18 ms·

“Is your startup idea taken?” and why we love X for Y startups

317 points by motiw 7y ago

ijidak 7y ago
It would be neat to see a more in-depth analysis on the success of these X for Y startups vs non. A big reason for X for Y, besides simplicity of explanation is... X is usually a novel NEW process -- or way of doing things -- that either became only recently possible , or was recently demonstrated as successful. Suddenly it becomes clear that this NOVEL new process can be applied in other areas. Uber and AirBnB opened up efficient sharing of expensive resources that were underutilized prior. Now, the natural next step is: "What other expensive resources are underutilized?" Boats? Commercial retail or wharehouse space? Tractors and heavy equipment? So, in the early stages of rolling out a newly realized novel process, it seems impossible that the process should not expand to a number of similar problems. Until the low hanging fruit is all gathered. Uber for Y, for example, seems to be only in its VERY EARLY stages. No doubt there are MANY Y's out there to roll out the Uber model to.
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
this post was obviously just satire. but, just so we're clear, Paul graham's article on this concept unequivocally says this is NOT how you build a start up.
goldenegg 7y ago
My startup business - GoldenEgg https://www.thegoldenegg.in/services/address-change/ https://www.thegoldenegg.in/services/address-change/
alex-wallish 7y ago
"Airbnb for Gamers" according to the infographic isn't taken. Any potential there? Letting people rent out their physical gaming rigs to other people in the area, in their homes. Seems like it'd be pretty easy to set up. I could see it be kind of like gaming cafe's in Asia, except you'd be renting a rig in somebody's actual home. I don't know if there'd be any market for this, but it seems like it wouldn't take to much to whip up and to a trial run in a city.
- WaxProlix 7y ago
  Nobody wants their hands to touch someone else's booger and cheeto dust coated peripherals, or vice-versa. There have been some times recently where I'd have paid money (but not much) to test drive computer hardware before buying it, but to some extent you can do that by purchasing from places with a liberal return policy. Speaking of test drive, I'm in the market for a car and would love to be able to actually test drive some of the contenders without having pushy sales people all over me and in my voicemail for the next 2 months. Opportunity?
  - froindt 7y ago
    Google Voice number for car dealerships. Turo to try cars out for a few days. The owner would probably be happy to tell you what they do or don't like as well - and perhaps sell it to you if they were looking for something else.
    - WaxProlix 7y ago
      Turo if you could search by car type without having to specify date ranges maybe?
- QuinnWilton 7y ago
  I suspect that, at least in places with decent internet, something like ShadowPC negates the need for such a service. I rent a top of the line gaming PC for ~$25/month, and run my games in the cloud. With what I used to spend keeping a gaming rig upgraded, it doesn't even make sense not to rent something that's always going to be state of the art.
  - ss3000 7y ago
    First time hearing about Shadow. Their site doesn't mention anything about usage limits, so it sounds a bit too good to be true. Do they have any usage limits in practice?
    - 7y ago
dheera 7y ago
Besides the "X for Y" approach, I find it laughable that every time someone says they are doing just "X" that the usual Bay Area response is "How are you differentiating from your competitors?" Go ask how UPS differentiates themselves from FedEx. Or how Shell differentiates themselves from Chevron. In reality, while product differentiation is good, unless there already exists a monopoly that has eaten every inch of the market, the market is probably big enough to fit multiple nearly identical products at the same time and still have them all profitable.
- a13n 7y ago
  > the market is probably big enough to fit multiple nearly identical products at the same time and still have them all profitable. Agreed, but VCs don't need you to build a profitable company, they need you to build a billion dollar company, in order to return their fund. This "How are you going to win your market?" is driven by venture capitalism. Most startups in the Bay Area are VC-backed.
  - dheera 7y ago
    Chevron, Shell, UPS, and FedEx are all billion dollar companies. They succeeded not because of differentiating product, but because the market is so big that it's hard for a single company to dominate it.
    - a13n 7y ago
      So you think if you pick a big enough market, then building a billion dollar company with no product differentiation will be trivial?
      - dheera 7y ago
        Not trivial, but very possible with a lot of hard work. Let's say you want to start a new grocery store chain and compete with Safeway. Differentiating your product (e.g. Trader Joe's) is one way, but another way is to just build new grocery stores where people want them and they don't already exist.
