Chemistry battle card game

Point 1: People evolved to commit a database of around 150 records to memory (among other things)[citation needed]. This was good for remembering local plants, or the people in your village, and now it's what makes it fun to collect baseball cards or play Pokemon.

Point 2: Supernormal stimuli drive evolved behavior to excessive extreme. Ask Zynga about this; gamification is the extraction of our community/economic stimuli to drive activities that aren't fun, but do pay Zynga.

Point 3: WildChord is harnessing gamification to teach you to play the guitar. And make them money, but I don't begrudge them that - the point is they're using supernormal stimuli and the mechanisms we're discovering lately to use them in order to reach goals set by the user, not just by the game maker.

Point 4: There are databases that are very useful to know.

Total: Chemistry battle cards for the win.

Now off to find out what I can about the design of battle card games. The name: 化学 (Kagaku). I'll bet you can even guess what that means.

(Elementeo is a competitor, kinda.)

17 Jedi mind tricks

Persuasion techniques. Worth reading!

Copywriting

Here are some ebooks on effective copywriting.

Startup ideas Giftrocket would be willing to pay for

[here][hnn] - tl;dr:

• Software that shows videos of real users using our site
• Yelp for business services
• UI wrapper around PayPal
• iPhone code editor with Github/Heroku integration
• Zerocater for startup swag

I like the Yelp for business services, myself. I want to do that.

Google Code Search

Code Search is shutting down. That leaves a vacuum. 'nuff said. [hnn]

Better filleritem.com

Filleritem.com is a neat idea: if you need to add 52 cents worth of stuff to your Amazon order to qualify for free shipping, it will give you a list of things that are 52 cents and qualify for free shipping.

Google dinged it because each page essentially consists of a hundred affiliate links and nothing else.

You could do better, though - because none of the stuff is stuff you really need. So you could just as easily just put together a random list of items that total the amount you need to hit - much shorter list! And if you don't like the list - get another one. Randomly!

The key: each list is much shorter. Heck, you could even do that in the browser in Javascript, actually.

This is doable.

Sims Social bot

OK, so the monetization strategy for Sims Social (thanks to tim rogers) is basically to pay them not to have to play the game.

Maybe it would be cooler if you could buy a bot to play it for you, perhaps on your screen saver while you were gone at night...

Startup idea researcher

So here's a real idea based on that, though. Let's say you want to start a niche business. How about a streamlining tool that would support that? Need to bone up on that small-business book and come up with a quick tool. It could integrate some Google searches, basically ending up with a nice little XML/JSON package that represents the seed for a niche business idea.

Add-on service: automate some of that research.

(Then you take that to Jenney and say, "start this business for me" and the framework for a business is built, LLC and all. Then you hire some guys in the Philippines to run it.)

Earn money while you sleep

Nice encapsulation of some rough business models for the high-tech early-adopter crowd. [here]

• Sell your by-products
• Sell your knowledge and/or experience
• Scratch your own itch
• Build something for the community

Atlassian: from 0 to $100M without salespeople

Some business advice from Atlassian. Worth a read. Boils down to 10 bullets:

• Start with two founders
• You need a business model
• Use your own product
• Measure everything
• Always be marketing
• Your first idea will fail
• Know when to switch gears: one model does not fit all and a business will grow out of each
• Letting people go hurts
• Build a place you want to work
• Interviewing: top grading

There you go, I just saved you some time.

Help desk service

It occurs to me that with Twilio you could put together a distributed help desk service employing technically skilled shut-ins pretty easily. Calls could be recorded and put into a CRM, scripts could be presented on-screen immediately with each call, and escalation could also be handled easily through Twilio.

I gotta get closer to Twilio.

Basic strategy

Another instance of the usual (and a good one):

1. Explore
2. Brainstorm
3. Feedback
4. MVP

And that's basically it, the how-to-start strategy.

Wicked problems

Karl Schroeder thinks a Wikipedia-like system could be built to facilitate discussion of wicked problems, and that, moreover, such a system is needed at this point in our social trajectory.

I'd like to build such a system. This is a good plan.

• Dialogic Design International
• Structured dialogic design (SDD)
• Another overview of SDD
• Architecting Wicked Problems (a conference in Norway)

Terminology resource

That's probably a tired thing - but specialized terminologies like medical, free of charge and well-documented, would probably be useful. Ad revenue, I suppose.

Strategy: microfocus blog

This is a great strategy article. Start a blog in your industry of choice. Cold call prospective customers offering to cover them in the blog; this will allow you to talk to them at length, understand the industry, and give you a positive association when the times comes. It's really a great idea on so many levels.

Reliable hosting

Another startup component: reliable Web hosting. An article from 2009, but the methodology should hold.

