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Ask HN: We are a startup looking for ideas. What should we do?

13 points by diwank ↗ HN
We are a bunch of guys who want to create some beautiful and usable software that helps people.

We need to know what people want. We could try brainstorming. But we think generating ideas by brainstorming is a bad idea. It's really just making guesses.

So, please give us ideas or tell us what you need as a user.

P.s. We made a small form (idea.diwank.name) for it but you could just comment here instead.

28 comments

[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 89.6 ms ] thread
46Bit
My advice? Attend some hack weekends, build lots of stuff, see what draws the eye in demos and decide if you're interested in something related. Rapid prototyping with a readymade set of alpha testers.
sitanshu7
It may sound silly but there are no hack weekends happening around us (We're located in India.)

We had already been thinking about doing something like this. And we realized that if we made ideas inexpensive and quick to implement, it would make our life easier and our startup more viable (analogy: git branching.)

How would we do that? Select, prototype, distribute and collect feedback. Selection being the key here (no chicken/egg problems, no enterprise software.)

We hope to primarily use 'Show HN's to distribute them and gather alpha users.

Does this sound like a good idea? Should we go ahead?

SingAlong
Hey sitanshu, I'm from Bangalore and I'm always game for hacking events anytime. CIS, I know, would be happy to host hackdays in Bangalore.
sitanshu7
Hey Akash, thanks for writing back. I'm from New Delhi. I'd love to take part in any hacking event. Please let me know if there's a good one being organized some time soon.

CIS? Center for Internet and Society? Has it held any hacking event recently?

My email id: vedanta5srj@gmail.com

SingAlong
Ya HasGeek conducts hacking events at CIS sometimes. HasGeek essentially works out of CIS. Every HasGeek event has a hackathon a week before the event in the same city as the event. So this sunday there was a JSFoo Hackathon in Chennai and coming sunday there's the JSFoo Chennai event.
robinwarren
Some sources of free ideas:

http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

http://androidforums.com/application-requests/

http://www.judegomila.com/2012/01/challengeyourself-in-2012-...

I think you're still going to be guessing though. It's good that you recognise that as you should then move to validate that guess work somehow. Good luck!

diwank
Thank you so much for compiling this entire list in one place. Great inspiration. Handy as hell! :)
joakimlob
So you're a startup with no product or idea? Stop calling yourself a startup then.

Find yourself something interesting to work on, that you like, do your homework. I see in your profile that you're an "Idea Architect", "thinker", "creator", well you really don't look like one of these with this message.

diwank
I don't know why you made the harsh comment but it is unfair to judge people on the basis of a single post/comment.

I think maybe you miscomprehended the purpose of this post. So let me rephrase this: Please give me instances when you face problems in your everyday life. This can help us identify common trends in what people need.

Model answer: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250749

weaponofchoice
hey diwank,

I like the way you've responded to some of these comments. You're a class act.

Interesting blog too (the bootstrap frontpage confused me for a moment though). found the post about the conversation with your co-founder rather interesting. so I think i've had a peek at how you plan to generate ideas.

What I'm about to outline might seem obvious to you, though might seem blasphemous to lotsa folks out there. I'd like to outline the one thing (most) founders ignore during their idea process.

-----

Given the inital variables:

- no idea how much the idea would scale

- market factors sketchy (platforms changing etc.)

- wise to assume failure

- chances of a pivot close to 99% for most startups these days. (yeah, they're all thinking it)

- sticking with an idea is hard in the absence of positive traction

-----

Imagine the 1-2% of your life that you're giving away. depending on how old you are, that might not seem like much.

As a startup founder here's a few things you could get out of the 1-2%:

(1) money (sustainable growth/revenue, acquired etc.)

(2) PR

(3) credentials

(4) connections

-----

IMHO, younger founders who're thinking of startup life as a career (long haul), should work on maximizing (2), (3) and (4) primarily. There's a lot of perception hacks that can be applied to get ahead with those three.

Now, here's the ONE thing: I'd like to suggest that founders imagine the kinds of people they'd like to connect with during this span of time: women(yeah!), movie stars(?), other founders, journalists, scientists, atheists, social workers. Don't just think it though, get it down on paper, turn it into a goal of sorts: I must form connections with these people!

It's possible you wouldn't cross off that entire list with a single startup.

You'll have to imagine yourself answering the 'what do you do' question to these people. (maybe you'd have to do some research into what they might likely want to hear) Now, regardless of the traction you have (ideally > 0, for mental reasons), that fact that you're running a 'startup' can get you places these days.

Before I get carried away, answering 'what you do' can get you massively different reactions varying with the audience, locality etc.

we're usually just thinking about what investors want to put money into. so yeah, think about the money, what's trendy, but also the kinds of people you want to connect with OUTSIDE the startup community.

I think the above holds extreme importance, especially if you're going on an 'what would you like me to build for you' marathon.

Good luck. Looking forward to updates on your blog.

diwank
Hey there,

I like the way you've responded to some of these comments. You're a class act.

