Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

Two free ideas that I just pulled out of my list:

1. Promoter Marketplace - A site where people can buy/sell product promotional services for local areas. Examples include a club promoter who gets paid based on the number of people at the club on a certain night, or an energy drink promoter that gets paid to hand out cans on exam week. Allow for people to list their rates and let past clients review them.

2. User Manual Creator - A site that lets people easily create user manuals for their products. Most manuals seem to follow the same set of steps: list parts, show numbered steps with pictures, provide alternate language text, etc. Let users upload pictures/text for each step and then you create a printable manual that can be folded up and neatly placed inside a product box.

They aren't my A-list ideas, but you get what you pay for. :)

Why don't you build an airbnb for Tools and Equipments. In winter, I'd pay to borrow someones snow blower once a week instead of buying it out-right.

People with specialized machinery will flock to your system if you manage the bookings and payment processing, and make it easy for locals/neighbours to meet each others needs.

That's something I would personally find value in, but it might not be so technologically challenging for a group of cs majors.

I'll shoot out more ideas if I think of any. You've got the ideal situation on your hands, get busy!

Solve a problem. That's it. Make a solution that will put a salve on someones pain.

It sounds like all of your other ideas are trying to take advantage of a percieved hot space or were just "neat ideas".

Start making a list of all the problems you have observed and figure out how your proposal could help address them.

Get your team together and brainstorm.

999 business ideas, courtesy of Seth Godin and his folks.

http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html

Distributed, decentralized, redundant, encrypted online file storage with the ability to share information with specific groups and individuals.

From the user standpoint, a user would access their content primarily through client software that would ask for their id & password (or perform other authentication). The authentication process fetches a small file from the network and decrypts it using the user's identification. That file then acts as a key to find and access the rest of the user's content in the network.

From a network standpoint, every client system has access to an amount of data proportional to the amount it's willing to store for the network. Data stored on the network is chunked down, encrypted, and stored on multiple nodes. Piecing together encrypted data without being able to read the contents of a user's index file should be considered Very Hard.

Something along these lines could really change the computer industry, and I think it's within the realm of possibility for a university and 5 CS majors, if they're sharp and motivated to work on it.

Why don't you ask the people in your team? They're more likely to give more to the project if the idea comes out of a discussion of theirs, rather than something you just present to them.

Two things I would love to see:

1. Kayak.com for ground transportation. Trains, buses, ferries, etc. are a pain to compare prices and book right now. Admittedly there probably isn't as much of a business case for this.

2. A music site where I could collaborate on a playlist with my friends and listen to the music at the same time. Currently there are sites that let you share playlists, but not listen at the same time as other people.

I would poll your professors for a pain point and pick one of those as a problem to solve. May sure it is something they would pay to solve (even if that just means out of their university budget).

1) It would provide you with a "customer" who is close by and you can interact with heavily. 2) There are likely more professors with a similar problem and a similar willingness to pay for it. 3) If you are successful, you will be giving back to your community that fostered your opportunity.

What do you wish someone would start a startup to build for you?

An augmented reality app for furniture stores. The store would include something like QR codes in their catalog which shoppers can cut out and tape on their wall or place on the floor. Then the app renders 3d versions of the product when viewed through a phone.

It'd be pretty awesome to see how a chair or painting would look in a room by getting a live rendering of the object actually in the room.

Make an app-store, but for web applications.

You can fill it to begin with using affiliate links to existing web apps. Once you get a decent number of people using it, you can allow people with new web apps to advertise there, or charge for subscriptions to be listed there, or take a cut out of every sale/signup. Many ways to skin this cat.

I've got a startup that's just starting to gain traction (~$4,000 in SAAS license sales, pipeline of more customer prospects). I've taken a tiny amount of angel funding, with a larger angel round pending more product validation. I'm a single, non-technical founder looking for a techie or two who can help build out features. I'm also just to the North of you in Nebraska, well within driving distance. Email if you'd like to chat.

I think the benefit to you is a real-life business that has a business driver (me) with business connections and already has some market validation. I've got a completed business plan that you can pull from to create a great case study. My technical advisor can also give you guidance from someone who's "been there and done that" (and will prevent me from making requests that are technically unsound). Instead of starting from scratch, you have a base to build on.

> ... or else I default into the standard class and must take a project from the industry.

