7 ms·
Business ideas: proving ideas are a dime a dosen
- mlwarren 15y agoInteresting list but the notion that "ideas are only valuable when someone (like you) makes something happen" can only go so far. If you have a bad idea that you make happen it doesn't automatically become valuable. This story might prove that ideas are a dime a dozen, but one can argue that good ideas are not.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago> A village in china that paints portraits of pop culture icons as various dog breeds. Look, Obama as a GreyHound! If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen.
- hcho 15y agoHow does selling ringtones of a frog singing to club music sound as an idea to you? Let me introduce you to Crazy Frog: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Frog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Frog Retarded ideas make money too.
- jamesteow 15y agoI sure as hell didn't think limiting people to 140 characters was going to make sense.
- AretNCarlsen 15y agoI believe that was originally a technical limitation, and only later did it become evident that there is a business value in offering partially-literate individuals a medium that caters to, while providing plausible deniability for, their slow reading and writing speeds. Twitter has little or no technical reason to be so limited, of course, but doesn't want to alienate the tldr crowd.
- beza1e1 15y agoTechnical limitation: SMS are 160 characters. 20 chars for username and 140 chars for message.
- wickedchicken 15y agoSo does running a successful bagel shop. The "ideas are worthless" people place your neighborhood bagel shop, Crazy Frog ringtones, and Qualcomm in the same group: businesses you can totally run as long as you know how to 'hustle.' Somehow I think Andrew Viterbi would frown on that.
- revorad 15y agoI think that idea could actually make some money.
- dmitri1981 15y agoOddly enough my friend paints famous people as cats. Her Chairman Miaow is incredible and I am sure people would love the prints.
- Alex3917 15y ago"If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen." There is actually a town in china where the entire village makes their money painting caricatures of monkeys. Not saying it's a good career move, but at least that's the context for where the idea came from. Interesting enough, the majority of the world's oil paintings come from this one tiny village with 5,000 painters who spend all day slavishly copying the same templates over and over: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiamen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiamen You can find all their stuff on ebay and alibaba.
- briggsbio 15y agoI wouldn't call Xiamen a "town" or a "village." My cousin lives there with his wife and two children. It has a population of over 2.5 million people, and was voted (by whom, IDK) one of the "most livable cities in China." He worked for EDS for years and wanted to be transfered to China because of how much he loved it. When they wouldn't transfer him, he FOUND a way to move there. He ended up building a factory there to manufacture leather goods. Get the best leather he can from N&S America, and manufactures it there. He now has hundreds of employees, many with some form of disability, and is incredibly happy. So I wouldn't call Xiamen itself a village, but you may be referring to a small village nearby.
- learc83 15y agoHe's talking about Xiamen Wushipu oil painting village. It's a part of Xiamen, there is a subsection about it farther down the wikipedia page.
- pom 15y agoOr in the streets of Montmartre, sold as genuine Parisian paintings...
- Jun8 15y agoExactly! Idea generation shouldn't be mental diarrhea, which this reads like, ranging from ho-hum, it's already obviously been done ("Brainstorm Consulting - Teach companies how to brainstorm", "Replicate reality TV shows for foreign countries.") to frivolous ("Herbal Flavored Gum").
- wickedchicken 15y ago> If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen. Conversely, people who believe ideas are a dime a dozen tend to focus on shallow ideas. The lack of deep interaction with technology (and whatever a pivot is supposed to be) forces you into businesses with a more social rather than technical role: web design, blogging, social networks, etc. I don't see much of HN's advice working well for a company developing asynchronous CPU chipsets. In theory they should be the same; the advent of fabless semiconductor shops and hardware synthesis languages lets someone design chips in their garage in Iowa, but the depth of technical knowledge required makes it a much different game than starting up "a distributed Facebook" or "a Foursquare but for X."
- ethnomusicolog 15y agoJust want to point that the most underrated reason why people choose the social app path is not the cost but politics (i.e. asking for permission). You have to ask the permission of fewer people (actually 0) to launch a social web app than to build a new hardware product.
- mikk0j 15y agoMy favorite, #469: "A YouTube VC firm, that will invest money in people who are willing to do stupid stuff on video in hopes that the video will go viral and they will make a profit." Could happen, in today's angel investment climate...
