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Y Combinator: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

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Saved by 35 people (-29 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-07-19


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on 2008-07-21 by joel

Hey, Do you think which ones are good and which ones are bad?

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Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

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Simplified browsing

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What viable ideas lie undiscovered in the space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox?

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IT department is an expensive bottleneck

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Outsourced IT.

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Getting them to make you a simple web form could take months. Enter Wufoo. Now if the marketing department wants to put a form on the web, they can do it themselves in 5 minutes.

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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.

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I suspect that if you study different parts of the enterprise software business (not just what the software does, but more importantly, how it's sold) you'll find parts that could be picked off by startups.

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One way to start is to make things for smaller companies, because they can't afford the overpriced stuff made for big ones. They're also easier to sell to.

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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.

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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.

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"We'd pay a lot if someone would just build a ..." Whatever you say next is probably a good product idea.

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they probably like to share pictures more. It's less work and the results are usually more interesting. I think there is huge growth still to come. There may ultimately be 30 different subtypes of image/video sharing service, half of which remain to be discovered.

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Web Office apps

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Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven't taken the world by storm, and how you're going to beat that.

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Fix advertising

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audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud they shout.

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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.

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

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Online learning

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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.

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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.

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it's possible to measure things we may not have realized we could

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some big problems that may be soluble if we can measure more.

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all is the defining flaw of large organizations: you can't tell who the most productive people are

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An improvement of even a few percent in the ability to measure what actually happens in large organizations would have a huge impact on the world economy, and a startup that enabled it would be entitled to a cut.

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New payment methods.

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So pretty much any new way of paying for things that's easier for some class of situations will turn out to have a bigger market than its inventors expected. Look at Paypal. (Warning: Regulated industry.)

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Application and/or data hosting

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start by solving smaller, specific problems, then gradually expand your scope. Start by writing Basic for the Altair.

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Shopping guides

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Bountii can find you the best price. But how do you decide what you want? Hint: One answer is related to number 3.

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A buffer against bad customer service.

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Maybe if you built a more user-friendly wrapper around common bad customer service experiences, people would pay to use it. Passport expediters are an encouraging example.

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Craiglist is ambivalent about being a business. This is both a strength and a weakness. If you focus on the areas where it's a weakness, you may find there are better ways to solve some of the problems Craigslist solves.

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Fixing email overload.

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Easy site builders for specific markets.

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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.

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Startups for startups

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