Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me)

[Cantdog]

Hello HN, I've been kicking around a couple of ideas for startups that I'd like to share with you. I'm having trouble deciding which one I like best. PG and others speak about changing ideas often in a Startup, so you shouldn't worry too much about the initial idea. Companies like Paypal are often referred to. However, I see this more as evolution rather than full out change. It is much harder to completely shift focus. Justin.tv did it, but it took them more than a year to go from one idea from the next. I'd like to avoid this if possible. First, I'll probably run out of money. Second, the opportunity cost is rather large. With that in mind, here are some idea's I’ve been thinking about. Let me know what you think of them. Please start building them if you like, or let me know if you'd like to try and work together on any of them.

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1) Online golf tee time systems that courses use suck! They are so bad that calling to get tee times is still the default method. The vast majority of existing software is practically unusable. It should not be hard to build software that kills everyone else. Features include:

-- Support all browsers (many do not)

-- Fix the broken login system. Most software requires you to login. No one can remember there login because the actual software is not the brand the consumer remembers, it’s the golf course. So I end up making a new account every time I want to get a tee time. That sucks, I usually stop at this point. Instead use open-id

-- All existing software uses the same broken UI. Currently there is a date picker and you enter the date and time you are interested in. This makes sense for airlines, but golf courses typical only let you get tee times 10-14 days in advance. I would rather see each day lined up, with the weather, price, and how busy the course was included. Clicking a day would show the day's list of all tee times. This would allow you to do things like find the least busy time, or find two tee-times back to back.

-- Edit reservations. Most existing software makes you go through the whole account hassle, then you can't even make changes to your reservation without calling.

--The killer feature, beyond building a usable website, would be a mobile website version and native mobile applications.

I’d charge per transaction. I like this product because the software is directly responsible for revenue (or making stuff golf courses want). Also golf courses want to minimize the time they are spending answering the phone.

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2) Mobile applications for students to get info about their colleges. This already exists for ~10 schools and the company who built these was actually just bought by Blackboard. Nonetheless, I think there is a lot of space in this market. In 5 years, students will be getting this info in a better format than they are now. Features would include:

-- News

-- Athletic Events

-- Interactive directory, with one touch calling/emailing

-- Calendar of events

-- Pushing emergency security notifications

-- Big CALL SECURITY button, since most students do not have security's phone number in their phone

-- Dining Menus

-- Interactive Map of campus/local attractions

-- Possibly some social networking thing where students could post where they are hanging out.

To start, I've tried to only include features that wouldn't require integrating into a schools internal network. This would keep the friction of installation much lower. At some point it would probably be worth looking into integrating though. I’d focus specifically on smaller schools that don’t have the IT infrastructure to build anything like this. High Schools could also be targeted. As a student I was always running around, and I would have loved to be able to get this information easily. As it was, loading up the website and navigating just takes too long. Also, I think schools are very interested in security these days, so focusing on fleshing out new ideas surrounding that would be important. Also, Students are early adopters with new tech.

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3) Completely Digital Tickets. This idea actually came out of #2 as I was thinking about possible features. At school, I hated having to go to the student union between 10 am and 12 am with 7.50 in cash to buy a ticket to whatever event. The basic usage would be as follows:

-- Event coordinator sets up event tickets on a website. Coordinator chooses how many tickets, price, etc.

-- Student gets push notification on their phone that tickets for event are on sale.

-- Student buys ticket using ITunes account or similarly easy payment option. The goal is to be frictionless.

-- Student goes to event with his/her phone and redeems ticket in one of four ways. The different ways differ in security, but also in infrastructure needs. Event coordinators could choose which option they prefer.

a) student shows flashing ticket on phone. This could obviously be counterfeited, but with sufficient animation could possibly work for small events. It would still be harder than counterfeiting most paper tickets used.

b) student presses a button which tells a server to send ticket redeemer a text msg with the name of the student and how many tickets he had. The txt would always come from my phone number, so txt spoofing would be required for counterfeiting. From some basic research txt spoofing looks tough in the US.

c) Mimic Bump Technologies, student bumps phone with ticket redeemer. This requires all ticket redeemers to have “smart” phones, but would be the most secure.

d) display a bar code that could be scanned. This would require barcode scanners as well as an API to exchange bar code info with the event coordinator.

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4) Real Time Shopping. This is my least formulated idea, so bear with me a bit. Basically, I think there are a certain class of transactions that could be possible, but aren’t yet. These transactions are extremely time sensitive. They occur when the buyer is interested in getting good deals more than getting the product at an exact time. I was thinking about what happens to pizza’s that are ordered, but never claimed or can’t be delivered. Obviously, the pizza places would like to sell this pizza, but they have a very limited time before it goes bad. I think there are a lot of potential industries where this could work, but the three that stick out are the food industry, ticket industry, and coupon/deals from consumer companies. I think it is just becoming possible to start trying to solve this problem. Consumers need to be able to subscribe to different types of products in geographic areas they choose. Subscribing could be done in a variety of ways including twitter, mobile app, txt msg. The actual transaction mechanism may need to be specific to different products.