What about if, instead of speculating on a business idea to implement in isolation, you found some of these industry partners, and asked them to describe something they need desperately and would pay for? If you can't do that before your proposal is due, make that research your proposal -- get familiar with the process of gathering needs and learning about a market. Deploy your team on iterating implementations, from paper sketch to running system. If you can get a customer or two to sign a non-binding letter of intent saying they'll buy your product if it does X,Y, and Z, you'll have accomplished something that's beyond most startup-oriented hackers.

I would try looking here (if you haven't already): http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

A Mint.com for managing your frequent flier miles instead of money. It alerts you to deals, expiring miles, and ties-in with the infinite affiliate programs for travel in order to generate revenue. (Credit to my mom on that idea.)

Here's a couple:

TV chat system - used to find (local?) people watching the same show you are watching and form a chat channel (on mobile phone?)

Personalized news site - kind of like YC or digg but using netflix style machine learning algorithms to customize

A free version of 'vault.com' (reviews on employers, salary surveys)

Find a haircut (paste your picture, sort of photoshop different hair on it)

Underserved search terms: find some way to figure out what terms have a lot of search traffic but very few good results

Easy quotes for local business (eg, find a plumber). Enter in "my pipe is broken" and get a bunch of emails with quotes.

And one meta idea: a website for people to share startup ideas and form startups

First of all congrats on convincing your univ to go with you on this.

Here's the biggest problem/asset I see with your scenario - the five seniors. If you really want to do something of significance, you better be damn well organized with your timeline. Another problem I've seen with school projects (yes, I speak from personal experience in the recent past :) is that it doesn't matter if you're willing in to put in the extra mile, but your teammates may not. If it's a grade they're going to be after, be careful, because that's all the finished product would look like. Seriously, your idea isn't so much important as getting along with your teammates.

Also, forget about a technical challenge as a sole basis for the project. Instead, focus on what pg says - what do you wish a startup would do scratch an itch of yours so well that you won't hit the back button :) Remember, your customers don't have to sit through your final project presentation, they can hit the back button anytime!

Alright, the ideas: 1) Look into the higher ed space. I am willing to bet that your univ is already spending boatloads of money on crappy enterprise software. I just walked out of lunch with a friend in the higher ed realm confessing about YC funding amount of money spent on calendaring software alone. Per Year! I am sure with six months time, you could rewrite iCal in javascript.

2) Well, put on walking shoes and talk to your friends about what's missing in their lives? But, really ask yourself what someone could build for you?

"trying to edge my way into point of sale restaurant software/hardware"

Having ventured into this realm, Just Say No. Or, at least don't think about the problem like, "Restaurants pay much too much for POS systems...I could build something cheaper and better." Contact me if you want to know more or would like an intro to some people in that space.

Having said this, here's what I want.....

I just bought what is, at least for me, a kick ass USB microphone from M-Audio for $60. Even as the world has become more accepting of telecommuting, the conference call still sucks from an audio standpoint. Skype seems optimized for modems. [Still true?] POTS lines are, of course, awful. Instead of compressing my voice from a cheap microphone into a 2Kbit upstream, what if my voice was recorded with a good microphone and sent upstream at, say 64Kbit? What sort of set-up should I have so that I can collaborate with someone and have the same audio efficiency (meaning, I don't have to expend brain cycles on a bad S/N ratio) as being in the same room?

On a much broader scale, I think that there are huge opportunities for companies who can produce better A/V collaboration tools, and I think that audio is much more important than video from an efficiency of human interaction standpoint. I'd be willing to spend my day in studio headphones and speaking into a mic -- much like a radio DJ -- if it meant I could have effortless conversations.

I like the comedy website idea. If tracks or "bits" were tagged it would be even better.

"clean", "family", "kids" (for example)

And then I could hear Bill Cosby's cookie jar bit, or Bill Engvall's I.G.Joe bootcamp bit, I'd be in listening heaven.

HOWEVER, I know for a fact there used to be something out there similar to this. I think it was called "haha" or something like that. I don't know if it exists or went away, but I used to use it back in 2005 (I think).

How about a StackOverflow.com for Indie Game development?

Is there a site where I can crowdsource my documentation within some privacy agreement? Let's say I have tons of undocumented code written by a previous employee and I'd like to pay someone X dollars to document each method/class/etc.

I tried searching for "crowdsourced documentation" and "paid code documentation service" but I couldn't really find anything. This might be a lucrative idea?

One idea I've had that I'll never get around to actually doing anything with is playing with Amazon's Spot Instances. I think that the cheap cloud computing they offer can open up some new possibilities and also just save people money.

