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Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
- rlander 16y ago#2 works and is a profitable company called tellapart (http://tellapart.com http://tellapart.com).
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- tmcneal 16y ago#2 reminded me of Directed Edge's generalized recommendations engine (http://directededge.com/ http://directededge.com/).
- rlander 16y agoCool, didn't know about directedge. Any idea how profitable are they? [edit] Crunchbase says they only received YC's $15k in seed funding. That's weird for a B2B company.
- Keyframe 16y agoDon't forget MMORPG!
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- JustinSeriously 16y agoWhich is often "just like game X, but more complicated." I think that's the route of most startup pipe-dreams: Take a successful site or product, and make it more complicated.
- pg 16y agoIt's true that such ideas tend to be magnets for sloppy thinking, but I think most if not all of them could be pulled off if done right.
- eladgil 16y agoI totally agree. The premise is not that they can not work - rather, that many people have tried them, or thought of them, but they have not worked as of yet. Even more importantly for the article, the really do come up in every brainstorm I have ever had :) I think social news (Reddit, Twitter) and Cloud based file sharing (DropBox) are two ideas I would have put on my list before that have been addressed in some good way....
- brlewis 16y agoShouldn't the parenthetical note in your title be (That Haven't Worked Yet)?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- gruseom 16y agoIndeed. Reminds me of Jerry Weinberg's story of the Nebraska farmer who was interviewed by the local paper when he turned 100. "Have you lived in Nebraska your whole life?" they asked. "Yes I have," said the farmer, and then added: "So far."
- stevenj 16y agoOut of curiosity, what do you dislike or think can be done better with Craigslist? In other words, if you were going to build a Craigslist competitor what would you focus on doing differently?
- pingswept 16y ago(I'm not pg, obviously.) I've found the scantiness of information in Craigslist posts a weakness. I have no idea how to fix that, but I rule out a large fraction of ads based on "Not enough info to know what this person is selling." For example, many ads don't have pictures, and many that do have pictures that are tiny and inscrutable.
- jbail 16y agoOne idea I hear all the time: Better agile/project management software. I've never met a nerd who liked what they were using (myself included).
- Elepsis 16y agoThis is actually an interesting one, because I think it falls into its own specific category: workflow-specific startups. The reason no one is ever happy with project management software is because everyone works slightly differently, and every nerd will occasionally have the urge to write one that matches the way they work. It's likely there are other startups that fall into this category. Time management and to-do lists seem like fairly obvious ones.
- nkohari 16y agoThis is definitely a huge problem in project management tools. I don't mean to spam, but with AgileZen (http://agilezen.com/ http://agilezen.com/), we're trying very, very hard to create a project management app that isn't workflow-specific. I'd be very interested in knowing how we could make it even more flexible.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- rgbrgb 16y agoAll of those ideas have clearly worked.
- klochner 16y agoIt should be a one-item list - craigslist killer.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- klochner 16y agoBest of luck, beating craigslist is akin to proving P!=NP
- mechanical_fish 16y agoOf course they all worked at least once. Otherwise the siren song wouldn't be so seductive. Often half the problem with an idea is that it has already worked once. In a world where you're allowed to assume away Craigslist, cloning Craigslist would have a much better chance of working.
- ig1 16y agoKijiji and Gumtree have also succeeded in this space (albeit in different countries). What's killing Craigslist/gumtree/etc in practice is their generality, they're no longer the dominant player in their most profitable markets (jobs, dating, housing) all of which are being carved away by specialist sites.
- Mc_Big_G 16y agoIf Craigslist is getting killed, they sure are making a lot of money doing it.
- 16y ago
- iterationx 16y agoHe forgot the 3D window manager.
- binarymax 16y agoSpeaking of which ...I wonder if we will hear anything from http://bumptop.com/ http://bumptop.com/ via Google soon?
- lkozma 16y agoHe forgot the data synchronization system, except that Dropbox pulled that off. Also the "social browsing", "see who else is visiting this webpage", except that Facebook is after that one already. Also the "alert me if a website has changed", well, I don't know if that really exists in a usable way or not.
