Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

Look for the pain, and to do that talk to people.

The challenge will be that most people accommodate the pain in order to get something done, but they don't like it.

A recent pain point I came across was that 501.c(3) organizations are good at organizing but often poor at "the Internet". That suggested that if you talked to a half dozen charities you could probably find a way to offer them a 'internet presence service' that would be a combination of tools to do calendaring, outreach, donor management, payment/donation processing, testimonial pages, event landing pages, Etc. Think of it as a mashup of Calendar, Wordpress, PayPal, Salesforce, and Quickbooks online. You make their interface to the site both simple to get to (suggest a hardware token) and the web sites appearance to be professional to people visiting.

If you architected it right you could also make it a onestop 'election' website (similar sorts of things and similar reporting requirements for donations etc)

Find folks who would like to get more out of the Internet or have trouble with it, and solve their problem in a way that saves them real money or real time. Then sell that to people in the same situation.

You sound like really competent people, but working under people without their own vision and without their own ideas is a wrist slashing inducing experience... The people with the ideas/vision should be in charge, not ever the other way around! If you're execution people, find some "idea/vision people" and merge (like in 100% equal partners) with them and make you team whole.

Nobody wants more "execution people" in charge. If it's not vision/ideas what drives something... it's not worth doing it! we're all better without it! I'd work anytime under/with and asshole with good vision/ideas than another "executionist optimizer" that makes everyone's life hell trying to optimize profit and efficiency when nobody wants more optimizing. People want meaning from their leaders and managers, and this can only come from vision/ideas.

Go head hunt for "you team's Steve Jobs", not for "ideas". You want the "idea generator" and you want yo put him/her half-in-charge...

You've done too much reading on the subject already and will learn nothing from reading even more by indulging yourself in the comments here.

And although good teams can find good ideas they have to "try and fail" at things, not just "consider and not try" things. I'm not sure how long you've been at this and which ideas you have considered and rejected and for what reasons, but if it has been longer than a couple of months, you don't have the right team makeup. You need someone with a strong product background immediately to find the intersection of product market fit and what you all are actually good at and will be passionate about building.

I'd love to hear more about what you've thought of and dismissed.

GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons once said something like (paraphrased slightly) "never be scared to enter a crowded market. Just be better than everybody else". Something to think about.

Beyond that, consider that your product is not the only dimension on which you compete. That is, there are other ways to compete besides having the best product. As we all know, the best product doesn't always win.

I'd recommend reading The Discipline of Market Leaders by Fred Wiersema and Michael Treacy, as well as Mastering The Complex Sale, The Prime Solution and Exceptional Selling, all by Jeff Thull. These books deal a lot with how to compete and sell and differentiate yourself... even when selling a seemingly low-value commodity like sand. Another valuable book is Differentiate or Die by Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin.

A drone fence. Hear me out.

Problem: Fencing is FUCKING expensive. For many people who want to keep animals out (garden, animals pooping in the sandbox) buying a fence is really cost prohibitive. Plus they don't always work anyways.

Solution: Self driving drones with IR cameras in specific locations. Place a camera or two in strategic locations, and have a drone take off and chase off deer or rabbits. Return to the main station, land, recharge, repeat. Might need to have a squirt gun with some vinegar or something to scare off the more aggressive deer.

But combine some machine vision (don't want to chase children), autonomous flying drones, and some smarts, and you could have a $2000 system that replaces a $X0,000 fence.

Sorta the opposite of an invisible fence for animals.

I would LOVE one of these. I just don't have the capital or talent to make it happen...

Frankly I'm not sure you can succeed if you're just a mercenary (not trying to insult you).

To me it seems you're approaching the problem the wrong way : it shouldn't be about doing like everybody else or trying to be successful just because you think it will make you feel good but it should be about releasing this f* idea that is nagging you since years and that nobody can do better than you.

I have one of those ideas since 2007. One day ... ;-)

Market research is deadly, because that's what big companies do. If there's an objectively verifiable opportunity, they are already on it.

This is what's so interesting about Christensen's "disruption" - part of the definition is that the opportunity is not appealing to incumbents. It's too small, not wanted by existing customers, etc.

So perhaps the key thing missing from "great teams without ideas" is the passion (aka craziness) to wholeheartedly pursue something that can't be objectively verified. And then, to discover unforseeable problems and solve them; or, to pivot to a new idea, serenpiditously picked up along the way... the journey provides the destination.

So... just start. "Scratch your own itch" is a good way to identify an unmet need, just something to start with. Don't consider market size etc. Also, don't commit much money to it, just your time, treat it as an experiment.

What you need is something where you provide a specific solution to a real problem, something people are really willing to pay for.

Network, speak to people, ask them about their problems. What do they wish existed. And if it existed, would they pay for a solution (is it a real business).

I've got some ideas for things from recent life experiences that seem to be common. This is where the best ideas come from. When there is a real need, and those addressing it aren't doing it well, or at all. Look for that gap.

Never hesitate to connect with others either. A good conversation can spur thoughts, and this is where ideas germinate.

Remember, the idea doesn't have to be a killer. Lowering friction in a process to make it faster/easier/cheaper/better goes a long way to turning into something good (think Uber/Lyft/AirBNB), even if the business is old and commoditized.

The most important aspects of a business are: 1) what you do 2) how you do it. Things like team, capital, etc. are secondary and only matter once you have those two.

It's a bit like you said, "I have a fantastic transmission for a 1977 Jaguar XFT T-Type" but it turns out that car doesn't exist.

Build something (anything!) that uses some cool ML technology (or even just some simple statistics) in that domain. Think of this as an ultra-MVP - something you build part-time in the order of weeks, rather than full time over months. This keeps your "investment" low and makes you mentally ready to accept changes.

Loop back with the people in the un-sexy industry to get feedback. Remember, not all industries are bombarded with technology - you'll need to strike a balance between showing them something sufficiently "fancy" to pique interest, and abstracting away your technology so they focus on a problem it solves.

When my cofounder and I started ~4 years ago, we chose an un-sexy industry that my cofounder knew from years of consulting. This was awesome, but even with his amazing experience, our initial idea for a product didn't take off (which was fine - it doesn't take too many wins to make the weeks of development/sales profitable).

Over the next 4 years, we built another couple of offerings, which sold better than the first. They took hold in various ways, but the insights behind each product were usually driven (or at least influenced) by the people we talked to about our initial product. Which brings me back to the key - build things in a low-cost way and use that to identify tangentially related problems until you think you've found a big enough pain point.

But you need the domain expertise (or be willing to acquire it).

Then, you also need to be passionate about it. To avoid the long slow SaaS ramp of death ( http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-... ) you'll want to really, truly have a burning need to solve your customer's problem. At least one of you will have to have this customer empathy.

just live your life as usual, and when you encounter a problem that you can foresee solving, ask yourself: 0. would i pay someone else to solve this problem? 1. do other people have this problem as well? 2. can i make a profit by solving this problem on scale?

an obvious point but always worth mentioning: a good business proposal should be short, obvious after the fact, and uses no big words (like AI, fintech, Blockchain Technology) (at least internally)

Step 1: Pick your customers. Are they small business, enterprise or consumers? Are they in a specific vertical or are you addressing a cross-cutting concern?

Step 2: Start learning. Set up interviews and learn their business inside and out. Perhaps volunteer to be unpaid labor as a way to get an inside look at how their businesses run and where the inefficiencies are.

Step 3: Find the right inefficiency to address. It should be one that people are willing to spend to address, not just one where people should be willing to spend on. Also filter based on whether your team is best equipped to tackle the problem (i.e. don't try solving a really hard problem that, if you're successful, Google or Facebook could bang out in an afternoon with small modifications to an existing product.) Also look for products/services that give you a durable advantage, whether it's because you're the only one with the right data or because switching is particularly painful or a host of other reasons...much has been written on the subject, so read up for more examples.

Step 4: Go back and try to work up a demo of a product idea. It doesn't have to actually work (read do things that don't scale), it just has to show your vision.

Step 5: More interviews with potential customers. These aren't sales calls, they're a chance to gauge interest and get feedback on features and potential pricing.

You'll have a good idea whether you're ready to move forward or back to step 4, 3 or even 2 at that point, but if you hit on something, then your tech starts coding and your non-tech starts trying to find launch customers using the demo. At this point, you've probably read enough about the next steps to take.

Good luck!

There's a piece of software, produced by a company called QRM, used within the treasury group of a lot of large banks. This piece of software is both slow (one run at a decent-sized bank can take several hours even spread over hundreds of CPUs) and incredibly user unfriendly (you cannot do any analysis within the software itself; everything must be dumped to Excel first).

Everyone I have talked with in the industry says this software must be replaced; however, it will take quite a long runway to get things up and going.

While I doubt that this piece of software could be implemented as SaaS for bigger banks, I definitely think if you pitched a solution to smaller banks and built up a group able to conduct the type of analysis you would do with this software, you would have a winner. Also, if your CMU guy is looking to come back to Pittsburgh, I might be able to get one or two other people together for an in-person conversation.

If you are interested in learning more, please provide an email address, and I will reach out to you.

So if you don't have any ideas, it means you don't have any wisdom or insight about any market. Therefore, you don't have a great startup team. Full stop.

If you have competent designers and engineers, you could maybe open up a consultancy, and provide implementation services for other entrepreneurs with ideas of their own...

