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Tell HN: Steal my ideas

60 points by pbj ↗ HN
I've got a few ideas and I'm not sure if they'll ever see the light of day. I'm happy to share them with HN in the hopes that you work on them or they help give you other ideas. Some may already exist, and if so, I apologize!

Idea #1) A scholarship service/site that doesn't suck

You'd think finding scholarships wouldn't be that hard, but you're in for a surprise. My wife is fixing to start graduate studies and I've been pouring over scholarship/fellowship sites for her. I've spent countless hours just looking for ones for her to apply to, and I've visited 20+ scholarship search engines.

They're filled to the brim with scam/"you could win $100,000! sweepstakes" type scholarships. They also have tons of extra offers from paid for profit universities. Lastly, they display scholarships that she isn't even qualified for, despite narrowing the filters to ones that she is supposed to be qualified for.

I've found different scholarships on each site, so there's not even a single site that has all of the same scholarships on it. I'm starting to wish at this point that there was a paid service that someone could just pay $X for. They'd research for you and send you back a huge list of scholarships that were tailored just for you.

For that matter, you'd think there would be a better service out there that would research anything like that. Kind of like Google Answers/MTurk, only for in depth things. For example, maybe I'm interested in opening a bakery and I want someone to do the research for me for all the competitors in the area, what they charge, what they have on the menu, the size of their bakeries, the available properties in the area, the legal requirements of opening a bakery and getting licensed in the city, etc.

Idea #2) An expat job site that actually helps you immigrate, aka overseas recruiters

I've flirted with the idea of immigrating elsewhere for a while now. But the sheer volume of things you'd have to do just to immigrate is mind boggling, not to mention different for every country. Some professions can help you get a green card in X country, but not Y, etc. I wish there was a site that would be designed for hopeful expats that would connect them with jobs from employers in other countries that hire foreign workers. The site could also guide you through the immigration process, kind of like Legalzoom does for creating a company.

Idea #3) Sortfolio for X

Sortfolio is a neat tool because it's a great way to browse web designers visually. There's lots of other things that could benefit from having this, like what about Web/Mobile app developers? Videographers? What about a way to browse local/regional bands for weddings/gigs?

Idea #4) SponsorMe

How many hours in a given week do you spend on Youtube? What about your friends? Tons of Youtube members easily have 10,000+ subscribers. It's true that they can choose to display ads on their videos, but what about cutting youtube out of the equation? If someone has a video series where they review phones, wouldn't it be neat to be able to reach out to the content creators directly and have them mention your app in their video, or wear your company TShirt? American Idol for instance does this with Coke cups drank by the judges (or at least they used to). Think about how much time they get of their product being on screen.

The site could basically be a marketplace that lists both youtube members who are willing to take on sponsorships and possibly their rates, as well as companies looking to advertise their products. You could browse by category to find the best people to partner with. The site doesn't have to stop at youtube, as there are also traditional bloggers out there that might be interested.

Idea #5) "Beat Mine" restaurant, aka the reddit restaurant

A brick and mortar concept for a restaurant. The restaurants menu is driven by the patrons. For example, let's say the restaurant offers a chocolate cake. You try it but you know your homemade chocolate cake is better. You submit the recipe and the restaurant offers it temporarily. If enough p...

39 comments

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melling
A site that lets people crowd-source commercial products, like mobile or web apps. I think the hard part would be figuring out the value he person contributes to the product.
suprasanna
As a student, I can say you're spot on with the first one. A huge challenge, to be sure because applications are scattered across the internet as PDF's, docs and outdated online forms. Still - if you could get even 50% of the legitimate scholarships out there and categorize them in useful ways (undergrad, grad, high school, by interest, etc) - I know I would pay for access to a curated list for me.
ec429
"For that matter, you'd think there would be a better service out there that would research anything like that."

You're asking for the Semantic Web.