- konad 16y agohttp://www.changedetection.com/ http://www.changedetection.com/
- allwein 16y agoIn my day (I'm only 32), the startup ideas everyone always wanted to do were: 1. A better bug/issue tracking system 2. A custom CMS 3. A code library/platform for easily building Business CRUD apps. 4. A word processing app that has only the 20% features that 80% of Word users use. 5. A better classmates.com
- bryanlarsen 16y agoThe difference between your list and his is that some people have actually succeeded with all of the items on your list. But you've still hit the nail on the head with your list: there are vast numbers of failures and uncompleted projects for every success.
- frisco 16y agoThat's the point of parent's post: that everyone on the old "stupid repeat ideas" list has now been successfully executed.
- smanek 16y agoIt seems like someone did do them! Obvious examples include: 1. basecamp/fogbugz/jira 2. Confluence/Sharepoint 3. django/rails 4. Google Docs 5. Facebook
- kno 16y ago... While we were all sleeping.
- cadr 16y agoI think there is a lot further someone could take #3 (crud apps for business). While django/rails are great, I think you could build some more specific tools that would provide a lot more leverage in some cases. (Maybe something like DabbleDB but with some more specifics built in.)
- bad_user 16y ago
- _delirium 16y agoVersions of #4 have worked, though not usually structured as X% of all future earnings. The most common version is the group-of-freelancers variant, where a group of people are really working independently, but do it legally via a partnership, which pools income to reduce risk, share upsides, smooth cash-flow bumps, etc. It's pretty well-established in a number of professions outside tech, e.g. in law, a partnership of four or five lawyers will all get rich if any case that any of them took hits the giant-settlement jackpot.
- bryanlarsen 16y agoA workers co-op is a good alternative to a partnership if your jurisdiction has sane laws. (in other words if you're not in the United States). The big downside to partnerships is that you're exposed to unlimited liability.
- _delirium 16y agoThe exact terms vary, but in some states an LLP or LLC is a good alternative with limited liability (just how limited the liability is also varies).
- acgourley 16y agoI would also like to submit a whole spectrum of ideas that have a huge bootstrap problem and that problem is often hand waved away.
- roadnottaken 16y agoI wish somebody would actually make a better Social Travel website. TripAdvisor is exceedingly unpleasant to use, despite the solid content. I keep hoping that wikitravel will thrive but it's never very good...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- JabavuAdams 16y ago> driverless cars Why not? Technologically, or socially?
- sedachv 16y agoIt's hard. Just the technology is hard. It would be something on the scale of Federal Express to launch. I am glad Page/Brin/Schmidt are working on it. I can't see too many other people succeeding.
- JabavuAdams 16y agoOh, I see -- in the context of a startup.
- binarymax 16y agoHere are some of the other common one's I've heard: - A social-networking site that totally respects my privacy and lets me own my data! - An app store that lets anybody sell their digital stuff to anyone, not in some walled garden! - A drag and drop interface that lets you make any program you want...totally code-free! I could go on and on...
- dgallagher 16y ago- A drag and drop interface that lets you make any program you want...totally code-free! Xcode and Interface Builder, using Core Data and Bindings. Don't expect to make a full-blown 3D video game doing that though. ;)
- chc 16y agoThat will let you make any program you want, as long as it is a simple CRUD app with nothing but text and no processing of the data entered. It will get you about as far as Rails' scaffold generator.
- jon914 16y agoAs a founder of a startup doing #3 (Stencyl), I can attest to that idea being an enormous time sink and risk. I can name at least 10 startups or larger companies that went after that idea and either died or pivoted. What we have is working, and it's working well, but as we press forward, we find that our strongest value proposition is no longer the code-free aspect, which turns out to be just one small part of a larger puzzle. Once you remove that roadblock, other pain points come to light that are far more difficult to solve.
- dwiel 16y agoany chance we might be able to read about what some of those points are?
