All actually good startup ideas are bad ideas when they are started. Everybody thought twitter was retarded, and nobody had any idea social networking was even going to be a thing when facebook launched. If you only work on things that people agree seem like a good idea, you are probably the 5th team that is working on it, and you probably started about 3 years too late.
This actually ends up giving many real successful startup ideas or just good ideas. It also gives a lot of bad ones, but here are some I noticed:
OKCupid, for music. (Pandora)
Github, but for knowledge. (Wikipedia)
Hacker News, but for knowledge (Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange)
FourSquare, but for photography (is that Instagram?)
and a bunch that are more of a stretch.
So, here are some ideas it had that I think are are actually good:
OKCupid, but for shopping (better, hyper personalized product recommendations).
LinkedIn, but for beer (more like "it's Just lunch" for professional relationships, set up one on one beers and such, foster mentor relationships, etc).
Github, but for fashion (imagine something like paper dolls, where users can mix and match shirts, pants, accessories and share the combinations with each other, and then purchase complete outfits).
I have to disagree a bit with the idea that no-one thought social networking was going to be big. Were you not around for Friendster? Amongst my college friends it was huge. The problem was that it didn't scale. I logged on frequently until logging-on became too painful. It was the first site I used to reconnect with lost friends, and that was valuable to me.
Apparently Google also saw the value in Friendster, as they offered $30 million for the company, which Friendster turned down.
I'm not sure that being late to the game is as bad as many people would like to believe either. Implementation is king. I yahooed before I ever googled, had many email accounts before gmail, talked on my computer before skype, and on and on.
I agree with you though about Twitter. Total surprise.
Agree about social networking -- it was around in early forms, soon after the web launched: PlanetAll.com (1996; acq by Amazon for $100mm in 1998) and SixDegrees.com (1997; acq for $125mm in 2000).
Before that, my friends were on LiveJournal and after Friendster was a little site called MySpace.
I've been trying to separate startups into ones you could do customer discovery for before you build the app and ones where you have to see it to get it. I think Facebook falls in the first category and Twitter falls in the second category but I'm not exactly sure why.
Agree completely that implementation is key. Look at all the open source voting sites. Anyone can start one but Reddit is popular. Why? The way they do things.
Those are creative ideas. Someone might point out that Pandora pre-dates OKCupid, and Wikipedia existed long before GitHub. I'm actually curious about "GitHub" but for "Fashion". Right now, I don't see a feature in common between any of "like X but for Y" pairs except for the presumption that Y will be as popular as X or the use of algorithms. In other words, "Microsoft but for Bagels" sounds the same way to me.
I too would caution against ridiculing some of these
mashups (or whatever you want to call this site's output)
too loudly. I've seen but never used twitter or facebook. To me they are retarded. Still, I have fond memories of my generation's net news and future generations will think similar of todays social fashions.
I suspect the question isn't whether or not the ideas this site creates are good but rather when the time will be right for them.
> All actually good startup ideas are bad ideas when they are started.
Hmmm. I've just created a website for an event happening next year, that around 16 million people in the UK will probably take part in. http://www.euroelection.co.uk/
Being "unable to sign this agreement" is a great way to decline the opportunity to do all the development, maintenance and marketing for the idea for 49% equity and a nice meal in the nicest way possible.
I was too lazy to refresh, so I built a script and dumped 220 of the ideas in a pastebin. Sorted with duplicates removed. Very likely that some are missing. Would've probably been just as easy to try all combinations of left and right terms, but oh well. http://pastebin.com/rzEuz89f
Definitely niche, but not bad. It might be cool to have a system like that for connecting young, promising Chefs with more established ones. I don't know too much about cooking, but I bet it's hard for Chefs to convey their expertise and experience with a traditional resume.
One day I was thinking of using github for writing novels, stories etc. Each branch will have different climax. Newbies in writing will be motivated to write small parts and get feedback.
Although it's not a startup idea but a use case of github api and will need a different interface.
