HN Explorer

All the stupid startup/app ideas I've had so far

51 points by superdario ↗ HN
Here is the list of all ideas I've had so far but never actually took time to create any of them or go further into details

- Church givings - not sure how it's called, but in Christianity while being in Church a person goes around and asks for the money from people, so people give a dollar or few cents. So some kind of app that does that on global scale for the Church

- Would you do it for a dollar? - I even coded this. Basically person can ask someone else: would you _____ for a dollar? And if other person does it and uploads the proof, he gets the money

- You have a dollar? - As beggars beg in real life for a dollar, how about begging online for a dollar

- iEgg - just selling egg with Apple's logo for a high price. This might not be possible because of the logo, copyrights and shit

- Messaging with push notifications only - nowadays you can reply directly from push notifications. So no chat lists, no list of messages or such. You reply directly via push notification

- Don't meet in person - some kind of dating site that forces you not to meet in person, so everything must stay online

- Stupid people repellent - like some kind of mace or such, if someone annoys you, you spray them or around to repel them

- Alien emoji - regular emojis but with double eyes and green color, like this ::D ::) ;;) They are more strong than regular, so if you type ::D it means you are extra happy

- Social network where everything is fake - fake followers, fake likes. Like a hyper networks, you become popular extra fast and gain followers fast. You get likes and notifications from fake people, boosting your dopamine

76 comments

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O__________O
Anything specific feedback/outcome you’re looking for by posting these?
theGeatZhopa
- idea for the travelers by plane:

Some system that automatically checks you in for all airlines you need for that travel and all the airlines must handle your luggage

Me: What???

nickfromseattle
> Church givings

Sizable companies are built around this.

Pushpay has 400 employees and a combined $100m in funding.

TrueGeek
And tons more. Lots of money in church software.
superdario
For real?
smeej
Practically every church I've been to in the last 15 years has had an online giving option, and most of them use different platforms from each other, even though all the churches have been Catholic and many of them have been in the same diocese (where you might expect a "best practice" or economy-of-scale-type agreement to have been made that would lead them all to use the same one).

This is very widely done already.

MarcoSanto
Yeah, that's a valid business. I also looked into that. wWould not mind to colaesce with others who think it could be worth to go to sanctuaries/worship palces and try to establish the service. think St. Peter's Square in the Vatican. St. Francis in Assisi, etc. (I am from Italy, but I guess every country has some sort of shrine where everyone goes, turists included)
O__________O
Curious, anyone have any startups they wish existed, but currently do not?

_________________

Related, YC’s Requests for Startups:

- https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs

Past YC Requests for Startups:

- https://www.ycombinator.com/past-rfs

suoduandao2
A couple. Just in the software space:

-When I was single, a dating app that uses a gene sample like 23andme produces plus deep learning to predict pairs that will find one another attractive.

-Another gene+AI startup, something that analyzes my DNA and suggests a healthy eating plan tailored to me.

-Something like the above two, but taking the state of the immune system into account (not sure how hard this would be to implement, but I know it makes a huge difference to the pheromones we like and the food we should avoid)

-something like Adnauseum (bots that click ads for you) but positive reinforcement so I can tell an ad I like what it showed me. I keep thinking that if advertisers knew my long-term goals they'd have a relatively more easy time selling me things, the only downside being they'd not be the things their customers would pay the most to move.

-Something like Airmule (sell your empty checked-bags space to the highest bidder) but not limited to the Shenzen-LA corridor.

O__________O
Wow, Airmule offers reduced airfares for the risk of going to prison - would have never guessed business like that would be viable.
suoduandao2
I think airmule does very close scrutiny of its importers, which is why it's limited to one air corridor. I'm more imagining a small-business owner putting out a call for something they want to sell in their store, the app user buys it on vacation, and sells it to the store owner after landing. a ratings system like uber or airbnb would likely take care of the bad-actor problem for something like that.
jamesbfb
My partner and I had a big night at a friends engagement party and we drunkenly stumbled upon the fact that we have a shitload of laundry to do and wished there was an Uber for dirty laundry. Someone better do this, otherwise I will!
O__________O
Appears there’s number of businesses doing this. Did you try any of them? If not, why?
arminiusreturns
SaaS drop-in replacement for the c-suite and board.
O__________O
Part-time, virtual, temp, fractional, etc — CXO (CTO, CFO, etc) - are already thing; being boards member is always minimal amount of time by definition also has clear legal limits.

