Venture capitalist and essayist Paul Graham published a list of some startup ideas on YCombinator just this month and says that they want “…to list some of the ideas we’ve been waiting to see, but only describe them in general terms… because imaginative people will take them in directions we didn’t anticipate.” The list then proceeds to describe some thirty startup ideas, with concerns being addressed ranging from multimedia to education to customer service. These ideas seek to uncover new ways of doing business, leveraging mostly the internet, but one or two involve hardware; they also seek to take advantage of emerging uses for the web especially when combined with compelling forces such as social networking.
Some of the items that piqued my interest (and imagination):
- 23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia.
- 16. A form of search that depends on design.
- 13. Online learning.
- 12. Fix advertising.
- 9. Photo/video sharing services.
- 8. Dating.
- 5. Enterprise software 2.0 and 6. More variants of CRM.
- 3. New news.
- 28. Fixing email overload.
Any one of these is an interesting, and potentially lucrative, area to tackle — and they don’t only have to be on the conventional web — for example, how about 8. Dating combined with an iPhone?
So I think I’m gonna put my thinking cap on, order some beers and pizza in, and fire up my shiny new IDE for some hacking goodness.
