Ask HN: What to work on?
LongCal: Basically, a calendar that goes beyond the standard month/week/day view. Emphasis on long term thinking and planning. I made a very rough prototype here (click on logo to get some test data): http://humbit.com/longcal/
uTrim: A URL shortener for universities. The idea is to create trustworthy links that can only be created by people actually associated with a school. I already have a functioning app and if you don't have an .edu account you can at least check out the landing page : https://utr.im/
Vulgat Library: Helps businesses create an internal lending library (movies, books, games). I sold this to two game companies, so it's the only thing I feel has proven demand. But I'd have no idea how to find more customers. This is the landing page that adwords objected to: http://vulgat.com/
Business naming app: After all the naming debacles I've seen on HN, I think an app that generates names (and checks against .com registration and trademark) could be really useful. My big doubt is if anyone would pay for it.
Do any of these sound worthwhile? Maybe I should just suck it up and do 30x500...
52 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadRe: naming, http://namevine.com asks for current registrar and may be earning affiliate revenue.
Regarding "only actually familiar with selling online scams" – they don't live of www.30x500.com but of http://letsfreckle.com/
There's gotta be an official name for these. That skinny page with varying font sizes of text images or embedded youtube videos encouraging you to buy/ act now / sign-up for their free newsletter til a big call-to-action at the bottom after scrolling for 10 minutes?
Those pages convert shockingly well. If you follow A/B tests and don't care about aesthetics, that's often where you end up.
There is; long copy sales letters
Personally I don't see the value in it but I'm fairly sure that others do. Calling it a scam is not nice. It also would require that you label lots of other things scams as well if you want to apply the same principle to teaching-for-money.
Probably I'm operating a scam (after all, what's the use of telling people things they already should know about the companies they're about to invest in for a fee) as well in your book.
Nobody forces you to sign up for that course, if you don't see the value, don't do it. And if you did sign up for it and you felt it wasn't worth your money then write about it or talk about it. Maybe ask for your money back. Lotteries are borderline scams, 419 schemes, pyramids, MLM, those are all scammy (as are sites that claim to sell you an article when in fact they sell you a subscription).
30x500 is not a scam by any definition that I'm aware of.
Please provide evidence to the contrary, nothing is wrong with teaching people how to run a business for a fee, and if not all of them become millionaires but the course providers to then that's business as usual. Evaluate the course, state what's wrong with it and how it could be improved.
(I have no dog in this particular race but I don't like such terms to be used lightly, especially not about other forum members without there at least being some actual evidence.)
The classes are live, but are basically just a series of pre-recorded videos that you watch along with your classmates and have limited time to discuss afterwards. Nearly everything done outside of that class (if you choose to pay extra) is an automated series of emails that you work on alone.
The teachers (Amy & Alex) are night and day. Amy is the ringleader. She is very pig-headed and will not tolerate ideas that do not fall inline with hers. She is quick to belittle people in front of the entire class and has zero patience. Alex is very helpful, easy-going, and open to exploring all ideas. Both seem to be extremely busy outside of the 30x500 world (with other businesses, vacations, and/or personal activities), so don't expect much interaction with them outside of the live classes. They are quick to respond up until the point where you've paid. But, their interest drops off pretty steeply after that point.
Is this a scam? No. But, it's not a silver bullet either. It does teach a few important concepts that are probably not so obvious to many people. The real trick is figuring out how to apply them yourself.
I think this class would be best delivered as an eBook -- since the teachers seem to want to fully automate most of it anyhow. I'm guessing live classes have more money-making potential though.
Note: I took this class in February. Amy kicked me out mid-course for no apparent reason (she would not respond to me, so I really don't know). I had to contact my credit card company to dispute the charge and get a refund. The little bit of knowledge that I did gain was surely not worth the time, money, or hassle involved. Buyer beware.
Thanks, you just saved me 2k. Please write up a blog post, you may save others.
I wrote about the micro-ISV community here: http://www.jasonswett.net/the-whos-who-of-the-micro-isv-worl...