The thing is: smart, creative entrepreneurs see ideas everywhere. They wake up in the morning with a hundred new ideas, lacking only the human bandwidth to pursue them all.

I'd venture to say, if you don't have ideas, you're not really living in the world. You're just looking for a leprechaun with a pot of gold you can claim.

Try just being a fully-formed person in the world, with hobbies and interests and passions and relationships and struggles and obligations and complicated logistics, and see what problems you encounter while living that life.

You'll have a hundred ideas by the end of the day.

My most important suggestion is the simplest: Come up with more ideas. Take a look through this guy's posts: https://medium.com/@x0054. Specifically, he set a goal to come up with 10 random ideas a day for a month. They are all over the place in terms of quality and practicality. Some of them are silly; some are outstanding. If you do this for a month (as do each of your partners, individually), you will have close to 1,000 ideas to comb through. Something will rise to the top.

Creativity is a habit. Creativity is a skill.

As for myself, I have several ideas that have risen to the top (out of hundreds) that are definitely money-makers, but I don't (yet) have the resources to pursue by myself. The hardest part for me is to find others who are motivated enough to bootstrap a business! It sounds like you have a good group, though, and for that I congratulate you and wish you luck!

I would stay the fuck away from software because it's an incredibly crowded field, that is notoriously cheap.

But private equity and biz Dev are great domains to be in. People will easily write big checks to solve small problems in those domains.

Have those two guys on your team talk to everyone they know in their respective spaces about what problems they have that they'd be willing to spend money on.

Basically your goal is to find out what problem keeps VPs in those respective domains up at night. And then brainstorm some way to make them worry a little less. Then shop it out to those same guys to see if anyone is willing to buy or help fund the app. Do this over and over again until you find an idea that works.

Obviously, this idea is overly ambitious. But, can you take a moonshot idea like that and break it down into smaller pieces? Perhaps, work on one small piece of a really difficult problem. In the example I gave, perhaps a zoning ordinance voting platform that makes zoning change paper work easier. I realize most of the housing problems are entirely Political. But, you gotta realize, those are problems too - and they are big ones!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576236

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007

Also, there was a Show HN nearly a year ago for http://patentsexpiringtoday.com/ which is a service for exploring ideas whose patent protection have expired.

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309025

Low cost stickers that can be activated then placed on items in the refrigerator to indicate how much time has passed. Should be feasible to develop for a qualified team and would save People a lot of food. Maybe the design exists and just needs proper marketing.

Easy, cheap, hassle free batch scanning of photographs. How many people have boxes and boxes of family photos that they only see once every 5-10 years? Get those things digitized and organized now cheaply and easily.

You know those people who fly over peoples houses, take nice photos, then try to sell them to the owner? Why not offer people a digital copy of their houses/property? Lots of applications for that. From games to interior decorating to planning renovations.

Methane can be produced using electricity from solar power. Which could be run in cars without much modification. This could reduce fossil fuel usage without having wait for internal combustion engine vehicles to be retired. Maybe a unit installed at home could provide fuel for an individuals commute at near zero cost after it's paid off? If not maybe large facilities could make and ship the fuel to be sold at gas stations. Some people would be willing to pay a premium for liquid fuel produced by solar(At least I would). It could become even more desirable if proper carbon regulations ever kick in.

A wikipedia for DIY things. Instructibles sucks. It would be nice to have a well organized and very large corpus of information on how to do things from the very general to the very specific. From various methods to repair a hole in sheet rock to replacing brake pads on a 1997 Volvo to gardening with lots of various individual plans for different home projects like Halloween costumes, knitting, and woodworking. The hard part is getting a large community of people to contribute to the making of it.

I could go on all day. Anyone can. figuring out which idea in the sea of available ideas floating around, then executing it. That's the hard thing.

Program that takes an AST and valid transformations, learn what kinds of ASTs humans prefer and offer a high quality auto restructure code tool that guarantees no side effects.

Company that I can pay a small subscription to that works to protect my attention, ad blocking has been done fairly well for free, but that is far from the only attention hog. Most app's notifications are just distractions and should be batched, only to be looked at at the end of the day. Should be easy to take a picture of paper spam mail and have the company get it to stop. Stuff like that.

Company that picks up anything from junk to valuables and either charges or pays you based off of the value of the stuff. As a customer I'd like to take a picture of the items, receive an estimate of cost or price and only have to interact with the company, no coordinating with craigslist rando.

IoT company that produces cheap place-and-forget devices that monitor long term potential problems in houses (major changes in how vibrations carry through the walls, moisture in basement)

EDIT more:

A purely audio interface to email, specific goal being usable while walking/driving to work.

Text preprocesser that estimates what you already know (tracks what articles you read, how much of them you read) and greys out/deempahsises stuff you likely already know. Having an estimate of what someone already knows could be huge for manipulating the forgetting curve & estimating the likeliehood of understanding what is in a piece of text.

Reddit/HN like site that ranks based off of amount of work done on the item, try to be more popular than bitcointalk. Plenty of ads targeting crypto holders.

PS: I use google's email service and have the same id there as I have on YC.

The opportunity cost of selecting any particular path is real (and scary), but you have to take the plunge! I have had a few reasonably successful start ups (link to my latest one is in my profile), and I can tell you that if you are careful to start small, the opportunity cost is not so big.

With a small startup, you don't really need to commit till you see traction. Try this (I've done this in the past, and it's quite useful):

1) All of you sit down together to jot down a few ideas you have floating around your minds.

2) Pick the best one at that moment, and think about who your potential customers could be. Google a few actual companies - say 5 or 10.

3) Without writing a single bit of code, think about logistics and give the idea a bit of structure (how it would work, how much it would cost etc).

4) Call the potential clients from step 2 and try to sell them the product. It doesn't exist yet, but they don't know that. They will probably tell you "no", or "we use xyz to do this already" etc

5) Use their responses as valuable data points - if all of them don't need your service, maybe the idea's a dud. If they already have something doing the same thing, and they pay for it, it may be worth exploring to see how you can improve on the existing experience.

That should take you about 2-3 hours at most and will at least end up generating some discussion. Clearly, you have time, money and people at your disposal. Unfortunately, it seems, you've locked yourselves away in an echo chamber to the point that the world can't reveal its many problems to you!

Our attitude was to work on something, anything, no matter how stupid. Which requires a pretty deep font of enthusiasm - it's not easy to get people excited about a self-consciously ridiculous idea. Take the startup seriously, but be willing to drop it if a better idea comes along. Here's what we worked on in 2016:

- Retro-Zine: subscription service for Playboy magazines from the '60s and '70s

- Fruit Mistakes (https://twitter.com/fruitmistakes): pre-sliced fruit subscription for startups

- Rat Dog Capital: trying to buy friends' lifestyle SaaS businesses

- Panel Ninja v1: admin panels as a service (think a SaaSified version of https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin)

- Panel Ninja v2: productivity analytics for enterprise customer support teams

Thanks to YC, Panel Ninja v2 eventually turned into Loop Support, our current startup. We're solving a real problem now (customer support as a service for high-RPU B2C companies [1]) - and like you guys, we had very little to show after a year in the woods.

All the same, I'm really glad that my co-founder and I spent a year eating quail and manna - we got really good at working with each other in a lower-stakes, lower-stress environment. Like training wheels and flight simulators. So don't get discouraged :)

[1] If you work at one of these companies, you're likely stressing out over holiday customer support. 1) Get back to work! And 2) I would love to help! My contact info is in my HN profile.

Explore spaces where change is rapidly occurring, and build things with those technologies/platforms/markets. You'll encounter problems along the way, be they legal, technical, distribution, etc. Some of those problems will be experienced by others and so you may stumble across a viable market. But you'll only know that by walking down those paths, rather than gazing from afar.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts/2054/Young-at-Heart-How...

The TLDR is to be aware of what is going on around you. He gives examples of that in action including a couple that stuck with me regarding the turnstiles at the Paris airport and children's toothbrushes. Things that are so obvious in retrospect but it takes stopping and observing in order to identify the problem.

My favorite quote from the talk, "Be childlike as often as possible. Be childish as little as you can."

(If you're looking to do something in financial services I think there are still a lot of problems that need to be solved and tons of opportunity over the next decade as demographics shift. Just think of what has happened in the past fifteen years. People used to do their banking in person. Now people even considering going to an ATM an inconvenience. Let's talk.)

If you're really desperate to do it yourselves though, you need to get out of whatever bubble you're in and start finding opportunity in more frequently-overlooked spaces.

Here's an easy one. Seattle just started piloting dockless bike shares. The competitors are kinda unimpressive, and nobody has offered an electric-powered fleet yet. The minimum electric fleet size is only 10 IIRC. Seattle is super hilly, and electric bikes would be great, but they are harder to make and repair, and may be more likely to get stolen (at greater cost to replace as well). However, traffic is so freaking terrible here that that bikes can easily be the fastest means of transportation at certain times. There are lots of amazonians with disposable incomes who would prefer to avoid the bus to get home, but can't justify the inconvenience taking care of a bike and riding uphill.

Figure out something cool to do with that. You'll have GPS data for all movements that you can apply ML to estimate demand and determine the most valuable places to leave them around town. Incentivize riders to drop them off in valuable spots with ride credit. Maybe partner with Postmates or DoorDash to make it a low-expense delivery vehicle for couriers who don't own cars.