- systemtrigger 15y agoCorollary: Some ideas are vastly more lucrative than others. Which is why it's useful to spend a week listing your top 999 ideas. Execution is a PITA so choose carefully.
- rokhayakebe 15y agoYeah, but you know they aren't giving away their most valuable idea.
- espadagroup 15y agoIdeas are a dime a dozen, but great ideas are not. Some ideas are better than others, and some are much better than others. It would be easy to argue that someone who could consistently come up with the much better ones would be worth just as much if not more than a great executor.
- marknutter 15y agoGreat ideas are only great in hindsight.
- espadagroup 15y agoI really don't think so. If in at least your own mind it is not a great idea then you shouldn't do it to begin with.
- marknutter 15y agoWhy on earth would anyone pursue an idea they themselves didn't think was great?
- puredemo 15y agoMake money.
- ippisl 15y agoNothing is worth without some level of testing. this also applies for execution. But testing/evaluating an idea can be easier than full blown execution. and you can use it to estimate how likely your idea would succeed. And at this point your idea has some value.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- lichichen 15y agoAlso see http://www.ideaswatch.com/ http://www.ideaswatch.com/
- dpcan 15y agoThis list is actually pretty awesome. I had my doubts, but wow, very nice. Funny: #120 A travel company that arranges people to stay at others houses.
- saraid216 15y agohttp://www.couchsurfing.org/ http://www.couchsurfing.org/ ?
- lurchpop 15y agoor http://www.airbnb.com/ http://www.airbnb.com/ ?
- fredoliveira 15y agoby travel agency he probably meant someone who takes the home-finding job off your hands.
- Shenglong 15y agoRent-a-wife – a woman who cleans, cooks, does laundry, picks up dry cleaning, mail, etc but without the emotional relationship. I'd rent...
- puredemo 15y agoIsn't this just a housekeeper?
- yeahsure 15y agoYou could simply hire an assistance and have a maid at home. Of course, there could be a service where you can pick them based on their looks, though it would be a little discriminatory.
- skz 15y agoThis made me lol. They interchanged 'maid' and 'wife.'
- Shenglong 15y agoYeah exactly, haha. Just one of the more entertaining points
- sireat 15y agoI know a number of places which have a rent-a-handyman service for lonely women (or I suppose men), who do all the handywork around the house. They are reasonably popular on a small scale.
- cruise02 15y agoI'm sure I saw this here first, but "Ideas are just a multiplier of execution." http://sivers.org/multiply http://sivers.org/multiply
- ulisesroche 15y ago#8: A gadget to cook beans/lentils/vegetables/rice for the same amount of time (quicker than what can be done in a slow cooker.) Ah dang, I was just about to re-invent the microwave too!
- ctdonath 15y agoNaw, the microwave is still pretty much a one-thing-at-a-time device. Do one thing after another, and the first is cold when the next is ready; do them together, and you either have to pop stuff in at different times or some stuff will be over/under-cooked when it ends. Methinks the idea was something crockpot/rice-cookerish which you dump all the stuff into at once, say into different sections of the cooker, and it ensures everything finishes cooking at the same time even though everything cooks at different rates. Lower/higher temps for some things, delayed start for others...
- ulisesroche 15y ago...and twitter integration! Let's get rich!
- Alex3917 15y agoFor what it's worth, here is the subset of the ideas I came up with from that list: http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/68-free-business-ideas.html http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/68-free-bus... The point of the exercise is that most people think of five or ten ideas, and then go with the first decent idea they come up with. But if you actually force yourself to come up with 100+ ideas then it's more likely that your idea will legitimately be a good idea. Which is important since the first .1% of the work you do on the project has a large influence on whether the next 99.9% will make you either millions or zero. Fred Wilson also recently said that he would use one of the 999 if someone made it, in case that means anything to those perusing the list.
- wrs 15y agoQuickly scanning the list, I see we did #712 as an intern project: http://www.elmoreclub.com/ http://www.elmoreclub.com/ I'll be looking for Fred's steps soon!
