3 ms·

Sure it's easy to come up with ideas, but it's much harder to come up with ideas that are good. If this list was vetted, I have a feeling it would be significan

Sure it's easy to come up with ideas, but it's much harder to come up with ideas that are good. If this list was vetted, I have a feeling it would be significantly shorter. For example, #2: "Incubator site providing office space, hosting, etc. for startups that are seed funded." Unless you franchise it, this isn't scalable at all. It's an idea, perhaps even a business idea, but it's not a startup idea. Or, #9: "Herbal Flavored Gum. MMM...rosemary." I don't know much about the flavored gum industry, but I would imagine their margins are razor thin. It's not really a startup idea as there is no innovation here, and no opportunity to improve the margins (well, may be there is an opportunity, but it's not at all evident from the description). Coming up with this list in such a fashion is definitely an interesting exercise and I applaud Seth for doing it, but the quality of the ideas is a bit underwhelming. Perhaps if they had to elaborate a bit on the descriptions and do some basic analysis, it would be a lot more interesting.

chrischen 17y ago
> Sure it's easy to come up with ideas, but it's much harder to come up with ideas that are good And you can't prove/know they are good until they are executed. Harder in this sense would just refer to the work required to iterate until it becomes good. So all ideas you just "come up" with will all effectively be of uncertain value.
- coffeemug 17y ago
  While I generally agree with you, I don't think all ideas are created equal. Some ideas are obviously bad (going into an established industry with razor thin margins without a clear plan for innovation; fundamentally unscalable businesses; etc.) Some ideas are obviously good (planes that fly twice as fast at half the cost without compromising safety). Some ideas are really good but look really bad, others are really bad but look really good. Some ideas aren't iterable (if you spend three years and half a billion dollars on building a plant that brings cars to the masses and find out that the masses are perfectly happy with horses you don't have much space left to iterate). It's hard. Really really hard. I don't think any given formula can capture the complexity of it all. The current model (fast iteration) has obvious flaws - there are plenty of businesses that turned out to be massively successful that were fundamentally not iterable.
  - chrischen 17y ago
    I meant each idea will have uncertain value until you test it, no matter how smart you are. Of course if you, know it's a good idea, it will have value. But it will only be valuable to you. Some ideas seem more valuable than others simply because most people already have experience testing it. So that's why some or all aspects of the idea may seem ludicrous. So based on my experience, a flying genetically modified horse is not a good one because o already know genetic modification at that level will be much harder than engineering a plane. I disagree with you about how not all ideas are iterable. One idea can iterate into another. Both a plant that makes toothbrushes and a flying horse are different from the original idea. Iteration simply means taking what doesn't work and replacing it. If the whole idea doesn't work, then you simply iterate into a new one. There really is no guideline as to what constitute the same idea after you iterate. After all, most ideas completely change after iteration right? Iteration is a process not tied to any idea, because it involves changing the idea. It is tied to the person.
    - coffeemug 17y ago
      What I meant is that some ideas are very expensive and time consuming to turn into products, even if you work like hell to make sure you build something as minimal as possible. If you're working on an idea like that, and you believe that you can't truly iterate until you release, then these ideas are less iterable. Of course you can try and test the idea against the market before you build the product - talk to customers, create focus groups, do dummy advertising to gauge customer response, but you can't really know until you build the product. For example, we're building a very high performance database. This type of software, even in its minimal conception, takes at least a year to build (at best). We talk to customers as much as we can, and we've adjusted our direction according to their feedback, but we can't iterate on this in the same way as the web guys can. We can't release a slightly different version every week and see what happens, we have no choice but to collect requirements, make the best judgements we can, and build according to those judgements. If, after a year or two of building, we find out that our product doesn't sell, we will have spent a lot of time and money at that point, and our options will be very limited. We can't easily switch direction because the software is so complex to build, and we can't do many incremental releases because the deployment process to customer sites is very time consuming. If you have a suggestion on how to iterate this type of project, I'm all ears :)
hedgehog 17y ago
Heh, #9 is baked, rosemary and all: http://thinkgum.com/ http://thinkgum.com/ His angle is to sell the flavor as a memory aid (for students).
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
Tichy 17y ago
Recently some startups started selling customized sweets. You could mix your own flavor in a web interface and then order the gums, build on demand. (I only know startups for chocolate, cereals and coffee doing this atm).
- dgordon 17y ago
  You Bar (http://www.youbars.com/ http://www.youbars.com/) does something like this for nutrition bars. People with food allergies will be particularly interested.
Alex3917 17y ago
"the quality of the ideas is a bit underwhelming." So the reason for this is that it was a very diverse group, and some of the most talented people in the program just had really terrible ideas. Whenever I'm online I'm always looking for new and interesting ideas, whereas there was another guy in the program who spent all his time online looking movers and shakers in the city who he hadn't yet met. And while his ideas were pretty bad, he was clearly the most successful of any of us, and contributed an enormous amount to the program in other ways.