Seattle is just one of the first to allow this model. Other cities and college campuses (especially ones less dense than Seatle, that may not get much out of traditional bike shares) will follow soon. There is a ton of room to grow. And the sooner you start collecting that data and interpreting it, the bigger advantage you'll have due to being able to make ML-driven optimizations.

1) Cancer , heart disease health related problem. 2) Depression 3) Poverty 4) Violence (how about a magic shield)

etc etc .. there are tons of real life problem that are yet to be solved and NEED to be solved for survival of human kind. Just open your heart and eyes and you will find.

The conclusion that I have reached is that the best approach is to find a boring problem. There are so many legacy industries out there that haven't changed in decades. If you can improve one of those, you're basically printing money. This was what Uber did for Taxis. A couple of examples of startups that I've run into lately that are doing this:

ripcord.com: record storage is a multibillion dollar industry in the US alone and is largely controlled by one company that is a hundred years old and has not modernized. spruce.co: title insurance is also a huge industry that is dominated by old companies with zero technology. If you've gone through the process of buying a house you know how ridiculous the signing and title transfer is.

You could build an Ecommerce and sell stuff. Spend a few grands on some products and see which one converts the best. Or create the landing of some of your ideas and see if people will leave their info by buying some advertising on Facebook/Google.

A crowded market doesn’t necessarily mean that you have no chance. The key here is positioning your product to make it look different. If you have cash to spend you can actually test a lot of “boring” ideas by differentiating them (e.g. another to-do app that does X or is made for Y).

Even better, which problems do you face daily?

1) Write software that uses machine learning to search for tornados in doppler radar signal returns 2) Write software that manages inpatient health care, orders, prescriptions, labs, etc 3) Write software that uses machine learning to route network packets faster 4) Use machine learning to control an engine's ECU to maximize fuel economy or power via valve timing, spark degrees/timing, fuel/air mixture, injection timing, compression ratio, etc

This means that you want to be in business for the sake of it.

I've always wanted to be in business but it's always on the back of a driving sense of something that I want to do / make happen.

Just seems strange to have assembled all the ingredients without a recipe.

https://pando.com/2012/12/11/what-makes-for-a-great-entrepre...

You could sign people up for grocery/sundry subscriptions, just like Amazon, etc, and fulfill through those retailers.

Just starting with weekly groceries that omit single use plastics, by choosing glass peanut better jars and cardboard detergent boxes.

Deposits put in a few blocks ahead to stop cheating. Store rage quits before time is up, to penalise bad behaviour. Count me in.

New physics engine libraries or games altogether could be registered and stored for a fee, on the blockchain. It would be like an app store. Each time such a games was played, the original uploader could earn royalties collected from the deposits.

Even copyright could be encoded, it could be set to expire automatically in 75 years, for instance.

A marketplace for sales people and SaaS products. Every sales agent can sell any product and get commission. This way, an agent walks to a business, and instead of offering him 1 product he doesn't need, he can offer him from dozens of products a few he really needs.

Your options are 1) develop this skill; 2) find someone who has. Weigh the effort and palatability of personal transformation vs setting aside the signal-detection machinery that has thus far excluded competent ideators from your circle.

A specialized debate forum. Basically, two people decide to debate on an issue. They are the featured debaters. They write positions and submit them, and then they try to knock down the other person's positions.

Watchers can comment on specific points they make, annotating them and giving points for them. I imagine a system kind of like RapGenius.

Eventually, in the best case, the best arguments float to the top, and the more common arguments will have a home on the net where people can point to them instead of rehashing them over and over again. Leading to more intelligent discourse and a perfect society.

So look for pilot projects in such industries where entry barriers are high, defence, insurance, banking, health, oil &gas, etc. Wall Street connections will come in handy to find the right folks to call. As of now the plan should be to convert pilots into products. If need be do two or more pilots at the same time and then take a call later based on what is most beneficial, the amount and type of risk, comfort factor of the team, etc.

I'd also change your thinking/language from looking for an "idea" to looking for a problem. The distinction may seem slight but it is important + helpful. The idea is really the solution, which often isn't clear until after a lot of sustained thinking/experimenting around the problem.

I'd try to find problems that genuinely personally piss you off. Building a company always takes longer and is harder than anticipated... so you have to be completely committed.

Finally, sell it in person right away... like day 1. Go sell it to people you don't know for real money even if it's not ready yet. When you go around asking people for money you'll either get it or get a lot of really brutal feedback on why not. Either outcome is helpful at this stage.

Good luck!

Alternatively, build the world's best To Do list app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355029

As many others have suggested, meeting other people and opening yourselves to different experiences will help. Maybe by meeting people and having experiences though a different cultural lens will help break the thought patterns holding you back.

Best of luck.

My advice would be to go out and find some group of people/companies and then ask them what problems are they currently facing that are not currently ideally solved (stressed out moms, small businesses, etc. It really doesn't matter, just a large accessible group who may have problems that could be solved via ML).

This way, you don't need to know really anything about the domain because the interviewees will know the space well enough and will tell you what's wrong with it (and will most likely list ideas on how to fix it.) This will also remove your worry about the space being crowded because even if it is, if your interviewees are saying that there is still an unsolved problem, then there is still opportunity for you.

Another idea is to attend a startup weekend and learn how to quickly test assumptions/prototype and then try and replicate the process during the week. (e.g. run one full validation sprint per week, every week on different ideas until something gains traction.)

And like others comments have said, I would also start thinking very critically about your self assessment of having a "great team". I could give you 10 viable business ideas before breakfast (actually, it is before breakfast for me!) Ideas are cheap to the point of being worthless. If you don't realise that, it's because you are likely inexperienced. This is not a criticism, just an observation. I would start by cashing one of those "blank cheques" and go looking for someone with experience who can help you. You are looking for someone technical who can give you sound advice about how to execute well building a product from end to end.

You may be thinking that the technical person on your team is who you need. But what ever the academic credentials and how ever smart the person is, execution relies on having done it all before. It relies on having failed a hundred times before finally finding the one way that works.

Finally, no matter if you follow my previous advice or not, begin by beginning. Like I said, good ideas are so common that they are worthless. You will either succeed through good execution or good luck. So start. Follow this advice: http://wiki.c2.com/?PlanToThrowOneAway

Can you determine which articles in a corpus of news, or other documents, agree/disagree with one another? Can you cluster and sub-cluster along statements of fact being made? Can you then trace a statement of fact back to it's "original source" based on when that entry was acquired?

There's a lot of opportunity in that space...

If you are less cynical though, you might want a startup that makes the world a better place. So instead of looking for a problem people with money have, you could look for a systemic inequity or market failure that hurts people and keeps them from having money.

My suggestion would be payday loans and credit card debt. There is competition, but there are plenty of ways to go with helping people.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/04...

Also....

You have everything you need, so nothing is niggling your motivation. Some people work best under constraint, with limited resources.

Finally, are you too fussy? Do you analyse every idea to death?

If you want a list of over 30 ideas (one of which I've been working on and recently got accepted to interview at YC for), feel free to email me and I'll send you my list. I write them down as they come to me, as crazy as some might sound. lxc5296 [at] gmail.

Here's one:

Why don't you come up with a startup that helps people find ideas? Clearly it's a problem you yourself have, as well as many others. It seems impractical, but most great things are until someone comes along and does it right.

How it could work: people can call into a center and talk with people that specialize in certain topics and have conversations that lead to ideas. The expert can get a feel for the callers interests and find an intersection between them and problems that need to be solved.

Or, it can be strictly software based.

Eventually it can turn into a platform for people that don't know what direction to go in in their life to seek help and get guidance. Trust me, there's a lot of those people in the world (basically all millenials). Huge market.

- Invest in some products or teams that already exist and learn their problems and come up with a solution that is needed or partner with them.

- Reinvent a common pain point in business with service or automation, pay or observe people in industries you want to enter and their problems.

- Find a problem you have or know about maybe in private equity, computer science or bizdev that you have experienced.

- Innovate/iterate on a solution in the market that needs progression, this might even be a crowded market or a commodity that may be easier to change due to the lack of interest there. There are no new ideas under the sun but there is lost of improvement that can be made.

- Find a passion project, create a tool that targets a niche area of something you like to keep your interest i.e. movies, art, games, finance, sports etc. Spend enough time there and problems will be self-evident.

- The problem you are having right now, maybe make a solution to that, finding an idea that is marketable for a well funded team (a great problem to have).

One anecdote I have a friend (~30) who works in real estate appraisal. He says the industry is run on excel. While it might not make you a unicorn, you could definitely make money having a better solution.

Once you stop being an external observer and commit to delivering a product, your understanding of the wider market will improve... before long you'll see profitability in places you didn't know existed.

There's nothing wrong in delivering something simple first. Most of the consulting businesses out there simply 'solutionize' Excel spreadsheets (i.e. add a web or mobile frontend to an internal process). Take the post room in my building as an example: they've just upgraded to an electronic system dispensing with the time consuming/error prone ledger entry and paper slip delivery. Someone sold them a 'CMS' with a package input form and email alert... As scope increased they added bar code scanning and a check-digit shelf allocator.

The problem of human health and aging. ( isn't it the biggest problem ALL of us face?) On the face of it you may think that there are plenty of people working on it but there aren't. Most of main stream research is aimed using the conventional approach: Finding a 'cure' for a disease just like it's done for an infectious disease.Example: cancer. This is a fundamentally flawed approach. If you think of it older people have a higher probability than younger people of cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc. So the more rational approach would be to target ageing itself.