Automated accounting, marketing, etc are also thing too.

What specifically do you wish existed?

arminiusreturns
Keep technical cofounders enabled to continue leading in that role while offloading as much of the types of responsibilities that impact that.
ninethirty
Social network IRL. You can only add a person to your list if you meet with them in-real-life -- then you swap QR codes or something. I think it might have potential, but how to bootstrap the network?
O__________O
To clarify, do you mean a contact relationship management software or something else, like Twitter or LinkedIn for people you have met in real life?
jacknews
If the VC's (who are in the business of implementing ideas) are to believed, all the value is in the execution/implementation.

So you just have to make these ideas real, and profit.

O__________O
If VC’s knew what they were doing, would they tell anyone?

43% of the most recent YC batch were funded based on only an idea + team:

https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-yc-summer-2022-bat...

Obviously who is working on the idea is likely bigger selection factor than idea alone, but does show currently unimplemented ideas do have value; specifically YC alone in past batch funded 240 startups at $500,000 per startup of which 43% were at the time only ideas, which is roughly $52 million worth of teams with ideas alone.

jzellis
Tithing, it's called in Christianity. You give ten percent of your income (in theory) to the church. This is what's known outside of the religious sphere as "grifting". :-D
croisillon
I think it's more about alms than tithes
keiferski
I really like the concept of tithing (broadly, putting 10% of incomes toward a larger project) and wish it was used more generally for taxation, funding projects, local development, etc. The simplicity and “human comprehensibility” makes it much more attractive than other, more complex funding and taxation methods.
robertlagrant
Government as a set of services you pay towards, some of them optionally, might be an interesting way to get people to vote for new/to maintain things: with their wallets.
keiferski
My original thought was something like: if you make tax rates uniform and easily understandable (e.g. 10% flat rate for everything and everyone) and remove all deductions, exceptions, etc. then you would get less tax avoidance/minimization and ultimately more tax revenues. But I’m not a tax accountant or economist and I haven’t done the math on this. At the very least, the entire infrastructure would be far more transparent and efficient.
robertlagrant
One of the hidden issues of complex tax is the millions spent on pay clever people to either account for it, minimise it, or check it. I'd love to know how much is spent on that that could be otherwise spent on all of that!
keiferski
Absolutely, it would destroy an entire industry. Probably hundreds of billions in costs and a few hundred thousand jobs.
robertlagrant
Well, it would certainly simplify some of it! Plenty of non-government uses for accounting; it's just we would have some of those clever people working to produce instead of to account to government.
shaftoe
Kickstarter for government projects?
drstewart
The problem is no one wants to pay for the boring necessary work like funding inspections for the water treatment facility, but instead would focus on sexy cool things like space launches or new trails in Yosemite
bombcar
You baseline that stuff and then add additional boxes you can check. California does it as additional “gifts” but the federal return does it already for the presidential slush fund. You could increase that more - add a 1% tax but you get to check a box and determine where it goes.

Mathematically it wouldn’t do much but it would make people feel more invested I suspect.

Fun fact: the US Treasury accepts donations to pay down the debt: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/gift/gift.htm

You can also donate to the general fund: https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.h...

luplex
this is a bad idea for society, because it disadvantages poor people even more.
nc_brit
10% of 0 is 0
dale_glass
Lots of poor people have more than zero income. If you live in $1000 a month, 10% of that is $100. $100 can make an enormous difference if you have no savings. Eg, easily the difference between being able to drive/take the train to work or not.