jonfw 7y ago
I searched a startup name in a seperate tab, came back and had an inescapable subscribe screen. If your going to attempt to hold the rest of the article hostage pending a subscription to your newsletter, at least let me get interested first. This is both hostile and ineffective- and unsurprisingly is the most amusing part of the website
- sp332 7y ago
  Firefox is working on a JS popup blocker. They're collecting data now, use https://github.com/ehsan/popup-reporter https://github.com/ehsan/popup-reporter to report sites.
  - musicale 7y ago
    Yes!! It's time for browsers/users to fight back against this madness. We all blocked pop-ups for a reason: they are obnoxious interruptions that interfere with web browsing. Unfortunately site designers learned the wrong lesson from, thinking "oh, I guess that means we need to come up with a sneakier way of forcing obnoxious pop-ups on users that don't want them."
- arberavdullahu 7y ago
  I wrote a nonexistent email to escape
  - shaftway 7y ago
    Ahhh, good ol' god@heaven.mil
- mattmcegg 7y ago
  the X is there in the top right, it's just white on white background.
- neonate 7y ago
  http://archive.is/7q806 http://archive.is/7q806
- 7y ago
haolez 7y ago
Uber for underwear? I’m having trouble imagining some of those open spots.
bananatron 7y ago
Tinder for bodily fluids is just tinder.
noonespecial 7y ago
By "taken" do they maybe mean "validated"? Ideas are executed not "owned". The proof is in the doing.
- holler 7y ago
  this. While it's an interesting article and thought experiment, I don't think anyone should be discouraged from trying to build the next ride-hailing, dating, or couch-surfing platform simply because others have already found success in it. Competition makes the world spin, and in the grand scheme of things, we're only just beginning.
  - im3w1l 7y ago
    I think when you make the world's first couch-surfing app you can plausibly tell your self that you are changing the world. The world goes from not having couch-surfing apps to having one. Creating a second couch-surfing app with the idea of out-marketing the first doesn't inspire the same sense of purpose.
    - holler 7y ago
      Innovation usually happens in small increments. Uber/Lyft/x/y/z ride hailing app, airbnb/vrbo/booking, tinder/bumble/match/pof/bagel/hinge/x/y/z dating app, friendster/myspace/facebook/twitter/pinterest/imgur/giphy/justin.tv/twitch/reddit/hackernews/discord/beam/dlive/slack/x/y/z social app, they're all just incremental. I agree it'd be foolish to try and out-compete or out-spend a goliath, but I'm saying that you can still be competitive in other ways. Build something people enjoy, start there.
cabaalis 7y ago
Do I have any of these "realms" wrong? It seems the best startup idea would be one that adds a new "realm" rather than rinses and repeats for another direct object. Uber for = simplify a process that involves transporting or delivering something somewhere Tinder for = rate/advertise/connect some product nearby Birchbox for = periodically refill a perishable or consumable Airbnb for = locate and book some experience or resource
- egypturnash 7y ago
  Uber for X can also mean “connect the user with independent contractors, or at least people we insist are independent contractors so we can pay less taxes and push the costs for things like insurance, consumables, and equipment maintenance onto them”.
- ska 7y ago
  I think you are trying to define a taxonomy of such services based on the nominal/advertised proposition to end consumers. I'm not sure that's the right way to quantify the startups themselves, as the business case is sometimes only tangentially related to said proposition.
- mr__y 7y ago
  Tinder for heroin (or maybe Birchbox?) and airbnb for used syringes
  - jebeng 7y ago
    > airbnb for used syringes So just regular airbnb?
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  I mean the way you make oodles money is taking market share (Uber) or creating new markets (AWS). Both are valid strategies - either take someone else’s customers or create a new way for people to spend money.
snegu 7y ago
One category that's missing on the left is "Parents." There's Tinder for parents (Peanut), Birchbox for parents (multiple subscription boxes). It would be interesting to think about what Uber or AirBnB for parents would be. I couldn't read the article though because I got that absurd uncloseable newsletter subscription screen. That was one of the most user-hostile things I've seen on a website lately.
- shaftway 7y ago
  It's KidzJet (http://www.kidzjet.com/ http://www.kidzjet.com/). They take your kids to after-school activities.
- frandroid 7y ago