- jon914 16y agoSure, I'll list out some of the pain points we're aware of and have tried to address. - Not able to think logically. There's only so much you can accomplish if you take logical thinking out of the equation, and when you do, the creations are underwhelming. Many startups set out to make creation easy, and that works to some extent, but the real solution to the problem may be to try to educate users and bring them up to a minimum bar (learn how to fish), rather than trying to lower the bar to the floor (give them the fish). This would be suicide for most startups, but the users of creative apps are more patient and more willing to learn and grow with the app. Sure, we'll shut out some people this way, but we want to lift up the right, motivated people, rather than trying to lift the entire world up. - Can't draw/other artistic skill. Shockingly, this ends up being a big problem, and people absolutely hate using placeholder art if they can't draw. We've addressed this by integrating a marketplace for pulling in all kinds of resources. - Can't work with other people. Many game projects fail due to bad communication (if you're not working solo). They start out strong when brainstorming and then die somewhere in the middle, usually when the members fall out of regular contact or don't know what's going on. We've integrated some features into our app to directly address this after observing how our users interacted with each other on several group projects. - Set their sights too high. No, you're not going to create an MMORPG or RTS as your first project. ;) This one isn't directly addressed by our app right now and falls more under the umbrella of general user education and progression. One idea we have is to incorporate game elements (turning game creation into a game?) to nudge the user towards making baby steps towards completing something through a quest structure, rather than trying to let them go free from day 1. The take home point is that like any startup, what you set out to do ends up evolving as you move along and that the problem you're solving turns out to be different and sometimes larger than what you originally expected.
- JabavuAdams 16y ago... until they do
- s3b 16y agoAnother one he's missed : Algorithm to predict stock market movements.
- ahilss 16y agoAnd another: Algorithm to predict football scores.
- topherjaynes 16y agoI dunno, I agree that everyone and their brother has these ideas, but it's like writing a novel. In literature there are a bunch archetypes (hero, heroine, Christ-like figure, etc), it's the nuance the author brings to the new iteration . Your right in that everyone has these ideas, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't think about ways to do them in a different way!
- djb_hackernews 16y agoI feel like this misses a ton of apps. In chronological order: textbook swap todo list dorm rating apartment/roommate rating/review local business rating/review something to hack the stock market better pet site better dating site better wedding site
- retroafroman 16y agoI agree with your list, but could you please format it for better readability? Each of those on a separate line would do wonders.
- there 16y agois anyone still trying to innovate in the online dating arena? i thought okcupid has had it pretty much locked for a while.
- Abid 16y agoFrom what I can tell old dinosaurs like Match.com continue to dominate this field. OkCupid was the last site I heard of that people found unique in approach, but even that was mostly used for the fun tests and quizzes rather than dating.
- enjo 16y agoI'm shocked that OkCupid hasn't been more in the discussion here. It's one of the sections on the OP's list. OkCupid not only found traction, but success in a vertical long thought dead. I have absolutely no doubt that something else will come along and do the same The idea that just because a category has competitors means it's "dead" is quite wrong on a lot of levels. That's the beauty of the internet really. New ideas will come along and trample the old, and usually on a much shorter timescale than anyone expects.
- ig1 16y agoDozens of major dating sites have launched post-okcupid.
- primigenus 16y ago3 years ago I built branddating.nl for a client; it was pretty innovative but not particularly successful (which was okay because it was intended to appeal to a niche). And right now the company I work for is building another innovative dating site for a different (bigger) client. So yes, I'd say there's still innovation in this space, just perhaps not at the scale of OKcupid, or necessarily with the same amount of attention startups in the US get (the above two are both Dutch).
- juliamae 16y agoi am! i was pleasantly unsurprised to see dating as number one! (read as "i thought it would be, and laughed when i saw it was"). the reason most dating sites fail is that people keep building the same site again and again but with different branding. i think the problem can be solved by completely changing the experience. that's what i'm staking my savings on anyway.
- timf 16y ago> Giant, Purposeless, Unfocused Machine Learning System. There's a YC company that does this in a general way but I would not label their use cases as "purposeless". http://www.directededge.com/ http://www.directededge.com/
- icefox 16y agoYou could even argue that is what Amazon.com did with their recommendations. And the main reason I signed up for netflix was after working on the netflix prize. And I have been rewarded by buying things I wouldn't have otherwise and watching movies I had never heard about, but loved. There is $$$ in recommendations and selling solutions.
- jallmann 16y agoDirected Edge has some really insightful technical articles on their site. I did not know they were a YC company -- awesome.
- fbru02 16y agowhy is directedge a better alternative to hunch?
- Tichy 16y agoI don't see why 1 to 4 shouldn't work. How many failed dating sites are there? Also, many dating sites seem to simply be a matter of efficient advertising - even if you are a newcomer, if you can pour enough money into advertising, you are all set. Machine learning: I hope Directed Edge is doing well (YC startup). Social Travel: what are some good social travel sites? I don't know any.