I think the best idea that I've had come out of it is some kind of spot instance guide where someone could say "I need this job done by 10am Monday. It'll take ~5 hours on 10 large instances. Get it done for me as cheaply as possible while still having a 95% chance that it gets done in time." You would know enough about the patterns of spot instance pricing that you could instantly estimate the cost for them, and they could play around with the confidence that they want of it finishing as they see the price vs. chance that it doesn't get done trade-off.

Now, there are definitely some issues with that idea. It may be a terrible idea. But I think there are opportunities to build businesses like that that exploit the cheap computing that spot instances offer.

Hmmm. Here's a problem that I'm going to end up building a solution to if someone else doesn't do it first (and by all means, please do it because I am lazy and have enough projects to last me for the foreseeable future):

A CRUD application generator. You go to a page and define all of your models and basic rules. The models get defined in very simple terms - you give each model a name, and then define each field with dropdowns that define what each field is. If it's a foreign key, you select that in the dropdown. You can select validation for each field from a catalog of validations (phone number, email address, string min length of 5 chars, whatever).

Offer addins for commonly needed functionality - for example, I end up using authentication in just about every project and end up having to do a lot of work to get it up and running. So you could have plugins like authentication, private messaging (which would require auth automatically), a ticket system, whatever.

Also offer the ability to choose a theme before generating a project.

So a user can go to a site, define their models, add any addins they want and pick a theme.

Then in the final step, they choose a language and framework they want everything generated in: Python / Django, Ruby on Rails 2.3.x, Ruby on Rails 3.x, Python / Pylons, Scala / Lift, ASP.Net MVC; whatever templates you've gotten built.

When it's done, they get a compressed file (zip or tar.gz) that contains the generated application and some programatically created documentation that explains where everything is, how to change the important parts and how to deploy it.

There are lots of ways to make money with something like this:

* Charge for addins per project

* Charge for premium themes

* Charge a small amount per project (I like this option the least)

* Provide automatic hosting a la Heroku for projects - this would let people with a basic idea but no programming chops get something up in an hour or two instead of trying to find someone to explore the idea with them. For this you'd want to limit it to a subset of frameworks so that you don't have to have a lot of different production environments.

* Use a fremium model where people can generate x number of apps a month for free, but over that limitation charge some amount per month. People will try to get around this by registering with multiple email addresses if the product is good, but that's a great problem to have!

Although it sounds like you're probably somewhat freed from a profit motive while you're building this, which helps significantly. From a dev perspective it would be fun to learn enough about all the major frameworks to generate sites in them.

How about a website for people who want to lose weight? I know this kind of thing already exists, but there are still lots of overweight people out there. I figure the existing ones don't attract all the target population, or they don't work for whatever users they can attract.

Incidentally you will be helping people to get laid.

"find a small problem, and start with a smaller problem inside of it"

Also, dont make a product that helps you generate ideas.

I've always thought it would be fun to build a "ramen profit" tool suite.

I.E. a suite of tools for startups to see how close they're coming to achieving ramen profitability and what else they need to do to get there. Also some tools to help grow the startups. Working with partners like 37signals/lesseverything/and other startups.

The business model could be something like this: offer the tools to the startups at a freemium rate model, make commissions each time they sign up with different partners...

As I was hoping to build this some day (but will realistically never get around to it) - I will mention that I own the domain RamenProfit.com and would be more than willing to contribute my design skills to the project.

Let me know if you're interested. (email is in my profile)

I love the idea of tying in comedy somehow. So much of the "funny" content on the internet is pretty lame, and I think there are a lot of amateur comedians who would love to test out new jokes somehow.

So I suggest you do two brainstorming sessions, one sober and one intoxicated, with the aid of a huge whiteboard, and explore the comedy concept (and other comedy concepts) further.

Imagine if you could do a live video stream of a person's comedy act, but make all watchers plug in a mic so that the crowd laughter / applause could be captured and mixed into the experience, both as feedback for the performer and as crowd noise for those watching it.

Comedyroulette? :) It could pair one commedian with a 20 person audience with one way video and n-way audio.

Two things.

1. Don't worry about the idea. They tend to change a lot. Pick something that interests you, roll along with it, and if you don't like just move on to a different idea.

2. I'm a college student too. One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is IP and the University. Talk to your professor about this carefully to make sure that your IP is yours and the University doesn't get any claim, just to alleviate headaches from happening later. In some schools, if you use the college's money or resources to create something they legally can claim a piece of it. Make sure you know about these details before embarking on any business venture.