  I found the X in white on white at the top right. Maybe a browser bug, I'm in Firefox.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  So Tinder for parents is a terrible idea. (Full disclosure: my wife's a Peanut member. She's been meaning to uninstall it for a while.) Think about the key observations that made Tinder take over the dating space: people are basically superficial and judge who to go out with based on looks alone; people have spare time to flip through photos; people want to be casual and not invest too much in a date before getting to know them. These are the exact opposite qualities that you want in a mom-friend. When you're a new mom you're probably not looking your best, and putting up a profile picture isn't high on your list of things to do. You don't give a shit what your mom friends look like, and once you're reading through text it's more like "Facebook for moms". You have very little free time to swipe through profiles, and when you do, you want your mom-friend-relationships to count. There's a lesson there for people who want to phrase their startup idea as "X for Y". You should ask how similar Y is to the userbase that originally made X popular, and whether you are capturing the qualities they have in common or just randomly cargo-culting a successful product. "Flickr for video" works because a photo-viewing community and video-viewing community are substantially similar: they both have similar casual interactions around shared multimedia, and they both benefit heavily from recommendations, discovery mechanisms, and social sharing. Similarly, "Google for China" works because people in China have information needs too yet actual Google has an antagonistic relationship with the CCP. "Uber for laundry" and "Uber for housecleaning" are both terrible ideas because Uber's value proposition is that you can get transportation on-demand and it can be done by unskilled people as long as they get you safely to your final destination, while both housecleaning and laundry are stuff you do once a week, on a planned basis, and you really want to trust the people who are doing it. "Uber for grocery delivery" (Instacart/UberEats/DoorDash/Postmates) is a decent idea, though, because grocery delivery is also something you want on-demand, do regularly, and can be done by basically anyone.
paultopia 7y ago
tinder for weed. somebody did tinder for weed. that's got to be the most young californian thing ever.
- mordechai9000 7y ago
  I had an idea kind of similar to that. Call it Herb Grind(e)r. I don't use weed myself, and I'm married, so I don't know how much need there is. I actually think something more like Meetup for weed users would be kind of cool, though. Find fun activities to do with herb friendly people.(Disc golf, anyone?)
hising 7y ago
Reading the article and trying to think of different startup ideas. Gets a non-closable (AFAIK) modal that covers the whole screen force you to go back. Maybe a startup idea that helps entrepreneurs grow without adapting to bad UX behaviour is a great idea that needs attention
- superqd 7y ago
  yeah, I didn't actually read the entire article because of this.
robomartin 7y ago
Very often engineering types can only think of differentiation in technical terms. I think I can say that, in practice, at least in mature markets, differentiation is more about positioning and marketing rather than almost anything else. Easy examples: - Cars - Bottled water - Computer monitors The vast majority of automobiles produced today have reached a level of design and manufacturing maturity that makes them pretty much equally reliable and equivalent. The days of a Porsche or BMW being markedly better than a Toyota or Nissan are gone. Sure, we can point at the extremes and find differences, but I am not talking about that, I am focusing on what the vast majority of consumers look for or need in a car. Today you could pick any vehicle almost blindly and not make a purchasing mistake. That was not the case a few decades ago. How do they differentiate and sell you cars then? Branding, positioning, marketing. They sell the feeling of owning the car rather than any true technical differentiation, because those really don't matter as much in non-technical markets. Bottle water is another case. I'll generalize and say that most bottled water is pretty much the same. Or, let's put it another way, no bottled water has magical properties that make it significantly better than the others. Again, marketing. They are selling you an image. In some cases it's a glass bottle with a different feel or a social mission. The product, however, that thing you drink, most of which you are going to urinate, is basically the same. If you position the product well you can command much higher pricing than the competition. Computer monitors fall under the same category. Nobody cares any more outside of those using them for very specific applications. There are only a few companies who make LCD panels. Every single computer monitor buys from them. So, if you buy a 24 inch HP vs a Dell monitor they very likely have exactly the same LG or Samsung panel inside. They might even share the rest of the electronics. For most computer users these products are perfectly interchangeable; they just don't care because it makes no difference at all. Not sure how computer monitor makers differentiate their offerings any more to the masses. Sure, there are folks who are more comfortable with one brand over the other (despite the fact that it might actually be exactly the same product inside) and, of course, there's