Serial Startups

Startup #7: Book review website aggregator

2009-04-22T12:55:00.001-07:00

I've always been dumbfounded as to why there's no book review section on metacritic. For those who aren't aware of metacritic, this is what the company has to say on itself:

"Metacritic.com achieves its stated mission--helping consumers make an informed decision about how to spend their money on entertainment--by providing access to thousands of reviews in a number of entertainment genres. We feel strongly that multiple opinions are better than one, and also that the presentation of these critical opinions must be done in a concise, organized and easy-to-understand manner in order for them to be useful. We also encourage our users to dig deeper on matters that interest them by providing links to full reviews whenever possible. Finally, we believe firmly in providing a pleasant, popup-free user experience for our visitors."

It's a brilliant concept: aggregating all available reviews into one reliable score for comparison; but where is the book section!? They do Film, DVD, Music, Games, and TV. Someone really could takeover the book review aggregating website niche immediately, with no competition. Perhaps follow the Rotten Tomatoes template as a guide, since it achieves the same effect as metacritic but only applied to one medium: movies.

Best potential iPhone app ever

2009-04-21T12:37:00.000-07:00

I'm sure many are familiar by now with the Sun employee who quit his programming job after earning $800,000 in 5 months from the development of the iPhone app iShoot. Naturally this inspired a legion of wannabe app developers hoping to profit from iPhone momentum. I thought of a good one the other day that I would develop myself, except I don't own any Apple products (besides, Objective-C really isn't that hard to code in). The app would integrate known speed traps with your GPS, and alert you with a siren noise when you're withing a mile or so of the trap. You could call it iSpeed. That's a million dollar idea right there.

Startup #6: Eliminate the need for high school guidance counselors

2009-04-14T21:36:00.000-07:00

The target audience of the following concept is college, high school, or precocious elementary school students. It seems that a large number of people make it to their mid-20's somewhat lost and unsure what to do with their life. This site will try to eliminate this problem by providing information about how someone can leverage their skills, hobbies, and interests into a rewarding career. It will simultaneously circumvent misguided advice from uninformed and insular thinking parents and guidance counselors (if they even care at all).

The user inputs their preferred skills, hobbies, or interests. Some search algorithm compares these to a constantly updated database of every job classified site on the web. It outputs a number of matching careers along with a wealth of supplementary information. This would include current salary estimates, academic course of study rec's (if any), common obstacles, common paths to an entry level job, best sites for additional information, etc. Armed with this knowledge, teens will have tangible answers to asinine and unimaginative questions like 'What are you going to do with THAT degree?,' or, 'Why waste your time reading about THAT?'
You could create forums for users with similar interests to interact. You could make special subscription portions of the site, such as useful college rankings with criteria related to your specific interests. Something where the user says 'I like X, Y, and Z' and they are given the best places to study X, Y, and Z. Finding out where those 'best places' are would be the tricky part of this potential startup, however; there's a great need for reliable and personalized ranking information. The predominant college rankings, US news & world, aren't based on anything normal humans should care about. They're horribly flawed:

'College presidents are a fairly unflappable lot, but nothing gets their goat quite like the issue of rankings. Take a complex institution, crunch it down into a single number, and the adjectives start flying: "Silly." "Snotty." "Scandalous." Echoing many of his peers, Robert Weisbuch, president of Drew University, blames the rank-ordering of diverse schools for much of the current college-admissions frenzy. "It's almost as though we've created a monster," he says. And yet, despite years of vituperation, most schools keep dutifully filling out the surveys that make these ratings possible. Why?'

...

'But schools complain that the surveys lock them into the same relative space on the list, often because of decades-old impressions. They also argue that the rankings' formula overemphasizes selective admissions data like low acceptance rates and high SAT scores for incoming freshmen while giving short shrift to what really matters but is much harder to measure: the education students receive once they get on campus. Even more pernicious is what critics call "ranksteering," i.e., specifically tailoring administrative decisions to move higher up on the list. The rankings encourage more per-pupil spending, which makes up 10% of a school's score and certainly doesn't help keep tuition down. Indeed, Bowdoin College watched its ranking slip from fourth to eighth in the '90s as it balanced its budget rather than keep pace with peers' spending increases.'

There is already a movement in place against U.S. news and world rankings. You could partner with them to develop your own ranking methodology for the subscription based portion of this startup idea.

Top 8 ways to find a job in a recession

2009-04-14T08:30:00.001-07:00

Although not necessarily in the spirit of the blog, this list might prove useful to at least a few readers.

