Startups & Ventures

"Start here" for business A website that covers all the things about running a business. Such as whether or not to sell a product, do you need investors, how to talk with them, how to hire, when, and whom. There is a lot of information on the Internet. The issue is how to filter it out to recognize valuable insights. A genuine thing would be to interview founders on how they did all those things that interest us. Their how-to guides.

Quick illustrations generator A website that generates images from a text prompt. Can be useful in a lot of cases such as creating images for an article you are writing, or images for a landing website. OpenAI reveals a ML model that does so.

Virtual team buildings A platform that provide a list of entertainment and not only services for teams. For example, online dinner, multiplayer computer games, board games but online, classes of some activity, virtual events.

Smell synthesizer A device that produces a smell you pick from a list. It may serve as a home aromatizer. Also, a second device which takes an air probe, analyzes it and passes the data to the synthesizer.

Community finder A website that provides a list of online/offline communities by category. Why: I bet you're a member of some community(consider even this channel, its group). It may give you a knowledge of where to go in your journey of X, an ability to share knowledge, to meet other people with the same interests, to befriend someone. Wouldn't it be fascinating to have a platform where we could find interesting communities? There are can be different ideas behind the main one. Take, for example, Discord. You browse the list of communities, join one, view a list of chats, talk with people. So it's not just a catalog. The platform could have a built-in newsletters support, community website creation, forum for discussions there, rooms for talk and other stuff. Remote jobs

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I plan to make more such posts like the above and articles that disclose related topics. My question to you is: what topics you want to be covered? About what you want to know or understand more? Reply in the comments. Examples: - On creating a product or an appendage - Key takeaways from YC advice for startups - Common reasons why startups fail - What a fragmented market is and why care - How to devise ideas - The resources for indie hackers and founders - YC advice for founders - Skills and building a product - How to validate ideas - Why to care about mobile devices - patio11 law: the software economy is bigger than you think - How to find a problem to solve - How to brainstorm business ideas

Resources for (potential) founders: - YC library for founders. I recommend to read/listen all the things there from Michael Seibel who is CEO of Y Combinator. Youtube videos with him (some of them are in their Library too). - How to start to build something from Indie Hackers - a lot of useful advice too. How to find a partner, what idea/problem to choose and so on. It's more about the whole process, not only choosing a market. Also, it's a good community there. They have interesting interviews with founders. - The Mom Test book explains how to talk to potential customers and understand whether you have a good business idea. Must read. - Interviews with failed startups helps you to understand why they fail and what they could do different.

Hover and learn A browser extension that randomly replaces some words on websites to be the words in the language you learn. You can hover on the unfamiliar word and see a translation, pronunciation, songs containing this word, a few movie clips with it and other usage of the word in different contexts. Example. This helps by allowing users to browse the web and learn more effortlessly. Anyway they should do a mental effort to learn and you can determine how they'll do it. For example, add the hovered words to a vocabulary and show them to repeat and learn (spaced repetition).

A server\website monitoring tool There are plenty of them over the Internet. But they're all different and have various metrics. The simplest option is an uptime monitoring: you ping a server once in X mins and if it's down you send the notification to owner. Another option is to build a monitoring system that checks not only the uptime, but other metrics such as website availability - how long it takes to load your website from X device with Y network speed; what CSS styles aren't used and should be deleted. These things can be set up in a development process with a tool like Lighthouse CI. What if you're a website owner, not developer, or just don't want to set up the stuff? A hosted solution would be much interesting: put down your website link and receive a bunch of different metrics.

Advanced book statistics It's great to see reading statistics such as an average time spent per page, per book and so on. It would be more great to know how much time you spent procrastinating and not really reading - it's when you return back to the previous page or paragraph. A possible solution is to track eyes motion to understand what kind of material you skip, what you dislike and what kind of stuff you like reading, what words/phrases/sentences/topics are the most complicated to understand. It could be a whole new ebook device with a camera and advanced statistics. As for ebooks, I have more ideas, will write about that later.

On demand stores Mobile stores that change their locations every day/week.

