30 startup ideas Y Combinator wants to fund
Y Combinator partners Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham only married in June, but they're ready to start popping them out. More $6,000 checks to fund startups, that is. Together with not-married-to-each-other partners Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris, the pair put out a 3,000-word list of 30 "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund." Sure, a lot of them are obvious, most already done — but the Y Combinator version, with Graham's seal of approval, has a better chance than your run-of-the-mill startup of getting quickly flipped to a gullibly starstruck buyer. A version you'll be able to finish before this fall's application deadline, below.
- Two things are broken: record labels and movies.
- Simplified browsing. The space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox.
- New news. PerezHilton and TechCrunch, Reddit and Digg are just the beginning.
- Outsourced IT.
- Enterprise software 2.0 for smaller companies.
- More variants of CRM: make interactions with customers much higher-res.
- Something your company needs.
- Dating.
- Photo/video sharing services.
- Auctions. EBay is doing a bad job.
- Web Office apps.
- Fix advertising.
- How can you teach kids through the web?
- Tell who the most productive people are in large organizations.
- Off the shelf security. Stitch together alternatives out of cheap, existing hardware and services.
- A form of search that depends on design. Google has no sense of design.
- New payment methods.
- The WebOS.
- Application and/or data hosting. Start by writing Basic for the Altair.
- Shopping guides. How do you decide what you want?
- Finance software for individuals and small businesses.
- A web-based Excel/database hybrid.
- More open alternatives to Wikipedia.
- A buffer against bad customer service: a wrapper around common bad customer service experiences.
- A Craigslist competitor.
- Better video chat.
- Hardware/software hybrids: iPod/iTunes.
- Fixing email overload.
- Easy site builders for specific markets. What's the best way to make a web site if you're a lawyer?
- Startups for startups. We're one; TechCrunch is another.