The SENS foundation is one such entity that has this approach (http://www.sens.org)

1. A common pain point across a sample of ~10 companies (the pain point was customer support, which lead us to the problem of automating first responses to customer support queries and our solution is https://ada.support)

2. A group of early, paying customers to help us build the product they needed. Paying because we wanted to make sure what we were building was actually valuable.

I don’t know if my partner would be comfortable with me disclosing our financials, but I’ll just say we’re close to being profitable with a team of 16.

Hope that helps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We spend ~2 billion on standardized testing in the U.S.; however, perceived drawbacks in how these tests are structured and administered prevent more widespread adoption (though expansion would provide valuable data that is currently unavailable to front line educational staff). The need for standardized testing is largely predicated on a lack of trust in the assessments that classroom instructors are creating and administering, but these untrustworthy assessments are being created in the millions every year. It is a classic 'business that still uses filing cabinets' as the collective value of these materials is largely silo'ed within the binders/file cabinets/'05 Dell Inspiron of the teachers who made them.

Provide a platform that is structured around the creation and administration of assessments BUT the test contents are made available for use by other instructors. The value to the instructor centers on four attributes: immediacy, authenticity, accessibility, and personalization. Immediacy in that an assessment can be created simply by building an appropriate request (e.g. 'comprehension' 'to kill a mockingbird' 'grade 9' 'ten questions'). Authenticity in that this generative model pushes the instructor to rapidly curate their provided assessment elements as appropriate to their lessons (accepted questions remain, rejected questions are replaced: much faster than creating from scratch). Accessibility in that as instructors modify assessment elements (e.g. for an ELL student) those modifications become available to all instructors in the future. Personalization in that the platform could provide any number of assessments that the teacher distributes according to the needs of their individual students, this distribution could likewise be automated to react to past assessment results and further extend the teacher's capabilities.

At the metal, it's one sliver of a Content Management System paired with a Cognitive Tutor. You would need a process for vetting the validity of individual assessment elements, but the teacher curation may offer an initial path (as judging the validity of assessment items would be an implicit element of the workflow). On the back end, you would be in a place to sell assessment data to school districts that is poorly provided by current testing services. You could also sell certified results for higher education, talent identification, and so on. Further on, this platform would be well positioned to create a marketplace for educational content, games, and domain specific tools.

I've put a lot of hard work into this and would love to see it in somebody else's capable hands rather than going to waste - would you like to talk it over more? Drop me an email at sajrobb at gmail dot com.

Release an open-source version, but have a fee-based "enterprise" edition and/or provide fee-based tech support, similar to MySql's and Php's business model.

Organizations often need something dynamic, such as during prototyping, but want to leverage existing RDBMS knowledge, principles, and the SQL language. The Dynamic Relational model can tighten constraints as a customer's project matures. The "NoSql" movement showed that dynamism is a sought-after database trait.

Armchair opinion, for all that it's worth (so probably stop reading here): what can you do to provide a lot of marginal value to people, without requiring them to do much?

All kinds of things - how about something with clean water or reliable power generation/storage? There is no shortage of ideas out there, richie rich. If you're REALLY hurting for something like an idea, it's going to show, and you're gonna get grifted. What are you expecting to accomplish here, opening a can of meat in a swarm of piranhas?

If you're doing a software startup, your team should be 3 engineers, not 2 business guys and 1 engineer.

Remember how in college, you'd fill in your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. housing options and get a match? Do that with groups of friends who are all graduating college at the same time and moving to NYC. Landlords would love you, as you'd rent out entire floors/buildings all at the same time.

Then build an ongoing matching service to fill the spots of individuals who move out.

NYC real estate is physically shitty, so you can add value by focusing on the social aspect of living.

Keep it really simple. There's a tendency to build too much when your only goal is to prove whether there's a market opportunity that you can capture.

Look beyond young people in urban cores.

Don't startup in a domain in which nobody on your team has deep connections. While there have been exceptions, it's foolish to assume that your antecedents were morons.

It's quite possible that the reason you don't have an idea is that your team needs a fourth person that is really passionate about an idea.

One thing you could consider trying is applying your team to an existing team that is having trouble getting traction for an idea you think has legs. Lots of people are working on a product that they have no idea how to bring to market.

Are any of you women? That missing fourth person is almost certainly female. And guess what? There's a lot of things that could be made better in the world for women.

If you start building a platform, I recommend that you skip the platform and build the first product that you'd build using the platform if it existed.

One really helpful lens for idea evaluation is: what current behaviour is this replacing? What do people with this problem do about it today? And are they willing to pay money to do it differently?

I wrote a post a few years back that you might find useful. http://hackertourism.com/how-to-tell-your-friend-that-their-...

1. Figure out what kind of company you want to build and which spaces you feel most comfortable with. B2C or B2B? Software? Saas? Hardware? Services? How long would you like to be involved? 2 years? 5 years? 15 years? Any different combination will require a different approach. Find alignment on these points with your co-founders early.

2. Align yourself with larger tech trends and figure out which ones you actually believe in. As a reader of HN (or your favorite tech blogs) you should have a good idea about the trends and hypes du jour. Pay special attention to where BigTechCo is allocating resources. Proper alignment with a larger trend (+ the right timing) is a major success factor in startups (but way too often gets lost in the discussion noise).

3. Figure out if there's an area within a general trend you believe in where you can get one step ahead of everybody else (e.g. because of skills/expertise/connections of team members).

4. Within that area, start talking to people.

5. If that sequence doesn't yield any good results, start over. Only commit to an idea if everyone has a great gut feeling about it. If your gut tells you no then don't do it.

Happy to talk more.

Currently your team is 'fundamentally' worthless (in market terms it can be quite valuable). Despite being well-funded, it has no market in which it can make money. The investors who are putting a dollar value on it are mistaken, because its fundamental value is $0. (There is a mismatch between its valuation and its fundamental value.) The investors are idiots. (By comparison, they probably wouldn't invest in many very valuable startups at the seed stage, again, because they're idiots.)

Well all right, you can get blank checks. Now you just need to add some value to the business. So you're writing a check of your own. You're writing this check:

https://imgur.com/a/QnTgb

And, ideally, will use it to pay for $1 billion in value: the new amount your team will be worth.

The thing is, you can't really get anyone to take your check. "I Just want to pay $0 and get $1 billion in value. Why is this so hard?"

Put in these terms, can you think of any reasons it might be hard?

(The actual reason is that the market misprices ideas, and although the market prices them at $0, you cannot buy them for zero: the market does not 'clear'.)

I'm already creating a business, but I have tons of ideas. I wouldn't even want a share of the companies you could build from these - ideas are cheap, right ?

You know hat ? I'll give you two very good ideas for free, and if you like them I'd be down to selling you two excellent ideas ;)

Help improve your public school system. Help teach teachers. Teach other people, yourselves -- start with your neighbour's kids, neighbourhood schools, nearby orphanages and children's remand homes. Help scale great initiatives that don't have the brand pull of Khan Academy and the ilk. Fund scholarships, if nothing else.

It will be a drop in the ocean, but an extremely high-leverage one, IMHO.

And one that leaves a legacy. I'm sure many noble people will be willing to write large cheques for legacy-creating initiatives.

OR,

Resurrect something that died an untimely death.

(edit) OR, Help turn around good businesses teetering on the edge.

Many companies and business models died ~15 years ago, in the dot-com bust, only to become wildly successful in the last 5 years.

I bet many otherwise-reasonable businesses died for dumb reasons, in the recent 5 years (like forgetting to be frugal).

If we believe that the market turnover cycle has accelerated; which businesses died before their time, and could be resurrected over the next 5-7 years (about the time to make a business viable)?

https://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/

http://startupgraveyard.io/

http://autopsy.io/

---

(edits: minor sentence tweaks)

INSPIRATION ------ Hari Seldon, hero of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, was deliberately put into a wide variety of situations and experiences to inspire his imagination and fuel his emotional responses. Get out of starbucks, do crazy shit and get uncomfortable - allow it to fuse emotion and desire for change, because that's where motivation comes from. (related: read Think and Grow Rich if you haven't already)

FROM IDEA TO BUSINESS --------------- Read 'The E-myth revisited' and 'The Lean Startup'

I think there's a huge business opportunity in marketing/modifying existing software for new applications.

1. What kind of stuff do you feel pain?

2. Do all the existing solutions on the market solve that pain?

3. Can you come up something that may be better so users will put their time and money on your idea?

4. Fail, why?

5. Traction, why?

6. Repeat, continue, 1,2,3 [4|5] until you decide to leave the industry.

I do just that about four years ago and have a stable client base of about a dozen clients who are all on our subscription based billing (instead of the costlier hourly billing) we have. Because of what we bill out, and the ability to work with my partners remotely even though we all live in the same city; we have zero overhead which increases our profit margin considerably.

We started with websites and SEO. Now we're building enterprise level apps for these firms and they can't get enough of it. The industry we're in is also a tight-knight small community so once word starting getting around about the stuff we did and how we helped these other firms, we started getting a lot of calls. When we started, it was all cold calling, doing local industry conferences, and reaching out to their professional organizations and doing educational seminars and talks to increase exposure.

Start small and then go after the big stuff. Otherwise, you're diving into a huge pool for competition. Focus on a small niche, own it, then duplicate that model to other industries.