This is an alternative to Amy's 30x500: http://www.micropreneur.com/ by the same guys who put on MicroConf, which is a great event.
LongCal - Though it is a prototype, it is very unclear how I would use such a tool. I use a regular calendar, and it is working for me just fine.
uTrim - It's been a while since I was in school, so I can't really say whether this solves a problem that I had.
Vulgat Library - sounds interesting, but I can't tell much from the landing page.
30x500 - I wouldn't shell out that much cash unless I have seen proven results (and not just off of their website copy). Do you know anyone who has gone through that program?
It seems like the monetization strategy would be to get the university itself to purchase the product (licenses or something) and then that would allow anyone affiliated with that university to publish trustworthy, shortened URLs (to their research, or in their research to whatever resources they used).
At least, that's what makes the most sense to me.
These things don't have pent up demand, and you're not solving meaningful problems for people (thus there's no money or interest in them).
My suggestion would be to rethink what you think you know about being an entrepreneur, or creating products for consumption. How you gauge whether something will be useful for enough people, and why someone would pay for it. You need to get a lot better at filtering out what seem like cool ideas, but in fact are just toys that occupy (steal) your time.
I've made the same mistake you're making. It took me years to figure out what I was doing wrong. Building what seemed like one cool thing after another, and for some reason none of them were taking off.
Do one thing, make sure that thing is worth doing, and put all your focus behind it, unrelentingly for a long duration of time. Few things take off right away, even when they're great businesses, they will always test your will to stay in the fight. If you happen to find a great opportunity, and you hop around and don't put all your effort into it for an extended amount of time (even when things look grim), you'll never find out if it has a shot at success. The emphasis is: make sure what you're doing with your time is truly valuable ("is this the most valuable thing I can be doing with my time?" is a legitimate question to use as a filter).
LongCal: I think there is something there with regards to "long-term thinking". But don't market it as a "calendar app". I believe there is potential in tracking people's long-term goals, breaking them down into tasks, and translating these tasks into chunks of work to build daily schedules and habits. The above is what I currently do in a text editor, and there is no "calendar app" that can do it for me. Don't make another calendar app, the space is overcrowded with Machine Learning powered calendar apps. How to validate? This one is tricky. I'd try customer interviews strategy (dalacv posted a book) to see if people are really unhappy with their current time management apps, and why. No need to build something before you figure out the pain points. Ideally you have a mockup of what you have in mind in order to validate your hypotheses against what people are telling you in interviews. Monetization is an issue you don't usually worry about with these kind of products. If you build a great product then people will come, and with enough people money will come.
uTrim: I'm not sure about this one. I never use URL shorteners unless they are already integrated in a service I'm already using (e.g. Twitter). The bigger opportunity here may be to sell this directly to universities and automatically shorten anything that is posted on university-internal mailing lists and forums and provide analytics on top of that. How to validate? Try to sell it to universities (in particular, certain departments for certain products and then let it ripple through other departments)
Vulgat Library: I'm assuming employees lend stuff to other employees (landing page isn't clear on this)? How to validate? Figure out what segment your customers are in and try to sell it to them. You'd probably need a more exhaustive landing page. This can be consumerized enterprise play where you are selling to individual employees within a company. They can set up the system themselves without needing permission from any higher-ups. They then invite other employees. Basically the Dropbox model. This way you can use consumer marketing strategies instead of needing B2B sales.
Business naming app: I may be wrong but personally I'd forget about this one: 1. Generating good names automatically is extremely difficult 2. I doubt people want to have generated names 3. Don't see obvious monetization 4. One-time use
It's mostly a mobile app because you have to be mobile to use it. (You can emulate mobility at a desk, sure)
In my head I call this app "Road Stories"
The premise of this app is that while you're driving around, your phone knows where you are, what speed you're going, etc. As you're driving home from your folks, to stay awake you fire up Road Stories and when you are coming up on an old memory worth sharing with the public, you hit record. The app starts recording your voice. Base case, you're going the speed limit, there's no traffic, so the story unfolds like one of those annotated amusement park historical rides. "See that white house on the left?" You do, because you're in sync with the original recorder. I'm sure there's some algorithm fudging to make it work.