No, really: if everyone's data were available as data, so you didn't have to scrape human-readable representations, this would be approximately trivial (at least, it'd be trivial for Google, because they already have this kind of raw computational horsepower, and experience with embarrassingly parallel programming).

eli
Here's my free idea:

An email service provider (ESP) that caters specifically to B2B and B2C newsletters (I'm thinking 100k to 10mil+ messages a month). It's crazy that this doesn't exist.

MailChimp and similar have pricing that does not scale up. Meanwhile MailGun and similar do not have the analytics or list management that publishers need. They are geared towards transactional messages, not newsletters. Lyris/EmailLabs and Silverpop cater to this market, but their products are not very cheap and not very good. (For examples, their APIs are terrible.)

I think there's a huge opportunity to simply layer a bunch of analytics and list management code on top of Amazon SES.

twakefield
I guess we need to do a better job on our messaging because Mailgun does have Mailing Lists[1] and recipient<>event level analytics[2] that you can aggregate by just tagging messages. We are working on improving the GUI in the control panel for marketing folk, but for now developers can enjoy these for 0.1x cost of typical email marketing services now through our APIs.

[1] http://documentation.mailgun.net/api-mailinglists.html [2] http://documentation.mailgun.net/api-campaigns.html

eli
I would be glad to take another look at Mailgun. Can you easily do segmenting (i.e. Only send this message to people where Job Title == 'CEO')? I think that may have been the dealbreaker when I last looked. Exposing the user's mail agent in analytics would also be nice.

And although I wish I could say all I need is a kickass API, I actually will need a GUI suitable for marketing folks too. Happy to followup privately since my requirements may be slightly unique.

tomh
Idea #2: Great idea, but many of the hurdles you have to jump over in order to immigrate are always served on a case-by-case basis, and are difficult to standardize.

For example, in most EU countries in order to get a work visa you have to display a reason why employer X should hire you over a citizen of their own country, i.e. what skill puts you over the rest of the populace who already pay taxes.

A counter-example is Cyprus, which will give you residency in 4-6 months if you buy property there. So, the only hurdle is $$$.

A more measured, focused version of this idea would be to start with a recruiter, a lawyer and a site: JobsInCountryX.com. As soon as that is moderately profitable, move on to country Y, Z, etc and cover the planet.

franze
please steal this ideas, too:

google analytics with out the new google analytics (the old google analytics interface using the google analytics API) .. as soon as google sunsets the old version (what they wanted to do last jan) there will be a lot frustration (as the new GA - currently - sucks, hard)

huge market (there will be millions and millions of frustrated users) - can easily be a premium market (5$ to 25% per user?) - i would be the first to sign up.

true_religion
What's wrong with the new analytics program?
franze
you can't answer the question "how is our (organic, brand, paid, cpc, ...) traffic doing (compared to yesterday, last week, last month, last year, ...)?" anymore without consulting the Calculator.app.

it makes answering complicated questions easy, and answering simple questions complicated.

it was probably designed by a committee (consisting of mostly adwords managers) - a committee that does not use the product itself.

and this is without mentioning the bugs (and more bugs and bugs with bugs and bugs with features and features with bugs ...) and the missing scheduled (email, pdf) reports.

it really is that bad. and i'm a professional. now imagine all the small local companies dealing with this kind of "update".

true_religion
Compare to past still exists, and you can set up reports for the more complicated questions that you need to ask.

However, your example is something that you can do easily in the main interface. Go to traffic sources > search > organic or paid then use compare to past in the timeline.

-----

Since this seems to easy, I'm sure I'm missing the point of what you meant.

But I used Analyitcs for years before the switchover, and I like the new version much better.

The improved form of Visitor Flow alone is worth it. Site Search tracking and Site Speed are great as well.

franze
>organic or paid then use compare to past in the timeline.

and get a useless total number(!!) - which you have to translate into percentage trends via the calculator.app

analysis is never about total figures, it's always about trends.

