Entries Tagged 'startup' ↓

This is an article in the Five Startup Ideas series at the 42topics blog. In his essay, Ideas for Startups, Paul Graham argues that ideas are not a critical factor for success of startups. Although I do not believe that ideas are worthless, as many people do, I believe that they are not any where near as important as execution. So to prove my point, I am giving away 5 startup ideas in next five days. All of them describe a problem, its solution, the technology involved, the competition and market size. If you are not a hacker, and want to build any of these things may I suggest Uswaretech.

Title:

A Geographical wiki

The problem:

There have been a few attempts to mix Wikipedia style collaborative editing with Geographical data, such as wikimapia. However they suffer from two problems.

1. For a collaborative software such as wiki to work, they must be very open, easy to roll back to a previous version, easy to edit and easy to audit. You must be able to see whose contributions were constructive and who is just spamming. It must be easy to roll back to a previous version. These features are currently missing from the current solutions.
2. There is no intent on these. All geographical information is fair game, Instead limit your wiki to commercial information only. Make the businesses provide reasonable amount of information to add themselves to the wiki.

The solution:

1. Learn from Wikipedia, and how they succeeded. Provide extremely easy ways to audit changes, contribution. Make it awfully easy to change, rollback and edit information.
2. Only allow businesses to add themselves to the wiki. “My House” is not a valid place to show. This is similar to the notability guidelines in Wikipedia. Make business provide enough information before they can add themselves to the wiki. (Of course you need to provide enough benefits to business in return for that.)

Technologies involved:

Do not use Google Maps, or make a mashup with another API. You need a lot of control over the mapping part, something which no API will provide. Instead go the Everyblock route. They built the mapping API themselves, either buy this technology from them or wait another year until their Knight News Challenge expires and they release the code under a open license.

Existing Competition:

Wikimapia does something similar. Read The Problem section to find out how you can differentiate yourself.

Market Size:

Wikimapia has an alexa rank of less than 2000.

Others:

None

This was part 5 of the series of 5 startup ideas. For next five days we will publish a new idea a day. If you want to read all of them, please subscribe. Oh and have you seen the 42topics startup section? Or if you want you can create your own topic.

This was the last essay in 5startupideas series. Hope you use some of these ideas, or get one of your own. Here is a quote from Yogi Berra to finish things up. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

This is an article in the Five Startup Ideas series at the 42topics blog. In his essay, Ideas for Startups, Paul Graham argues that ideas are not a critical factor for success of startups. Although I do not believe that ideas are worthless, as many people do, I believe that they are not any where near as important as execution. So to prove my point, I am giving away 5 startup ideas in next five days. All of them describe a problem, its solution, the technology involved, the competition and market size. If you are not a hacker, and want to build any of these things may I suggest Uswaretech.

Title:

Building a scalable alternative to Google App Engine.

The problem:

Scalability is Hard, lets go shopping. -Consultant Barbie

There are many companies trying to take the pain out of scaling. Amazon EC2 and GAE make this much easier.

However there are still big problems with GAE. For example not being able to run cron jobs make this instantly unusable for many people. Many of these shortcomings would be removed in time, still I believe that when a site can pay for itself, many people would like to move it on their infrastructure, with much more freedom to do things.

The solution:

Create a drop in replacement for GAE. People must be able to just drop in their GAE applications and start using it, without modification.

Technologies involved:

Of course this is a hard problem. You essentially want to build a super scalable system. But this is possible if you mix some open source components well. For hardware, host all your system on EC2 instances. Use Hadoop for getting Mapreduce functionality. Use Hbase or Hypertable instead of Bigtable. Use Django to talk to them.

Existing Competition:

This is such a new area there are no existing competition in this area. But if you want to take other systems promising infinite scalability as competition then there is Heroku. Of course GAE is an competitor as well.

Market Size:

Heroku raised 3 Million USD recently.

Others:

It would not be a lot of extra work to build massively scalable solutions for Django. You play with the same stack, but write two database API, one which mimics Django, and another which mimics GAE.

This was part 4 of the series of 5 startup ideas. For next five days we will publish a new idea a day. If you want to read all of them, please subscribe. Oh and have you seen the 42topics startup section? Or if you want you can create your own topic.

This is an article in the Five Startup Ideas series at the 42topics blog. In his essay, Ideas for Startups, Paul Graham argues that ideas are not a critical factor for success of startups. Although I do not believe that ideas are worthless, as many people do, I believe that they are not any where near as important as execution. So to prove my point, I am giving away 5 startup ideas in next five days. All of them describe a problem, its solution, the technology involved, the competition and market size. If you are not a hacker, and want to build any of these things may I suggest Uswaretech.

Title:

Remotely hosted Analytics solution.

The problem:

For most commercial websites tracking results, about their visitors, about the sites which link to them, about which users convert to sales/leads is a big problem. Google Analytics is the default solution for doing this. In truth Google Analytics is an absolutely marvelous piece of software. Yet there are a few problems with this.

