New Startup Ideas Spreadsheet

[jcs]

To follow on from cdixon's recent submission (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190710), I suggest we put into practice the "opposite of secret" theory.

Feel free to add your own ideas and leave feedback on the others. Also if you see something that interests you, get in contact and make it happen!

[jcs]

Inspired by the recent submission from cdixon (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190710) regarding developing new startup ideas and being the "opposite of secret", I thought we could put the theory into practice.

Feel free to add your own ideas and leave feedback on the others. If you see something you like, get in contact and make it happen!

[apsurd]

Good start, but I think this highlights the reason why around these parts "ideas are worthless". Very very very few people are inclined to actually give 2 specks of a damn about some sentence written in some cell on some spreadsheet.

What I'm getting at:

Show don't tell.

So how about a list of products/service prototypes that people are actually building, and making that a starting point. I'd much rather take 10 seconds to click around on an app, than read text in a cell as noted above.

[jpwagner]

makes me feel bad for PG and and YC team: reading just those 20 or so responses is painful.

[lincolnq]

Hmm. I think your comment sets a bad tone for the discussion, especially as the top-rated comment. While I wouldn't want to back many of these startups as they're written, I think some of them have potential to be grown into a viable business idea, and dismissing them all in one shot just biases the whole thread negatively.

I guess I'd just rather read constructive posts first.

[DaniFong]

Don't eat the vegetables, they grow in dirt!

[dkokelley]

I would like to think of this document as more of a brainstorming session than polished startup pitches. Throw everything out there and see what sticks. Some people might find a gem from part of an idea, and tweak it to make it viable, even though the rest of the idea is garbage.

[ntoshev]

Painful? I read only the ones that interest me (quickly judged from elevator pitches) and it's exciting!

[Blasa]

I put my idea up (about the group learning community), because I'd like it to be made. Even if I'm not the one to make it. It scratches one of my itches.

[imp]

I saw that item on the list and thought that it resembled the website I recently launched: http://www.crunchcourse.com/ Is that similar to what you were thinking? I'd be interested to get your feedback on it.

[wallop]

Imagine it's 1998. Google doesn't exist yet. Would Larry Page and Sergey Brin have added their big idea to this spreadsheet? My argument is that if you have any idea that's worthwhile, you're not going to publicize it. It might make sense to get feedback from a few friends. But you don't want potentially dozens of other people trying to execute it before you have had a chance to. Brin and Page are good examples of the fact that ideas in themselves can be extremely valuable and are worth guarding.

[tsally]

Brin and Page are good examples of the fact that ideas in themselves can be extremely valuable and are worth guarding.

They're probably one of the worst examples. It was technical brilliance, not their idea, that allowed them to succeed.

[bemmu]

It was April 1998, Google hadn't been incorporated yet (took until September), and Larry & Sergey did release their big idea: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

[jrockway]

There were plenty of search engines in 1998. Larry and Sergey's implementation just happened to be much better.

[khelloworld]

As far as I can recall reading, they did go to a bunch of places to sell their idea. Needless to say, none of the companies took their idea seriously.

[ThomPete]

Google wasn't an obvious success in the beginning.

My take on this is.

If your idea is good you might as well put it out there as you won't be the only one who have thought about it.

If your idea is brilliant it will have no takers as brilliant ideas seem to be less obvious in the now and will only with time and in retrospect be obvious.

[vlad]

1) I think the actual story has elements of both variants--keeping an idea secret until execution, as well as executing on it and improving the idea.

If PageRank was closely guarded in any way, it could have been so that Page and Brin could submit their research paper about it to SIGIR--at which point it would be public. On the other hand, Page and Brin hosted the search engine for anybody to use.

2) As an aside, assuming the page below is the actual paper, does it mean Larry and Brin already have funding at the time they were writing it up? It mentions that users should try the search engine out at google.stanford.edu, but supposedly, it was their first investor who named Google.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

[DaniFong]

Great hackers see more solutions to big problems than they can ever possibly execute. Why hoard ideas?

[dbz]

I'm not going to lie. I literally said "Awww, Coool!" Then looked around to see if anyone noticed because I felt like my inner child surfaced a bit too much.

[dkokelley]

Got my idea up there: Crowd-sourced shipping (Tip: It's row 62). Not sure I'm the best person to go with this idea, but I would love to see the internet make something like this work.

I know it's a little bit out there, but I think it would be a fun startup to make something like this work.

[ntoshev]

Here is what the world will look like when you're done:

http://tqft.net/wiki/Maneki_Neko

[spokey]

The idea currently on row 17 "apt-get update/upgrade for music" is very good IMO. I would use this service.

