugin that does one neat copy and paste... even if it is very useful. (Useful Tool Example:) Citationsy for Chrome: Cite anything in one-click right from Chrome And honestly a lot of ideas might be interesting or funny... but they aren't even good ideas. (Funny but Stupid Example:) howlongisyourdong.com is now on product hunt: GROW UP YOUR E-PENIS RIGHT NOW : And some ideas are just wishes for things that obviously aren't going to turn out well in execution. (Product won't match customer desire Example:) Your mobile app needs a website. I built Flycricket to generate and host a site for you!: If you come up with an idea that is truly disruptive, that isn't something everyone in your field has been asking for for years. You should pursue it. But it should stand out on a list like this, not fit right in. Edit: Many people do well building out the extremely obvious ideas that everyone wants. But to do well that way you should be talented, work extremely hard, and be well funded if you want to beat the competition.

pedro1976 8y ago

Slightly OT, does anyone of you know some idea resources outside our IT bubble, e.g. renewable energy, recycling... ?

kickopotomus 8y ago
Not exactly analogous but if you are looking for some inspiration, there are some interesting data sets to browse though on data.gov[0], and innocentive[1] has "challenges" in a variety of areas. [0]: https://www.data.gov https://www.data.gov [1]: https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/browse https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/browse
HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
Sure. Browse Upwork or Freelancer.com and see what the buyers are asking for. They may be delusional in terms of what they want to pay, but at least those are examples of needs people have that they are willing to spend money on.

tomc1985 8y ago

Reading that list feels like browsing an aisle at Big Lots, or those tables of cheap stuff at Fry's