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Hi there, sorry for not publishing regularly, I've moved to a new country and these weeks are busy. I plan to post more from the next week.
Here is a problem for you: it's difficult to start blogging if you're not a technical person, it's not easy to understand whether this activity is for you and will be beneficial or profitable either.
Many companies try to solve this through:
- tools that simplify the process of creating a blog: Ghost, Wordpress, livejournal.
- consultancy services for the technical side of the question(how to host, where) and for SEO questions(how to promote, how to be searchable, what to write about).
It'd be better to combine these services together and provide a "just help me to start a blog" solution. Not multiple different ones that you use because a consultant you paid for told you how it all work: a blog engine, a server to run it, a tech person to set up it, a keyword research tool, a SEO course.
Can I, as a motivated to publish my thoughts person, just start doing it and not paying for multiple services and understand whether it'd be fine for me in a perspective?
Share your thoughts in the comments, I'll share a potential solution later.
Gratitude net
An app that tracks your gratitude feelings where you may point target people, so they'll get notified, though all of that is anonymous. Or, there is a possibility to not be anonymous, and people will receive messages saying you're grateful to them.
What is a minimal viable product(MVP)?
So, you have this idea that sparked a lot of interest in you. It may or may not do the same for the other people you're gonna show your project. That's why people do MVPs. To test something quickly: build and get feedback to understand whether to proceed further. You may love the idea but no one else does so.
*Why it's minimal?* Imagine the idea you love and want to build. How many days you should spend creating a working prototype? Let's calculate: 4 features, plus 3 integrations, and a possibility to pay in all countries, and one more feature to show cool analytics, and awesome UI, and..., and... Hmm, it'd take you 9 months. Fine! You've built it in 13 months(some unexpected adjustments here and there). You released it to an alpha test and it occurred no one is interested.
You may say it's due to a lack of sufficient market research. You're right, let's do the research then. You did it and figured out that your target customers are private teachers in small schools. You talked to many of them and asked about the problem you try to solve. You did all the right things. Then, it's time to build something, right? So you've decided that in this case, it'll be fine to spend 13 months building a solution. You built it, showed it to the target potential customers and it turned out your solution doesn't address the problem they have. They would solve it differently! Fine, you collected the feedback and rectified your MVP in 2 months. Then, you repeated the release-get feedback cycle a few times spending a year overall to get a few people who want to use your solution. So, it's 2+ years just to build an MVP that people can use?
The main point in the MVP concept is to iterate fast. You build something fast, show it to your potential users, collect feedback on what's wrong, adjust the solution. Do this multiple times and you get a few users. Then more until a product-market fit where your problem is scalability.
Opportunity: health care optimization
How many industries do you think can be optimized by involving technology to increase their efficiency?
For instance, let's take the health care system.
As described by TechOpinions, “the actual medical care system is not significantly more efficient than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Yes, there are now electronic medical records, and some consumers have access to their health history online. But the process of booking appointments, getting a referral, determining the price of a service, or determining the efficacy of a physician or the quality of a hospital or other treatment facility remains a rather arcane process.” While capital intensive, is there a potential alternative or opportunity to roll up a healthcare system in a rural part of the country and begin experimenting with tech optimization? There are currently over 6,090 hospitals in the United States with 2,946 Nongovernment Not-for-Profit Community Hospitals and 1,233 Investor-Owned (For-Profit) Community Hospitals. Given that there is a market, this business would double-down on capturing a larger more efficient share of the investor-owned community hospitals that exist.
We had an idea posted here about ERP systems that are super outdated, expensive, time-consuming, but health care units use them because of a conservative monopoly in the market. There are still businesses in, for example, rural areas where you can implement such a system, which will be not so expensive, more efficient, user-friendly, and yield profits.
It's been a while since the latest post, so I'm sharing some useful links to go down the rabbit hole. Some of them may seem to not be related to startups or businesses directly, but advice there can affect this mindset implicitly.
- The Pmarca guide to startups
- Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
- Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
- Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?
- Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
- Startup idea checklist
Find me a date
A dating app synced with a wearable ring. When you’re in proximity to a match, your ring glows brighter the closer you get.
Common reasons why startups fail by Failory.com:
- Marketing mistakes were by far the most common, and they were generally speaking the most deadly with 69% of all mentioned marketing mistakes being fatal. In fact, the fatal marketing mistakes were more numerous than all other fatal mistakes combined (56% vs 44%), as can be seen in the pie chart below. By far the most common reason for shutdown was lack of product-market-fit which constituted more than half of the marketing mistakes, but more on that below.