- blhack 16y agoI hope I don't come across as negative here, but I hate lists like this. Peopel are always raining on each others' ideas "Oh, what, you're going to make a myspace clone? Bahahahaha." (facebook) "Oh, what, you're going to make a facebook clone? Bahahahaha." (twitter) "Oh, what, you're going to make another dating website? Bahahahaha." (Okcupid, plentyoffish) "Oh, what, you're going to make another social bookmarking website? Bahahahaha." (Reddit, digg, hacker news, etc.) This sort of "You can't improve on an existing design" rhetoric is usually coming from the same people who champion companies like netflix and say things like "The RIAA suing downloaders is like wagon wheel manufacturers suing car tire manufacturers! GET WITH THE TIMES, HELLO!" You want to make a better dating website? Awesome, I hope you do and I hope it's better than okcupid! If it fails, guess who's going to come out the other side better than they were when they started? You want to make an abstract machine learning system? Good! I hope you do! Guess who's probably going to be learning a lot about ML when they come out the other side? You want to make a craigslist/ebay mashup? Good! Do it today! Start it right now and, if it's better than craigslist, my friends and I are all going to use it! How much are you going to learn about interface/UX design in the process? You want to apply gaming mechanics to exercise? Good! Do it and tell me about it! That sounds awesome! Make an iPhone app for it, make a facebook app for it, let me pick random strangers across the internet to challenge at it. Make leaderboards and lots of badgers, and blog about it. If you fail, write more blog posts about why you failed. I'm sorry, I'm sure the author of this blog post had good intentions; trying to help other geeks, but I find this sort of "don't even try this because it's a stupid idea and you're going to fail" attitude extremely harmful. The first project I ever did was called http://newslily.com http://newslily.com it was a fark/reddit/hn/digg clone. Did I sell it to google for 2 billion dollars and retire to a yacht somewhere just east of anywhere on the planet? No. Did I go from knowing absolutely nothing whatsoever about web development to being able to turn ideas into things? Yes. My current project is called http://thingist.com http://thingist.com . Have people said "oh, psh, you're making a twitter clone...boorrrrriinnnggggggg."? Guess who doesn't care? My daydreaming about having 50 millions users is forcing me to learn about scaling, and how to use mod_python (oh, and if I get super crazy, maybe nginx as a web cache for my 10 users!). In a year, or two months, or six weeks, or however long it takes me to decide that, yeah, well, it's just another twitter clone and isn't going to get more than 10 users, I'm going to be 1 twitter clone closer experience wise to making something people love. (Although I still think that thingist isn't a twitter clone). My advice: make 10 twitter clones and 20 abstracted ML frameworks. NOT doing this is like a running coach advising their runners not to waste their time jogging around their neighborhood because they're really not going anywhere anyway.
- alex_c 16y agoTake-out services / services for restaurants.
- ErrantX 16y agoSocial network. That tends to be a common one. (yes, I spent a long time creating a social network, no it went nowhere special :))
- clistctrl 16y agoI was honestly expecting to see something about a bar revolving around gaming. I've heard it proposed by at least 4 seperate nerd friends.
- nickpinkston 16y agoAdd to that a coffee shop around thinking/debating... It's on my friends' lists.
- dzlobin 16y agohttp://www.barcadebrooklyn.com/ http://www.barcadebrooklyn.com/
- dominostars 16y agoThis is definitely an idea lots of nerds have, which is exactly why it shouldn't be shrugged off. There's a desire for nerds to socially interact with similar nerds, and by and large this has been accomplished by adding social features to the internet. Well, why not add social features to a game stop? Why not add nerdy features to a bar? A barcade doesn't need to be the last stop. Why not take what we learned about online dating, and use it to improve offline dating? Maybe people don't want 'a bar revolving around gaming', but it's a thought in the right direction. Barcades and shared hacker work spaces are an actual step in the right direction.
- mikeklaas 16y agohttp://manabar.com/ http://manabar.com/ (Zero Punctuation guy)
- daimyoyo 16y agoDoes this mean I should stop working on www.craigsmatchsquaretravelocifund.com?
- silverlake 16y agothere's already an app for that
- uast23 16y agoIt boils down to the cliche "if you think you are unique, you are probably an asshole". The mere fact that you manage to find a co-founder in your own country/city is enough to prove that there are lot of other people in ROW going in the same direction where you are headed. It's not about doing things uniquely, its about doing things in a better way or at least trying to do it in a better way. So, I should get back to work now.