Have you found anything that meets all three of these conditions? That would be something to jump on with both feet. But not a lot of opportunities like that come along. So how about a two out of three, with the third question being unknown? That might be worth trying, at least.

Second question is, how big is your market. That is the only question that really matters to serious VCs.

I'll be honest though the fact that there are two "business guys" and only one developer is a big red flag and I would not get involved with this company. "Business guys" tend to not care for or understand technology and the reality is that in the tech space you win with technological advantage. Period. All best tech cos were started by developers (Google Facebook, Microsoft, all SaaS companies I know of even if the founders were not coding at the end they were developers by training - marc benioff, Larry Ellison) or had genius developers coupled with brilliant sales people (Apple).

The best technologists are driven and are not usually fond of "ideas" from business people. Also, remember that ML is an area that will be conquered by large companies, FANGs. It's not worth wasting your time on, if you are not a technology person.

Given what you mention about your background, I would focus on creating a company that is based on a problem the industry at least one of you knows really well, and have light technology because you are not going to win in the tech space if you have two business founders (my true honest opinion) not nowadays. Something like consulting, something where sales matters more than tech. Business people HAVE to be good at 1. strategy and 2. market so if you're not that's a red flag. Maybe you guys like hanging out, a business partnership is not a great idea.

Consider that there were many search engines before Google and many social networks before Facebook and so on.

All spaces are crowded but there is still lots of room for improvement. Even a simple todo app doesn't do quite all the things everyone needs. You can imagine super versions of a todo that automatically uses your calendar to allocate time to the tasks. Then when people want to meet with you, it show you options that are spaced so you have time for your tasks and then analyzes the tasks you do and don't get done, and notices what the differences and then allocates the right time for the right task (morning for creative, night for braindead, lunch for meetings) or whatever.

The problems are the same problems. Just look at the current solutions and you can see they are lacking. Then the question is, can you find a good way to solve them. (You code up the above solution and simply doesn't work, for example. )

I used to think they'd stop coming but always new ideas come and I write them down in a list now. Too many to execute.

Some good, some probably not so great.

The accepted wisdom is that ideas are worth nothing but I strongly disagree. I think most ideas are worth nothing, but some ideas are incredibly valuable so I don't give my ideas away in case I want to make use of them one day.

If you are or can be a funder, find my info in profile.

It is beyond me how anyone can be technologically savvy with an engineering mindset and look out on the world as it exists today and not see innumerable ways that it can be improved.

Is your roadblock simply that you're trying to look for the easiest ways to make money? Or the sexiest? Take a look at the world and start coming up with problems that need solutions, and potential ways that technology could serve. Imagine things that you, yes you yourself, wish existed but don't yet. Imagine things that you simply wish were better. Keep iterating on those processes until you have a huge list of problems that should be solved and things that should exist but don't. Then filter your list down to only the subset of problems that your team could potentially tackle well and that have some sort of possibility for monetization in the near term, then pick one or a few and run with it.

[1]: https://www.plangrid.com/ [2]: https://zeplin.io/

Consider not even creating a new new business. Do someone else's better than them. And there are several companies that seem to grossly overvalued by the standard of "if I gave you [their market cap], could you make a better version of them?" Since one of your strengths is an endless flow of capital, get $1b and make a better Twitter (or whatever).

Maybe just follow Josh Levine's blueprint for $100mm?

https://wp.josh.com/2017/10/23/adventures-in-autorouting/

rjbrown at gmail

Some examples:

- Single digit Hertz: seismic observations. Could you build a better earthquake predictor? How about an active control system for shifting building loads during an earthquake?

- kilohertz: Lightning detection systems.

- kilohertz to low megahertz: traditional FM/AM radio. Is there a better way?

- gigahertz: think your good old-fashioned microwave oven. What if it could automatically learn what it's cooking and how to best heat it evenly?

- gigahertz: could you build a smarter Wi-Fi network (or cell network) if devices reported their location when they didn't have coverage and the network could automatically adjust?

- tens of gigahertz: we now have object sensing systems in cars. what other parts of life might that kind of technology be useful for?

- infrared: what happens when a ML-based vision system wants to see in the dark?

- above the visual spectrum: ML + medical imaging (x-rays, other scans? what could be learned?)

There are lots of fun research questions to be answered and new technology yet developed. The wonderful part about doing some really structured research along these lines is that you might have to ask about "who knows about this" and run into the PhD student who's working in this area -today- but isn't yet developing a product. There is a ton of university research that could lead you towards an interesting new product: the idea doesn't have to be your own, or even come from the typical "ideas" person.

1. Don't sell to techies. i.e. ignore any ideas about software testing, cloud base load testing, etc.

2. Pick a solid business domain you know really well. There is no substitute for domain expertise. Sometimes things that look really simple are actually mindblowingly complex. And vice versa. But it sounds like you don't have that so...

3. Do something in HR Tech. Every single company on earth competes for talent, and the HR software industry is already worth many 10s of billions, and is not remotely built out. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of startups in this space already. Also, in HR software you're dealing with people, so there will never be any "one right approach" - you can always sell your crazy HR software product to at least a few wide eyed early adopters somewhere.

Currently, we are looking for an investment to fuel sales internationally and create new SaaS revenue channel to target medium and small companies. Your team sounds like a great fit to complement our mission - for example you could steer the US expansion. If you are interested, contact me under awayt764@gmail.com and leave a comment under this post.

I'm sorry for all this anonymity, I'll explain more when we get in touch.

1) Look at the background of you 3 guys, and list out problems which were being worked around in the areas of your business development or private equity or the domain of your phd friend.

There is a much higher probability of you guys having domain expertise in the areas you have been exposed to in the past, and a lot of business contacts as well - and solving a problem in those areas means that you will be able to address problems you have personally faced before - through a combination of software and services.

Note that there is no dearth of problems to be solved, but problems you have faced before personally can be a much more fruitful area for automated solutions.

Here are a few tsunamis to think about:

1. Self-driving cars - which part of the value chain can you make a difference? Manufacturing, tech, ride hailing, financing, or others?

2. OTT TV - eventually, all content will be streamed. Where would the new value be created? What is the ideal experience in a world where you can watch anything, anytime on any device?

3. VR gaming/entertainment.

Everyone can see the big waves on the horizon. Not everyone knows how to ride them well...

Because those founders don't get the capital they need, because folks like you unfairly do.

This is because the system is zero-sum and wack, but such as it is, what I suggest is a much better place for the money to go, in terms of profitability (as well as for other obvious reasons).

From there, you should get a job at an established tech startup in a BD role.

The last part is what is likely to happen anyway, after you guys give up within the next 2-4 months. But it would be so much cooler if you did the first part before that happens.

With Good Intentions, A Non-dudebro Founder Not in Need of Capital Because of My Ability to Build Product/Traction with Little Funding

peace

Have you understood them 8)

Sorry, couldn't resist it but as many have pointed out here: a business generally develops from solving a problem and monetizing it.

Problem -> Ahah! -> I can charge for this -> Business

Almost certainly you lot are already aware of that basic fact. For now I would personally suggest that you might want to consider what the basic premise implied by your post (in my head anyway):

Profit == Purpose

... means.

You imply money at the moment isn't an issue - you cool kids have already been successful financially in previous endeavours. Why not help fix a small part of society in some way? I suspect that will lead to a financially successful <something> in the long term.

That's what I'm going to do.

Here's one: Glowstick.com .. it's currently at auction. http://www.namejet.com/pages/auctions/standarddetails.aspx?a...

Go buy it, and create an online ecomm store selling stuff to party folks, halloween folks, safety folks, etc.

Or hire a domain name broker like MediaOptions.com or Evergreen.com to handpick a domain - that way you have an unfair advantage out of the gate, and a somewhat business direction already baked in..

Examples:

- at 200kph, a 50km commute takes 15 minutes. Draw a 50km circle around San Francisco (all the empty land near Walnut Creek or in Marin County now "local" to downtown)

- at 1000kph, transporation between cities becomes better and faster than private jets, for everyone (no need to drive to the airport)

Edit: Tunnels are still the most underrated big idea out there. Of course those numbers come from Elon. "Without tunnels, we'll be in traffic hell forever" - Elon Musk.

You don't necessarily need to burn cash / offer insane discounts to achieve it. Cost reduction can also be achieved by improving the supply chain to make it more efficient, thereby reducing cost. For ex: replacing paid software with free/open source alternatives, automating some of the mundane tasks etc.

I got then introduced to Amy Hoy's Sales Safari technique where instead of interviewing people you observe them. You find out where your audience hangs out online and listen what they talk about. After you do this enough you start to see patterns. And these patterns are the raw material for figuring out problems to solve. I highly recommend Amy's 30x500 course.

what industries has the PE person done deals in? in those industries, are there any sources of very large costs for businesses? think about ways to get in the middle and lower those costs.

there are probably also some spaces where existing solutions are mediocre because access to capital is more important than quality to get a business going. since you have access to capital you might be able to compete.

it’s possible to do a startup that is tech heavy while also being B2B. the classic image of a consumer facing website chasing user engagement isn’t everything.

There most be a way to provide some kind of similar service that could close the gap (at least in the US) between the people in need of such services and the high costs.

Mental Health services in general have a problem: high cost. To make it cheap, some just prescribe drugs, which in the long run probably do more harm than good. Most people just need to talk, but one or two hours a week is simply not enough.