You could also expand it in various ways beyond tracking new releases for a single band to make it more of a music discovery service, e.g., (a) tracking side projects started by members of a given band or band "communities" where there are several inter-related artists and bands that appear in various ways in one another's work (like Broken Social Scene, Wu Tang Clan or The Bird and the Bee) (b) tracking other bands/albums/songs etc. that someone had a hand in (e.g., show me new releases that Pharrell Williams produced) and somewhat obviously (c) tracking new releases in a given genre, which could be very fine grained.

[khangtoh]

Got my idea up, hashpic.com. Hundreds of thousands of pics are being submitted to Twitter/etc real time. Get people to #tag the pics, geo location is already there. We do not host the pics, but we classify and help discovery of pics using their hashtags. Think Delicious for pics.

Interested to collaborate on it, or has something to say about the idea, drop a note on the community feedback column on spreadsheet! Thanks!

[dzlobin]

I don't mean to be pessimistic here, but a 50MM plant to recover phosphorous from water or breeding hypo-allergenic dust mites?

[DaniFong]

What's pessimistic about them? They're hundred billion dollar scale problems, surely one could recover some of that. Currently desalination plants are even more expensive, and they don't do anything with the waste product. And breeding isn't very expensive at all, though with dust mites it's tricky because they're quite small and transparent to visible light.

[nc]

Crowdsourced startups anyone? ;)

[rafd]

I've been toying with the idea for a while, but there are still many obstacles to overcome: a) Efficiency (communication, administration) There's a reason most startups have 2-4 founders, and why certain open source projects eventually collapse under their own weight b) Dividing the profits. How do you measure User1233s? contribution vs. User252s? c) More minds =/= better product An enlightened leader (say, Jobs) is sometimes better than a democratic process. Also, massive collaboration tends to result in lowest-common-denominator results (ex. Digg, Reddit)

..but then again, a lot of these problems could be solved with some sort of (online web app?) system: a) Basecamp tweaked for massive collaboration. b) StackOverflow-esque reputation system + karma + uservoice demand identification? c) No suggestions here yet, but HN seems to be doing a pretty good job at engineering away the Digg-problem.

[mixmax]

I've always thought good ideas were a dime a dozen. Maybe I was wrong.

[jayair]

I would be really like to see the HN community do a project collectively. Come up with the idea, design, develop and launch it.

It probably sounds more fun than it is going to be. But it should be cool.

[maxklein]

The problem is that whoever owns the domain or the password to the repository owns the project.

[amazonfx]

I have to add my idea to the mix. It's called the Pixelator. It's a site where you can upload photos of people and it returns to you the same photo but with all the faces pixelated.

[dkokelley]

Not a bad idea, though I don't know how it would make money. Maybe you could choose which faces get pixelated, and then sell it to online newspapers, facebook, and Google street view.

[jasonlbaptiste]

im sorry, i love you all, but this list is filled with some really bad stuff. After reading more thoroughly I'm assuming a lot of it is just people messing around Such as:

100% return lottery.

pandora for chatroulette.

Wordpress.com 20 years more advanced, for video blogging.

Public Takeover - Use capitalism to control the ills of capitalism, one share at a time. Use crowdsourcing and social network effects to take over public companies by linking all socially-responsible minority shareholders.

*Dog Walking 2.0 - potential acquirer 37 signals?

[JayNeely]

"Wordpress.com 20 years more advanced, for video blogging" is one of mine. I'd love to hear critiques of it. I realize the "pitch" is bad, but did you read any of the other sections?; I'm trying to convey that it's not just a hosted platform for video blogging, but that there's some technological innovation involved as well.

[DaniFong]

Pandora for chat roulette is a bad idea? How can a recommendation engine for people possibly be worse than random?

[tocomment]

Ive always wanted to try that public takeover idea. It actually sounds plausible right?

[coryl]

Don't you know that dog walking is a big business?

[pjharrin]

I would be interested in discussing ideas with people, however it would need to be in a more private setting.

[coryl]

Participated :D

[mtrimpe]

Whao ... sharing a Google Doc with that many people is a really interesting experience ;)

[khangtoh]

"Viewing in simple list mode due to high traffic to this document" Looks like Google has imposed some limits

[t3rcio]

The 6th idea is great.

[dnsworks]

Body Doubles for Rappers is the clear winner here! It's not quite as scaleable, but it would be a great boutique service. BDFRAAS

[dnsworks]

Bah, since somebody deleted the BDFRAAS entry, I've saved it here for posterity: http://mhalligan.com/best-entry-from-a-hackernews-startup-id...