How about you guys who have collectively a lot of ideas for startups but probably not the time to work on them, contribute your ideas for startups here? and we can rank them by the number of points the comment will get.Maybe the next bill gates will pick it up and do something great with it :-)
I think this is one of those times when we, as a community, are perhaps too focused on ourselves.<p>Business ideas are <i>out there</i>, in the real world, you won't find them here (generally). Yes, "scratch your own itch", "do what you know", etc. All of those are true, to a point, and there are plenty of smart people here...some of them are even working on businesses that will be a success (or already are). But, if you just ask a bunch of entrepreneurs, investors, and nerds what they want, it's easy to end up working in the very small and competitive field of "things ten other people are working on, and the entire market is measured in hundreds of dollars".<p>I'm unfortunately not exaggerating. I've met quite a few people at startup mixers and events and such who were working on clones of things that I'd never even heard of. So not only are they working on something where they have established (by some definition of established) competitors, but it's a field that nobody outside of a tiny set of web 2.0 early adopters has ever even heard about, and only a small segment of those even care about it.<p>And, of course, I would be remiss in my duties as a curmudgeon, and HN old-timer, if I didn't say this: Ideas are worthless.
Mixing Tumblr and Paypal/Amazon to sell something straight from a blog post. Blogs are really the way of the future, and there are a ton of people out there who blog about their business or interests and sell things at the same time. Think of a band or someone who blogs about indie music. You can sell a new product easily from each post, without setting up a store.<p>Both Amazon and Paypal now have micropayment options (5% + $.05). Both have code you can easily copy and paste into a post to add a sell button and both have developer API's. Both are free to implement (no set-up or monthly fees), Amazon has cheap storage and bandwidth and you only pay for what you use. Tumblr and other blog systems are also free. Its time for a digital goods selling revolution!<p>All this great stuff is out there, but no good interface exists to make it easy for a non-developer to implement it. The current solutions available require monthly fees that usually overcharge you for bandwidth, storage, or transaction costs, or limit you in some way (e-junkie limits the amount of products you can have). And in typical e-commerce fashion they have gawful help desks and incomplete documentation.<p>One big thing missing is a way to instantly direct your users to a download after they purchase something. I'm a non-technical guy who's looked into it, and believe me, its impossible to do without using a service such as e-junkie. But the parts of the solution are in place to make it happen for everyone.<p>I think a lot of people out there want less of a website, more of a blog, less of an online store, but more of an easy way to sell digital or physical goods. Think musicians (or musical blogs), photographers, artists (a really great way to sell artwork as you make it). Monthly fees make it prohibitive to sell artwork, because you usually only make one, and there might be some time before you make another, but a blogstore is a great way to do it.<p>I like Tumblr, because its non-technical yet can be messed with if you really want to dive in. What this problem needs is also a non-technical solution that will allow people to get at the nuts and bolts if they need to.<p>Anyone want to have a go at it?
Good idea for those with some extra time during the holiday break. Here's one I like that I've been saving for my blog (<a href="http://www.astartupaday.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.astartupaday.com</a>) but I'll go ahead and post it here.<p>I'm predicting that over the next 1-3 years, we're going to start to see a major shift as users move from mouse+keyboard to touch as the primary input to their computing devices. However, today every mainstream website is optimized for the mouse+keyboard.<p>My idea is to get ahead of the curve and create user experiences for all the major mainstream web verticals (such as Email, social networking, news, search, etc..) that are designed primarily for use with touch. For verticals that have a high switching cost (such as mail and social networking), instead of trying to build from scratch, the focus should be on a front end that pulls from an existing service (i.e. pulls from gmail pop or Facebook connect). Users could choose the verticals that they use on a daily basis, and each service would be available from different tabs. The core UX elements would be consistent across all services, and would be optimized for use with a touch screen.<p>If anyone's interested in hearing more or maybe hacking out a prototype with me over break, feel free to contact me at kleneway@hotmail
There are plenty of opportunities in the enterprises. They're looking to cut costs and switching to interesting, powerful, cheap apps is one way. As a hacker you'll likely need to team up with a former enterprise insider, possibly someone recently laid off. They'll need to understand what tools are inefficient, what strange requirements enterprises have and how to sell to them. You'll need to price below the ceiling where middle managers can make spending decisions without committee oversight or prepare for long slow sales process.<p>One possible perspective.<p>Producing an ecosystem where normal 'sheeple' workers can be employed outside of the restraint of big companies is another opportunity. After these mass lay-offs people will see that working for one boss who can fire you is bad and that multiple bosses will produce more stability. These workers and the companies that use them will need sources of information[eg <a href="http://freelanceswitch.com/" rel="nofollow">http://freelanceswitch.com/</a>], tools to manage work and workers [basecamp] and ways of communicating with peers and customers[twitter].
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.
I got this idea after building a specialized website for a particular local artisan, but I think the whole method could be generalized pretty easily.<p>Etsy provides a clean, centralized storefront for individual
merchants / creators to sell their products -- taking over what used to be the significantly more decentralized and disorganized venues of eBay and Craigslist.<p>This site would be a similar such venue for people who are trying to sell <i>services.</i> A glance at the Craigslist "services" section shows plenty of people like this -- computer repairmen, graphic designers, programmers, housemaids, accountants, tutors, personal trainers, and
many more. Each person would be able to personalize their "storefront" with a list of their services, some copy text and an image gallery, and a section for people to post reviews / testimonials of this person.
Two start-up ideas which are feasible but I decided against:<p>1) Alumni software which lets universities/companies manage alumni communication and also lets alumni network with each other. A few top-tier unis and companies have in-house stuff for this, but most don't. Facebook/Linked-In just don't work for alumni networking due to trying to be too many things at once.<p>2) Publisher driven ads service. Current ad systems suck for closed sites (i.e. non-public) or sites which know a lot about the user (dating sites, social networks). Most of the big sites in this category currently solve this by running their own networks but this obviously isn't feasible for many sites. You could probably build this as a CPA ad brokerage service and expand from there.