pricing. This is one example of the fact that significant differentiation might not always be an absolute necessity in order to have a successful billion dollar business. One area where they do differentiate --although consumers never see it-- would be in the terms and relationship they have with distributors and retailers. This is a big money play. For example, HP could drop two million dollars of inventory into Best Buy warehouses, effectively on consignment, and get paid based on what is sold. Best Buy, will, of course, push those products because they represent pure profit without any capital investment to speak of. This is a distribution chain differentiation that drives sales rather than differentiation to drive consumer behavior. Books have been written about this topic. I've read a few of them over the years. Still much to learn.
lancewiggs 7y ago
This gives strong flashbacks to the dot com boom and bust. Folks were going through ISO codes looking for new B2B marketplaces to launch. Start with an end user need.
sk84life 7y ago
I am always questioning why startup idea have to be unique ? Let's say you sell "books" we all know who's biggest.. but they idea was not definitely not unique. My opinion service quality for customer matters more than uniqueness..
jtth 7y ago
the popup modal for the newsletter is undismissible and blocks the article completely in the latest safari
jrochkind1 7y ago
popup that keeps me from reading the article unless I give them an email address when I'm half-way through? No thanks.
- musicale 7y ago
  That is an extraordinary anti-pattern. Is there any browser in 2019 that is actually capable of blocking obnoxious pop-ups? It seems like we're losing the arms race. Fortunately the best part of the article was "above the fold" so I didn't run into that monstrosity.
malodyets 7y ago
Is anyone else offended by the non-dismissable email signup pop-over on this page? Ctrl/Cmd-R refresh allows continuing to read from the same point, but still....
- mrbuttons454 7y ago
  I came to the comments looking for this, and was surprised it was so far down. They are just asking for garbage input...
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/7q806 http://archive.is/7q806
theandrewbailey 7y ago
This idea needs to be incorporated into https://thisstartupdoesnotexist.com/ https://thisstartupdoesnotexist.com/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
treblig 7y ago
http://itsthisforthat.com http://itsthisforthat.com (2010) :)
magashna 7y ago
20000 startup ideas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21112345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21112345 Seems people found this pretty funny when it was posted >> Document software defects, using hand and horn signals.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Those "ideas" are just occupations, as categorized by the US federal government, called "Standard Occupational Classification System".
gwbas1c 7y ago
I started scrolling around, and then an unclosable "subscribe to my newsletter" blocked the entire page. WTF??? No, I don't want to subscribe to your newsletter. Furthermore, forcing me to subscribe to your newsletter just to read a silly post on your website is a jerk move.
- tonynguyen1 7y ago
  Exactly, that's how I come back here and leave this comment.
  - mc3 7y ago
    "[op] is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm" It's also an odd move. If you have that level of credential, then you definitely don't want to be doing that!
- tjalfi 7y ago
  I fill out undismissable popups as abuse@theirdomain.com. I'm sure their email support team doesn't want to miss out on the incredible rewards.
JoeCianflone 7y ago
Can we all just please agree that Tinder for Kids should not exist? Please?
Jun8 7y ago
I think the reason this sort of thinking works is that it's an effective way to perform exhaustive search in idea space where metrics may be hard to define, based on combinatorics. A very early example of such an approach was Ramon Llull's Ars Magna (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull#Llull's_Art_(Ars_Magna) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull#Llull's_Art_(Ars_M...).
luizb 7y ago
F annoying pop-over after X seconds. I will not give you my email.
polynomial 7y ago
"Plaid for Bitcoin"
cbanek 7y ago
Tinder for laundry seems like good, clean fun.
LoSboccacc 7y ago
the list is questionable. I was very hopeful to see if there was a tinder for gamers (say, to find people to play coop games) but there's some sort of tinder inspired incremental game in that spot, so I wonder how much is it really curated and how much is a proxy to a Google 'feeling lucky' search
ethanpil 7y ago
I'm looking forward to seeing the first startup in the Uber for Beards space.
SmelyMonkyFart 7y ago
It's not about is it taken it's who can do it better
mokarma 7y ago
Airbnb for bathrooms, you can use it to allow desperate strangers to pay you to use your toilet. Preferably while you're not home. We'll call it Airpnp.
- symplee 7y ago
  AirPnD
symplee 7y ago
Some say that's how they got the idea for MongoDB: Snapchat for Databases