Instead I'd focus on being a 'special forces team' for people who have a good idea and some product &/or traction but need more people with your skill sets and access to capital.

You would then be essentially super hands-on investors, who could add significant value (although that really depends on you - you could also be super disruptive).

Over time you'd pick up a portfolio of companies that you've worked in and on, then exited and allow the initial team and new members you brought in to flourish.

While you rinse and repeat and slowly build network effects and improved learnings along the way.

Seems like it would be a really fun problem to solve as well.

Give the money to charity, if you have it, and then do something inherently worthwhile.

If I believed in the team I would probably just give away my ideas for free, or for the pleasure of being an advisor. I have almost no interest in going through the steps of doing a startup myself at this juncture.

I would love to see a couple of these come in to the world through any route.

If that sounds plausible feel free to reach out at me directly and I’d be happy to chat.

1) A great early product ( SaaS, ML, AI ), made up of a solid partnership and early paying customers.

2) We have investors interested in funding this product but only managed to raise six figures seed.

3) Cash is running fine but we need more to grow the team and product to win it all.

4) An big interest in scaling a SaaS product for enterprise and a ton of customers waiting to discover the new enterprise.

-Things that we don't have:-

1) More cash and a winning team to bring home the trophy.

Email me so we can change the world together: tohk1@hotmail.com (my old active hotmail)

You can get a beer of the month and a wine of the month subscription, how about colas from around the world?

Less regulatory mess too.

Ask them what problems they need fixed in their life or what things they thing are crap and could be improved.

1. Passion - what area excites the team the most? Health, AI, FinTech, Hardware? You are going to spend a few years building a brand, company, and product. The more connection you have to it the better.

2. Network! Be inclusive. You are basically saying you can build at scale quickly. Ideas come easily from interaction. Plan the next 30 days to scour every event you can and go. Listen, don't build. See what pops for the team. Iterate from there until something bubbles up.

It seems a bit forced to look hard for an idea, its usually a process, not something you just come up with overnight. Not to be a downer but it might be better to look for some work until you find something you truly care about.

We are a great team, backed by great investors, but could not find a good idea (after we pivoted from the last one).

It took us 2 long months. But we finally made it (hopefully).

My conclusion is pretty simple - take a "fast moving water" area, and build a product with proved market fit around this area. If you can't recognize this "fast moving water" area, use VCs and investors to understand what they are excited to invest in, what sound sexy for them.

[edited a couple of times...]

Maybe try a match matching endeavor?

ML might be useful in some specific niche where it isn't being leveraged.

It sounds like you have generic contacts and expertise in "ML".

Find a promising business niche leader and pair them with one of your ML contacts. The business niche people won't know ML, but they'll know the unsolved problems.

Like, for example, an airline centric niche company that does not currently leverage ML. Or maybe healthcare, or whatever.

Make the marriage and fund the ML part.

Pick one and execute a MVP. You'll learn about your ability to make it happen as a team. Part way through, you'll probably come up with a better idea.

I find walking our dogs in the woods or driving leads to thinking, which usually leads to ideas. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail.

I'm a bit late to the game here, but maybe we can jive. I have various ideas in the cryptocurrency space. Solo founder, working for 3.5 years on various ideas. I'm into private fund growth and market data/pipeline sales. Willing to meet about my recent pivot (to market data sales) and the need for partners on my end.

Drop me a line: brandon.lawrence.bradley at gmail dot com

Cheers!

2. Instead of looking for problems, I think more about how is the world changing and what can I do about it. I would advise you to do the same. Sometimes something big changes and most people aren't paying attention. For example, Trump's recent XO on healthcare allows businesses to form "associations" (small companies can pool together to get large company rates). In the recent Berkshire meeting, Buffett said that American businesses are going to be increasingly uncompetitive (at the global stage) if healthcare costs keep rising. These are things that are connected - if one is paying attention. The uber thought is from Peter Thiel [1]

3. Instead of thinking about a startup, start an industry [2]. I think Alan Kay's talks are inspiring - but also give a good framework to think about projects.

4. If I could just give you one advice, it would be: Pay attention. Very few people are paying attention to the whats happening.

5. One of the biggest disadvantages that you have is that you already have a team and money. This puts enormous pressure to do something "Big". No good idea is going to survive this test - obvious "Big" ideas are taken (not that you still can't work on them). So when PG says, works on "projects" and don't think about starting companies - he means, just do stuff that you find fun. This is very hard to do in your case.

I have helped several companies when they found themselves in the same predicament as you did. If you think it would be helpful, I would be happy to talk: ad@42.life

Best wishes and Good luck!

To end with a cliche: Stay hungry, Stay foolish

[1] Peter Thiel: pg 114 http://gsl.mit.edu/media/programs/south-africa-summer-2015/m...

[2] Alan Kay at 1:10: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/11

Most have ideas, some have MVP and some have early customers. Pick the third one and bigulate it.

Set up a studio, where the team builds a new "thing" every 2 weeks. Then, 2 months later you have 4 things, and you can pick the one that inspired the team the most.

Given your cash position, you should be able to easily float 2 months while building a bunch of different things.

Those who miss the boat will blame themselves not being the next Whatsapp.

I'll give you free access to nugget. We have over 500 SaaS startup ideas in there.

You probably won't find your final idea but it's very inspiring stuff.

Skimming through that much stuff can help spark or grow ideas you were previously thinking about or you can think through the ideas in another business domain.

Of course, there are just some great ideas in their own right and you might pick one of those.

Aside from that, I'd like to see the social stigma around mental health eliminated. It's viewed as a positive thing to care about, and work toward, better physical health. I wish that were true for mental health. I wish improving your mental health was as normal as going to the gym.

Goal MVP / validation /

Travel, read fiction, daydream, write down ten bad ideas right after waking up... play a bit looser than you're used to, and some new connections should form.

Only you can form a valid startup idea, because it is entirely dependent upon what you are capable and willing to execute upon. It is the difference between a great idea and a product.

See where they're having problems and then do the research to see if it's a problem for others in the same industry. If it is you have your idea and probably your first couple of customers.

Restated, it is impossible to have a great team without the constraints of a problem statement. It is similar to those who claim C++ is the best language. With out the context of the problem to be solved, it is merely an opinion.

* Syntax-tree aware version control system. Do merges taking into account the syntax tree of the code being managed.

* Real time stats of the judicial system by real-time analisis of the sentences.

My standard ideas license is: the first $100 millons you make, are yours. I want 1% of the rest. If you make less than $100 millons, you owe me nothing.

Good luck!

I wanted to implement something like Buffer, but for posting product on e-commerce platform. However, not all e-commerce platform in Indonesia provides API for you to do so.

If you want an idea, here's one: I'm looking at Cloud-based load testing based on JMeter (maybe more frameworks later) A few companies in the field, but not many. Plenty of room!

I have been working on a startup that would disrupt a few industries, but it turned out I bit off more than I could chew and I got burned out. Have a bunch of paying beta testers, crazy stick rate, but have moved onto simpler things for now. Have pitch deck ready and would be happy to discuss in private.

Another source for uncovering pain is consulting - less about the income and more about uncovering needs and gaps tied to marketplace needs.

I always wanted to start my own thing, thought about many ideas, started a couple just for fun, not full speed, because they were not great ideas.

I was a bit where you are.

Then I met someone with a great idea needing help, and I was ready to jump. I did, it worked. So it's possible, so good luck!!

Http://learning.krmmalik.com

The course is called Idea to Launch

I'm doing something that will blow your mind. I already have customers, time to build a team and scale

https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4...

Function ideas: scheduling, workforce mgmt, payments, commerce, task management, workflow, ordering, marketing/advertising, customer mgmt

Niche ideas: restaurants, dentists, construction, financial advisors, teachers, parents, event planners, handypeople

You'll see problems people have across different domains and maybe discover some problems with opportunity for solutions. You can also make small experiment projects as part of your firm.

Find such a person and identify a few immediate "pain points" in the space that can be quantifiably measured.

If I could humbly suggest a few: obesity, student loan debt, and US elder care.

Good luck.

I've had successful exits in the past. BryanStarbuck@gmail.com

Don't overthink it. Good luck.

Do that thing well and charge for it.

The market for large robots for manufacturing is full of very capable machines, but small robots could re-use many cheap components from cell phones and other consumer electronics.

---

Or, to mashup your own list: MLaaS!

would like to chat in private! :)

https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

Your company could provide consultancy services to other businesses, and as such you could collect problems, and sell them to other businesses!

:)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474609

Go build a startup to change that.

Talk with your early users. Once you've detected a pain point, pivot and double down on it.

Good luck!

(See also: comments by idlewords, pkw2017.)

You could be your first customers :)

Sponsor a hackathon where you provide a few categories of problems to solve. For instance:

- ML used as a personal tool - SaaS solutions for connecting Healthcare data sharing (that one should be interesting given HIPPAA restrictions alone) - None currency uses for Blockchains

And just see what develops. You may find ideas that you can delve into further.

Imagine something that must be here 30 years from now. Invent the future. (Alan Kay)

I have a couple of ideas with legit legs. I am also pretty competent at implementing stuff.

There are hundreds of apps out there, and they all suck.

A really compelling app could sweep the market.

Feel free to reach me @gmail or on rizon with the same nick.

Think of it as a lightweight version of LinkedIn, FaceBook, and Github combined as one.

No one should have any trouble finding any sort of job or whatsoever.