- arethuza 15y ago"Microbrewery with high-octane beers with boutique labels that cost as much as good wines" 32% beer at £35 a bottle: http://www.brewdog.com/ http://www.brewdog.com/
- scottkrager 15y ago968. Make a Triple Snuggy. What exactly is that? I'm scared.
- iAmSpartacus 15y agoI think that's called the human centipede
- run4yourlives 15y agoConsidering there is also the "double snuggy", this idea is pretty much 7 minute abs.
- rokhayakebe 15y agoThe magic number is 6, not 7.
- gigantor 15y agohttp://flippa.com http://flippa.com, where you get a stream of business ideas that are mostly proven to work. Due diligence required as usual to identify scams, future market demand, revenue/effort, competition, profit margin, etc.
- pacomerh 15y agoIdeas that are based on making money for the sake of being rich are the worst.
- fragsworth 15y agoBut that's kind of the main reason why you start a business, you know, to make a lot of money. Otherwise you're talking about charities.
- masterzora 15y agoReally? I've talked to a number of entrepreneurs who are in it because they have an idea they'd like to see happen or they think it's fun or to try to leave a mark on the world or a number of other reasons where the money is only a side effect.
- pacomerh 15y agoWell put, money happens when you scratch an itch that is keeping you from sleeping basically. Many people got lost somewhere in the way and think of ideas as machines that will squeeze wallets and make them rich. All people I know that made money actually solved a personal necessity or where so excited about wanting to see something happen that their own genuine excitement attracted natural attention from people that where at the same time excited to see that.
- ThomPete 15y agoIdeas matter. So does luck, timing and many other things. Not ideas like "I want to create a backup tool" but rather ideas like "I want to create a backup tool that allow the user to simply drag and drop the files they want backed up into a folder on their machine". In other words ideas that are followed by an insight. When people walk around saying ideas are a dime a dosen and execution is everything they forget that execution in itself is empty. You need to execute on something and that something is ideas.
- DrCatbox 15y agoI have read a couple of hundred of them and thats the most useless ideas I have ever seen. Most of them seem to be a solution to really mundane everyday consumer quirks. None of them attempts to use basic human needs such as need for communication and approval. Its just "somebody could do my laundry" and "somebody could write something on a website".
- mjallday 15y agoThey are only useless if your goal is to address one of the basic human needs you mention and even then maybe they do. "Someone could do my laundry so I can complete my research paper on curing cancer"
- run4yourlives 15y ago>A paperless hostpital may as well have suggested an lunar-orbiting space platform that launches rockets to mars...
- hmottestad 15y agoTypo. Dosen -> Dozen
- wickedchicken 15y agoNot to mention "hampster," regardless of how "Hampster Dance" was spelled
- nbashaw 15y agoMy response: http://www.nbashaw.com/2011/06/09/ideas-matter-too.html http://www.nbashaw.com/2011/06/09/ideas-matter-too.html
- rkon 15y agoI built a paper airplane and sold it for a penny. Therefore, airplanes are only worth a penny. Quick, let's all go get our own Airbus!
- hugh3 15y agoI don't understand all this pooh-poohing of these ideas. None of them is great, but the point is that every one of 'em (well, all the ones I've read) could be, if executed correctly, a perfectly viable business. Picking out a few at random: Presentation Consulting - Teach companies how to improve their presentations That's not a bad idea. Is somebody already doing it? Possibly, but that doesn't mean you can't do it too. Online flower shop with one-hour delivery Sounds tricky, and you'd need to restrict it to a couple of major and dense cities, but again there's no reason it's not a viable business. Market it correctly by encouraging men to send their ladies flowers spontaneously, and you could surely make some money. Build Your Own Back Pack Shop Damn you, random numbers! I don't much like this idea, but there's gotta be somebody out there (schoolkids, I guess) who would love to build customized backpacks for themselves. Great idea? No. World changing? No. Profitable if you get the product and the marketing right? Sure!
- beza1e1 15y agoPresentation Consulting - Teach companies how to improve their presentations: Duarte http://www.duarte.com/ http://www.duarte.com/ Famous, because they made Al Gores Climate Change presentation.
- jdietrich 15y ago> Build Your Own Back Pack Shop Timbuk2 have a successful business offering customised messenger bags.