- ojbyrne 16y agoThis would have been better with at least a little explanation for why each idea wouldn't work (other than a Nerd thought it up).
- anmol 16y agoisn't hunch an example of #2? as an outsider, with many west coast friends, it appears that both start-ups and investors move in herds. for example, six months ago it was location-based check-in services?
- raganwald 16y agoI'm pretty sure that "Better Search Engine" was on the list when Google, Cuil, Bing, and DuckDuckGo were founded. SOmetimes you win, sometimes not so much. Let's get empirical for a moment. If we are sifting through applications for funding, do you think that there is a significant correlation between whether a business is on this list or not and its eventual success or failure? If the other factors driving outcomes--founder quality and so forth--have higher confidence levels, this kind of list isn't very useful.
- wtracy 16y agoFavorite comment: "You should have made us sign an NDA before reading this post."
- wheels 16y agoI know of companies doing well in at least 5 of the 6 spaces listed here. (Future success of friends being the missing one, and there very well may be companies doing well there, and you could almost consider the fact that prominent angels often raise money from other prominent angels as an instance of such.)
- jlees 16y agoAh wheels, I saw #2 and I thought of you. ;)
- randrews 16y agoThe stereotypical "never gonna work" idea that I always see is this: * There's a sort of thing that there are many implementations of (website logins, say) * Having many implementations is confusing, one canonical one would be better (Hey! Let's make OpenID!) * They make a new one, announce it, everyone sees that it's not as mature as what they already have (Provider? XRI?) * Nobody else adopts the new one, now there's one more competing implementation for the next never-gonna-work idea to contend with. Note: I don't want to pick on OpenID, it actually works pretty well, but I needed an example. Once you start looking for this pattern you see it everywhere: Linux distros, OpenSocial, OS X package managers, etc.
- user24 16y agoQuite pleased to see none of these are on the list of ten startup ideas I released a few weeks ago: http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/10/ten-ideas/ http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/10/ten-ideas/
- rwhitman 16y agoAmen. Definitely been sucked into and subsequently failed at Social Travel big time. I think that's a sexy one, there is an unsaid allure in it of being able to mix travel with running a startup. Such a crowded space, and most fail out the gate. Once you do the math you realize there is far more travel media out there than travelers, especially in a down economy. Anyone who loves to travel and wants to get out more, but is stuck inside writing friggin code all day gets this idea at least once. "Wait! How would I combine writing code with travel? I know, I'll make my own travel recommendation site." The irony is in reality I traveled wayyy less as a result of committing to this idea. Bummer
- danielhodgins 16y ago"Once you do the math you realize there is far more travel media out there than travelers, especially in a down economy". I recently shut down my travel startup - a site that offered tours and excursions in many of the world's greatest cities. Why? The VC-funded big boys have 2,000 affiliates and many thousands of inbound links to their site. This bumps them up in the organic rankings which sends more traffic to their site - enabling them to gather more conversion data. As conversions gradually increase, their product becomes more attractive to other affiliates, and more sign up, thus perpetuating a positive feedback loop. Learned a ton during the process of building the company, and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. To all prospective founders out there - really do your homework and understand the competitive advantages held by the top competitors in your market - things that are very difficult, time consuming, and/or expensive to replicate! For example, 37 Signals now has a passionate fan base of hundreds of thousands of people based on years of teaching and writing opinionated rants. Nearly impossible to replicate for a new startup trying to market simple project management software. Also, realize that cute innovations and a great user experience might not overcome the massive reach held by existing companies.