This platform should be implemented in such way that any country out there should be able to offer jobs to nearly all their residents.

... and after a year still can't find a punchline.

Figure out how to get from here to there

implement

I have plenty of ideas. All I see are problems that need solving. There are so many things broken in web/IT that they can't be listed here. I have a file with literally hundreds of problems that need fixing and that's just scratching the surface.

Example, I think someone already mentioned this earlier but have you ever browsed a bunch of corporate websites - I have seen so many websites that are so horribly broken that it's just crazy - there are literally MILLIONS of broken websites out there. You could start by looking into why that is (I've been thinking about it and believe there's numerous business ops just in that area alone)...

I recently wrote about how the first company I worked for ran their entire operation (which was quite complex) with a few dumb terminals and a few Z80s clocked at 4MHz, running something called TurboDOS:

https://coffeeandcode.neocities.org/remembering-turbo-dos.ht...

I once wrote an entire oil rig data acquisition system in TurboBasic in a weekend. You could use ON TIMER to called a routine every second or so, no assembler required. ON KEY and ON TIMER gave you event driven programming (ok primitive but effective). There were things like INPORTB and OUTPORTB (I think) that could write directly to ports for control and data acquisition.

So are we going back in terms of productivity? What can you do about that?

Are you still waiting for someone to come up with a viable alternative to JavaScript?

You could almost come up with something by looking at trends like the move to multi-machine, multi-processor, multi-core, multi-threaded and there are so many things that could be moved to that model for scale. Then there are the tools to help profile and debug those things. Example: Elasticsearch - Lucene was/is a great library for search/indexing, but the Elastic search guy (Shay Banon) saw the opportunity to scale that to multiple machines.

Scale drives a lot of innovation: look at innovative technologies like Redis for example.

Another example - SQL databases. Have you ever set up a MySQL replication cluster and kept it running 24/7? Sure there are excellent services like compose.io and the new kids on the block like Cockroach Labs, but highly scaled database with ease of set up and management is not really a solved problem. Just keeping the darn thing up and running is often a challenge.

Like I said, I could go on and on...

p.s. yes, people are right - a bit of competition is not necessarily a bad thing...

You can share your farts with others and vote on the 'best' fart in various categories (temporal,geolocation) with leaderboards.

There is a much longer version, of course, but I had to cut 75% of this before Hacker News would allow me to post it.

-----------------------------

SUMMARY:

For many years I've worked with startups involved in data mining, so I've gotten to know how the current crop of these firms operates. The companies that I've worked with rely on Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). All of the startups that I've worked with so far, and all of the one's that I've read about, fall into 2 categories:

1.) they got into a business where they thought they could use humans to do data aggregation, and now they are desperately trying to build ML/NLP stacks to automate the work.

2.) they were certain they didn't need humans, because their Deep Neural Network was magically effective, but now they are having to rethink their business model because their Deep Neural Network has been less of a magical breakthrough than they expected.

There is a great deal of redundancy in the current efforts to find the right balance of ML/NLP and humans. One company might use Spark to ingest documents about medicine, another analyzes advertising using a Hadoop cluster, another scans the web to pull in millions of articles that it runs through Storm, where it parses the data and then stores the final results in Cassandra. Each company stumbles through a painful process of trying to figure out where it should use humans to patch the failures of its ML/NLP techniques.

In particular, there are specific patterns of using Mechanical Turk to vet those items where ML algorithms could not reach a high level of confidence. A given item can be sent to 5 different people on Mechanical Turk, and we can accept a vote of 4 or 5 as representing a high level of confidence. But if the vote is 3 or less, then we need to escalate that item to an even higher level or review. I've seen multiple companies build similar processes, which is why I think this should be a business of its own.

It's important to be aware of the limits of startups such as Bigml.com. Most of the time, data analysis is just the starting point of a longer process that involves much interpretation on the part of humans. But much of that later human vetting can be standardized, and so firms should outsource the work.

LONG VERSION:

Let's start by talking about one particular industry, which is firms that sell data about privately-held companies. There is a great conversation on Quora that summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of most of the enterprises in this field:

"How do CB Insights, PrivCo, DataFox, Owler, Tracxn!, Mattermark, and Venture Scanner compare for private company research?"

https://www.quora.com/How-do-CB-Insights-PrivCo-DataFox-Owle...

Danielle Morrill has written a great blog post about how and why she created Mattermark ("The Deal Intelligence Company"):

https://medium.com/@DanielleMorrill/introducing-mattermark-t...

According to Crunchbase, she has so far raised $17 million to build out her company. Samiur Rahman, the lead data engineer at Mattermark, has given a revealing interview about how NLP helps Mattermark pinpoint data about deals that companies may be arranging:

https://www.techemergence.com/how-natural-language-processin...

Anyone who tries to scour the Web for information about companies, either publicly held or privately owned, immediately runs into a few problems, including the fact that any given company may have dozens of subsidiaries with similar names. The law, or a regulatory agency, might have forced the company to break up. So, for instance, German law has forced Deutsche Bank to set up different companies for loans and investments. As a consequence, one finds the following names on the web:

Deutsche Bank - Corretora de Valores S.A. Deutsche Bank A S Deutsche Bank AG Deutsche Bank GmbH Deutsche Bank S.A. Banco Alemao Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas Deutsche Bank Trust Company Delaware Deutsche Bank Journalists tend to misspell these names, or just use the generic "Deutsche Bank," which makes it difficult to discern which incarnation of Deutsche Bank is the subject of the article.

Samiur Rahman says he is a fan of "word vectors" and "paragraph vectors", and then he uses the Nearest Neighbor algorithm to figure out which companies are similar to each other. As the interview makes clear, Mattermark got into a business where they thought they could use humans to do data aggregation; now they are desperately trying to build ML/NLP stacks to automate the work. (In my taxonomy, they're a Category 1 firm.)

...Some customers buy from several of these data-analysis companies. Some buy from both CB Insights, which has the best data about deals, and also CB-Mark, which has the best estimates on revenue. The customers are often sales teams hoping to find new customers for their own companies, but sometimes the data is also used for research (as at the universities) and sometimes the data is used for VC investments, as Danielle Morrill made clear in her history of Mattermark. Right now there are something like 30 companies in this field (selling data about private companies), though I assume this will eventually consolidate to something like 3 or 4 companies.

THE HYBRID APPROACH USES BOTH HUMANS AND ML/NLP

For the foreseeable future, the best approach to data mining is a mix of ML/NLP plus humans. The ML/NLP scripts can be calibrated to produce an estimate of confidence. When there is high confidence, the entire ingestion process can be automated. When there is low confidence, the item-of-data needs to be flagged for human review.

The process I'm working on needs two levels of human review, but I'll also talk about a third, if only to dismiss it.

1.) low-level: for tasks that don't need much context, yet still can't be automated, the item-of-data should be sent to 5 different people using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. If at least 4 of these people come to the same conclusion, we can assume that this was data that low-skilled people were successful at categorizing. For instance, if an article had an ambiguous mention of Deutsche Bank, but 4 out of 5 people came to the same conclusion about which Deutsche Bank was under discussion, then we can consider this item-of-data categorized, and the rest of the ingestion process can proceed automatically.

2.) medium-level: this level of skill is needed if people with low-level skill failed to agree on how to categorize an item-of-data. If something was sent to Mechanical Turk but 5 people each reached 5 different conclusions, the data clearly needs a much closer inspection. Medium level skill review would also include large parts of medical and legal data sets, where data can be read from context by a person who lacks specific medical or legal training. "While I worked at Google I downloaded all of Google's documents for self-driving cars and now I'd like Uber to finance my new self-driving car startup" is a sentence that can be understood by an untrained layman, though the realization that this describes illegal activity is still beyond the ability of a pure ML/NLP approach. People of medium-level skill would be people who work directly with my startup. They could do the work remotely, but they would require some training, so I would have a long-term relationship with them.

3.) high-level: this is a different market, and so I'm not going to consider this. Data that requires high levels of skill might be items of medical or legal knowledge that a person needs extensive training to understand. Trying to deal with this kind of data would require a completely different business model. I'm not considering this as part of my current project.

WHO ARE MY CUSTOMERS?

My customers would be every group that:

1.) needs the output of NLP scripts...

2.) ...applied to a data source they specify...

3.) ...vetted to a high level of confidence

The market for ML and AI startups might seem crowded, but I think there is still many opportunities there, in particular, regarding standardizing the process whereby humans review the output of ML and NLP scripts.

- There are on the order of 20,000 new startups each year; most of the other people in this thread are from this pool.

- Only 2-5 of those 20,000 startups will end up mattering (i.e., will reach a high enough valuation/impact on the world to move a needle).

- Of these 2-5 startups that matter per year, almost none of them were pivots (Twitter is LoudCloud are the only examples I can think of).

- The conventional wisdom is to take an incremental idea and run with it; "ideas don't matter and execution is everything"; run sprints and use the Lean Startup methodology to pull the market out of an idea (or pivot), and reach a local maxima.

- This will only get you the result that 20,000 startups a year typically get: incrementalism, small victories, and/or failure.

- There's also lottery ticket mentality to this conventional style of thinking: you're no different than anyone else, so stop ideating and start doing, and maybe you'll get lucky.

If you've been at it for a year and haven't found anything good enough to give your life to, it could mean you are different than the average HNer. It could mean you have a calling to think bigger than most people do.