- Team problems – friction, lack of experience, lack of motivation, etc., were the second most common. They were some of the least-deadly percentage-wise (only 39% of all mentioned team problems being fatal), but because they are abundant they were still the second most common reason for shutdown.
- Financial problems and mistakes were the third most common. That said, bearing in mind more than 50% of the projects didn’t have any budget to begin with and more than 75% of the projects were self-funded, it’s a surprise that only 16% of the projects point at financial problems as the major reason for failure.
- Tech problems were extremely rare, which is surprising considering almost all projects in the data have a technical side to them. The most common remark was that too much time and effort was spent on tech that proved to be useless in the long run. The most common answer to “a thing you would do differently next time” by far was “I’d talk to customers and validate my assumptions before writing a single line of code”. That said, a big % of tech problems were fatal: e.g. relying on a 3rd party API that changes can ruin a business overnight.
- Operational problems were quite rare and not that deadly, but it’s important to mention that most interviewees ran software projects, so operational problems (e.g. suppliers, distribution) are not as common as in brick-and-mortar and physical product projects by definition.
- Legal problems were rarest, mentioned only four times, but two of those four proved to be lethal. For most early-stage startups the legal side is a non-factor. Yet, there are still industries where you can’t afford to ignore it (food, finance, etc.).
Cloud video transformation
Many companies build their own solutuions to work with videos. For instance, encoding, decoding, cutting, making previews and so on. For a company which goal isn't providing such functionality, it's resource consuming to make its own solutions to work with video.
The idea is to provide video transformations functionality as API in a cloud. Thus, I can easily, for example, cut a video file, then reduce its size in one or two API calls instead of spending a huge amount of time implementing this myself.
Monetization: users pay for an API call. Or tiers for a specific amount of calls per day, week, or month.
Idea: Releases tracker
A tool that helps me to track when my favorite series, shows, movies will be released. Also, it'd be great to track recent news that mention those movies/series.
What is a minimal viable product(MVP)?
So, you have this idea that sparked a lot of interest in you. It may or may not do the same for the other people you're gonna show your project. That's why people do MVPs. To test something quickly: build and get feedback to understand whether to proceed further. You may love the idea but no one else does so.
*Why it's minimal?* Imagine the idea you love and want to build. How many days you should spend creating a working prototype? Let's calculate: 4 features, plus 3 integrations, and a possibility to pay in all countries, and one more feature to show cool analytics, and awesome UI, and..., and... Hmm, it'd take you 9 months. Fine! You've built it in 13 months(some unexpected adjustments here and there). You released it to an alpha test and it occurred no one is interested.
You may say it's due to a lack of sufficient market research. You're right, let's do the research then. You did it and figured out that your target customers are private teachers in small schools. You talked to many of them and asked about the problem you try to solve. You did all the right things. Then, it's time to build something, right? So you've decided that in this case, it'll be fine to spend 13 months building a solution. You built it, showed it to the target potential customers and it turned out your solution doesn't address the problem they have. They would solve it differently! Fine, you collected the feedback and rectified your MVP in 2 months. Then, you repeated the release-get feedback cycle a few times spending a year overall to get a few people who want to use your solution. So, it's 2+ years just to build an MVP that people can use?
The main point in the MVP concept is to iterate fast. You build something fast, show it to your potential users, collect feedback on what's wrong, adjust the solution. Do this multiple times and you get a few users. Then more until a product-market fit where your problem is scalability.
💡Idea: SEO analytic
A tool that analyzes a website and gives recommendations what kind of content to make to attract visitors from search engines.
You may think of such things do exist, not really. There are many tools to analyze SEO and traffic, but you should do keywords research by yourself. Plus, you need to analyze competitors to understand if your article can outrank them in search results.
It also would be good to see what kind of topics is not covered much, i.e. what articles people search for, but can't find a valuable piece of information. This is an important one because many articles are spam w/o giving value.