- sedachv 16y agoThis reads like a list of the Montreal startup scene. So far I've met people working on dating sites, purposeless recommendation engines (to be fair, in one of those startups two of the guys were part of the team that won the Netflix prize, the other one is headed by someone who placed second in the GitHub contest, so they're not dilettantes at least), social travel ("we'll get film students to make videos about restaurants... for free!"), I'm pretty sure there was a Craigslist killer there somewhere. Other hard things of dubious utility people work on: 1. Local events 2. Local business directories (I was once removed from this space by working at a company that provided an integrated directory/SEM buying product to various Yellow Page companies around the world; the cynic in me thinks this is a great way to fleece small businesses, although if you try it really can drive a lot of business) 3. Microsoft Access for the web. Dabble DB tried (acquired by Twitter), I tried, http://formlis.com/ http://formlis.com/ (HN user warrenwilkinson) is trying. There's probably a bunch more. Google Forms and Wufoo seem to be the most successful with the least functionality. The hard part here seems to be getting people to know about the service. Companies typically contract these apps out, and the contractor companies are more interested in $30k contracts to build custom form apps and making busywork for PHP drones than reselling a solution where the customers or other contractors can cut them out as middlemen. Actually the more I think about it, the more I want to try this again.
- WalterGR 16y agoLocal events This is my "Dream Project" - i.e. the one I'll build when I have endless free time that I'd like to devote to working. I'd love to know why you think it's of dubious utility. (Aside from movie times, I've never discovered an event through an "event site" - but I feel like I could...)
- rwhitman 16y ago"Social e-commerce". I get a lot of project bid requests for variations on this theme. Especially when the economy really tanked every panicking startup tried to pivot their business plan to be shopping related for a while. Very difficult to implement, people are much less amped about sharing purchases than nerds would expect
- dlevine 16y agoI think that all of these (or at least most of them) are reasonable ideas that could work. I think the biggest problem is that a lot of them are either technically difficult or involve entering crowded markets. For example, the Craigslist killer can and has worked. The guys at RentHop and AirBnB are both attacking pieces of Craigslist's functionality. The problem is that most nerds don't have the ability to pull these ideas off. Heck, most people in general don't have what it takes to build a successful company. There's a big difference between hacking on something for a weekend and building a company out of it (although you can't build a company without starting somewhere). Overall, a lot of people (including many successful YC Founders) start out with stupid, unfocused ideas, and morph into something that's focused and solves a problem that people need solved. It's all just part of the process - if you wait for the perfect idea to hit you, you might never get started.
- sedachv 16y agoThere is something common with some of these ideas worth noting: Dating sites, social travel (social anything), and Craigslist killer all depend on network effects. A common argument for starting a new business is that "hey, someone else already has this idea, they've mapped out the market and proved it can make money." This works really well for things like restaurants where there is no network effect, no incentives for new users to go with well-established providers or disincentives for existing users to switch providers. In the social/dating/craigslist space, you don't just need to build a better X, you need to convince people to leave the old X (or pray that they've never heard of the old X before and won't consider it) and sign up for your new X. In terms of dating, social and craigslist at least you're only dealing with one type of customer. As soon as you turn to local events/businesses you needs to do this for two (the people looking for events and businesses, and the promoters and business owners). Cable networks are similar businesses, but I think the key distinction is that they charged money for their services. Somewhat paradoxically, I think this makes it much easier for people to switch than if all the services are free - there is the immediate incentive of "save $10 a month!" I think this is why AOL and Prodigy managed to make so much money. Then all the free (ad-supported) online services came along and basically wiped out the paid services, and intensified the network effect and its disincentive for switching to better services.
- dnsworks 16y agoGeeks are so incredibly negative it's why I end up trying to convince friends to find a better career filled with happier people whenever they ask how to get into the tech field. There's nothing more pathetic then that guy who is the born skeptic and can't see beyond his own inability to find success, constantly putting down every idea his friends give him. I'm told that's what it's like trying to do a start-up in England.
- zeemonkee 16y agoThat's a very good point; I'm very much that way myself, and more so every year. Part of it is cynicism from being at the bottom of a pecking order that puts the braying salesman and architypal PHB at the top and consistently having advice and ideas ignored, while given impossible deadlines because people don't know how to manage a development process properly. However there is also a very negative vibe among geeks in general, especially (but not exclusively) in the UK. No doubt American geeks suffer from the same idiots in charge, but say the hell with it, and go start their own companies. Here there is more of a resigned shrug of the shoulders. It's not a univeral British trait; people in other walks of life seem to have a more positive attitude.
- jodrellblank 16y agoI'm told that's what it's like trying to do a start-up in England. That's what it's like trying to do anything in England.
