The post is the fridge magnet poetry of startups, which at least provides a baseline or waypoint co-ordinate. They aren't startup ideas, it's a list of things n

The post is the fridge magnet poetry of startups, which at least provides a baseline or waypoint co-ordinate. They aren't startup ideas, it's a list of things nobody wants. Clever, but the general problem of ascertaining desires by speculating about them and then testing them is more interesting than just iterating ideas and seeing if any are funny or inspiring. I'd speculate the best startup ideas will come from more literary minds with insight into desire, and wonder if we can get better results by looking at how succesful startups in fact did not solve a problem at all, but instead understood a desire and implemented something to manage it. The difference is that desire is understood before it is problematized, where I think as technologists, we all have a tendency to filter experiences through the lens of problematizing, where we index on the things that seem solvable, and ignore the ones that are less concrete, but it's the incremental response to the more nebulous desires that ultimately scale into massive companies. Snapchat responded to young people's desire for porn. Facebook responded to the desire of harvard students to signal their status. Google originally responded to the FOSS community's desire for indexed technical documentation, and then to the desire to signal tech savvyness to align to power. Airbnb met a desire for authenticity (counter signalling status) in travel experiences. Some years ago I did an exercise about mapping startups and tech to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and what clicked is there wan't a tech problem I couldn't eventually find a solution to - I just couldn't think of other people I wanted to listen to and respond to their desires, which sounds awful, but I'd challenge anyone to answer the question of who they want to listen to and support. Chances are, you will have the same problem. Wishing some people were a different way doesn't count, and educating them about some truth you are in posession of ends as well as one might expect. Who do you want to listen to? Problems without people attached to them are boring and useless iterations on disconnected ideas. A version of the post of that listed groups of people Gwern would like to listen to and respond to their desires would be super interesting though.