The Y Combinator advice key points (full article):
• Launch now
• Build something people want
• Do things that don't scale
• Find the 90 / 10 solution
• Find 10-100 customers who love your product
• All startups are badly broken at some point
• Write code - talk to users
• "It’s not your money"
• Growth is the result of a great product not the precursor
• Don’t scale your team/product until you have built something people want
• Valuation is not equal to success or even probability of success
• Avoid long negotiated deals with big customers if you can
• Avoid big company corporate development queries - they will only waste time
• Avoid conferences unless they are the best way to get customers
• Pre-product market fit - do things that don’t scale: remain small/nimble
• Startups can only solve one problem well at any given time
• Founder relationships matter more than you think
• Sometimes you need to fire your customers (they might be killing you)
• Ignore your competitors, you will more likely die of suicide than murder
• Most companies don't die because they run out of money
• Be nice! Or at least don’t be a jerk
• Get sleep and exercise - take care of yourself
#materials
Problem: "I’m currently using google sheets to cost track our various job. It’s typically 4-6 jobs being tracked at a time mainly for profit and loss. I find excel/sheets to not be ideal because it requires all manual input of numbers and employee times. If anyone has any good experience with a program capable of automating some of the data input or has done cost tracking themselves using excel/sheets your input would be much appreciated"
Source
Idea: 🏗 Tracking software for the construction industry
An app that can help in managing employees, track their shifts, wages, sick leaves, private notes. It also can be a full CRM-like thing: it may track a business' clients, calculate profit/loss and other subtleties related to the construction industry.
💡Idea: Note-taking apps directory
Did you notice how many note-taking apps are released every day? When someone looks for a good app in this category, it's hard to compare all of the solutions. Usually, people go with Notion and other popular solutions, which may not be the best for their use cases.
What if we have a website with narrow categories of such apps, a listing of known note-taking apps? It'd save people's time a lot. It would be a go-to place to submit your new note-taking app and a place where there are good comparisons betweens such apps, divided by category and features.
If employing SEO right, a lot of people will visit the site, so monetization is ads and affiliate links.
💡Idea: TikTok for marketplace
An app where you watch short videos of shopping items. You can upload your item with a video, so other people may see it too. A person that likes video can go to the item's page to see the details and maybe buy it.
The system suggests videos(items) that suit best to users' interests.
Idea: A cloud-based SaaS app that will let users create and share excellent, on-brand transactional documents like invoices, receipts, bills, quotes, orders, contracts, agreements, shipping documents and so on very easily and within minimal time. The app will provide lots of templates and 100% automation to make it possible to deliver transactional documents instantly.
The problem:
• Creating an excellent, transactional document is complex work, requires skill and time consuming.
• Existing solutions offer too limited necessities e.g. professional templates, e-stamps and branding to make outstanding documents
• Existing solutions are too complex to use for the average individual.
We welcome new members of this channel!
I want to remind the primary goal of it: it's a collection of ideas that may be turned into a business or side project. It doesn't mean they are unique. Most of them(if not all) are already implemented by someone.
Ideas are worthless. By sharing them I want to encourage you to think about a niche and the people they're about. Therefore, to dive deeper and learn more about the industry and its potential problems.
Businesses aren't built on ideas, they solve a problem. Use this channel for inspiration and research extra information to understand what kind of problems you might solve. The more critical they are to the people, the more value you provide to them, the more money they're ready to pay you.
If you need help or want to say hi, reply in the comments to this post.
idea: Convenient CV
A tool that helps to manage your CVs and keep them up to date. The problem is to update them: you need to edit PDFs manually by adding new experience and changing skills level and so on. The tool should help you to eliminate the pain.
It's like versioning your resume.
Idea: Digital Graffiti
Using AR you can "tag" any location in the world and paint on it. It can only be seen holding a phone up to it.
Example: go to a supermarket, hold up your phone and draw all over the cereal aisle. Anyone who has the app can hold up their phone and see your art through the app. It's like having a different layer of the world.
People buy 4 things and 4 things only. Ever. Those 4 things are time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. If you try selling something other than those 4 things you will fail.
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In which category video games fall into in your opinion?
Finding reliable users to fill out your surveys is too time-consuming
Recruiting people for your customer surveys with a specific demographic and recruiting enough of them to have representative samples is incredibly time-consuming. I really wish that there was a service where I could fill out a couple of parameters and request these users on demand.
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Attract early-stage supporters and contributors for your project
Open-sourced fitness bracelet
Recently I've got a fitness bracelet(Honor) to track my sleep better and other metrics. I had an idea to collect as much data as I may through API, so I'd build an app to get my(!) data and analyze it in a way I prefer. Why? I'd like to have data for the years I wear the device to make my conclusions and visualizations, rather than just what I see on their app.
