HN Explorer

Ask HN: What software will you build if your financial needs were full covered?

10 points by curiousgeek ↗ HN
While many of us have reasonably fulfilling professional lives, there is still the need to make mortgage payments and other financial needs that will keep us grinding away at a day job for years to come. And thus we find ourselves working on problems or industry sectors that we don't particularly care for.

So I wanted to try this thought experiment: Imagine that you are immediately freed of all financial obligations for the rest of your life (housing, taking care of family, saving for retirement etc).

What kind of software would you be bringing into existence then?

20 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 55.9 ms ] thread
humbleMouse
I would build a better Soundcloud, and I would make a point of sales system targeted at the medical marijuana market.

I would also make a dating website for artists.

allendoerfer
Wow, you are consistent.
humbleMouse
LOL, I suppose you can parse out a lot about my hobbies and interests by what software I would make.
shylor
I would jump into community education and helping find opportunities.
msie
Too many dreams: I would build a better Second Life. A programming language. Something to aid medical research. A low-cost, widely accessible medical imaging solution (MRI would be the start).
strcpy1980
I would contribute to ReactOS — opensource reverse-engineered WindowsXP.
dchun
I'd contribute to computer vision. It's a thorny field with lot's of opportunity
partisan
An idea I have to encourage charitable giving, a SaaS. It would be for profit because that would be a worthwhile motivation for me.
lj3
I'd create an alternative mobile OS from the ground up. I've become disillusioned with iOS and Android both. Neithor of them nor any of the alternatives make full use of the hardware. Phones are capable of doing so much, yet in practice they fail when you ask them to do much of anything.

Or, maybe I'd just build myself an electric motorcycle. There's a lot of interesting work in Battery management these days and a motorcycle is a good platform for experimentation.

Lordarminius
> Or, maybe I'd just build myself an electric motorcycle...

If you do, and its well made and competitively priced, I guarantee you you will become a billionaire in less than a decade.

lj3
Doubtful. There are dozens if not hundreds of guys who have made their own electric motorcycles[0]. Getting it to production is a whole other ballgame, one that only two companies out of dozens have managed to pull off (Zero and Brammo).

[0]: http://www.evalbum.com/type/MTCY

Lordarminius
You must be from the West. I repeat, a competitively priced motorcycle would upend the market and make you a very very rich.

The vast majority of motorbike users reside in Asia and Africa.

Imagine being able to charge your spare batteries using solar panels during the day and no longer paying for gas; an electric engine would be quieter and require less maintenance. In performance and ruggedness it would have to supersede current offerings and I guess that is quite difficult or else Yamaha, Honda, Sukam and the rest would have built one already.

If I were rich I would certainly consider funding such a project.

lj3
> I repeat, a competitively priced motorcycle would upend the market and make you a very very rich.

There are dozens of cheap chinese knockoff electric scooters available in Asia. Upend the market? Please.

> Imagine being able to charge your spare batteries using solar panels during the day and no longer paying for gas.

I don't have to imagine. Been there, done that, along with hundreds if not thousands of others. As I said before, you have no idea what it takes to go from a working prototype to a finished, mass produced shippable product. There's a reason only 2 companies have ever pulled it off and one of them went bankrupt. If you want a fun rabbit hole to dive down, google 'homologation' sometime.

I'm not saying somebody with access to billions in capital can't eventually break even and start making a profit, but we're talking a 10-20 year break even period. Longer, if you have to do what Tesla did and create an entire solar infrastructure in Asia and Africa.

benologist
I think we could be doing much more to enable the other 1/2 of humanity to join us online as equals, Stripe Atlas is like a tentative step 1 of many. People in developing countries face such stupid limitations that effectively restrict them to just being consumers of the internet. I have some ideas percolating that I hope will help democratize the internet a little bit more for when I finish with my current company.

There are also a lot of shitty practices I would like to help erode - like automatically converting abandoned free trials into paying customers, or not providing an online way to cancel online trials etc. "Dark patterns" rely on nobody calling them out.

Frivolous privacy violations and impediments are also an area of interest, especially as the least democratic countries join us online encumbered by hateful laws.

purans
Would do farming, at the end world needs to eat
J_Darnley
Well if all that were true and I had the skills to: a Winamp v5 clone, a Firefox < v4 clone.