For most webmasters, giving information to Google about their sites is a issue. If you install Google Analytics on your site, what you know about your site, Google know too. Your best performing Adwords keywords, conversion ration and most anything. This is a situation in which many webmasters would not like to be in, but as Google Analytics as the best analytics software, most webmasters choose this.

The solution:

Create a remotely hosted analytics software. Do not think much, just STEAL all the features from analytics. If you want to go beyond Analytics, you may try providing services provided by Crazyegg, but I think that would be a case of featuritis. Provide ironclad guarantees in your SLA, that this data will never be provided to any third party.

Technologies involved:

A server side technology to collect and make meaning of data. Javascript code to capture the visitors information.

Existing Competition:

There are a lot of people who are trying to do this. Mint and Clicky are doing this. Of them Mint is a self hosted solution which means that the users need to install on their server, which is hassle many people do not want to get through. Clicky is a remotely hosted software but this is not comparable to the level of detail provided by Google Analytics.

Market Size:

Google bought Urchin in 2005. The exact terms of Google’s Analytics purchase were not disclosed, but were expected to be in ballpark of 30 Millions.

Others:

The big issue here is gaining webmasters trust, that you would never share their data with any third party.

This was part 3 of the series of 5 startup ideas. For next five days we will publish a new idea a day. If you want to read all of them, please subscribe. Oh and have you seen the 42topics startup section? Or if you want you can create your own topic.

This is an article in the Five Startup Ideas series at the 42topics blog. In his essay, Ideas for Startups, Paul Graham argues that ideas are not a critical factor for success of startups. Although I do not believe that ideas are worthless, as many people do, I believe that they are not any where near as important as execution. So to prove my point, I am giving away 5 startup ideas in next five days. All of them describe a problem, its solution, the technology involved, the competition and market size. If you are not a hacker, and want to build any of these things may I suggest Uswaretech.

Title:

Ad network which takes into account user feedback.

The problem:

Today Adsense is the default Ad network. If a person has a website they just slap an adsense ad unit on the page, and try to get a few bucks.

Adsense is a contextual advertising solution. It read the page and tries to find the area the page is about. For example, try this site. From reading this site, google decided that this is about web hosting, and showed ads about web hosting.

The problem with this is that this site is about free web hosting. So no person on that site is clicking on paid web hosting ads, and the site owner in not making any money. Assume now that the demographic of this site is gamers. So if you showed ads about games, the ad revenue for the site owner can be potentially much higher.

Of course you need to do this algorithmically. So you need to take users feedback into account. See solution for how this can be done.

The solution:

There are a few ways to find out what ads will convert for a given webpage. When the ad unit is put up on the page, show a random collection of ads. After a few clicks have happened, you can pin down with reasonable accuracy the niches from which these clicks happened. Now start showing ads from that niche, and keep track of which subniches convert best. Soon you can find out which niches, and ads are best performing and show them.

When you are just starting you would not have large inventory of ads to show on all pages. So you need to show ads from other networks as well. Amazon has an API, so does Ebay, Adsense has one too, though I am not sure it has what you would be looking for. You can use these to show ads your members would be interested in.

Technologies involved:

Use any server side technology ROR, Django, or if your feeling adventurous J2EE. All of the services mentioned above have SOAP or REST api. So any programming language won’t be a problem.

Existing Competition:

You are essentially trying to mix Recommendation System with Ad networks. There is no ad network which I know which does this. There have been a few ad networks which have used the Ebay shopping API to create such an ad network, most notably Shopping Ads, but you still need to tell the system which area your site targets, and then it shows ads from this area. This system of asking which ads work best for a site cab be automated away, or can be used to make a first guess, but an automated system can perform much better than asking humans for each page in site about this.

Market Size:

As in my previous post, I am unable to find the exact size of market here, but Google’s financial information is here. Also the whole internet is based on advertising, so the market size is big.

Others:

None

This was part 2 of the series of 5 startup ideas. For next five days we will publish a new idea a day. If you want to read all of them, please subscribe. Oh and have you seen the 42topics startup section? Or if you want you can create your own topic.

This is an article in the Five Startup Ideas series at the 42topics blog. In his essay, Ideas for Startups, Paul Graham argues that ideas are not a critical factor for success of startups. Although I do not believe that ideas are worthless, as many people do, I believe that they are not any where near as important as execution. So to prove my point, I am giving away 5 startup ideas in next five days. All of them describe a problem, its solution, the technology involved, the competition and market size. If you are not a hacker, and want to build any of these things may I suggest Uswaretech.

Title:

An automated Adwords optimizer

The problem:

A lot of the advertisers are using Adwords for SEM. They have to manually keep track of the keywords they are optimizing on, the ad sales copy, the ROI on each keyword+Ad sales combination. For a lot of advertisers, who have a large inventory finding the keywords they want to advertise on, and keep track of is a big challenge. This manual process is very inefficient, drudgery filled and can be automated away.