Why would anyone care? A bracelet app may show you how well you sleep, but not raw data you or other people would analyze better. You may scan the data through more advanced algorithms(e.g. employing ML) than just doing "if sleepTime < 6 hours { return 'You slept too little' }". There are good data though my bracelet app presents to me I could handle it to make some other aggregations.
The other thing to mention is it'd be nice to have all your raw personal data that the device collects, right? Why can't you upload it all and analyze yourself? Yes, I bought the thing, give me the great API. Instead, there are many obstacles. In my case, I should register in some Huawei(the Honor parent) company development program, then get their development kit available only on Windows. It's ridiculous.
A potential solution? Well, some (nerd?) human-oriented devices and open API to do what you want with your data. Analyze it. Make your server the device will send the data to. Do whatever you want. No closed APIs and unknown policies regarding your data that is being sent to some big company servers, so they can "improve our metrics".
💡Idea: Algorithmic Casting Director
Problem: There about 135,600 actors in the US that are both employed and unemployed. Globally this number is even higher. Given this, it is extremely difficult for casting directors to find high-quality talent.
Solution: An algorithmic casting director that can analyze the audio and video submissions from candidates to determine if they would be a good fit for the role. Right now, casting directors have to watch each individual video in order to determine whether or not to move someone forward in the process. Given that these directors are looking at hundreds or thousands of videos, this leads to implicit bias. Thus, the business would attempt to eliminate bias and increase diversity in casting by being more objective and (hopefully) more accurate in finding high-quality artists.
Idea: Burned out community
A place where people meet advice and other people that care about burnout prevention, depression, overworking. There is a chat/forum where one can seek advice and read others' stories. There are learnings from others that prevented burnout. There are tests to check if you're about to burn out, or, if you have some mental issues, stress. You may pick a customized plan of antistress, read reviews of how it worked for other people.
There can be a lot of content and even a possibility to connect with a professional who can help with the issue. It may be a place where people from IT, business, medicine, etc. might refer as a ultimate great resource to check out.
💡Idea: Choose for me
It's time-consuming to choose a thing you want to buy because there are many similar products. Some are better than others, some are worse. Searching for every one of them, reading reviews, comparing by price, specifications...Meh.
What if there was a service that could do all of that for you? You tell it what do you want to purchase(e.g. a phone that does X and has Y, or, a new mouse for the office that won't break after a few months), it does the analysis and suggests you the result. Save a lot of time.
Idea: Entertain me!
A website that recommends you some activity to do when you're bored. For example, it hints you to listen to music(a specific playlist, group, or a song), if you like it, the system will recommend similar activities in the future. If you prefer other things to do in your current mood, it'll try to suggest to you other activities, like watching a specific movie, visiting an online museum, gallery, having a conversation with a person, or, maybe listening to music with a group of people online.
Posts you may find interesting from a makers community:
- Everything I’ve learned from growing my product to 10 million users with $0 in funding
- Today is the start of the new me, 12 projects in 12 months!
- What was your first product?
- Is no-code really an option?
Share an (recent) article you've found interesting in the comments.
Babysitting services
There are several ideas regarding this.
1. Become a babysitter.
2. Make a platform for the babysitters. There they could be hired and promote the services. You get a fee when someone is hired. You can still do babysitting by yourself.
3. Standard way: hire babysitters and sell their services.
The most interesting way is the 2nd. Thus, you don't have to hire people and sell their time. Instead, you make a glue(platform) between babysitters and people who need them. So you don't have to correlate demand and the people you actually hired.
Babysitting will always be actual.
Resources:
- video on how to start a babysitting service
- how to make a babysitting app and monetize it
💡Idea: Big 5 social network
A social network that connects you with people that seem to be a good fit for you based on the Big Five traits. The algorithm will mix the results with suggesting you similar to your traits people and finding a bit of the opposite. It shouldn't be the usual social website where you showcase your life to friends. But more of a finding friends functionality.
Article to Instagram image
Many people use Instagram as an additional or main source in their marketing. It turns out the process isn't convenient because it's time-consuming to convert useful information into images. You should google for the right image dimensions for Instagram, then design those, fit huge amounts of info there. What if we had a tool for that?
You put information there and the tool converts it to the images that can be posted on Instagram. A few clicks instead of a few hours for someone.