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Each Idea gets progressively less conservative and more “futuristic”. I’m having trouble deciding whether it’s worth trying to solve one of the harder problems or going for the relatively more concrete ideas. Any thoughts or suggestions would be great!

[mseebach]

I have an idea that's related to (4) - actual last minute flight deals.

You go to the airport you want to travel from, and go to a "last minute" lounge, preferably behind security. Then, every time a flight is about to leave that has empty seats, the seats appear in an auction (available on smartphone devices or via wifi in the lounge) that will last maybe 10 minutes. The winner gets a digital boarding pass and is required to report to the gate within 10 minutes, or the flight is lost. The idea is that almost any revenue from an otherwise empty seat goes directly in the contribution margin.

There are any number of problems, especially getting not-yet-travellers through security, as well as baggage, but the essense of selling a very-soon expiring product is the same.

[s-phi-nl]

This reminds me of rush tickets http://www.kimmelcenter.org/planning/tickets.php

[Cantdog]

One More Idea: A super simple dating mobile app. Your profile consists of a picture of yourself and the question , "Ask me about....?", filled in. There would be a list of bars organized by cities and people could choose to share which bar they were at. Potential suitors could browse all the singles at a bar and decide which person to talk to (in real life).

The goal is to solve the awkwardness of cold openings at a bar. It's much easier if you can use something as a conversation starter. Also, one of the problems I see with online dating is the stigma attached to it. Hopefully, since this app is to be used in aiding real life dating, the stigma will not be there.

[run4yourlives]

Chicken and egg, but kinda neat.

Screw the whole bar scene though and just make it "geo-aware". You pre-define picks and as you travel throughout town, it let's you know when one of those picks is close by.

[physcab]

"The goal is to solve the awkwardness of cold openings at a bar."

Isn't that what alcohol is for?

[johns]

The golf one sounds easy, but most of those web sites are directly integrated with POS systems. A lot of courses buy it all together as a package. Plus the biggest golf course management software vendor in my area aggregates all the golf courses they serve into a single web site, so you only have one account.

Also, as much as I love Open ID, trying to get your average Joe Schmoe golfer to use it is not going to work.

[DanHulton]

The easiest way for people to remember their logins for sites is not to USE logins. Use EMAIL ADDRESSES instead. Then, if they forget their login, they just enter their email address and it auto-generates a "reset password" link.

Open ID is cool and all, but it's nowhere near frictionless enough for average people yet.

[Cantdog]

The integration is the hardest part of this idea. There are a couple of different ways to go and I'm still not sure exactly which is best. I'm debating between integration with other software suites, building a small POS layer or making it easy for courses to handle it manually themselves. I'd like to do one thing really well, but we may need to broaden our horizons a bit.

You're region is lucky then. In my region every course uses a different system.

I would use Clickpass on top of Open ID, Clickpass seems fairly easy to understand, even if you don't fully get all the details.

[DLarsen]

I happen to know that one particular company in this market has some sort of patent that they defend pretty aggressively. It's worth checking into the story for more detail.... http://www.hotel-online.com/News/PR2007_1st/Feb07_GolfSwitch...

[tierack]

I used to work for a online golf tee time company, and you're absolutely correct in saying that building a better online reservation system wouldn't be that hard (the bar is pretty low). I'm not sure about what smaller providers give the course, or how they charge, but the bigger ones also:

1) Provide a 24-hour call center, so no one at the golf course is answering reservation calls much anyway.

2) Provide POS systems, which means that almost all revenue is reportable through one interface.

3) Have rewards and tournament management built in. And also something to report scores to golf associations.

And instead of being paid in totally in cash, they're also paid in tee times, which the company resells itself.

But those are the big guys. I'm sure there are plenty of courses using simple webapps to manage tee times that are horrible. It'd be a good thing to shake that up.

[tricky]

Don't let the 24/7 call center scare you. There are guys out there who run generic call centers that will set up a low-volume 24/7 service for cheap. real cheap...

[Cantdog]

In the beginning, I would go after the smaller golf courses as well as large courses that realize that this portion of their suite sucks, and they want to use something else in conjunction with it.

[icey]

We've been seeing a lot of these idea threads lately. Maybe someone should make an "I have an idea" site :D

It would be nice to have a page per idea, plus commenting, and maybe some sections for research (other competitors in the area, probable market sizes, etc).

If I had unlimited funds, I always thought it would be cool to start a company that did nothing but churn out little ideas. People could put idea synopses on a big board on one wall and either grab the idea off the wall when they wanted to build it, or write their name under it to let people know they were working on it. Then other people who were also interested in the idea could collaborate. Or compete, whatever.