317 points by motiw 7y ago

It would be neat to see a more in-depth analysis on the success of these X for Y startups vs non. A big reason for X for Y, besides simplicity of explanation is... X is usually a novel NEW process -- or way of doing things -- that either became only recently possible , or was recently demonstrated as successful. Suddenly it becomes clear that this NOVEL new process can be applied in other areas. Uber and AirBnB opened up efficient sharing of expensive resources that were underutilized prior. Now, the natural next step is: "What other expensive resources are underutilized?" Boats? Commercial retail or wharehouse space? Tractors and heavy equipment? So, in the early stages of rolling out a newly realized novel process, it seems impossible that the process should not expand to a number of similar problems. Until the low hanging fruit is all gathered. Uber for Y, for example, seems to be only in its VERY EARLY stages. No doubt there are MANY Y's out there to roll out the Uber model to.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

this post was obviously just satire. but, just so we're clear, Paul graham's article on this concept unequivocally says this is NOT how you build a start up.

goldenegg 7y ago

My startup business - GoldenEgg https://www.thegoldenegg.in/services/address-change/ https://www.thegoldenegg.in/services/address-change/

alex-wallish 7y ago

"Airbnb for Gamers" according to the infographic isn't taken. Any potential there? Letting people rent out their physical gaming rigs to other people in the area, in their homes. Seems like it'd be pretty easy to set up. I could see it be kind of like gaming cafe's in Asia, except you'd be renting a rig in somebody's actual home. I don't know if there'd be any market for this, but it seems like it wouldn't take to much to whip up and to a trial run in a city.

WaxProlix 7y ago
Nobody wants their hands to touch someone else's booger and cheeto dust coated peripherals, or vice-versa. There have been some times recently where I'd have paid money (but not much) to test drive computer hardware before buying it, but to some extent you can do that by purchasing from places with a liberal return policy. Speaking of test drive, I'm in the market for a car and would love to be able to actually test drive some of the contenders without having pushy sales people all over me and in my voicemail for the next 2 months. Opportunity?
- froindt 7y ago
  Google Voice number for car dealerships. Turo to try cars out for a few days. The owner would probably be happy to tell you what they do or don't like as well - and perhaps sell it to you if they were looking for something else.
  - WaxProlix 7y ago
    Turo if you could search by car type without having to specify date ranges maybe?
QuinnWilton 7y ago
I suspect that, at least in places with decent internet, something like ShadowPC negates the need for such a service. I rent a top of the line gaming PC for ~$25/month, and run my games in the cloud. With what I used to spend keeping a gaming rig upgraded, it doesn't even make sense not to rent something that's always going to be state of the art.
- ss3000 7y ago
  First time hearing about Shadow. Their site doesn't mention anything about usage limits, so it sounds a bit too good to be true. Do they have any usage limits in practice?
  - 7y ago

dheera 7y ago

Besides the "X for Y" approach, I find it laughable that every time someone says they are doing just "X" that the usual Bay Area response is "How are you differentiating from your competitors?" Go ask how UPS differentiates themselves from FedEx. Or how Shell differentiates themselves from Chevron. In reality, while product differentiation is good, unless there already exists a monopoly that has eaten every inch of the market, the market is probably big enough to fit multiple nearly identical products at the same time and still have them all profitable.

a13n 7y ago
> the market is probably big enough to fit multiple nearly identical products at the same time and still have them all profitable. Agreed, but VCs don't need you to build a profitable company, they need you to build a billion dollar company, in order to return their fund. This "How are you going to win your market?" is driven by venture capitalism. Most startups in the Bay Area are VC-backed.
- dheera 7y ago
  Chevron, Shell, UPS, and FedEx are all billion dollar companies. They succeeded not because of differentiating product, but because the market is so big that it's hard for a single company to dominate it.
  - a13n 7y ago
    So you think if you pick a big enough market, then building a billion dollar company with no product differentiation will be trivial?
    - dheera 7y ago
      Not trivial, but very possible with a lot of hard work. Let's say you want to start a new grocery store chain and compete with Safeway. Differentiating your product (e.g. Trader Joe's) is one way, but another way is to just build new grocery stores where people want them and they don't already exist.