Story advice site

I write fiction, and it falls into two categories. Some is "publishable", and some isn't. The "isn't" is more or less pornographic, and while I don't mind sharing it, under no circumstances do I want it associated with my name.

In that second category, I actually have a genre venue with other interested writers, and we occasionally trade unfinished stories. I'd like some of their opinions on stories that are publishable - but I want to retain anonymity, and I want to avoid any publication on an indexed site.

The solution: an anonymized story posting site with attached forum, invitation-only. I post, and I give people specific individual keys to access the story and engage me in conversation about it. I can reveal comments between threads - but only at my discretion.

That seems pretty dang niche. I don't know if there's anything like a market.

Perl Swiss army knife

Not a new idea, of course, and I'm not sure how to monetize it (if at all) but essentially the idea is to be able to write scripts and run them in a GUI environment without much effort. Essentially an App Store idea for Windows. That might actually be the right way to businessize it, too.

Lessons from failing at Grinn.it.

[here] tl;dr:

1. Understand where you fit in your market
2. Focus on the problem you are solving
3. Trust your founders and hold each other accountable
4. Know thy strengths and weaknesses
5. Know when to hold'em, and know when to fold'em.

HNN trending topics

Like this, but proactive. You'd probably want a periodic search query (hourly should do it).

Piperka: Webtoon reader

Well, kind of. [here] The database aspect is certainly there, but the UI is not what I had in mind.

That said, I think I'm going to use it. Lord how I need it.

Edit, after an error occurred as I was signing up: it's written in Perl! Oooh!

Edit again: well. Point of differentiation: Piperka seems possibly to be defunct, at least as far as creation of new accounts. Interesting data mining project, though.

Patrick Freaking MacKenzie

More or less the guy I want to be, talking about how it got that way. [hnn] The tl;dr:

• Charge more money.
• Make it Web-hosted.
• Get the credit and create the buzz.
• Get good at SEO.
• Optimize everything.
• Outsource/automate/eliminate, down to five hours a week.
• Get their email and permission to contact.

Words to live by.

Gamification of tutorials

Project Euler is a mathematical programming site (HNN, article, site) that encourages discussion of solutions for mathematically themed problems. Your challenge: do that for other domains of knowledge. CSS design? Javascript? Physics?

There's a real market for education. I don't know how to monetize this, but it could be popular.

Thoughts on competition

Nice little article on competition and ways to consider it that won't crush your ego.

Email

Email is definitely a startup component. Here's an interesting new development in email, though: bad @gmail.com subscribers can downgrade your email reputation - and now that downgrades your Google search results as well! Yikes! This is actually good - it's all part of Google's antispam effort - but it's counterintuitive for people who are following what they thought were the rules for mailings.

Another component list

Here. I oughta have a Wiki - oh yeah! I do! That came to nothing.

Digital currencies

I don't even know if this a component or what, but here's a link to a list of resources for digital currencies, financial crypto, and so on.

Fake it before you make it

An interesting post from Andrew Thomas: the concept of building wireframes as a marketing tool to get out into your target before (or while) you work on the application itself, and generalizations of that concept (e.g. put links for possible extensions into your existing application, then work with the people who click them, etc.).

Upshot: a cookie-cutter wireframe + business process service would rock.

Business patterns

What I really want to end up doing with startups is treat them like programming. That means libraries, components, a language for expressing them, a substrate to run them on, and design patterns. Swombat talks about dark patterns. Think about it. Think harder about it.

Data reconcentration

Here's an interesting post for a small-scale business strategy. Republication of data, living off traffic and adverts. I think this makes a lot of sense, actually - and come up with a cookie-cutter solution and do it over and over, and voila! Income!

And in general, Big Data is turning into a Big Issue. Viz a data man being hired by Cheezburger. It's definitely a place to be going.

Marketing for Hackers

A post I need to read.

Gold farming

By bot. Seriously. The news item about Chinese prisoners gold farming led Charlie Stross to post on it (natch) and one of his commenters dropped a link to a pretty fascinating how-to article (NSFW illustrations).

Point being: one node can earn (right now) something like $2/hour. I don't know how much of that requires any human input at all; responding to chat requests seems to be a bot test. Let's assume that with good programming you could get that to essentially no human input. The article asks, what if you play 12 hours a day every day: $700/month. How about ten nodes? Now you've just built a money machine that you can live off of.

The point being, it would be a good programming project, and I have a hard time thinking that the skills and code you develop for it couldn't be repurposed - and you'd be earning money for free. I feel the same way about pokerbots. Worth thinking about, anyway.

Startup components

Again: not an idea, just a component. I should categorize these at some point.

Recurring billing service provider: PintPay.com.

Founder's library

Not a startup idea, just startup-related. A Founder's Library.

Travel agency stuff

Damn, there are a lot of travel search sites. A registry of travel search sites would already be a good start. Whew. SkySkanner. The obligatory HNN thread.