1. Use Indeed, not Craigslist

Craigslist is so 2007. Indeed includes job posts from basically every classified site on the web. If you're not using Indeed you're at a huge disadvantage. From the company's 'About' section:

"Indeed.com includes all the job listings from major job boards, newspapers, associations and company career pages - and we continue to add new sites every day."

There have been instances where I have found postings on Indeed that weren't even on the company's career site yet. I also find their search algorithm much more advanced than Craigslist. For instance, if I searched for 'mathematics' on Indeed and sorted by relevance, I will get a list of every company that is searching for someone with a mathematics degree. If I do this on Craigslist, 75% of the postings are for mathematics or SAT tutors. It weeds out the crap for you. Indeed also saves your searches, tells you whenever new jobs have been added to your searches, has a great trends & salaries feature, and a useful forum. I don't mean to hate on Craigslist, especially since I've found many jobs there in the past, but you gotta get with the times. And now you need every possible advantage you can find.

2. Smart search queries

Say you are looking for a job in New York City (let's forget for a minute that this decreases your odds significantly because the talent pool there is better than anywhere else in the U.S.). Make sure to expand your searches to all surrounding mini-cities. For NYC that would include Newark, NJ, Paterson, NJ, Stamford, CT, Long Island City, etc. All those places are easily accessible by public transportation and might have more openings than their corresponding NYC counterparts.

Similarly, be smart with your keyword queries. If you're looking for a QA Engineer position, just search for QA. Some companies might call your job title QA Analyst, QA Tester, etc. and you don't want to exclude those. I once held a niche scientific position with the title Data Analyst, which wasn't indicative of the job responsibilities at all. Your keywords might want to focus on unique skills you have, just as particular programming languages, software familiarity, or other credentials.

3. Use your school's alumni network

Most colleges have an alumni network that offers free mentoring services from registered alums or specific alum job boards. Yet I'm always shocked to find that most college graduates I know completely ignore this option. At the very least, it's a good way to electronically network with others in your chosen field. They might point you in directions you might not otherwise have thought about. Additionally, I've talked to grads at a number of schools who still had access to the normal undergraduate job boards. This happened with me, and I was able to apply to jobs and schedule interviews just as if I was an undergraduate. The school didn't care because they said not a lot of people think to do this (and it was a very large school, 4K+ a class). If all else fails, use LinkedIn!

4. Send unique cover letters

This is the tip everyone is going to ignore, and then wonder why they're not getting responses. You have to send unique cover letters for every job, based solely on the impressions you get from the job posting. The first paragraph is the most important. HR managers right now are probably seeing three to five times as many applicants for each job posting, if not more. You need to provide them with a reason to keep reading, and if you're lucky have them look at your resume for 20 seconds. Point out how excited you are about the position, and somehow mention that you're a special candidate. Enticement is key. If that worked, in the second paragraph make sure to explain why you fit all their needs, and supply examples. Don't stray too far from the skills and keywords supplied in the posting. They're basically giving you the answers to an essay exam, you just have to fill out the exam poetically. Conclude nicely, without sounding like an idiot.

5. Follow up

Don't listen to people who tell you to send a hard copy of your resume (the job will be gone by then). This isn't the eighties; although, if a fax number is listed it wouldn't hurt to fax over your materials immediately after you e-mailed application.

Let's say you receive a generic follow-up e-mail (this is better than nothing at all). It says that the relevant parties will look over your application and contact you if an interview is warranted. The company is giving you an opportunity to sell yourself further here, yet 90% of applicants probably just delete the e-mail. Take the time to send supporting materials (transcripts if you're an all-star, major publications, code samples...anything that seems relevant). It can't hurt.

6. Enlist a headhunter

Depending on your industry, this might be a viable supplement to your job search. One industry in particular where it's extremely difficult --currently, meaning in the recession-- to find an entry level position is the actuarial field. I'm privy to this info mainly anecdotally, but the trend has persisted for months now. However, the actuarial field has a large network of headhunters that you can hire for free (a google search will provide you with many). If a company hires you, the headhunter is paid by them. Thus, the headhunter subsists by finding you jobs.

7. Use only your best references

If you're fortunate enough to get in a position where a company is calling your references, you're so very close. Having a well-known and respected reference say that you are 'the greatest analytical mind they've ever seen' should get you that unpaid internship.

8. Be relentless

Self-explanatory; be at it at least a few hours a day!