jonfw 7y ago

I searched a startup name in a seperate tab, came back and had an inescapable subscribe screen. If your going to attempt to hold the rest of the article hostage pending a subscription to your newsletter, at least let me get interested first. This is both hostile and ineffective- and unsurprisingly is the most amusing part of the website

sp332 7y ago
Firefox is working on a JS popup blocker. They're collecting data now, use https://github.com/ehsan/popup-reporter https://github.com/ehsan/popup-reporter to report sites.
- musicale 7y ago
  Yes!! It's time for browsers/users to fight back against this madness. We all blocked pop-ups for a reason: they are obnoxious interruptions that interfere with web browsing. Unfortunately site designers learned the wrong lesson from, thinking "oh, I guess that means we need to come up with a sneakier way of forcing obnoxious pop-ups on users that don't want them."
arberavdullahu 7y ago
I wrote a nonexistent email to escape
- shaftway 7y ago
  Ahhh, good ol' god@heaven.mil
mattmcegg 7y ago
the X is there in the top right, it's just white on white background.
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/7q806 http://archive.is/7q806
7y ago

haolez 7y ago

Uber for underwear? I’m having trouble imagining some of those open spots.

bananatron 7y ago

Tinder for bodily fluids is just tinder.

noonespecial 7y ago

By "taken" do they maybe mean "validated"? Ideas are executed not "owned". The proof is in the doing.

holler 7y ago
this. While it's an interesting article and thought experiment, I don't think anyone should be discouraged from trying to build the next ride-hailing, dating, or couch-surfing platform simply because others have already found success in it. Competition makes the world spin, and in the grand scheme of things, we're only just beginning.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  I think when you make the world's first couch-surfing app you can plausibly tell your self that you are changing the world. The world goes from not having couch-surfing apps to having one. Creating a second couch-surfing app with the idea of out-marketing the first doesn't inspire the same sense of purpose.
  - holler 7y ago
    Innovation usually happens in small increments. Uber/Lyft/x/y/z ride hailing app, airbnb/vrbo/booking, tinder/bumble/match/pof/bagel/hinge/x/y/z dating app, friendster/myspace/facebook/twitter/pinterest/imgur/giphy/justin.tv/twitch/reddit/hackernews/discord/beam/dlive/slack/x/y/z social app, they're all just incremental. I agree it'd be foolish to try and out-compete or out-spend a goliath, but I'm saying that you can still be competitive in other ways. Build something people enjoy, start there.

cabaalis 7y ago

Do I have any of these "realms" wrong? It seems the best startup idea would be one that adds a new "realm" rather than rinses and repeats for another direct object. Uber for = simplify a process that involves transporting or delivering something somewhere Tinder for = rate/advertise/connect some product nearby Birchbox for = periodically refill a perishable or consumable Airbnb for = locate and book some experience or resource

egypturnash 7y ago
Uber for X can also mean “connect the user with independent contractors, or at least people we insist are independent contractors so we can pay less taxes and push the costs for things like insurance, consumables, and equipment maintenance onto them”.
ska 7y ago
I think you are trying to define a taxonomy of such services based on the nominal/advertised proposition to end consumers. I'm not sure that's the right way to quantify the startups themselves, as the business case is sometimes only tangentially related to said proposition.
mr__y 7y ago
Tinder for heroin (or maybe Birchbox?) and airbnb for used syringes
- jebeng 7y ago
  > airbnb for used syringes So just regular airbnb?
unlinked_dll 7y ago
I mean the way you make oodles money is taking market share (Uber) or creating new markets (AWS). Both are valid strategies - either take someone else’s customers or create a new way for people to spend money.

snegu 7y ago

One category that's missing on the left is "Parents." There's Tinder for parents (Peanut), Birchbox for parents (multiple subscription boxes). It would be interesting to think about what Uber or AirBnB for parents would be. I couldn't read the article though because I got that absurd uncloseable newsletter subscription screen. That was one of the most user-hostile things I've seen on a website lately.