Here is some material you may be interested in which bolsters this viewpoint:

- Alan Kay's "The Future Doesn't Have to be Incremental": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o&t=1830s

- Peter Thiel's book Zero to One. Among other things, this book discusses the importance of avoiding competition and commoditized markets (unless you have something 10x better; i.e., Google's Page Rank).

- Listen to interviews with Elon Musk, who claims he started by thinking about HUGE problems that humanity faces and worked backwards. Instead of thinking incrementally, Musk thinks extremely large and seems to plan for years in advance: https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j...

At some point, of course, you have to interact with reality, and that could involve interacting with negative people on HN (and especially real customers, etc). When Reid Hoffman started LinkedIn, he talked with dozens of people in his network and more than 2/3 said negative things about his idea. It's part of the process of getting calibrated with reality. But this shouldn't be your starting point; it should be what you do after you find something that actually moves you.

Finally, I want to say that me and a friend were in a similar boat to you and your friends several months ago: we had been reading about technologies and problems for months and had rejected incremental ideas that didn't move us. It looked like we had just fucked around for several months and had nothing to show for it.

We ended up working on a experimental VR Window Manager as an attempt to bring Linux to a new computing platform (i.e., VR): https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula

Here was our rationale for this idea when we started: https://gist.github.com/georgewsinger/46ea8d6b16fb8bf3249358...

It's very much in the spirit of the advice I just gave you. Lord knows we could be wrong, but one problem we don't have is in doubting whether our project could matter if we pulled it off.

Good luck.

Setting luck aside, the most important step to success is the first one, project selection.

Currently, broadly the best projects are from (A) information technology or (B) biotech. Of course, some projects could be some of both. Why? Because (i) the basic technology has not yet been nearly fully exploited and (ii) earnings per dollar of opex can be fantastically high.

I prefer (A) information technology because the basic technology has been improving so much so quickly and because we can exploit applied math, old or original, heavily neglected by current information technology business. Why math? Because broadly we take in data, have computers manipulate it, and report the results. For more powerful manipulations, proceed with applied math likely with advanced pure/applied math prerequisites. Not many people are doing this, and this fact is part of the opportunity.

The computers are good at doing what we tell them to do, and the math tells us what to tell the computers to do.

Here I concentrate on information technology.

(1) Problem. Want to find a problem where the first good or a much better solution will be a "must have" for enough people and revenue per person to make a successful business.

(2) Solution. For the first good or much better solution, get some advantages, e.g., from some math. The advantages can be the key to the "first good" or "much better", that is, blow the doors off, knock the socks off, present and likely future competition. And the advantages can be secret sauce, proprietary intellectual property, with trade secret protection, and a technological barrier to entry, i.e., a "Buffett moat."

(3) Use the Internet to deliver the solution. The users can have mobile apps and/or Web browsers.

Okay, I've done (1)-(3). For the problem, currently there is no good solution, and the first good solution will be a "must have" for essentially everyone on the Internet in the world, smartphone to desktop, now and for at least decades to come.

For a fast, first-cut, round-number, back of the envelope, ballpark estimate, based on the above and some other solid, public financial data, the company should grow quickly to be worth $1 T.

Currently the production quality software is in alpha test. To the users, the solution is just a Web site with just a few, simple Web pages that are easy to use and load very quickly (400,000 bits per page with only old HTTP, HTML, and CSS and nearly no JavaScript).

I'm the solo founder, did all the work, and am 100% owner.

I have a long background in computing, especially for science and engineering, and a long background in business. My Ph.D. is in the applied math of stochastic optimal control from one of the world's best research universities.

If you and your team are honest and honorable, I would be more than happy to share my projects with you, at least one of which is most certainly genius. Without question, I most certainly share the most important factor in geniuses of all varieties: my simple curiosity and love of knowledge. It is also my natural naivety and lack of concern for money and my utter lack of the mindset that most people have in its pursuit that has left me at the mercy of the greedy and ruthless (but also with a very happy, normal family life and the ability to sleep soundly). As such, I have very little means to pursue my ideas, even though I have achieved enough to be able to provide hard proof that my ideas are still years ahead of their time, and are based upon my experience in dealing with practical needs of modern software development projects, which my resume will demonstrate more than adequately.

Like I said, if you are honorable and intellectually honest about what you don't know (that is a fundamental key to greatness), and you want to work as a team where each member is respected for the uniqueness that they bring to the table, then let's figure out how to chat.

I am deadly serious about this. And while I'm not a fan of TDD as a strict discipline (because I am already a particularly belligerent software tester myself that feels that TDD is a bit over-the-top in terms of structure), I do understand the necessity of setting specific, testable goals. As such, I feel that our world society has failed to create a proper goal for our achievement as a unified human race. I propose that we declare "done" to be "Lasting peace and happiness for all human beings."

My goal, therefore, is to somehow utilize my life's work in information systems to help promote and achieve that definition of "done". I understand that we could engineer such systems to create that society for all human beings, irrespective of ethnicity, form of religion (or lack thereof), sexual orientation or gender identity. While I respect money's ability to measure any endeavor's value to the society producing it, I do despise the love of money for its own purpose while so many human beings suffer in poverty and the Earth is being destroyed due to short-term profit being pursued at the expense of the long-term health of the Earth and its peoples.

I believe that it is my loving perspective on helping others that has given me insights into next-gen technology endeavors. I would love to share my perspective with your team and let you judge me for yourselves. In any event, I'm not feeling very eloquent tonight, but I can share with you my belief that if you make a Bodhisattva Vow or somesuch commitment to facilitating the transformation of this world such that it becomes "On Earth as it is in Heaven", you will receive all necessary inspiration to achieve your goals and far, far more. I wish you all success in your endeavors.

I would enjoy speaking with your team and sharing what I have learned and the kinds of information projects I have already envisioned. My question here is how do we connect without our doxing ourselves, for I have no website to point you towards.

David Cornelson

- make a robot vacuum cleaner that doesn't require maintenance

- design a system which allows a robot vacuum cleaner to move between floors

- make a robot vacuum cleaner that doesn't require one to empty the dust bin.

- make a robot to plaster my walls for a fixed fee with insurance that if you fail to deliver I can get it done fully paid by my previous guy with escrow money in the bank if you fail to deliver

- install solar panels automatically (too challenging? I thought you had a "great" team)

- automate kitchen staff in restaurants using smaller or equal space

- build a machine which can take a message and optimize it for the target audience; e.g., by making it simpler to understand or more politically aligned.

- build a machine that cheaply figures out whether the fish/meat you are serving up in a restaurant contains toxins

- revolutionize space travel using far out ideas you probably wouldn't understand

- figure out what could potentially be built in space cheaper than on Earth, patent it, and give Elon a call.

- build a quantum computer (some startups do this already)

Your problem likely is that you want to get a "great" startup without the required capital and resources. You literally have one guy according to my count, because a money guy is worthless (below a billion dollars to burn) and business development people are a dime a dozen.

If you don't have domain expertise to know how something could be done better, the probability of failure is going to be enormous.

In principle, I could probably help all of the above happen, but all of them require a lot of capital, people, and patience.

Take for example MAPPER Lithography. This is an example of an innovative company, a startup if you wish, but it started 17 years ago. If you really want to make something of value, that's the kind of commitment you should have. If not, try to create the next Snapchat (still no idea why it's worth anything).

Until that time, get a job. Having a job is not the worst thing in the world.

Why do you want to found a company

Why do you think your team is sound?

Why do you feel you can solve a problem that will result in something youre passionate about sticking with?

Why do you think this is the best path?

etc...

WHY do you want to pursue this?

---

With that said - as others have posted: find the problem to solve and then address HOW you can be the best to solve WHICH problem with WHAT and WHO will pay you for such.

build an augmented reality app to help people with basic car repairs - start out with small jobs like replacing lights and air filters and move into more complex tasks and gear for technicians. Eventually you can expand out into a wider variety of machines.

It happens when you do some work and suddenly need some tool that could "do this or that" but all you find is complicated solutions or no solution at all

contact me at HN AT opendomain dot org

That that having been said, my best shots at the question as asked:

A local reviews site where you make a long play and your selling point is being serious about tackling the accuracy of reviews.

A stackoverflow competitor where you don't let the deletionists take control of the site.

A browser fork where you make a bunch of little quality-of-life improvements like killing sticky headers, and make those happen automatically by default.

The question your bot is trying to solve is, "should I buy or sell this stock?" And the criteria is, "will this stock be up or down in the next X minutes."

Let the bots play in a fake market until they start to make money. It should be enough to give each bot a pot of money ($10k?) and call it dead when it goes broke or call it "good" when it makes good bets.

This is a good space for ML because the inputs are fairly well understood (stock tickers and a small set of common stock metric values). You can add in some novel inputs, like weather data in all of the trading capitals of the world (NYC, Toyko, etc).

The two tricks are this:

1) You need a community of bots that are all communicating with each other. Meaning, each bot knows what the other bots think, and how much money they have.

2) You need to let each individual bot's neural network evolve. Meaning, let the "best" performing bots "breed" with each other. Also meaning, let the values in the neural network set themselves through evolution/random rather than bothering with backpropagation.

This toy [1], showing an evolutionary neural network "learning" to follow a maze should be inspiring. Or, imagine a version of Agar.io [2] where you had to decide if a pellet (a stock) was a good idea to eat/purchase.

[1] http://ml-games.tomasz-rewak.com/ [2] http://agar.io/