Personally, for that type of time/budget size, I would probably start a company that make mobile (android) widgets. I would like to see full screen ones made with more to offer than the ones that are out there.

Things like niche news portals (gaming, restaurants, real estate, music industry, auto news, etc...), stock trading info, local offline shopping sales, etc...

Basically, the stuff that has been done in this area is pretty crappy imo and you could take it quite a bit further. The development for something like this shouldn't be too tough either compared to making normal mobile apps because you're mostly just aggregating existing data.

I also think that you have put the horse in front of the cart.

Start an idea pad- this can be a note on your phone or whatever, and whenever you have a problem with something or think "I with I could...." then write it down

Not thought about these much, but I have them jotted down on my ever-growing ideas list. They're a bit dated.

1. Bluetooth analytics. A lot of people are broadcasting their BD_ADDR and don't know it. Give shop owners some way to see recurring visitors - or perhaps even track how they move around the shop.

2. P2P file distribution for businesses. Your users install a client and get paid a small amount per hour (which changes depending on demand). Businesses needing to distribute a large file pay you to host it on your 'botnet'. I don't think ISPs would like this an awful lot.

An idea I had was a site where members can make a list of all their possessions and how much it'd take for them to part with each item.

They then have the opportunity to search the stuff other people own and see much they'd want for it, and can make offers if it's something they'd be willing to pay the asking price for.

Basically a classified ads site for stuff you aren't really bothered about selling, but would do if the price was right.

Don't know how you'd monetize it though as most transactions would probably be done cash, in person.

I don't make music but I love music. This is a way to potentially help every indie artist/label in the world.

I have an entire database of music industry listings. These types of databases usually cost lots of money and therefore independent artists have been excluded from using them. We're talking 50,000 listings spanning across the united states and canada. Lots of independent labels and artists I've spoken to are excited by the prospect of having the most comprehensive music industry contact database available for free, to anyone, any age, anywhere in the world.

The database is legit and put together by myself and a friend who is music industry major.

THE PROBLEM:

The programming behind it sucks. It should be re-built from the ground up, using the database as the starting point. The search is horrible and doesn't pull the results that users expect (even though the results exist!). There should be more community features. The best way for this type of database to stay up to date and accurate is for users to contribute. Users can also talk to each other about what works and begin to talk about their experiences with different contacts.

Business prospects: - advertising - premium accounts

There's always advertising, in this case the ads are to a very niche crowd, so that always helps. There's also reasons why a business with money, like an indie label, might want a premium account.

To be honest, this probably doesn't have a big chance of making a lot of money. My hope has always been to make it simply sustainable. The upside is that you are literally helping out every independent musician and label in the united states and canada that wants to be heard. You're helping the underdog expose their music to the world.

If community participation grows, it's easy to start allowing people to post listings from countries other than US/Canada. And that would be awesome.

There's quite a few interesting technical challenges this site is facing and currently no one is stepping up to face them. The code, project, and database is yours if you want it. Maybe we put it all under an open license? I'll even continue to help with design/front-end development (photoshop/html/css/js) as that is my strong point. Programming is my weak point.

http://www.indiedirectory.net

Don't worry about the idea too much. If you find a good one, great, but this project will probably be an awesome experience whether or not you have a great idea. Taking charge of a project and executing on it, even if the idea is mediocre or down-right bad, will be incredibly educational and useful.

So... if you have have a choice between 1) doing the project with a bad idea, or 2) doing a project for industry, I would definitely pick #1.

Develop an alternative to TicketMaster that you can white label to MLB, NFL, etc. They could be making millions of extra dollars a year if they had their own system. Why not create the system for them and skim a portion off the top.

[I'm a designer and have no idea what would be involved in making this happen, or if it's feasible from a business perspective. I'm also in Denver, so...would love to hear what comes of your project]

Since you have the support of the university you may want to consider building something they would want to use. This way the university could be a lead user.

Try to talk to who ever procures management software, BI, CRM, payroll and see how much they pay for what. See if there is something you can do significant better/cheaper. Also ask them what they wish they had.

A while ago I had a discussion going in a thread on HN about a crowdsourced medical diagnosis tool. Sort of a Stack Overflow for chronic medical conditions.

I haven't seen anyone do it right yet, here's the thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1399953

I don't know if something like this exists: write a highly distributable script to solve some problem, then pay to distribute it over a large network.

To get the network, you could create an app like SETI@home which pays people for their idle cycles.

Mechanical Turk, but with lots of computers instead of a few humans.