I just got "Quora for programming" which is already a thing, it's called "Stack Exchange" and it's a massively big deal of a company making a ton of money that saves my life every day at work.
Sooooo actually picking one of these may be smart.
Stumbleupon but for knowledge — this could actually work. You stumble knowledge of particular subjects instead of blog posts and comics. Very interesting. Cool idea, lots of fun I've been generating ideas for 20 minutes now.
A side project of mine is sort of a stumbleupon for knowledge. Sort of. It's more like a directed stumbleupon; you get web pages related to the page you're currently on. Good for research, but knowledge-stumbling works too: http://jellly.com
There are some amusing combinations there. Quora, but for programming: sounds like StackOverflow :). Netflix but for news: rent news broadcasts months after they were aired; sounds like a perfect plan!
To be fair, any of those ideas could produce a great startup with the right team behind it… That's the thing, the idea alone is pretty much meaningless one way or another.
I hear people say this often and never quite understood it. The idea is very important. Having a bad idea vs. a good idea is like the difference between trying to sell snow to an Eskimo and trying to sell a glass of water to a man dying of thirst. Given the right salesperson, both can be theoretically done and both can be screwed up, but that doesn't mean that execution is everything.
Absolutely, you need both. I'm not sure how to quantify which one is more powerful or important, especially since "idea" can mean many things, from a very vague concept to a fully fleshed out and vetted business plan. I was just taking issue with the "ideas are worth nothing, execution is everything" mantra.
That should go without saying though. I think a better way of asking the question is "what's better: a brilliant idea executed so-so or a so-so idea executed brilliantly?"
That to me is a more interesting and logical question.
While there are clearly bad ideas, Facebook for robots is probably one, there are lots and lots of great ideas. I always tell people my 'real' startup idea is time travel, but I'm still working on the implementation.
Often these great ideas are hard. PG has an essay on this (http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html). Better search is a clear example. Google is amazing, but it isn't perfect. Yet being better than google is really, really hard.
I think one of the tricks of being a founder is to pick the greatest idea that you are capable of implementing, with the caveat being that picking something that you are capable of implementing right now is probably too conservative.
If execution is all that matters, your idea isn't good enough :)
Ideas are very important.
1. Without an idea there is nothing to execute on.
2. Depending on how much you believe in the idea it is what will give you the stamina to continue no matter what obstacles you will meet. (This can some times be a problem, but often and advantage)
3. Without and idea there is nothing to validate against.
I don't know about you but in design I always found it a lot more effective to have an idea before i start designing instead of just make it up as I go.
I have a friend who builds high-end custom aquariums for rich people and businesses. There's a lot of monitoring to be done on those things, I bet there's an opportunity
So I refreshed and got "Github for Cooking" which sounded funny at first, until I thought about it. Which then led into a 15 minute discussion with the wife expanding on the idea. Now I wanna build it.
We've been working Sharpen (https://www.sharpenapp.com), a site for sharing your creative pursuits. You can fork a project, like in GitHub, and cooking is pretty popular with our alpha users: (https://www.sharpenapp.com/#!/tag/cooking). We haven't messed with fork in a while but we've got some idea on how to make it more useful... forking recipes makes total sense to me.
I'm pretty sure I've seen "GitHub for Recipes" pop up on HN before. Can't recall it's name at the moment, but it was definitely discussed here fairly recently.
This actually ends up giving many real successful startup ideas or just good ideas. It also gives a lot of bad ones, but here are some I noticed:
OKCupid, for music. (Pandora) Github, but for knowledge. (Wikipedia) Hacker News, but for knowledge (Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange) FourSquare, but for photography (is that Instagram?) and a bunch that are more of a stretch.
So, here are some ideas it had that I think are are actually good:
OKCupid, but for shopping (better, hyper personalized product recommendations).
LinkedIn, but for beer (more like "it's Just lunch" for professional relationships, set up one on one beers and such, foster mentor relationships, etc).
Github, but for fashion (imagine something like paper dolls, where users can mix and match shirts, pants, accessories and share the combinations with each other, and then purchase complete outfits).