Character-based Advertising Advertising today is disjointed: the stories are separate from one another. Some of the biggest ad campaigns in the world (GEICO, #LikeAGirl, The Most Interesting Man in the World, Got Milk, etc.) are character-based: the use individuals as the focal point of their messaging and develop a sense of interest and allure for that reason. GEICO used a Gecko, Always used athletic girls, Don Equis used an actor, and Got Milk made a mustache the star. Would it be possible to create a whole business focused on building character-based media content that could eventually become advertisements (or vice versa?) Perhaps the best example of this is Disney: a media company that now has become a marketing and advertising powerhouse (and cash cow) purely because people love its characters. The business would innovate by attempting to create cohesive marketing that inspires individuals to buy products or take an action based on affinity rather than necessity.

Website Live-chat Visiting website is a very individualistic endeavor. There is no sense of camaraderie or community as I browse the web. Solution: A platform that allows website viewers to live-chat as they browse a website with people who are also looking at the same website and the same webpage at that time. It would essentially be HTML-based chatrooms. One competitor in this space is Intercom. However, Intercom is a chat platform between users and the business. Looking a bit deeper into this field, it’s clear that there is no chat platform to build community between website browsers by allowing website users to chat with each other. Some positives for such a system would be: - A stickier user experience - A more engaging experience for users - A way to feel less along online, especially now during COVID-19 quarantines This feature would not be new, in fact it is one that TaoBao launched in the early 2000s while AliBaba and eBay were fighting their now infamous war over control of China’s B2B e-commerce industry. According to a variety of sources, the live-chat market is booming. WhosOn reports the following 5 statistics: - The global live chat software market was valued at $590 million in 2016 - By 2023, it is projected to reach $997 million - The market will grow at a CAGR of 7.5% from 2017 to 2023 - A typical business now handles 978 chats per month (a number rising year-on-year) - 56% of organisations adopt live chat with less than 100 customers In September 2020, MarketWatch presented updated numbers; writing that “the global Live Chat Software market size is projected to reach USD $839.2 million by 2026, from USD $591.6 million in 2020.” In short, based on WhosOn and MarketWatch, while bullish about the opportunity growth has been stagnant between 2016 and 2020. Perhaps a live-chat business like this could break the curse.

On creating a product or an appendage If I'm going to start a SaaS business, what type of product should I make? Should it be an appendage or an independent product? By appendage, I mean a product that is built on top of another product. For instance, a browser extension for Medium to enhance the reading experience, a tool to schedule Instagram posts, a tool to extend or enhance the Shopify experience. By an independent product, I mean a product that is valuable by itself. Shopify, Instagram, Facebook, etc. On the first hand, choosing a self-sustained product means you're not dependent on other APIs/services. You don't need to adjust the functionality/features to the new release. That is the opposite of appendages. The customers pay for a product because it has value without other services or additional hustles. Again, that is also the opposite of appendages. It seems the right way to start a SaaS venture is to create a product, not to build something over something. Is it? What about the competition? Sure, we can build a great product. We miss the point that it's hard to market the product after release. It depends on a niche though. By choosing a small niche, we can be sure there are fewer competitors. Building on top of another product gives us privilege. We know, there is a market for the product we build over. We know, there are problems with the product we can solve, that's why we decided to build our tool.

Key takeaways of the YC’s Essential Startup Advice article. - Launch as soon as possible. The earlier you understand customers needs, the better. - Don't think about scaling yet. Do things that don't scale. - Build only core features that do 90% of the work. - Don't get distracted. The main things you should be doing in an early-stage company is to talk to users and write code. - Do less, but do that better. Focus on acute problems the customers have. - Don't try to solve all the problems your company has at the beginning. Every company has it, even those with $1B valuation. The points is: it's OK to have problems. Solve the important ones. - Don't worry about competition yet. - Stay sane and take breaks.

Applicable notes A platform that allows students to share notes, essays, videos, and other student-created content for free (or at a small fee) with other students at different schools who may be looking for a new way to learn the same content. To avoid plagiarism, the platform could ensure that it only allows graduate-level or PhD-level students to post on it. Examples: - Student's notes from Harvard - A lot of Cambridge notes

Find a roommate An online platform to simplify searching a roommate, something similar to a specialized social network. It would be easier to have such a service than looking for the people on local forums or asking friends.

Meet local campus singles It's a website that allows students to meet other singles. It would be much appreciated than using Tinder and so on. The another idea for this is to encourage networking in college to make new friends while not attending some hobby classes.