HN Explorer

Show HN: Incubator as a Service – we build, launch and test your employees ideas

20 points by overthinkerJS ↗ HN
I've been wanting to experiment with this for a while. It's a subscription service for companies that want to utilise the new product or service ideas their employees come up with.

With a fixed fee of $7500/mo, we'll basically work on up to 2 different ideas at the same time of your employees. This includes:

- Designing & Building an MVP - Validating the idea and get early signups - Talk to early beta testers and gather feedback - Keep the original team/employee in the loop and have him/her participate into guiding the product further.

When you decide the idea is ready for the next phase, you can build your own internal team or do so with our help.

Interested, contact is in my bio

13 comments

[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 44.2 ms ] thread
dane-pgp
It's an interesting idea, and I hope it's successful, but I'm wondering if a similar business model is possible. Imagine a service where a company or individual could submit a suggestion for a product / app / service, with no upfront cost, and the receiving company would offer to create the MVP and generate revenue from it until they recouped their costs, then demand only a small percentage of all future sales / subscriptions.

The company offering this would obviously have to be very careful about which ideas it invested its resources in, because it would be taking all the risk, but for simple ideas the exposure would be quite small. Also, anyone using this service would want to be very clear about what "recouping their costs" means, so that there isn't any creative accounting going on. In practice, it might just end up as a way for one company to harvest a lot of barely profitable ideas, but that might be sustainable, and eventually they might bag a unicorn.

cameronbrown
It's been said many times that ideas aren't worth much, implementation is. Chances are that shipping dozens and dozens of 'ideas' won't yield a sustainable business model.
i_am_nomad
The business model is implementing customer’s ideas, or at least an MVP of them. They’re monetizing the prototypes, not the ideas themselves.
seventhtiger
There is no customer here if they're not paying.
rgbrenner
So this shop would take on all the risk and get almost none of the upside.. And customers would need to risk nothing, but might get a huge payoff..

Even better, since submitting ideas is free, a customer could submit a ton of vague ideas, then sue them if they do anything remotely similar.

dane-pgp
The shop would have the right to refuse any idea that it didn't think would produce enough revenue to at least cover their costs.

Also they would have a clause saying that the customer whose idea is closest to the one they implement is deemed to be the one who owns that idea (which an independent arbitrator can decide).

rgbrenner
sounds like a dev shop but without an hourly rate. Monthly payment for some unknown amount of work.
omarchowdhury
A well designed and written landing page selling me on this with previous project examples would have gone a long way...
mathgladiator
The challenge that you will run into is the people problems.

Basically, doing new stuff and building an MVP is the fun work that many of your future client's employees would want to do. If you take on the fun work, then they may not be motivated to finish it.

Instead of building the MVP, it would be better to be a coaching service to help build up your client's employees ability to lead new projects. Provide marketing and complimentary support skills and teach the future leader what is possible and how to leverage others.

Independent of the actual results, a missing thing for many companies is the ability to build up leadership.

machtesh
That's actually something I'm working on building - unlimited, on-demand management/leadership coaching for team leaders.

http://LeadingUp.co

alaskamiller
You're a dev firm on retainer. Also, it's creating more work for the principals involved. If it's a small org, they have neither time nor resources to do this to begin with, at medium org they might like it they might not, at the large orgs they would do it in house. So you end up targeting the same demo as every remote dev shop cold calling, competing against the boss's inclination that Fiverr would take care of it cheaper.

My suggestion is to take existing admin dashboard projects out there, integrate a few data sources for common use cases then sell that with the option to pay for dev hours to further customize.

Companies need more automation, data visualization, notification, reporting tools than anything else anyway.

blodovnik
Not many companies would have budget for this.

I'm not even sure which part of the company finances it would come from... Maybe employee training?