That's obviously producer mode. Then you have consumer mode. You leave it on, and as it starts hitting nodes, it auto plays them. After there are overlapping ones, it plays by newest, best, unlistened, etc cetera.
Advertisement is the obvious way to make any cash off it. I dont know anything at all about that domain and I think this is why I never bothered trying to make it. It'd be neat to know some local businesses tucked away off the highway, sure. Mostly you're listening to hear either synthetic, or historical, folklore.
I think it would be a neat way to make people more aware of where they are, spread history, invent folklore, and just stay awake on that long-assed drive across new hampshire at 10pm. Steal it if you want it.
Andrew Mason's new venture is kind of similar in terms of tech
The real flaw with this is that most people are not natural story tellers. It's hard to get content with that issue. You're bound to get people who like to talk but have nothing to say, leaving you with a whole lot of nothing useful.
http://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-Generation-Visionaries-...
In fact, finding that the university which employs me has a url shortener was a happy day - the url looks official, but it took a whole 2 lines from a column in the paper I was writing. If you haven't had the "joy" of trying to fit your whole idea into a short page limit, you may not understand how much space that really is... Remember in high school when you would fudge margins and font and so on, and using big words unnecessarily to reach the minimum pages? Similar tricks are often done in reverse for research papers.
If you're going to sell that service to smaller universities that don't run their own, or bigger universities looking to outsource, here's a few things that really matter:
1. Being able to tie into the existing SSO/Federated ID system the university uses.
2. Being able to guarantee lifetimes of the shortened links - perhaps even providing for running the service after the company goes away (if this unfortunately happens). Alternately, providing a way to migrate data to a local machine w/in the university if all else fails.
3. The ability to attach a university affiliated domain name - this lets shortened urls look official rather than shady.
4. The ability to move the shortened url target. Long lifetimes conflict with changes in infrastructure in the customer organization.
5. The ability to notify any/all of: the original poster, the poster's department, and the university it department when target links stop working.
6. (maybe) a caching service in case a long term url goes down - oops the page seems down, but here's a cache of what it last looked like....
Your problem seems to be a recurring theme here on HN and elsewhere. People building amazing stuff (as in intellectually stimulating, fun to build, difficult to do, impressive etc.) with amazing technology (shiny new languages, stacks etc.), launch it and yet nobody seems to care. Nobody seems to be willing to throw money at an app, service and so on. Why is that? People often build things that solve non-issues. And I love all of this, 99.5% of the stuff I build is purely for fun, learning, play and prove something (to myself). But that's not where the money is most of the time, though the things I learn from play are useful for the 0.5%.
I'm sure you read everything there is to know about the entire lean thing (Business Model Generation got mentioned already). Are you familiar with the work of Dane Maxwell [1]? As jasonswett wrote, the money is in the boring stuff. Dane Maxwell developed a robust and proven framework to help bootstrapped businesses with hands-on advice and mentoring. I highly recommend to have a look at his work and look up some of the success stories. It's very inspiring and you can learn a thing or two. His advice is more in the tune of people like DHH (you're much more likely to succeed in building a small company that solves a specific problem than, say, the next Facebook). Does it seem achievable for you to build an app with 50 users who pay €150 each? Or with 100 users who pay $70 each? Would you be happy with something like this for a start?
Pick something that solves a real problem in an area where there's money. B2B that is. Pick something that bothers you when you interact with other businesses as a starting point. Why is there friction? Work from there. Talk to those businesses and ask them what their biggest pain points are. What they would be willing to pay for if somebody (you) would solve it. You will have to pick up the phone, write emails and talk to people in person. That's all scary stuff (at least for me). You will be surprised what businesses are struggling with. Which things eat up tons of their resources and could be solved with open source solutions that you simply glue together. Once you find something that you think you can solve, nail the business owners down on it. Demand commitment. Make them part of the process and work closely with them. They will become your evangelists later on. Make them pay for a year in advance. That will truly validate your business idea. Only then start to build.