Coincidentally, I've got a great idea, I'm going to be moving to Fort Collins in about a two months and was going to start recruiting developers.

I'd love to get in touch with you to see if there's a fit. Is there a good way to exchange contact info on HN without publishing it to the wider world?

This is something I've been wanting to see:

Virtual animals/monsters roam the earth (probably relegated to streets/parks for property issues), and with your phone app, you hunt them, collecting trophies/treasure.

You could join safari parties with friends to hunt the scariest of monsters, or to share resources.

Fun fun fun.

Read The Map of Innovation by Kevin O'Connor, founder of DoubleClick. http://www.amazon.com/Map-Innovation-Creating-Something-Noth...

Make an improved version of etherpad! This was a great project/company, that ~ended when Google bought them. Would love to see someone run with this.

Not to sound negative, as I appreciate your situation, but you do realize that their are tens of thousands of people who do try and come up with startup ideas everyday; they call it work. I'm sorry, but I don't think you are going to get much here, especially just so you can skirt some classes. Best of luck though

Ask your student peers about what gets on their nerves.

Could you provide a way to contact you directly?

It occurs to me that the professor is teaching you something. Good people are a dime a dozen. Good ideas are much scarcer.

just curious: are there any intellectual property risks (with CU-Boulder)?

Good ideas take a while to develop. You need to be familiar with the domain to execute them well, care enough to put in the work.

What domain are you familiar with? HTML/CSS/JS? Backends? Programming IDEs? Text analysis? Surfing the web? (UIs, journalism, communities etc..)

I have some ideas.

1. Community designer - you'd start with a forum, then add features like up/down votes, ratings, tags, following, blocking, limiting length of posts (aka Twitter), anonymity, chats in threads, micro-comments (quick comments about meaty posts visually separate) topic isolation, user labels (like trolls, political, religious nuts) etc.. You could add and remove features in order to guide the community to be active, post good content, or troll like 4chan.

Of course you'd need extensive experience of wasting time on forums, digg, reddit, starting your own forum to approach this idea.

2. Code map - lots of projects have a lot of boilerplate code, multiple functions with little inside them, linking to other parts of the program for convenience. Code density map shows where the functional code is in a large project. Complexity map could show where there is long, incomprehensible logic. Dependency map showing which classes have more dependencies than others. Some of these could be documented by the developer, he can label something "hacky" and you could see how much of the code-base is "hacky" on a map. Long name API map should look different for JQuery and Google Closure (JS frameworks), would be useful for designer coders because they have low tolerance for long lines of text. Would look different for Processing.org vs Java drawing API too.

Such a map should look different from one project to the next. It might reveal coding style. Someone who is looking to work on a project could decide if the coding style matches their own without having to dig in to the code. People choosing a framework like Rails, Django could decide based on a map of example projects that do the same task. Compare how verbose one framework is vs another.

This is a hard problem with fun social implications. I don't really know how hard, but there should be some intermediate stages for the idea that would be neat, maybe even useful for github.

3. Individualized content - user takes a survey of words, concepts he understands, like helium, fusion, deuterium, megawatts, steam turbines and when looking at a news site he would only see the articles where he understands the concepts. If the news site wants to explain these concepts to the individual, they have to write specially written articles that break things down, start at the fundamentals.

It's not hard to get ideas after you have some experience, did a lot of research in a domain. As a bonus you have more motivation to work on it than you do on someone else's less familiar idea. That might be a problem for you.

This one's easy: Facebook-killer!

It takes some training to get to the state where you can sense and recognize when there's a problem where something sucks. I've thought banks really sucked for two decades, but never had the idea of doing something like simplebank.

The best ideas are ones where there is pain you can relieve.

Here's one: Web development sucks profoundly. People actually write CSS and HTML by hand, using text editors. That is a complete indictment of the state of web development tools. We've got decent stuff for web apps, but nothing for html building. Cappucino and Sproutcore are starting to provide interface builder apps for javascript based apps. But still nothing that works.

I think an Interface Builder for the web would be revolutionary and profitable.

I'm tempted to say that if you don't have a bunch of ideas then you shouldn't be leading this thing-- but on the other hand, you have the presence of mind to recognize that those three ideas are all poor and that, my friend, is extremely valuable. So at this stage, pick the best idea from here or from the other people who will work on it and go for it.

For anything you do-- see if you can find 4-5 people who are not engineers who will honestly say "Yeah, if you could build that, I'd buy it for $X" or that their company would.

Like gdgt for apps. I'll throw in $5K + existing code base as investment.