All Annotations of Y Combinator: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund[Preview]

saved by15 people, first byJoel Liu on 2008-07-19, last byIvan Pavlov on 2008-08-13

• 12. Fix advertising. Advertising
  could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead
  of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in
  return for whatever free site they're getting. It doesn't work
  anyway; audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud
  they shout.
  

  
  What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated
  to the web. The right answer will probably look very different.
  It might not even seem like advertising, by current standards. So
  the way to approach this problem is probably to start over from
  scratch: to think what the goal of advertising is, and ask how to
  do that using the new ingredients technology gives us. Probably
  the new answers exist already, in some early form that will only
  later be recognized as the replacement for traditional advertising.
  

  
  Bonus points if you can invent new forms of advertising whose effects
  are measurable, above all in sales.
  

• 20. Shopping guides. Like news,
  shopping used to be constrained by geography. You went to your
  local store and chose from what they had. Now the space of
  possibilities is bewilderingly large, and people need help navigating
  it. If you already know what you want, Bountii can find you the best price.
  But how do you decide what you want? Hint: One answer is related
  to number 3.
• Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
• It may be that recipes for ideas
  are the most useful form anyway, because imaginative people will
  take them in directions we didn't anticipate.
• Grandparents and small children
  don't want the full web
• 6. More variants of CRM. This
  is a form of enterprise software, but I'm mentioning it explicitly
  because it seems like this area has such potential. CRM ("Customer
  Relationship Management") means all sorts of different things, but
  a lot of the current embodiments don't seem much more than mailing
  list managers. It should be possible to make interactions with
  customers much higher-res.
• 7. Something your company needs that doesn't
  exist. Many of the best startups happened when someone
  needed something in their work, found it didn't exist, and quit
  to build it. This is vaguer than most of the other recipes
  here, but it may be the most valuable. You're working on something
  you know customers want, because you were the customer. And if it
  was something you needed at work, other people will too, and they'll
  be willing to pay for it.
• News will morph significantly in the more competitive environment
  of the web. So called "blogs" (because the old media call everything
  published online a "blog") like PerezHilton and TechCrunch are one
  sign of the future. News sites like Reddit and Digg are another.
  But these are just the beginning.
• You can take practically anything users still depend on
  IT departments for and base a startup on it, and you will have the
  enormous force of their present dissatisfaction pushing you forward.

• 13. Online learning. US schools
  are often bad. A lot of parents realize it, and would be interested
  in ways for their kids to learn more. Till recently, schools, like
  newspapers, had geographical monopolies. But the web changes that.
  How can you teach kids now that you can reach them through the web?
  The possible answers are a lot more interesting than just putting
  books online.
  

  
  One route would be to start with test prep services, for which
  there's already demand, and then expand into teaching kids more
  than just how to score high on tests. Another would be to start
  with games and gradually make them more thoughtful. Another,
  particularly for younger kids, would be to let them learn by watching
  one another (anonymously) solve problems.
  

• It should be possible to make interactions with
  customers much higher-res.
• Start this sentence:
  "We'd pay a lot if someone would just build a ..." Whatever you say
  next is probably a good product idea.
• Focus
  on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem.
• As with dating, however, a startup that wants to do this has to
  expend more effort on their strategy for cracking the monopoly than
  on how their auction site will work.

• 29. Easy site builders for specific
  markets. Weebly is a
  good, general-purpose site builder. But there are a lot of
  markets that could use more specialized tools. What's the best way
  to make a web site if you're a real estate agent, or a restaurant,
  or a lawyer? There still don't seem to be canonical answers.
  

  
  Obviously the way to build this is to write a flexible site builder,
  then write layers on top to produce different variants. Hint: The
  key to making a site builder for end-users is to make software that
  lets people with no design ability produce things that look good—or at least professional.
  

• Bonus points if you can invent new forms of advertising whose effects
  are measurable, above all in sales.
• But once an
  organization gets big enough that people on in the interior are
  protected from market forces, politics starts to rule, instead of
  performance.
• But if there were
  a kind of search that depended a lot on design, a startup might
  actually be able to beat Google at search.
• 20. Shopping guides.
• But how do you decide what you want? Hint: One answer is related
  to number 3.
• Passport
  expediters are an encouraging example.
• 25. A Craigslist competitor.
• Related problem: Using your inbox as a to-do list. The solution
  is probably to acknowledge this rather than prevent it.
• What's the best way
  to make a web site if you're a real estate agent, or a restaurant,
  or a lawyer?
• Hint: The
  key to making a site builder for end-users is to make software that
  lets people with no design ability produce things that look good—or at least professional.
• Startups are often
  ruthless competitors, but they're competing in a game won by making
  what people want.

• on 2008-07-21 Joel
  Hey,
  Do you think which ones are good and which ones are bad?