Please share your wildest ideas.
The ultimate successful exit sees the entire sector of “tax service middleman” drying up once you have cut off the revenue of TurboTax and the rest of the tax preparation lobby, so they can no longer keep lobbying the government to have this complicated process instead of just automatically doing your taxes and sending you a bill like every other civilized country. Your company vanishes along with the rest of this sector.
The growth imperative required by VC funding is directly or indirectly to blame for all the awful things about Dropbox mentioned in https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/. It's difficult to see how a product like Syncthing would be of interest to VCs.
A lot of smaller markets exist. For example, I did a keto recipe app for Malay food. Malay food is different to the usual keto recipes; with rice based food, you can't simply replace everything with cauliflower. The market was about 200k people, too small for VCs but it was in high demand for the target market. People just kept asking to buy more. We only pulled out of the market because it was (literally) toxic and cultlike.
But similar problems exist. Primal diet for Japanese food maybe. Job boards for part timers and teenagers. A better language learning app, maybe for something very specific like Latin.
Take an existing market and hyperfocus it.
New law? Push the update.
Pull old law easy peasy. diff/grep on newer versions or the county's over.
Vote on what makes it to prod, sub-teams for smaller areas like parking tickets, etc.
Yeah, it's simple at the end, but digitizing it all, linking it to the underlying databases, root privileges, etc. would make it all run much smoother. Be nice to see people get involved more too.
Design laptops and cellphones to last 50 or 100 years plus. Start designing for a long term and mature computer industry.
It's important to understand that while tech-obsessed founders, like most of the people found in Hacker News, usually think of tech-startups and VC being almost synonymous with entrepreneurship, that's not at all true.
Lots of people all around the world consider themselves (and are!) entrepreneurs, without necessarily building innovative tech or seeking VC-like growth prospects.
E.g. the corner restaurant you ate at last week? Opened by an entrepreneur. That barbershop that cut your hair? Same. Even much bigger ideas fit in this category - the software that runs the local gym? Possibly a VC-backed startup, but also possibly just a relatively small company focused on a small market, not aiming for sky-high valuations but quietly churning out millions in income.
These kinds of businesses have existed for long before VCs, and it's entirely possible to get funding for them the "traditional" way, e.g. raising a friends-and-family round, getting money from a bank, self-financing, charging customers from day one, etc.
This will never be VC backable because the market is small and each local government has special needs and unique requirements. The cost per customer is high and there's a hard cap on the TAM.
(not only is that incompatible with VC funding, it's incompatible with capitalism & western style individualism, so arguably operating in such a fashion is unreachable from our current society, even if being able to operate in such a fashion would be superior from the perspective of the whole species)
We deliver $100 worth of aid for every $1 we spend on operations. Literally a 100x return for humanity.
The need is there. The scale is there. But it'll never get VC funding for obvious reasons.
The advent of Bluetooth has made it normal to have things hanging out of your ears, but a lot of hearing-impaired people would feel less self-conscious if their hearing aids were invisible, yet still functional.
Pipe dream, I know... but one can dream.
So this question might have some interesting answers if we take this knowledge into consideration as well, as some of the ideas here could potentially be funded by these VCs even if not by traditional ones.
We're fighting a huge war of misinformation and the current method of nice graphs and we'll constructed prose is failing[0].
So we need to use much of the same tactics used by misinformation groups to spread facts.
Plot twist: The underlying framework, database connection system, and model is sane - so that when you get to the point where the walled garden doesn't let you change what you want you can dive into the underlying system to do significant changes.
Goal: Empowers humans to explore and iterate knowledge faster
Features:
- Upload your own knowledge base, wiki to join the network
- Search network-based knowledge
- 'Clone' a knowledge branch
- Edit on it then 'Push' it back to the network
- The branch owner / other users can choose to 'Pull' the update to their branch
- 'Merge' different knowledge branch
Steps:
1. Build a search engine for network-driven knowledge
2. The users iterate knowledge with other knowledge branch owners in the network
3. Build an efficient machine learning data pipeline on top of the structured knowledge input & output system
4. Use the unique data to train the customizable personal knowledge AI
Medical diagnosis is fundamentally an information problem, which should be both free and open source. But there may be little to no business model here.
The site is made by volunteers, server costs are paid by donation, and there's full financial transparency. Legally the structure is comparable to Wikipedia/Wikimedia, and is a non-profit "association" in France.
Why volunteer? I build things because I want to. Sometimes they make it to Show HN. But nobody uses them. I lose motivation when there isn't a colleague asking me to fix things twice a day. Hospitality exchange has the network effect needed to bring in newcomers and get people involved.
My dream is that it could be much bigger. Passionate people could start other social networks within the same community: BeBook, BeChat, BeMail. I'd like to build BeTranslate, starting with Chinese/English. At first it would just be partnering with existing open-source projects (like all the CS meetups that are choosing to rename). But it would also be a commitment of these developers to never close their source, never charge fees, and always involve the community.
So if you are a startup wanting to build a long term business then the VC track probably isn't for you unless you are willing to either (a) get acquired or (b) IPO.
There really does need to be more revenue sharing VC options as this is the only way to support the type of long term, sustainable businesses we really need.
Any great solution that can be successful under 100M/y probably wouldn't be of interest to VCs, so there's a lot of opportunity out there.
Many National Defense projects won't work for VC for a variety of reasons. Some can, but security clearance and regulations usually scare VCs away.
Many service based companies... not because they can't (strictly speaking) but VC has a system in place that doesn't gel well with service based approaches.
Anything that would take a long time to grow won't attract VC funds either.