Startup #5: Map out areas of free parking in major US cities

2009-04-13T14:34:00.000-07:00

To my knowledge this doesn't exist yet, and if it does, using it would have saved me a lot of parking ticket money. From living in Boston for 5+ years, I've found that there are thousands of little side streets where you can park freely, often for unlimited periods of time (excluding street cleaning days). Additionally, at the majority of metered spots you can park freely from 8PM-8AM. In theory, you could wake up every morning at 7:30 AM and move your car to a known unmetered free spot; then repeat every night. Amazingly, a LOT of people do this within various boroughs, so the spots are in demand (I did this for over a year). It seems like too much work, but it's also frustrating to pay $150 a month to rent someone's extra spot, only to find it occupied one night when they're having a large party. Trust me, they'll know you were the one who called the towing company.

What would be helpful is having a mashed up Google maps app which highlights two types of streets: the ones where you can park free indefinitely, and the ones where you can park overnight at meters. A street cleanining day/time note would also be helpful. I think this is feasible if you had a lot of friends to scour the area. Your revenue stream would be ad-based, because a site like this would generate a lot of web-traffic (especially if you hit the majors: LA, NYC, chicago, SF, boston, etc). You could even charge for a subscription mobile app (or just create an iPhone app and pocket a bajillion dollars).

Startup #4: Urban Garden Tools and Supplies website

2009-04-11T15:12:00.000-07:00

It has been widely reported that the current recession is creating a home gardening boom. This AP article includes a graphic which shows 43 million households will grow their own produce in 2009, up from 36 million in 2008. Of those surveyed, 54% of those are doing it to save money, and 21% are doing it for the first time in 2009. That means there is a significant portion of Americans who have no idea what they are doing and yet are still trying to build their own home garden. Someone enterprising with a green thumb could really capitalize on this market, especially in urban areas.

Even I have been bitten by the urban gardening bug, but I have no idea how to get started. Usually I try to take a DIY approach to things (especially with computers/technology/programming), but I'm not about to try to build a self-irrigating planter out of a soda bottle to put on my windowsill and hope for ripe tomatoes. I would much rather go to some central urban gardening website and have the necessary supplies mailed to my apartment with helpful and friendly instructions. I would also like the urban gardening website to have some type of community forum for complete idiots. I can't be alone in this (and in fact, I know I'm not because I've talked to many other young urban dwellers with the exact same want/need).

Someone please get on this so I can make my own pesto.

UPDATE: This urban gardening blog is awesome. But they're just giving away free info; there's still a need for a sales-based urban gardening product site.

Startup #3: Circumvent public transportation by creating a community carpool network

2009-04-10T17:53:00.000-07:00

If you live in Boston, you're aware that the oft-maligned MBTA is on the verge of making drastic service cuts. From Bostonist, commenting on a Globe article:

"Commuter rail folks will never be able to get home after 7pm. Three stops each on the B and C lines will be gone. The E line will stop running past Brigham Circle and stop running altogether on weekends, with the C line going up to Lechmere to compensate. It's really quite a crazy collection of cuts."

The B, C, and E lines they talk about mostly affect metro Boston residents. The commuter rail issue affects anyone who lives outside the city which must number in the tens of thousands. Someone with enough drive and web-savvy could implement the following concept:

Create a website akin to Zipcar. Users can offer to give other people rides in their own car for a set price. They create a listing with the time they are going to leave, the location, and the price. Ideally you would try to fill up all seats, but it's up to the original poster. Anyone using this site would be subject to a rating system (timeliness, friendliness, etc) so there could be some sort of screening process. I can name half a dozen companies in Boston that already have a intra-office system like this in place. Why not expand on the idea?

In a city like Boston -- and with the right type of web interface -- this would catch on very rapidly. The MBTA has been notoriously unreliable for years. Do a google search for MBTA + service + problems and see for yourself. If they make these cuts, wipe out entire bus routes, and eliminate customer service underground (all of which is planned), the service might become unusable. Capitalize!

We have a mantra now

2009-04-10T16:47:00.001-07:00

I think I'll even bold it:

"Let me repeat that recipe: finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be possible to solve it. Simple as it seems, that's the recipe for a lot of startup ideas."

-Paul Graham, Ideas for Startups

Lifehacker discussion on a personal business model

2009-04-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

Lifehacker opened up a discussion today on what a personal business model looks like (in contrast to the traditional corporate business model). Definitely worth checking out, especially in the comments.

FreeMind: open source mind mapping software

2009-04-10T10:33:00.000-07:00

From the FreeMind sourceforge page:

"FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool. We are proud that the operation and navigation of FreeMind is faster than that of MindManager because of one-click "fold / unfold" and "follow link" operations. So you want to write a completely new metaphysics? Why don't you use FreeMind? You have a tool at hand that remarkably resembles the tray slips of Robert Pirsig, described in his sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance called Lila. Do you want to refactor your essays in a similar way you would refactor software? Or do you want to keep personal knowledge base, which is easy to manage? Why don't you try FreeMind? Do you want to prioritize, know where you are, where you've been and where you are heading, as Stephen Covey would advise you? Have you tried FreeMind to keep track of all the things that are needed for that?"