chrischen 17y ago

> Sure it's easy to come up with ideas, but it's much harder to come up with ideas that are good And you can't prove/know they are good until they are executed. Harder in this sense would just refer to the work required to iterate until it becomes good. So all ideas you just "come up" with will all effectively be of uncertain value.

coffeemug 17y ago
While I generally agree with you, I don't think all ideas are created equal. Some ideas are obviously bad (going into an established industry with razor thin margins without a clear plan for innovation; fundamentally unscalable businesses; etc.) Some ideas are obviously good (planes that fly twice as fast at half the cost without compromising safety). Some ideas are really good but look really bad, others are really bad but look really good. Some ideas aren't iterable (if you spend three years and half a billion dollars on building a plant that brings cars to the masses and find out that the masses are perfectly happy with horses you don't have much space left to iterate). It's hard. Really really hard. I don't think any given formula can capture the complexity of it all. The current model (fast iteration) has obvious flaws - there are plenty of businesses that turned out to be massively successful that were fundamentally not iterable.
- chrischen 17y ago
  I meant each idea will have uncertain value until you test it, no matter how smart you are. Of course if you, know it's a good idea, it will have value. But it will only be valuable to you. Some ideas seem more valuable than others simply because most people already have experience testing it. So that's why some or all aspects of the idea may seem ludicrous. So based on my experience, a flying genetically modified horse is not a good one because o already know genetic modification at that level will be much harder than engineering a plane. I disagree with you about how not all ideas are iterable. One idea can iterate into another. Both a plant that makes toothbrushes and a flying horse are different from the original idea. Iteration simply means taking what doesn't work and replacing it. If the whole idea doesn't work, then you simply iterate into a new one. There really is no guideline as to what constitute the same idea after you iterate. After all, most ideas completely change after iteration right? Iteration is a process not tied to any idea, because it involves changing the idea. It is tied to the person.
  - coffeemug 17y ago
    What I meant is that some ideas are very expensive and time consuming to turn into products, even if you work like hell to make sure you build something as minimal as possible. If you're working on an idea like that, and you believe that you can't truly iterate until you release, then these ideas are less iterable. Of course you can try and test the idea against the market before you build the product - talk to customers, create focus groups, do dummy advertising to gauge customer response, but you can't really know until you build the product. For example, we're building a very high performance database. This type of software, even in its minimal conception, takes at least a year to build (at best). We talk to customers as much as we can, and we've adjusted our direction according to their feedback, but we can't iterate on this in the same way as the web guys can. We can't release a slightly different version every week and see what happens, we have no choice but to collect requirements, make the best judgements we can, and build according to those judgements. If, after a year or two of building, we find out that our product doesn't sell, we will have spent a lot of time and money at that point, and our options will be very limited. We can't easily switch direction because the software is so complex to build, and we can't do many incremental releases because the deployment process to customer sites is very time consuming. If you have a suggestion on how to iterate this type of project, I'm all ears :)

hedgehog 17y ago

Heh, #9 is baked, rosemary and all: http://thinkgum.com/ http://thinkgum.com/ His angle is to sell the flavor as a memory aid (for students).

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

Tichy 17y ago

Recently some startups started selling customized sweets. You could mix your own flavor in a web interface and then order the gums, build on demand. (I only know startups for chocolate, cereals and coffee doing this atm).

dgordon 17y ago
You Bar (http://www.youbars.com/ http://www.youbars.com/) does something like this for nutrition bars. People with food allergies will be particularly interested.

Alex3917 17y ago

"the quality of the ideas is a bit underwhelming." So the reason for this is that it was a very diverse group, and some of the most talented people in the program just had really terrible ideas. Whenever I'm online I'm always looking for new and interesting ideas, whereas there was another guy in the program who spent all his time online looking movers and shakers in the city who he hadn't yet met. And while his ideas were pretty bad, he was clearly the most successful of any of us, and contributed an enormous amount to the program in other ways.