Online travel agency that doesn't suck

Not a single one of the flight-search services has any kind of memory for what you're doing. If you want to poke around, you have to keep re-entering everything; Travelocity will kinda-sorta remember the city you started from, but it will forget you wanted to bring your kids, for instance.

There's no service at all that lets you look for flights from one region to another. What if I'm on the East Coast, don't mind driving a couple of hours, and want to get somewhere in Europe sometime in June? Can't (easily) be done.

What if I want to research a trip, then go back next Tuesday and look some more? It's all been forgotten. The prices I saw last week (or fifteen minutes ago)? Forgotten.

I'm not even talking about anything else, just flights, although a real travel planner online would also be nice.

I can't imagine that wouldn't be a hit. Add forums and maybe some social stuff and bam, you're off to the races.

Webtoon reader

Maintain a list of your favorite Webtoons, then, in a framed viewer, scan through the ones that have updated today. Get notifications for erratically updating ones.

2. ???

3. Profit.

Ads, I guess, although there would be significant static from a lot of people even though you'd be putting their own ads in the frame. I can't think of a better way to monetize it, though.

Only... I'd use it. If it already existed, I'd already be using it. So ... there has to be a way to make it pay.

Another dark side idea

http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/03/uncovering-advertising-fraud-scheme.html

I18n consulting

From a post at Noticias Hacker - I contacted the guy in question and it turns out he's interested in outside help to internationalize his site. Cool, say I! A great way to leverage my knowledge of the translation industry and practices, while transitioning back into Web programming.

Old News

This is from Jacques Mattheij's blog, actually (here) - but I've been considering it for some time now, and maybe it's time to start considering harder.

The idea is to track news items over extended periods of time, and do a "how did it turn out" thing periodically. Wikipedia kind of does this for a lot of events as they unfold.

Anyway, this would also be more than just an online venture - you'd need journalists actually following some things up on some sort of schedule. It sounds like a good idea, though. (Though how you'd monetize it is beyond me.)

Write ebooks for Kindle

Just .... just. 350,000 sales in two months at 99 cents. Given that I could do the ebook formatting/publishing, thereby even cutting out the grand....

You wonder. How easily could you write a metawriter?

Prototyping tool

Like Keynotopia, but ... in JS, using WWW::Publish specs internally, and with full file skeleton output.

Right-click JS on the elements of the screen to enter test data. How cool would that be? Drag and drop components, and boy howdy - Keynotopia has already got a neat list of components.

It would be so cool.

Categorized job ad aggregator

This should go onto sproggler, I guess...

Update: I should specify: categorized job ad aggregator that doesn't suck because there are plenty of the sucking kind.

Sailboat ad aggregator

Good domain (findasailboat.com) and it's something I need, anyway. How would one monetize that? Ads, anyway. Try to contact some sailboat sellers directly for ad placement, once there was a little traffic.

1. Find all the sailboat ad engines you can.

2. Write a scraper for each one.

3. Run the scraper periodically (say, daily).

4. Have various hit pages for the search engines, but provide an expert-level search.

5. A blog in conjunction, perhaps?

This would work for any vertical, really. There's probably a whole range of possible search topics that could be narrowed in this manner.

• http://www.piubarche.it/it/annunci/Barche_a_vela
• http://www.sailboatlistings.com/
• http://www.sailingtexas.com/cclassifiedslouisiana.html (seems out of date, but a great start)
• http://www.domesticsale.com/Classifieds/Recreational/Sail-Boat/
• http://motors.shop.ebay.com/Sailboats-/63728/i.html?_catref=1&_fln=1

Just a start.

Update October 2012: the domain's still available.  Just a thought here - the reason this would be useful is that existing sailboat engines are either not sailboat-specific, or crap in terms of the underlying database, or both.  If you just want to look for sailboats online, you're kinda out of luck.

So this would be pretty cool, and as I say, it's more or less a replicable domain-specific model.  If it works for sailboats, it would work for antique bottles. Or ... you know, whatever.  Like Techspex, which Nick replicated out to multiple tool types.

Porn

OK, OK, I know - it's just that porn always pays.

As you know, Bob, there is a vast amount of free porn on the Internet, and a vast number of aggregator sites for it. With few exceptions, they're horrible trash in terms of usability; the idea is to be as cheap as possible and push as much Javascript down your throat as possible.

Porn for geeks could be different. Similarity metrics, RSS feeds, I dunno - but the main thing is, a usable tool. We all know geeks consume porn. Monetization by sending people to the pay sites is also pretty standard. The question is: how do you stand out? I don't know. But here's a marker, just because.

Tutoring

Online or off. There's a lot you could do with social networking, possibly Facebook integration, real-life tutoring meetups, and so forth. I have a guy interested in developing this, so maybe this will be actual startup #1.