A global power station that taps 'natural' electricity in the ionosphere. Unlimited free power, already in the form we need. No emissions, no need for mining or damming or drilling.
And the term 'aurora power' has a really nice ring to it.
In more detail: a few days ago on HN there was an article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580362) about the risks of solar storms and EMPs on America's power infrastructure. Solar storms induce potentially huge electrical currents in the power grid. Rather than regarding it as a danger, why not find a way to harness it?
The Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American had a lovely article about electrostatic motors, powered by the Earth's electric field: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-amateur-scien... (Search for the article title, there's a PDF available elsewhere on internet)
The SF writer Murray Leinster made extensive use of ionospheric electricity in many of his novellas...
This is a civilization-changer. Like I said, big.
Pick any large industry and look at the software used. It is probably not great (there is a difference between old software that works or works well enough and badly designed software that does not do its job well). Within that lies what is actually interesting, which is customer pain, and potential customers who will pay to have that solved.
https://escholarship.org/content/qt81h4g1f5/qt81h4g1f5.pdf
On a less quixotic note, electric buses, particularly dual-mode trolleybuses that never stop to refuel. They're slowly appearing but less exciting than electric cars apparently.
Cities are inefficient, expensive and unsustainable.
We could build cities in a better way. Ten times better. But why it’s not happening?
$COMPANY will allow millions of people to pool money, resources and great design to build better cities.
Our first milestone, or Tesla Roadster, will be to collect 100 million dollars in pre-orders for the first $COMPANY village.
Builders, home buyers, and a 10x great design, as if you were building a city on Mars. And maybe Elon Musk will like to help us too!
Eventually we will build entire cities from scratch, to make housing affordable and clean for everyone.
I tried to build something like this already once, and failed, but I really want to make this happen, and I want you to believe in me. So, let' talk!
[0]: https://youtu.be/GtMybYBGCwc
(please don't share this video elsewhere for now, if you can be so kind)
Edit: I will soon apply to Apollo [1] with this. Suggestions are welcome :)
Edit: Fixed link
VC funding means revenue optimization, which leads to either of the above 2 revenue models (or some variation thereof).
Charging your customers like how tarsnap charges its users means you won't ever make a lot of money, but it can be a sustainable business.
[edit: But these aren't sustainable businesses, necessarily, if that's what you're asking.]
It’s difficult to convince someone to fund something that can’t be sold. How do you profit by seeking fasting?
With all the push to remote work, it's not farfetched to do your daily Scrum on a Hawaii beach inside the Second Life VR.
Here's my idea:
P2P grid compute + storage that is actually cheap and can drive down the cost of computation significantly.
Can be achieved with unikernels, homomorphic encryption, ipfs. There's a lot of compute and storage available all over the world, idle, waiting to be used. A system like this can utilize it
Let's face it. Church is boring. Most of that time on Sunday is consumed with the same old filler material. The choir sings. You stand up, you sit down, you stand up, you raise your hands, you sit down, you kneel, you stand up, you sit down. You sprinkle in hymns in between prayers. There's always The Lord's Prayer, which everyone recites by rote like zombies. The pastor/priest gets up and delivers a sermon/homily that may or may not be interesting. You stand up, sit down, a basket lands in front of you and you drop a few bucks into the donation basket, stand up again, sing another hymn, then sit down.
Finally, mercifully, it's time for communion. You wait until the row in front of you has gone, then you stand up and, like a parade of penguins, waddle down the pews until you get to the aisle where line up like lemmings and shuffle forward until you reach your destination. There's a little "this is the body of Christ, this is the blood of Christ", yadda yadda, then you sit down, stand up, sing a hymn, sit down, close your eyes for the final prayer, shake everyone's hands and leave.
For Catholics, at least, the important bit is communion, that little 5 minute sliver in the middle of an hour is the most important bit.
But hey, I mean, you're a busy person. You want to beat the crowd to the post-church Olive Garden all-you-can-eat buffet or you want to watch the football game that starts at 11:30am on the west coast, and all of that sitting and standing and murmuring along with prayers is cutting into your valuable time!
So,... drive-thru mass.
You pull up in line. There's a sign at the beginning that says, "Turn your radio to 1530 AM". You turn to the channel -- or maybe you download this week's podcast episode?! -- and it's the priest with today's sermon. He's talking about how the world is a scary place, and the only way to survive is through the grace of God. Yadda yadda. It's a 5-10 minute affair, but that's okay because you're in line for communion!
You pull up to the window, and a deacon leans out and says, "The body of Christ", then hands you a cracker. You eat it as you pull forward to the next window. The deacon leans out with a thimble-cup of wine (or grape juice, it's so small, who cares) and says, "The blood of Christ." You knock it back, do the sign of the cross at the Jesus-on-a-cross hanging just past the window, pull forward, drop a few bucks in the donation chute, and then head out on your merry way.
Time elapsed: 5-10 minutes.
You saved your knees and back, and you got the sermon, the body/bread, the blood/wine, and if you're really feeling it, you listen past the sermon and catch a hymn or two, and beat the crowd for those unlimited breadsticks.
Seems like a win/win to me.
the data can be used for anything from competition and pricing analysis, to dashboards, to creating automatic RSS feeds of anything.
it just seems that being able to unlock the late and value of all of the information the structured information on the web which is presented only in a semi-structured form but with the addition of human labor could be so it's machine usable could unlock so much value.
but I've been pitching VCS and y combinator on this idea for the last six or seven years and not so much as a peep of interest so it seems that this idea doesn't possess a way to create a lot of money but I do believe it's very valuable.