Meanwhile if you earn $1M/month, then it's absolutely trivial to live in a way that $100K more or less makes no practical difference.

Or if you do odd jobs and managed to scrounge up $100, you now have to do the paperwork to pay the $10 you owe, which seems like an odd thing for a government to bother with taking care of and enforcing.

Now here comes the logical thought of "what if we set a minimum", and you have the beginnings of tax brackets.

dahfizz
The easy solution is a single, general deduction. Everyone's first $25k or so is tax free. Everyone pays 10% on every subsequent dollar.

Mathematically, this is equivalent to a small UBI.

dale_glass
Why? If you earn $1M/month you can contribute a lot more than that and not notice it.
robertlagrant
> Mathematically, this is equivalent to a small UBI.

Or vice versa. UBI requires lots of people to implement it. A simpler income tax rate doesn't.

What's nice about it is you could basically just get paid post-tax from every income source, and they all know to subtract 10%, and the government would just need a simple web portal for you to claim back your first 25k.

pflenker
That applies only for people who have absolutely nothing. The point is: To pay 100 EUR per month hurts much more when you only have 1000 EUR to spend, much more than it would hurt to pay 1000 EUR a month if you had 10000 EUR at your disposal each month.
nameless912
Pick-and-choose taxes are a terrible idea for the simple reason that they're very easy to weaponize.

If some guy walks into your government office and says he'll give you ten million dollars to increase everyones' salaries, but only if you arrest all the homeless people on his street, you just created a perverse incentive. You can claim that anti-bribery laws fix this, but it's a who watches the watcher problem. To be clear, regular government has this problem too in the form of political donations and lobbying, but removing even the thin veneer of legitimacy that our current taxation system has (where you can't opt out of paying for social safety nets or into specific initiatives) makes open bribery almost inevitable.

robertlagrant
The same mechanism that determines why that can't happen today could still be in place.
dahfizz
Yeah, I wish taxes were only 10% of my income as well
newbie578
How do you all keep track of ideas? Do you categorize them somehow and store them?
superdario
Nop, just write them down on phone
josephd79
Same but in my notes app. I have a long list of ideas that have been in there forever.
superdario
it's usually hard to market and promote
robertlagrant
> - Would you do it for a dollar? - I even coded this. Basically person can ask someone else: would you _____ for a dollar? And if other person does it and uploads the proof, he gets the money

Sounds like you're undercutting fiverr.com :)

> You have a dollar? - As beggars beg in real life for a dollar, how about begging online for a dollar

giverr.com? :D

jakey_bakey
These are great. iEgg made me lmao.

The social network idea has legs - You could probably turn it into either one of those mafia-wars/adcap style games, or more interestingly as an immersive educational tool to teach tweens not to stake their mental health on social media.

nisegami
The last one sounds prophetic almost.
aintmeit
It's fate. Imagine playing chess not against people but against fate. I wonder how that would go?
Xcelerate
Based on recent progress with stable diffusion, GPT, etc., I'd say the last one is going to possible soon.
OhNoNotAgain_99
How about a deep difusion model, generating a road movie, with a tesla AI trying to drive it, put in a taxi and let people pay for a never ending drive.
e61133e3
An app that can generate a blog post from the content of a video
no-reply
+1. Can probably use captions.
bheadmaster
> Social network where everything is fake - fake followers, fake likes. Like a hyper networks, you become popular extra fast and gain followers fast. You get likes and notifications from fake people, boosting your dopamine

The currently-rampant social networks have already beat you to it.

boonpod
This is an excellent satire. Thank you for posting this, I enjoyed it.
wsgeorge
> Church givings - not sure how it's called, but in Christianity while being in Church a person goes around and asks for the money from people, so people give a dollar or few cents. So some kind of app that does that on global scale for the Church

My first startup turned into this!

busymom0
> Don't meet in person - some kind of dating site that forces you not to meet in person, so everything must stay online

I might steal this one.

quickthrower2
I think the church one is good, maybe it is already done?