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Ask HN: I come up with ace business ideas that I can never do anything about...

4 points by imnotinsane 13y ago

Hi HN, I have Schizoaffective Disorder w/ Bi-Polar subtype and to distract from poverty I come up with ace business ideas that I can never do anything about. I receive a small stipend each month that covers housing and food but nothing more than that. I am highly proficient in web programming and design but delusional thinking stops me from seeing the smaller steps of the big picture. So I quit each idea after a week and then start the same cycle over again the next week. My latest idea [1] is fractions away from insanity and I need help. What steps could I take to improve my life and become successful? Thanks! [1] (Fireworks export) http://i.imgur.com/9JvXaZy.png

notastartup 13y ago
Interesting...can you describe your process when you encounter a delusion that prevents you from continuing? Provide an example if you could.
- imnotinsane 13y ago
  Sure. One would be coming up with a design for a site that has 100,000 users. Then starting to code some of the screens and planning the infrastucture. So I will need a private cloud on Amazon with horizontal web nodes and a massive Postgres database master-master. Now how much is that going to cost... Okay, well that's well over my budget of $0. But I have a $50 Linode credit so maybe I can just use that to start out. What's this OpenResty that's doing so well on the web frameworks benchmark? Maybe I should use that. So setup an Arch box and get that setup. Find Lapis and MoonScript and so I'll use that. Now back to the coding. Strip everything I have done in Grails, using Lapis now. Except I have to spend a day reading the Lapis documentation and then it's been 5 days and I need a rest. During said rest I decide the whole idea is stupid because how am I going to get an audience on TechCrunch or whatever to promote this site? Come up with another idea on Monday... Except I'm totally drained and don't know what I should be doing.
  - notastartup 13y ago
    don't scale in the beginning. If you have linode credit use that. Also reaching 100,000 users is a huge assumption, you may not even get there. Openresty and Lua is interesting but it takes time to learn those. Use what you already know. Take a rest, re-evaluate the tools you are familiar with and use it. Then when you have a prototype to show, you can email people at TC or anywhere else, you may not even get a reply but try it.
    - imnotinsane 13y ago
      I guess it might be that simple eh? Thanks for the advice. I will definitely look into resuming with Grails.
pavel_lishin 13y ago
I'm having trouble seeing step #2 here: 1. Start a farm out in the country 2. ??? 3. Launch a startup based on step 2.
- imnotinsane 13y ago
  Would it matter? We'd probably build a renewable energy farm to run Bitcoin mining gear, and have a field with vegetables and a grass area to kick a soccer ball around.. :-)
  - pavel_lishin 13y ago
    It matters in that you're basically asking us to fund your retirement. I mean, that is an ace business idea if you convince enough people to just give you two million bucks for no reason, but I don't think quite that many suckers are out there.
27182818284 13y ago
For what it is worth, lots of people on HN, and elsewere, struggle to finish a product! That's good news, because it means you might be able to overcome it. That's where MVPs come in. Ship an MVP. Have you seen how atrocious Reddit was when it first came out? Remember when Facebook didn't even have a wall to post on? Google was called Backrub when it started. Ship an MVP. You also have to consider, that sometimes, the idea wasn't actually that good. You ship the MVP and get no traction, you can pivot and figure out how to make it better or move onto the next idea.
- imnotinsane 13y ago
  Thanks! This has actually shot me in the foot a couple times. To give an example: I think I was most productive in 2005 during the 4 months I was at UBC, where I did nothing but research recommender systems and design screens for a music album recommendation site (hivolume.net!). Which turned out to be far more efficient by the last.fm model of automatically submitting your played tracks to their service rather than having to add them each manually as my idea would have been. So that idea got shelved as have quite a few like that where the scope is beyond one person yet I pluck away thinking that something miraculous will occur to adjust reality in some way, where getting from A to B becomes doable.

4 points by imnotinsane 13y ago

notastartup 13y ago

Interesting...can you describe your process when you encounter a delusion that prevents you from continuing? Provide an example if you could.

imnotinsane 13y ago
Sure. One would be coming up with a design for a site that has 100,000 users. Then starting to code some of the screens and planning the infrastucture. So I will need a private cloud on Amazon with horizontal web nodes and a massive Postgres database master-master. Now how much is that going to cost... Okay, well that's well over my budget of $0. But I have a $50 Linode credit so maybe I can just use that to start out. What's this OpenResty that's doing so well on the web frameworks benchmark? Maybe I should use that. So setup an Arch box and get that setup. Find Lapis and MoonScript and so I'll use that. Now back to the coding. Strip everything I have done in Grails, using Lapis now. Except I have to spend a day reading the Lapis documentation and then it's been 5 days and I need a rest. During said rest I decide the whole idea is stupid because how am I going to get an audience on TechCrunch or whatever to promote this site? Come up with another idea on Monday... Except I'm totally drained and don't know what I should be doing.
- notastartup 13y ago
  don't scale in the beginning. If you have linode credit use that. Also reaching 100,000 users is a huge assumption, you may not even get there. Openresty and Lua is interesting but it takes time to learn those. Use what you already know. Take a rest, re-evaluate the tools you are familiar with and use it. Then when you have a prototype to show, you can email people at TC or anywhere else, you may not even get a reply but try it.
  - imnotinsane 13y ago
    I guess it might be that simple eh? Thanks for the advice. I will definitely look into resuming with Grails.

pavel_lishin 13y ago

I'm having trouble seeing step #2 here: 1. Start a farm out in the country 2. ??? 3. Launch a startup based on step 2.

imnotinsane 13y ago
Would it matter? We'd probably build a renewable energy farm to run Bitcoin mining gear, and have a field with vegetables and a grass area to kick a soccer ball around.. :-)
- pavel_lishin 13y ago
  It matters in that you're basically asking us to fund your retirement. I mean, that is an ace business idea if you convince enough people to just give you two million bucks for no reason, but I don't think quite that many suckers are out there.

27182818284 13y ago

For what it is worth, lots of people on HN, and elsewere, struggle to finish a product! That's good news, because it means you might be able to overcome it. That's where MVPs come in. Ship an MVP. Have you seen how atrocious Reddit was when it first came out? Remember when Facebook didn't even have a wall to post on? Google was called Backrub when it started. Ship an MVP. You also have to consider, that sometimes, the idea wasn't actually that good. You ship the MVP and get no traction, you can pivot and figure out how to make it better or move onto the next idea.

imnotinsane 13y ago
Thanks! This has actually shot me in the foot a couple times. To give an example: I think I was most productive in 2005 during the 4 months I was at UBC, where I did nothing but research recommender systems and design screens for a music album recommendation site (hivolume.net!). Which turned out to be far more efficient by the last.fm model of automatically submitting your played tracks to their service rather than having to add them each manually as my idea would have been. So that idea got shelved as have quite a few like that where the scope is beyond one person yet I pluck away thinking that something miraculous will occur to adjust reality in some way, where getting from A to B becomes doable.