I don't recommend this idea, but it is a fabulous way to make money (or lose it all!) very fast

2009-04-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

A common scenario:

"I hate my job." This thought leads to...

"I want to work from home." Which becomes...

"I can start a home-based online web startup!" Then reality hits: it's not a secure or easy path. Must be some way to strike it rich without have to work hard...

"Day-trading!" (or to keep up with the times: FOREX!).

Then you spend minutes, hours, or even days voraciously consuming all available information on trading. If you're savvy you'll end up at Investopedia, Seeking Alpha, or The Big Picture. If you're not, you'll find yourself at The Motley Fool, or the Google Finance boards. Maybe you'll even pick up a Forex ebook or three. You'll read about optimal entry strategies, profit-taking exit strategies, earnings surprises, Fibonacci retracements, Elliot wave theory, overbought/oversold levels, MACD signals, the RSI, and eventually you'll develop your own strategy to test out. You drop 10K into a Scottrade or TradeKing account (please don't use Zecco) and two things can happen:

1. You start losing money immediately. You panic, you're down 8% over a two-week period you know this is where you set your mental stop but maybe the market will turn around tomorrow you could get it all back plus you need this money you need to prove you can strike it out on your own you don't need a real job. Your holdings then plummet to a 15% loss and you sell everything and never mess around with stocks again (until 6 months later when you've pushed that bad experience to the back of your mind).

2. You happened to be on the right side of the trend with the majority of your holdings. But you listened to traditional advice that you should diversify. In fact you bought some $GLD to hedge your stock positions. You're up 11% on your stocks over a two-week period but you didn't set an automatic stop to get out of $GLD and it plummeted 8% in one day and maybe -15% over the same period. You eke out a couple hundred dollar gain THAT IS NOT WORTH THE RISK YOU ARE TAKING.

3. You realize that market makers control prices virtually at will, and if you go against them you are fucked. You make astounding gains because you understand how market dynamic really work.

Please choose option #3. Now read this excerpt from Growing Wealth Mag:

"The specialists and market makers post their buy and sell prices. This information, along with retail investors’ orders, is transmitted through the Nasdaq system. The market makers have the added insight of seeing all the limit orders — a powerful advantage in determining the market buy and sell resistance levels. With Nasdaq Level III access, the market makers essentially know exactly when the investor will buy and sell.

They say knowledge is power, and market makers are no different. The market makers know exactly the low points that will cause a trader to sell, as well as at what prices traders will jump in to buy the stock.

Given their powerful knowledge of limit orders, market makers commonly employ techniques that arbitrarily raise or lower the price of the stock. They are known to shake the tree and get the loose leaves to fall, causing the shaky retail investors and day traders to sell or buy before bringing the stock back to its true value.

Market makers can manipulate a stock by artificially pushing the value down to where they see a bulk of limit orders to sell, resulting in retail investors and day traders selling to cut their losses. After the carnage is all that remains, the market makers will raise the price back up to its real value.

At the same time, market makers can artificially inflate a stock price, causing investors to jump in on the rise before the market makers correct it to the stock’s true value.

Most people trade on patterns and breakouts, and when market makers artificially inflate the price to where they see a bulk of limit orders to buy, it looks as though the stock is on a breakout pattern, because it has penetrated through traditional resistance levels. This signals day traders and pattern traders to purchase the stock, since all technical indicators suggest a breakout is about to occur. Once these buy limit orders have been filled, the market makers bring the price back down to true value, causing day traders and investors to lose tremendously."

If you keep the above in mind always, purchase Level II quotes to see what market makers are up to, set automatic stop-loss triggers, and always always go with the trend, then you should be okay. Don't let logic get in your way, just trade what you see. Don't read media reports about why the stock market is going in a certain direction; it's poison.

StockTwits.com and The Big Picture are really very useful if you're just getting into this.

Free tip: If you're on margin and only have a couple grand, you could probably double that in the next few months just VERY carefully playing $FAS and $FAZ (but for god's sake don't hold them overnight ever).

Startup #2

2009-04-09T13:11:00.001-07:00

This idea is slightly outlandish.

Concept: use a genetic sequencing machine to adequately match a potential child with adopted parents.

Let's set aside the legal and ethical ramifications of such a concept for the moment. To get started you would need a sequencing machine, and a clean room (aka lab space) to run genetic material through the machine. In 2008, the cheapest machine was about $150,000 and could do 10 billion base pairs in an 80 hour run.