>Site Search tracking existed before >and Site Speed are great as well. a nice feature, these new featured (if they work bug free) are great, but most of the time they have bugs - and the stuff that the old version did good, do not work anymore.

the new GA is a textbook case of "second system syndrom"

oh, and not forget that they stop basing the x-axis at 0, but at at the lowest figure of each chart, meaning you can't visually scan different graphs for visual patterns.... and so the tour the force that the new GA is continues.

bigiain
One thing all my clients are screaming about is "Where did the email report as pdf option go?"

That's been on the "coming soon" list ever since the new interface launched - no sign of it yet…

herrherr
Shameless self-plug:

www.getmetricmail.com :D

alain94040
Regarding #1: I just saw alltuition.com at the LAUNCH conference, they have a really nice UI, and seem to address more or less the pain you are describing.

Regarding #2: that sounds like a really tiny market to go after. People who want to change country. What about a site that tells you where you should live, based on what you want your life to be. It wouldn't focus on international only, think of people moving across states to find jobs, sunshine, or what have you.

sgdesign
My free idea: when using different analytics services, I'm sick of having to add the tracking code and then reconfigure the same users and events for every new service.

So my idea is a third-party site that only collects your data once, and then serves it to other products. Kinda like Twilio for analytics, if you will.

As an added benefit, new analytics startups wouldn't have to build the "collect data in real time" brick. So that might help them focus more on what to do with your data, instead of on how to collect it.

rokhayakebe
This is probably one of the most powerful ideas I have read in a long time. It could be applied to your website data, as well as email data, lifestyle data, financial, etc...
sgdesign
Glad you like the idea! It does seem a bit like one of those all-encompassing "boil the ocean" ideas, but PG's last post made me think maybe those ideas are worth considering after all!
kartikrao
We've built a product for publishers called "MediaAdapt"

Dynamic vendor agnostic tags for analytics, adserving and targeting. You can mix n match, add / modify providers easily. http://www.adinfinity.com.au

franze
chicken - egg problem. for publishers (websites) it's only worth if lot of analytics companies use it, for analytics companies it's only worth it if lot of publishers use it.

but if this gets solved, it will be awesome.

wgx
These are all really good. Great to see so many giving ideas away.

I've put a few on my blog over recent months in case anyone's interested:

http://willgrant.org/category/idea-dump/

I know one (Wavetees) is being turned into an actual product.

molsongolden
Thar be some good ideas here mate, thanks for sharing.
saiko-chriskun
I might be willing to do the coding for #2 if someone else has experience in the area and can help with the design/direction of the app :)
[dead] avstraliitski
I have experience in many countries and can help.
jamiek88
I like idea 2 and have years of experience both as being an expat and an employer who immigrates (Oil & Gas professionals). The revenue is drive from the recruiters side. Simple interface. 'I want to work in....' 'I am good at....' 'My family situation is...' etc. Pre sorted meta data and resume to recruiters who can immigrate the best talent in each sector, pre selected to those who actually want to go to that country/region. Rather than now when you start with a list of people who may not want to move to move to USA when they would like to go to Aus or Singapore etc. I'd love to do something like this. I can't code worth a damn but I am a relative expert in this area.
sedachv
The #2 problem is served by a large, established industry called relocation services (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relocation_service). Combining this with a job board doesn't really make sense - the reason people are moving to the US for jobs and not vice-versa is because there are a lot of jobs in the US and not in the places where people are moving from.
jeffool
Livestream for writers.

A writing block in the top right rectangle on the page.

A chat block on the bottom right.

A menu on the top left.

An ad on the bottom left.

Make the panes able to be resized, or completely hid, by clicking and dragging on the intersection. Any time the menu or chat is visible, the ad must be as well.

Give the writer the power to control thing, like: can users copy and paste? Can users scroll around freely, or are they stuck with author view? Can the file be read when not streaming?

Eventually take it further, become a storefront. Let people sell their written wares.

Ideally? I'd like to work on it.

4midori
#3 - if you do one for bands, or want to discuss, get in touch: bas AT versastudio.com