shaftway 7y ago
It's KidzJet (http://www.kidzjet.com/ http://www.kidzjet.com/). They take your kids to after-school activities.
frandroid 7y ago
I found the X in white on white at the top right. Maybe a browser bug, I'm in Firefox.
nostrademons 7y ago
So Tinder for parents is a terrible idea. (Full disclosure: my wife's a Peanut member. She's been meaning to uninstall it for a while.) Think about the key observations that made Tinder take over the dating space: people are basically superficial and judge who to go out with based on looks alone; people have spare time to flip through photos; people want to be casual and not invest too much in a date before getting to know them. These are the exact opposite qualities that you want in a mom-friend. When you're a new mom you're probably not looking your best, and putting up a profile picture isn't high on your list of things to do. You don't give a shit what your mom friends look like, and once you're reading through text it's more like "Facebook for moms". You have very little free time to swipe through profiles, and when you do, you want your mom-friend-relationships to count. There's a lesson there for people who want to phrase their startup idea as "X for Y". You should ask how similar Y is to the userbase that originally made X popular, and whether you are capturing the qualities they have in common or just randomly cargo-culting a successful product. "Flickr for video" works because a photo-viewing community and video-viewing community are substantially similar: they both have similar casual interactions around shared multimedia, and they both benefit heavily from recommendations, discovery mechanisms, and social sharing. Similarly, "Google for China" works because people in China have information needs too yet actual Google has an antagonistic relationship with the CCP. "Uber for laundry" and "Uber for housecleaning" are both terrible ideas because Uber's value proposition is that you can get transportation on-demand and it can be done by unskilled people as long as they get you safely to your final destination, while both housecleaning and laundry are stuff you do once a week, on a planned basis, and you really want to trust the people who are doing it. "Uber for grocery delivery" (Instacart/UberEats/DoorDash/Postmates) is a decent idea, though, because grocery delivery is also something you want on-demand, do regularly, and can be done by basically anyone.

paultopia 7y ago

tinder for weed. somebody did tinder for weed. that's got to be the most young californian thing ever.

mordechai9000 7y ago
I had an idea kind of similar to that. Call it Herb Grind(e)r. I don't use weed myself, and I'm married, so I don't know how much need there is. I actually think something more like Meetup for weed users would be kind of cool, though. Find fun activities to do with herb friendly people.(Disc golf, anyone?)

hising 7y ago

Reading the article and trying to think of different startup ideas. Gets a non-closable (AFAIK) modal that covers the whole screen force you to go back. Maybe a startup idea that helps entrepreneurs grow without adapting to bad UX behaviour is a great idea that needs attention

superqd 7y ago
yeah, I didn't actually read the entire article because of this.

robomartin 7y ago

Very often engineering types can only think of differentiation in technical terms. I think I can say that, in practice, at least in mature markets, differentiation is more about positioning and marketing rather than almost anything else. Easy examples: - Cars - Bottled water - Computer monitors The vast majority of automobiles produced today have reached a level of design and manufacturing maturity that makes them pretty much equally reliable and equivalent. The days of a Porsche or BMW being markedly better than a Toyota or Nissan are gone. Sure, we can point at the extremes and find differences, but I am not talking about that, I am focusing on what the vast majority of consumers look for or need in a car. Today you could pick any vehicle almost blindly and not make a purchasing mistake. That was not the case a few decades ago. How do they differentiate and sell you cars then? Branding, positioning, marketing. They sell the feeling of owning the car rather than any true technical differentiation, because those really don't matter as much in non-technical markets. Bottle water is another case. I'll generalize and say that most bottled water is pretty much the same. Or, let's put it another way, no bottled water has magical properties that make it significantly better than the others. Again, marketing. They are selling you an image. In some cases it's a glass bottle with a different feel or a social mission. The product, however, that thing you drink, most of which you are going to urinate, is basically the same. If you position the product well you can command much higher pricing than the competition. Computer monitors fall under the same category. Nobody cares any more outside of those using them for very specific applications. There are only a few companies who make LCD panels. Every single computer monitor buys from them. So, if you buy a 24 inch HP vs a Dell monitor they very likely have exactly the same LG or Samsung panel inside. They might even share the rest of the electronics. For most computer users these products are perfectly interchangeable; they just don't care because it makes no difference at all. Not sure how computer monitor makers differentiate their offerings any more to the masses. Sure, there are folks who are more comfortable with one brand over the other (despite the fact that it might actually be exactly the same product inside) and, of course, there's pricing. This is one example of the fact that significant differentiation might not always be an absolute necessity in order to have a successful billion dollar business. One area where they do differentiate --although consumers never see it-- would be in the terms and relationship they have with distributors and retailers. This is a big money play. For example, HP could drop two million dollars of inventory into Best Buy warehouses, effectively on consignment, and get paid based on what is sold. Best Buy, will, of course, push those products because they represent pure profit without any capital investment to speak of. This is a distribution chain differentiation that drives sales rather than differentiation to drive consumer behavior. Books have been written about this topic. I've read a few of them over the years. Still much to learn.