Thanks for the encouragement! (Really hard to come by these days.) :)

Interesting blog too (the bootstrap frontpage confused me for a moment though).

I just stitched together the design in a hurry. Redesigning the blog is lower in my priority list right now. Expect an overhaul soon though.

found the post about the conversation with your co-founder rather interesting.

I'm glad you did. This is why I put it there in the first place. I thought people like you'd help me figure out if we're on the right track.

IMHO, younger founders who're thinking of startup life as a career (long haul), should work on maximizing (2), (3) and (4) primarily.

I totally agree. It is easy to take these things for granted. Especially the value of connections and the fact that you have to be constantly working to make new ones.

It's possible you wouldn't cross off that entire list with a single startup.

Like I said, I think connections are a perpetual work in progress. It's more than likely that we won't cross off even half of it.

Before I get carried away, answering 'what you do' can get you massively different reactions varying with the audience, locality etc.

Don't even get me started on that one! A few relatives of mine are actually horrified by the idea that I despise the idea of a regular job and would rather start my own thing. Sigh.

I think the above holds extreme importance, especially if you're going on an 'what would you like me to build for you' marathon.

Haha, exactly. In fact, the whole point of this (even-if-you-have-to-make-a-fool-out-of-yourself) exercise was to get two things into our heads:

- Ideas are like girlfriends. Have fun with them but think twice before getting emotionally involved.

- The hardest thing for startups (and for most things in life) is to be able to talk to people and successfully get your idea across. Practice it.

Good luck. Looking forward to updates on your blog.

Thank you. Trust me when I say that I have derived great value from your comment.

Take care.

edlea
Work in an industry, any industry, until you get a feel for how businesses currently operate in that space.

Find the things that are either repetitive or hard, or a different way of approaching the problems for these businesses.

Then you have your startup idea and know who your customers might be.

diwank
Thanks for the advice. I'm trying to land myself an internship at some good corporation to get a taste of problems they face.

Though, I'm a little vary of companies with bad work environments lest I end up getting a net negative worth out of the whoe experience.

DanBC
I watch a movie. I see an actor wearing a nice watch, or using a nice pen.

I want to go to a website and search for $ACTOR_NAME and $MOVIE_NAME and get a list of watch models, or pen brands, or clothing manufacturers.

See, for example, people searching for the coat worn by Zooey Deschannel in "Yesman".

diwank
Nice one!

In fact, why limit to just movies? You can take this idea and implement it everywhere. Associating and tagging real-life objects with entertainment and web media. You know, so you can facilitate searching real objects within virtual contexts.

Could be a mind blowing technology. :)

ksajadi
not sure about the idea, but you can start with changing the name: diwank? unless you really mean it to be humorous in British English by saying you want to fix things that suck or something, I'd suggest changing it!
diwank
Haha. It's just there for the time being. Actually that's my personal website. My name is Diwank Singh. ;)

Blag: blag.diwank.name

Poems: poet.diwank.name

Home Page: singh.diwank.name

AznHisoka
1) Payment receipts/tax software Here's a pain: If I own a small business, I need something where I can forward all my payment receipts (GitHub, Constant Contact, web hosting, etc), tag it, parse it and at the end of the month/year/tax season, see where my money went. Great for taxes too because I always end up having to go back and add it all up myself. I know Mint can do this but I don't need all that bank crawling nonsense, I just wanna forward receipts to an email address (maybe using a Google filter to automate the process), and be able to view the numbers in some concise dashboard. BTW, if someone knows of any solution out there I'm missing, let me know 'cause this is a pain of mine.

2) Image resizing as a service. It can be a small pain to resize images using ImageMagick (installing it can be a headache), or any third party solutions. If the price is affordable, I wouldn't mind paying for image resizing as a service, image overlaying, or watermarking as a service. Maybe make it a few cent per API call.

diwank
Image resizing seems to be an easy-to-implement idea. App Engine + Stripe + A Good API can do the trick. Will get to work on it!

Receipt tagging is a different beast. The format is inconsistent, mining data would be difficult and I don't know if people would be willing to send potentially sensitive details of business transactions to anyone.

But I'm up for it given it has a substantial market. Any other takers?

AznHisoka
If you get either of those done, let me know. I will be your first customer
rudasn
When I worked on a custom CMS the killer feature (according to clients) was the ability to upload and resize images (which they can then insert to their text) in just a few seconds. If you make a service, with an API and wrappers/scripts for common CMSs I think you can get some money out of that.
waldr
This question just seems so wrong, don't try and create someone else's product. Think of something yourself, test if its viable and build it.
diwank
We are not trying to create someone else's product. Basically, we are looking for what people need everyday. The problems they face and any existing solutions they use. So that we can look for patterns in users' needs and build something that adresses them.
diwank
Someone suggested the United Nations Millenium Development Goals to draw inspiration from. It is a good place to start with for startups looking for ideas. High time we started working on 'real' problems.

http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/