[vilya]

Have a look at http://www.halfbakery.com/ - it's pretty much exactly what you describe in terms of an ideas site.

Also, there are companies which churn out little ideas - my girlfriend works for one. It's pitched as an innovation consultancy, aimed at opening up new markets for companies big enough to afford their fees. Not sure if that's exactly what you were talking about, but maybe kind of similar?

[jodrellblank]

Maybe someone should make an "I have an idea" site :D

http://www.halfbakery.com

[ednapiranha]

I've built an application called ideaKIN. It's basically a place where you enter in ideas, and look at other people's ideas, add them to your 'container', etc. The ideas are treated more like simple 'tasks' where you can either complete or not.

Anyway, I just built this a few days ago, and it's still in its super early phase. http://ideakin.com

[jamesbritt]

Some years back I was occasionally involved with the OTA (Open Travel alliance), and ended up attending a meeting to discuss specs. Along with a largely enterprisey view of XML, I was amazed by the amount of attention given to defining markup to handle golf tee times.

I'd worked in hotels for many years by then, but never at a resort; I first thought they were talking about tea times, which seemed just plain bizarre. But no more bizarre than their love for W3C Schemas.

[jdoe]

Idea time!

Another one: A mobile geo-aware "hot-or-not" site/app for fashionistas:

1. go to shop x 2. grab the prettiest/craziest/sexiest clothes you can find 3. get into a booth 4. take a phonecam pic of self thru the mirror 5. upload and show to online crowd 6. let the voting commence 7. instant feedback for user (vanity)

I think there's a lot of potential in this for marketeers.

What do you think, is this idea hot or not?

[notaddicted]

Good idea, doesn't need to be geo-aware.

Getting strangers to rate each other's outfits in real time would be fun.

[noodle]

i like the golf course concept. drop me an email, i'd be willing to give it a shot

[dpcan]

This would be great, but keep in mind that this project is more about sales and execution than software development if it's going to be used anywhere.

No rock stars required to develop this system, but you'll need a crack-sales-team.

This sort of thing may still feel like rocket science to many of your pro-shop guys taking tee times over the phone - and they are probably the gate keepers when it comes to sales and implementation.

[tboxer854]

I'd also like to throw my name in to the mix. I've actually been pursuing this idea and have talked to some golf course management companies/golf courses.

There are certainly some serious apprehensions I have about the business. It worries me that there is no one out there searching for this and that it would boil down to a 100% cold-calling sales gig. Also, most, if not all, of these golf courses have the worst looking websites, which leads me to believe that there is no one looking after any web presence or anything web-related.

This actually touches on a bigger issue which I'd love to discuss. What you have here is a very profitable niche, one in which a few early 90s web companies took over, gobbled up all the market share, and then stopped innovating. I see this in a lot of ignored niches.

[donw]

Nice pun.

I second the golf course idea -- sounds like a good opportunity.

[dejv]

I like it too, drop me email too, please.

[bgnm2000]

love golf, would love to be a part of this and help design the UI/UX

feel free to shoot me an e-mail

[gaustin]

sign me up too

[dminor]

The shopping thing seems ripe for fraud. Put in a fake order, get a discount.

[weirdwes]

I agree with this, but it would be nice to hear some opinions on how fraud could be limited as well. Reason being that I like this idea and would love to see other people's take on it.

I used to manage a pizza shop and we would run into issues from time to time where we would have extra food. Occassionally it was due to fake orders, but more often it was due to mix ups in the prep area where our cooks would forget to take down a ticket after putting a pie in the oven and the next cook would make it again. If we didn't eat it ourselves, we would call up the local bars, fire stations, police stations, repeat customers or anyone who had a large order in the past and offer it to them at a substantial discount or free. We generated a lot of repeat business that way. We were a small, horribly unorganized shop, so I don't how much that would spill over into the average food business - but it does happen.

[karanbhangui]

I'm working on idea #2 along with other location aware services for mobile browsers. The domain I've picked up so far is http://this.st (standing for This Street); figured it'd be easy to type on a phone. One of the services is going to cater to schools, starting with mine (University of Waterloo). MIT has done a great job with m.mit.edu and it will be a good benchmark.

Other services for densly located areas will be in places like malls and theatres.

[DanHulton]

Problem you'll run into with scanning bar codes displayed on mobile phones - it won't work. In general, barcode scanners can't scan digital screens for barcodes.

[warfangle]

Unless they don't use typical barcode scanners. I'm thinking photo recognition scanners - they point the camera on their smartphone at the screen of the barcode to be scanned; the app sends the decoded data to the server and gets a success or denied along with ticketholder info (name, etc)....

[bdmac97]

I just had my iPhone "scanned" at MSP at security as my boarding pass... So it's doable.

[loganfrederick]

Idea #2 is definitely already being explored. I know of a couple CS students at Ohio State who are trying to build similar features for the university online and on mobile phones.

[clistctrl]

real time shopping is interesting