- igravious 16y agoIs this is general geek trait? I have a (very good) friend who always rubbishes my ideas as unworkable, impossible, idealistic, or whatever. He earns a much better salary than me but the funny thing is, I got him into tech and taught a _lot_ in the beginning. He gravitated towards the Microsoft ecosystem and I gravitated towards open source so that whenever we find something we would both like to work on we can't agree on the tools! Groooan. He's one of the smartest guys I know and he's always coming up with ideas (as am I in my own way) but whenever I say, come on, let's do one of these he always demurs. (Not that I'm much better.) I love tech and coding but I'm in the process of giving it up to a certain extent for a stint in academia. That was a sly dig at Engerland, right ;-)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- swecker 16y agoI think the point this author is making is not, "These ideas won't work, so don't do it." but rather, "You might think these ideas are unique, but they're not." So he's not shooting down the ideas per say, but warning people that if they undertake such a project they need to be honest to the fact that your "variant" needs to be something special and/or you have to execute seamlessly to get ahead of the crowd.
- WalterBright 16y agoThis site is hilarious. Every successful business idea I've had was met with derision by every respected professional I encountered.
- cj 16y agoI'm guilty of #4. Made this but never followed through with it. http://brandonpaton.com/demo/ http://brandonpaton.com/demo/
- nowarninglabel 16y agoMeh, these are more like ideas that nearly every person has, and then wants a developer 'nerd' to implement (for free mind you, for x% of future profits).
- mmaunder 16y agoThe idea for building a better search engine and a better social network was on a list like that, once upon a time.
- praptak 16y ago"Gaming Mechanics Applied To X Vertical" I have seen real money spent on something along the lines of "Hey, we're in accounting business! Let's make a Facebook of accounting where accountants will create profiles and publish their annual and quarterly reports." (details changed to protect the guinnocent.)
- rrrhys 16y agoHow about the best to do list ever!
- Goladus 16y agoDating sites still kind of suck. If I were building a dating site, it wouldn't be anything like what the original author suggests. Rather than focus on matching algorithms or ways to stimulate initiative (okcupid is already reasonably good at that), I'd focus on providing value after the initial connection has been made. I don't know of any dating site that does that well, at the moment.
- joe_the_user 16y agoI imagine "social networking site"/"myspace killer" would have been on the list five years ago. The article sketches ideas that have promise and long odds. Five years ago, most people who were trying to create "yet another social networking site" looked dumb. One doesn't now. There is are many reasons that most of the cool ideas people come with brainstorming late at night don't work. But it's not that they are bad ideas. The factors for failure include the distance between idea and execution, competition, the need for good design, etc.. It's just a question of whether you want to make an easy bet or a hard bet.
- chwahoo 16y agoI think the wrong-headed idea that many nerds have is that creating a startup is mostly about having a brilliant idea. If someone comes along and creates something similar to their idea, they think "that could have been me." I suspect that the real value comes from execution of the idea, perseverance, and willingness to let your idea evolve until you've created something that people want. Often folks fail to recognize that the ability to execute and evolve (and be willing to fail) are traits that we don't all have, and so it's very possible that it couldn't have been them. While there are probably some ideas that are doomed to fail, I don't think that label applies to any of the ones from the original post.
- yoak 16y agoThe most common thing I see from such people is a desire to break off and do whatever is being done at their current company, but to do it right instead.
- ja27 16y agoNo "groupware"? http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
- gojomo 16y agoNever say never. Ramit Sethi, a smart writer and generally perceptive entrepreneur, highlighted textbook exchanges in May 2006 as his top "stupid frat-boy business idea". He wrote: "NO BOOK EXCHANGE HAS EVER REALLY SUCCEEDED. I HATE TO CRUSH DREAMS BUT PLEASE FORGET ABOUT THIS." http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/8-stupid-frat-boy-business-ideas/ http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/8-stupid-frat-boy-... But now there is Chegg. And Chegg is not just Sethi's despised textbook exchange idea -- it started as a Craigslist competitor for campuses! And when it pivoted to its current model in 2007, it first used the name textbookflix.com! And it competes against others on price! So it fits multiple categories from these Ramit Sethi and Elad Gil 'never work' lists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chegg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chegg Estimates are that it'll have more than $100 million in revenue this year and is growing to a dominant position in a large market. http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/05/teardown-chegg/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/05/teardown-chegg/ Chegg's final success isn't assured -- especially given the rise of e-textbooks -- but it's passed the point of "tempting but foolish nerd/frat-boy startup idea".