lancewiggs 7y ago

This gives strong flashbacks to the dot com boom and bust. Folks were going through ISO codes looking for new B2B marketplaces to launch. Start with an end user need.

sk84life 7y ago

I am always questioning why startup idea have to be unique ? Let's say you sell "books" we all know who's biggest.. but they idea was not definitely not unique. My opinion service quality for customer matters more than uniqueness..

jtth 7y ago

the popup modal for the newsletter is undismissible and blocks the article completely in the latest safari

jrochkind1 7y ago

popup that keeps me from reading the article unless I give them an email address when I'm half-way through? No thanks.

musicale 7y ago
That is an extraordinary anti-pattern. Is there any browser in 2019 that is actually capable of blocking obnoxious pop-ups? It seems like we're losing the arms race. Fortunately the best part of the article was "above the fold" so I didn't run into that monstrosity.

malodyets 7y ago

Is anyone else offended by the non-dismissable email signup pop-over on this page? Ctrl/Cmd-R refresh allows continuing to read from the same point, but still....

mrbuttons454 7y ago
I came to the comments looking for this, and was surprised it was so far down. They are just asking for garbage input...

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/7q806 http://archive.is/7q806

theandrewbailey 7y ago

This idea needs to be incorporated into https://thisstartupdoesnotexist.com/ https://thisstartupdoesnotexist.com/

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

treblig 7y ago

http://itsthisforthat.com http://itsthisforthat.com (2010) :)

magashna 7y ago

20000 startup ideas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21112345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21112345 Seems people found this pretty funny when it was posted >> Document software defects, using hand and horn signals.

icebraining 7y ago
Those "ideas" are just occupations, as categorized by the US federal government, called "Standard Occupational Classification System".

gwbas1c 7y ago

I started scrolling around, and then an unclosable "subscribe to my newsletter" blocked the entire page. WTF??? No, I don't want to subscribe to your newsletter. Furthermore, forcing me to subscribe to your newsletter just to read a silly post on your website is a jerk move.

tonynguyen1 7y ago
Exactly, that's how I come back here and leave this comment.
- mc3 7y ago
  "[op] is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm" It's also an odd move. If you have that level of credential, then you definitely don't want to be doing that!
tjalfi 7y ago
I fill out undismissable popups as abuse@theirdomain.com. I'm sure their email support team doesn't want to miss out on the incredible rewards.

JoeCianflone 7y ago

Can we all just please agree that Tinder for Kids should not exist? Please?

Jun8 7y ago

I think the reason this sort of thinking works is that it's an effective way to perform exhaustive search in idea space where metrics may be hard to define, based on combinatorics. A very early example of such an approach was Ramon Llull's Ars Magna (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull#Llull's_Art_(Ars_Magna) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull#Llull's_Art_(Ars_M...).

luizb 7y ago

F annoying pop-over after X seconds. I will not give you my email.

polynomial 7y ago

"Plaid for Bitcoin"

cbanek 7y ago

Tinder for laundry seems like good, clean fun.

LoSboccacc 7y ago

the list is questionable. I was very hopeful to see if there was a tinder for gamers (say, to find people to play coop games) but there's some sort of tinder inspired incremental game in that spot, so I wonder how much is it really curated and how much is a proxy to a Google 'feeling lucky' search

ethanpil 7y ago

I'm looking forward to seeing the first startup in the Uber for Beards space.

SmelyMonkyFart 7y ago

It's not about is it taken it's who can do it better

mokarma 7y ago

Airbnb for bathrooms, you can use it to allow desperate strangers to pay you to use your toilet. Preferably while you're not home. We'll call it Airpnp.

symplee 7y ago
AirPnD

symplee 7y ago

Some say that's how they got the idea for MongoDB: Snapchat for Databases