Basically, the possibility now exists to apply sequencing techniques to personalized medicine. But why not apply it to other areas? (like adoption matching). From the aforementioned article:

"An inexpensive new gene-sequencing machine is due to hit the market next month, and its creators hope that it will make sequencing more common, ultimately giving a boost to personalized medicine. The machine is the brainchild of George Church, a genomics pioneer who developed the first direct sequencing technology as a graduate student in the 1980s and helped initiate the Human Genome Project soon after.

Church sees greater access to sequencing as a vital component in the drive toward personalized medicine, in which treatments and preventative medicine are tailored to an individual's genetic makeup. The new machine, which was developed with an "open source" philosophy, was commercialized by Danaher Motion, based in Salem, NH, with the specific intent of keeping costs low. "It seems like the biomedical-instrument field in general tries not to commoditize," says Church, who heads the Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School, in Boston. "It tries to keep profit margins high and slow the inevitable decrease in cost." The Danaher device will cost roughly $150,000, a third to a tenth of the cost of systems currently on the market."

So to do this you're going to need some people with scientific background to know which sequence encodes certain genes leading to certain phenotypes. Then you would need someone with the bioinformatics skills to assign probabilities to the child turning out a certain way (the way the potential adopted parents wish).

This is something I definitely think will be developed, or at the very least get some serious VC $. 23andMe would have seemed impossible 5 years ago.

Capitalize on the success of Twitter

2009-04-09T11:20:00.000-07:00

StockTwits.com is my favorite microblogging service. It's stupidly easy to use, and you can use your existing Twitter account to log-in. From the founders:

"In essence, StockTwits helps people interested in stocks to socialize their ideas. It focuses on stock trading, letting users discuss their latest stock trades in an interface using Twitter as the content production platform, adding features like graphs and the ability to filter messages."

I dabble in 2-5 day momentum trades frequently, and StockTwits has more than once assisted in huge short-term gains. The amount of shared theory, charts, and strategies is stunning.

Surely there are other ways to piggyback on Twitter. The founders even encourage it! From FT.com:

"Howard Lindzon, an entrepreneur and backer of other internet media start-ups, sees Twitter as a platform for developing a fresh form of content and creating new stars from those that master the medium.

He has helped to raise $800,000 for StockTwits, a service that encourages users to discuss stocks and investments in short messages.

“It’s like a farm system that will produce tons of new experts. Stocks, sports and dating will be great avenues to explore on Twitter. The format is more real-time, and it’s kind of an art form to say what you want to say in 140 characters or less,” he says.

Twitter itself says it approves of the leveraging of its service and the emerging clones. “We love it. Being a platform is a way to grow and increase the value of Twitter,” says Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder."

Home-based startup awards

2009-04-09T10:49:00.000-07:00

Here are StartupNation's 2008 Home-Based 100 Competition winners.

I think you'll see a thousand replications of this in the next 2 years:

"Combat global warming while shopping online? myFREEoffsets.com is a 100% free service for consumers that rewards shoppers with carbon offsets at a rate of up to 8% of what they spend online with the company's participating retailers."

Check out the entire list for some inspiration.

Startup #1

2009-04-09T09:52:00.001-07:00

Concept: The Collaborative Genealogy Project
Business Type: free website
Focus/Features: extreme ease of use, attractive and simple interface

**This is not intended to be a social networking site!** (The social networking angle is played out).

Each family gets their own page on the site, with two main components.

An attractive and simple graphic of an oak tree with editable nodes. Any member of the family can edit these nodes, which include: full name, location of birth death/date, date of birth/death, and a small section (150 characters) for a brief note. If alive, can include current contact info also. If you want to associate husband/wife, you create each person separately and then you can use a drag and drop method to link them. Same deal with children. Drag and drop keeps it easy.
A simple message board underneath the tree only viewable to the family. Site will recommend that you keep track of your tree edits on the board, or have brief dialogues with family members concerning strategies to track down elusive relations.

Other features:

Since this is not a pay site, one could sell posters of completed trees to any family member interested. You could require Google AdSense, but give families the option to pay to turn them off.

Family members will publish their page to the public (excluding the message board and contact info). You could group different trees into ‘forests’ based on geographical location. Users can then browse their state, city, or neighborhood’s forest. Here you could integrate with Google Maps.

Startup #0

2009-04-09T09:40:00.000-07:00

Thanks for stopping by. Every day I am going to come up with and post a minimum of one startup idea. My hope is that at least one person finds something useful here and turns it into a success.