Show HN: Idea Minr – Business Ideas Aggregator (opens in new tab)

Never bought into how that saying diminishes the value of good ideas, particularly that of a unique domain-specific insight. I'm rarely excited by "the new Facebook" or "like X, but with AI", but when I hear someone say something like "an app that creates layouts for solar plants, saving energy consultants hundreds hours of work", that tickles my senses.

That's a real example from a meetup I went to the other day. Two solar engineers who were tired of drawing these solar plant plans and realized a computer would do it faster and better. They're killing it.

Many software engineers rely on domain experts to come along with good ideas to execute on. Maybe ideas matter immensely after all.

Ideas don't matter (assuming the set of ideas you're choosing among are roughly equal in quality, and that the average quality of the set is well above outright stupidity).

Which is to say, ideas matter a lot, but no one who subscribes to the saying has ever noticed that they're auto-rejecting bad and terrible ideas constantly, and have also never had a great idea.

Ideas alone don't matter.

That saying exists to deter procrastination, obsession with being first, being secret and other mistakes people make.

But ideas do matter. Google AdWords' bidding model was an idea (I think overture had the first quality implementation at scale). That idea was/is responsible for adding 0s to Google's as income.

Well, that's why we all should build yet another calculator or weather app for Android.

Edit: for those who haven’t seen this before (talking to you idea guys), I was shared this formula by one of the top VCs in New York almost 10 years ago.

https://sivers.org/multiply

“ The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20.

The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.

That’s why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas.

I’m not interested until I see their execution. “

I’ve since heard this referenced and repeated by numerous successful entrepreneurs.

Let me know if you disagree.

It takes a whole lot more to build a business than technical chops.

As I normally to say. If execution is all that matters your ideas arent good enough.

There are plenty of good executioners out there who dont succeed because their idea or timing isnt good enough.

Good ideas give you something to strive for, something to think alongside i would say good ideas is the very reason a team execute well in most cases.

And yet every single day "execution guys" keep asking about business ideas.

I don't know how you equate knowledge of customer with technical chops. I see tons of list like these with site and coding etc done but no clue on how to build a sustainable business.

Thanks Claudio for the enlightening comment. It's true and I'm feeling a bit like this myself, going over lots of business ideas daily for the past month or so made me realize the same thing and this is why I've started doing some research into what makes an idea more likely to succeed (or not). I don't want to discourage anyone from the process of creation because the act of creation is inherently human and through all this aggregated creative effort we are progressing and improving little by little and this is how, in my opinion, the site should be used, to improve upon existing ideas little by little. On the other side, knowing that there are a lot of creative people out there spreading their ideas should give one more courage to do the same, this is another thing that I realized. I'm thinking of myself as an insignificant little spec of dust in the galaxy and this thought actually gives me courage. We are condemned to be creative, we are condemned to try and fail again and again and succeed some times, we are condemned to progress.

Don't give up on the idea of being an entrepreneur.

Just realize that MOST ideas are iterative and not truly innovative. Nothing wrong with that, but there is going to be a ton of competition when you build a Chrome Plugin that does one neat copy and paste... even if it is very useful.

(Useful Tool Example:) Citationsy for Chrome: Cite anything in one-click right from Chrome

And honestly a lot of ideas might be interesting or funny... but they aren't even good ideas.

(Funny but Stupid Example:) howlongisyourdong.com is now on product hunt: GROW UP YOUR E-PENIS RIGHT NOW :

And some ideas are just wishes for things that obviously aren't going to turn out well in execution.

(Product won't match customer desire Example:) Your mobile app needs a website. I built Flycricket to generate and host a site for you!:

If you come up with an idea that is truly disruptive, that isn't something everyone in your field has been asking for for years. You should pursue it. But it should stand out on a list like this, not fit right in.

Edit: Many people do well building out the extremely obvious ideas that everyone wants. But to do well that way you should be talented, work extremely hard, and be well funded if you want to beat the competition.

Well, hang on.

There aren't thousands. There's like 200+ on that list right now.

And if I am understanding this right, a lot of those don't seem like they're "daily"

There's also a lot of pointless and silly stuff in there. For example, the one about a microwave that stops before it rings, or the one that filters top level domains (tlds).

An entire section isn't even real businesses, just wishes for one.

There are only a handful of actual serious businesses that can generate money listed here. Something like ~10. Even assuming this was daily, that would be 3k+ new serious businesses per year. That should be way higher, like 10x as much given how low the barrier to entry is for a modern day business (especially in software).

I'm honestly glad not to be alone in getting that same feeling.

Also make the text a hyperlink, in honor of the 30 year anniversary of this hypertext platform, rather than sticking a small link icon to the side that's an inconvenient click target.

Readability could go a long way on desktop.

Advice:

- Make two text columns vertically.

- Chose better colours. Either learn colour readability, or pick a palette from a generator.

Thanks for the suggestions guys, they are all very good ideas for improvement, I'm not really a front-end guy. I thought about making columns but this would probably affect the readability. Hyperlink idea: especially good considering the anniversary :)

Agree, on the desktop the readability is also quite poor. And you seem to have some issues in the CSS, as gigantic icons appear while loading.

Keep it simple, align to the left and put some margins to center the content.

Thanks, I thought about it but for now I'm thinking that the human mind is more intuitive in what actually makes an idea applicable and feasible. It's like Kasparov playing chess against Deep Blue, AI might come up with a lot of calculations per second but it has none of the insight and intuition a chess master has. However, there is a startup idea generator at https://startup-gen.surge.sh/ if you want to check it.

I've done that before using markov chains. It works, and some of the "ideas" can sound interesting, but I never used any of them to work on actual projects. Fun though.

That's the users job :)

It's said that an image is worth a thousand words but that it's not always true :) I've kept things simple and without clutter because the idea is that one should be able to parse a lot of data in short time, no one has time to look at a lot of logos that most of the time are not that relevant (for some purposes). Image processing takes a lot of brain computing power :) Sorry for the 'one liner', that's how Gatsby outputs the data.

Not exactly analogous but if you are looking for some inspiration, there are some interesting data sets to browse though on data.gov[0], and innocentive[1] has "challenges" in a variety of areas.

[0]: https://www.data.gov

[1]: https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/browse

Sure. Browse Upwork or Freelancer.com and see what the buyers are asking for. They may be delusional in terms of what they want to pay, but at least those are examples of needs people have that they are willing to spend money on.

Thanks for the suggestion Pedro, I'm testing the waters for now, there is the possibility that I might add curation in the future.