[1] http://thefoundation.com [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Athefoundation.com *
* The website is built in a way that it's hiding some of the content. You get it for a share on Facebook or an email sign up - that's why I've chosen this form.
What I am saying is that find businesses where the quality of the product is directly correlated with the success of the product. For instance, if you could create an exaflop computer, I don't care if you are bad at marketing you will be rich. Another example is AI, if you could get software to learn generally, you will be successful. Yet another example, being able to easily control an android(human size) remotely[this could be used in construction, farming, security, elderly care, site seeing etc.].
These are hard problems to solve, but you are trading easiness of producing a product for a guarantee on success.
>Google allows sites that collect personally identifiable information from users as long as this is not the primary purpose of the site.
>Google doesn't allow the promotion of sites that offer incentives in order to collect users' personal information (such as free quiz/survey results, horoscopes, etc.) where collecting this information is the primary purpose of the site.
If offering updates on the project is an "incentive", well, I have no idea how anyone does this. The adwords+landing page concept is so ubiquitous on HN. I've asked here before and gotten no explanation.
The gist is, finding an objective (or as close to it) way to evaluate ideas within a simple structure.
Anyone else interested? Anything better already exist?
Basically, I had too many ideas and could not decide what to work on.
You need to speak to enough customers and iterate on what you offer to figure out the validity.
Coding stuff up is always a lot more comfortable, and a no-touch approach like adwords based validation is 'easy', but really, you need to be in front of people to understand if there is any validity to your thinking.
Open ended conversations around the problem area usually results in great insight and can lead to some valid ideas you can work off of. Also, speak to more than one person in a given problem area and it's not too hard to ask 'do you know anyone else that has this kind of problem?' to find a common theme and get an idea of a market size thats worth your time.
As an example, Concordia uses different email adresses depending on your faculty: @jmsb.concordia.ca, @encs.concordia.ca etc.
I believe it would be a good idea if you could implement a way of submiting "new" universities to the list of accepted schools, which can then be handpicked by youself. I suppose ideally a list of most universities available would be better. Dropbox used an amazing email list for their Space Race challange a few years ago, however I can't seem to find it.
[1] http://www.concordia.ca/
Make sure there is a large enough market before you put much more time in. Then, once you've got a concept that is workable and has a large enough potential market, try to convince your complainer-soon-to-be-customer to become your pilot partner. Then execute on the idea you have, make your first happy customer and then branch out to other people/companies with the same problem.
Then brainstorm a solution to the most painful problem or two that you can solve with software, double back to your interviewees and see if they would pay for it. If a decent percentage are willing to pre-pay for it, you've already got your early adopters waiting for you and you didn't have to write a line of code. If nobody is interested, you may have saved yourself a ton of time and effort and now you can easily move on to researching the next problem/target market.
More info: http://www.smoothconversion.com/blog/why-you-don-t-validate-...
If you're looking for more ideas, here is some additional reading:
Passive income ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868
Startup ideas spreadsheet 2010: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag-R_ZlGO21NdE9HSWRk...
2012 re-discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190974
Further HN discussions of ideas: http://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/forever/0/startup%20ideas
The most successful technological innovations throughout history have come from making a manual or longer process automated or to take less time. Start with things in your life that you feel are unnecessarily complicated and map out the possibilities from there.
The other issue is that the techosphere is plagued with solutions that solve the problems of the technocrats that populate it. Start talking to your family and friends outside of our bubble and ask them what is on their wishlist. Find someone in a flyover state that still has a flip phone and has no reason to upgrade to a smart phone because there aren't any solutions to problems they have.
We are in the infancy stages of what computing and wireless technology can accomplish. Those that bring something new to the table have the greatest chance to succeed, and the odds are best when you tap into a market that isn't currently being served.
It isn't sexy, but it is profitable.