The solution:

Take the example of Google search for Buy books. A lot of advertisers are bidding on this keyword. Now take the results for Buy harry potter no one is advertising on this keyword. Most of the advertisers would have Harry Potter in their stock, but can not afford to advertise on this as keeping track of each keyword and measuring ROI is unfeasible. So the Software need to do things,

1. Allow to easily track all items in advertisers inventory. Mix this with other commercial intent keywords and bid on them. For example if the advertisers inventory is [’Harry Potter’, ‘LOTR’, ‘Lord of the Flies’, ‘Kamsutra’, … ‘Iacocca’] then with one click the advertiser bids on [’Buy Harry Potter’, ‘Buy LOTR’, ‘Buy Lord of the Flies’, ‘Buy Kamsutra’, … ‘Buy Iacocca’]. The inventory is pulled from the advertisers database.
2. Track the ROI on each keyword. For example Buy Harry Potter is profitable to the advertiser, but for some reason Buy LOTR is not. Automatically remove the keywords which do not perform. The costs are pulled from the advertisers database. The conversion ratio can be calculated by adding a javascript to ‘Thanks you for the purchase’ page.
3. There are a lot of other places where automated optimization can be done. For example people who are advertising on buy books would also want to advertise on buy boks, a misspelling, yet very few are. Automatically advertise on misspellings and track the ROI as in 2.

Technologies involved:

You would want this to be a web based hosted service. So you can use any server side technology you want. ROR, Django any would do. The interesting part is that Adwords has an API using which you can interact with an Adwords account, and most things are possible. using the API is not free, but has a liberal pricing, so this will not be a barrier.

Existing Competition:

There are a few software in this area such as Adgooroo, but it still requires a lot of manual intervention. There is still a lot of place for optimization and automation which can be done in this space.

Market Size:

I am unable to get an exact breakdown of the market size of Adwords, but Google’s financial information is here. Of the 5,186.04 million revenue for 3 month period a significant percentage are from Adwords program. (If you can find a better source for market size please let me know.)

Others:

There is significant risk that if you build your software around the Adwords API, and your software leads to losses for Google, the API may be changed or removed. You need to find a way to make this software win-win for Google and the advertisers. This is possible if you find new areas the advertisers can advertise on.

This was part 1 of the series of 5 startup ideas. For next five days we will publish a new idea a day. If you want to read all of them, please subscribe. Oh and have you seen the 42topics startup section? Or if you want you can create your own topic.

And if have a question about this, or think this idea sucks leave a comment and I will reply to you queries.

In the glorious tradition of the internet, where we generalize from way too little data, I am going to tell you exactly why people start startups. Of course, I have no experience, on why people make this trade of security for adventure, apart from my own, and a few other very early stage startups. So yes, this is a personal story. This is why I, and everyone I know started a startup.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Paul Graham’s influential essay, Why to not not start a startup, tells why starting a start up is a decision which is a rational, and a logically sound decision. And of course, Marc Anderson tells the reasons for not doing a startup. As does Matt Marron.

Today is exactly three months, since I left my job. When I started, I did not know what I wanted to build. After three months , finding a co-founder, losing a co-founder, talking to a number of very early stage startups, I can tell why every one who starts a startup does so for exactly one reason. Without further ado that reason is,

You would rather be doing this than any other thing, and unless you do this you will be depressed, sad, possibly suicidal until you do this.

Everyone tries to minimize the risks and uncertainties in their life. We would rather take a 90% chance of having a million dollar, compared to to say 2% chance of 100 million dollars, even though the probability adjusted value of 2% * 100mil is larger. So even if logical analysis of probabilities tells you that a startup is a good decision, unless you can ask “Would I be rather doing this, no matter what the odds”, and answer YES, chances are you are not going to start a startup.

The reasons for “Would I be rather doing this, no matter what the odds”, are different for everyone. Might be you want to see a change in the world, and you do not see any one else doing this. Might be you consider yourself the most persistent, the most hardest working, or the smartest person, and wonder if Bill Gates can make 53 Billion dollars, why can’t you. If you “would rather be doing this, no matter the odds”, you are going to start a startup someday, whether you want to or not. No amount of persuasion, or dissuading can change that. You can run but you can not hide.

Why I would rather be doing this ….

India has a few great Software services companies, but not one great Software Product company. I want to start a world class product company in India. This is a small start, but then “The First 20 Million Dollars Is Always the Hardest“.

With launch of Google Appengine, there has never been a better time to start a startup. Let not the lack of a business plan or a pitch hold you back. Go to our web 2.0 startup pitch generator, and get your own, custom, startup pitch. Hurry only 24192 available.

The original source for this was written by Nathan and was in Perl. Of course we needed a web2.0 logo for such a marvelous piece of code. This comes from web2.0 logo generator.

The source for this is available here