"Find people around you app - Nobody wants to find people around them and meet them. Trust me."<p>I've been runing a site the last five years for tabletop gamers to do exactly this. It's busier than ever, I'm spending my nights and weekends hacking on it to keep up, and I expect some of the features I'm working on now to make that growth curve noticeably steeper.<p>There's huge chicken-and-egg problems in this sort of project, but that difficulty is also why they're valuable.
So, let me tell you about my great idea. It's an app for creating social/dating networks for book nerds who can find other book nerds around them, exchange old books, and participate in local group buying deals based around shared interests.<p>We'll add a Facebook login and a couple of ads and be <i>millionaires</i>.
>Find people around you app.<p>This might be true in NAm. In other parts of the earth, it might be different. There are different cultural barriers and different things which are considered "normal" for meeting new people. I'm sure "dating" sites are working on ways to integrate this feature into their offering. Or, let's say, find 5 other people around me who want to play some 3 on 3 basketball, or a squash partner, whatever.<p>>Coupon / Daily deals<p>Again, true in the US market. Other markets might be ripe for a newcomer. For example, a team in SAfrica could develop something to fit the local market.<p>>Online Dating Sites.<p>Sites, yes. But there's still room for innovation. It's far from perfect.<p>>Book Exchanges for colleges<p>True. Will there be any physical books in the long run anyway?<p>>Apps that create Apps<p>Ok.
More than a few investors said that about search engines in the late nineties. Just because an area is overrun with competitors doesn't mean it's not promising. There's signal in all that noise.
I really hate stealing page views from the owner, so when the site comes back up, I'll take this down. (just reply here if it does)
In the mean time here's the full text:<p>[begin]<p>I hear a lot of people with new startup ideas, and although it is great to hear them – I start hearing the same one’s over and over again.<p>> Find people around you app – Nobody wants to find people around them and meet them. Trust me. It’s weird, and it’s been done. I don’t know why people think that this is a need.
Coupon / Daily deals – If you are coming up with this idea now, trust me when I say millions of people have the same idea and are executing on them. It’s a saturated market, do something else with your time.<p>>Online Dating Sites. Unless you are building a hack on top of an existing dating site, it’s next to impossible to jump into the dating market.<p>>Book Exchanges for colleges – We have craiglist for a reason, and it works very well. Yes, I know books are expensive and people aren’t getting their money back but it will always be an issue. A book exchange site is not going to solve that problem. It’s saturated, so please avoid it.<p>>Apps that create Apps – This might be the techie in me talking, but for some reason I can’t stand these types of solutions. yes, they are good for non techies, but i’m not sure how much value they are creating in the end.<p>[end]
"Book Exchanges for colleges"<p>Don't be too fast to discount this one, maybe not for the US, but as a Dutch student, this is definately something that needs to be built... Something social (friends of friends will often have the books you need) and easy. We have Amazon, Bol.com (Amazon clone), Marktplaats (craigslist/ebay crossover), but none are a perfect fit for textbooks.
<i>Unless you are building a hack on top of an existing dating site, it’s next to impossible to jump into the dating market.</i><p>This is interesting. How would you create a hack on top of an existing dating site? Make a deal with said dating site? Provide an unsanctioned plug-in (eg Greasemonkey)? Something else?
"Find people around you app - Nobody wants to find people around them and meet them. Trust me"<p>Install Grindr on your phone and you'll find that a huge number of people are very interested indeed in finding and meeting people around them.