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My startup idea is a web app that automatically generates startup ideas by randomly combining various inputs. I think this would be approximately as effective a

by jwesley 18y ago

My startup idea is a web app that automatically generates startup ideas by randomly combining various inputs. I think this would be approximately as effective as throwing out ideas here and asking people to vote on them.

petercooper 18y ago
You mock, but there's something to be said for the idea of randomly combining unconnected ideas.. that's a hallmark of an original idea. There are many bad ones formed by such a process, naturally, but you can come up with some awesome ones too.
- tstegart 18y ago
  But has it ever succeeded when tried by non-humans? Its kind of like the monkeys at a keyboard theory. Yes, they can write a sentence every once in a while given enough time, but in actuallity, they're useless at writing. Original ideas are combinations of other ideas, but they're ideas combined by humans.
  - petercooper 18y ago
    It depends whether non-humans have a sense of creativity and then the ability to recognize a good idea from the randomness. I don't think they do. We humans are, putting it mildly, ridiculously good pattern matchers.. If I were to pull some buzzwords from a single niche (let's say social networking) from a hat, say.. Twitter, music, friends, pictures, e-mail, profiles, voting. I could pull a lot of random ideas from joining some of them together: - a site that lets you specify the music artists you like, then it finds Twitter users who have mentioned all of those artists.. instant music buddies! - social profiles oriented around people's e-mail addresses - random MP3 sent to your e-mail each day as voted for by people on a Web site - voting on Twitter in elections - use song mentions on Twitter to establish the most popular songs for certain artists I won't go on..! These are not really great ideas, but they're not nonsensical either. You might argue that earlier I mentioned "unconnected" ideas, whereas "Twitter, music, friends, pictures, e-mail, profiles, voting" are from a niche of sorts. True, but when I said "unconnected" I guess I meant more that the ideas are not connected in any practical way, rather than sharing a common element. Random words would probably not cut it :)
shabda 18y ago
You are late. http://startuppitch.appspot.com/ http://startuppitch.appspot.com/

by jwesley 18y ago

petercooper 18y ago

You mock, but there's something to be said for the idea of randomly combining unconnected ideas.. that's a hallmark of an original idea. There are many bad ones formed by such a process, naturally, but you can come up with some awesome ones too.

tstegart 18y ago
But has it ever succeeded when tried by non-humans? Its kind of like the monkeys at a keyboard theory. Yes, they can write a sentence every once in a while given enough time, but in actuallity, they're useless at writing. Original ideas are combinations of other ideas, but they're ideas combined by humans.
- petercooper 18y ago
  It depends whether non-humans have a sense of creativity and then the ability to recognize a good idea from the randomness. I don't think they do. We humans are, putting it mildly, ridiculously good pattern matchers.. If I were to pull some buzzwords from a single niche (let's say social networking) from a hat, say.. Twitter, music, friends, pictures, e-mail, profiles, voting. I could pull a lot of random ideas from joining some of them together: - a site that lets you specify the music artists you like, then it finds Twitter users who have mentioned all of those artists.. instant music buddies! - social profiles oriented around people's e-mail addresses - random MP3 sent to your e-mail each day as voted for by people on a Web site - voting on Twitter in elections - use song mentions on Twitter to establish the most popular songs for certain artists I won't go on..! These are not really great ideas, but they're not nonsensical either. You might argue that earlier I mentioned "unconnected" ideas, whereas "Twitter, music, friends, pictures, e-mail, profiles, voting" are from a niche of sorts. True, but when I said "unconnected" I guess I meant more that the ideas are not connected in any practical way, rather than sharing a common element. Random words would probably not cut it :)

shabda 18y ago

You are late. http://startuppitch.appspot.com/ http://startuppitch.appspot.com/