> A village in china that paints portraits of pop culture icons as various dog breeds. Look, Obama as a GreyHound!

If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen.

How does selling ringtones of a frog singing to club music sound as an idea to you? Let me introduce you to Crazy Frog:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Frog

Retarded ideas make money too.

I sure as hell didn't think limiting people to 140 characters was going to make sense.

I believe that was originally a technical limitation, and only later did it become evident that there is a business value in offering partially-literate individuals a medium that caters to, while providing plausible deniability for, their slow reading and writing speeds.

Twitter has little or no technical reason to be so limited, of course, but doesn't want to alienate the tldr crowd.

Technical limitation: SMS are 160 characters. 20 chars for username and 140 chars for message.

So does running a successful bagel shop. The "ideas are worthless" people place your neighborhood bagel shop, Crazy Frog ringtones, and Qualcomm in the same group: businesses you can totally run as long as you know how to 'hustle.' Somehow I think Andrew Viterbi would frown on that.

"If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen."

There is actually a town in china where the entire village makes their money painting caricatures of monkeys. Not saying it's a good career move, but at least that's the context for where the idea came from.

Interesting enough, the majority of the world's oil paintings come from this one tiny village with 5,000 painters who spend all day slavishly copying the same templates over and over:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiamen

You can find all their stuff on ebay and alibaba.

I wouldn't call Xiamen a "town" or a "village." My cousin lives there with his wife and two children. It has a population of over 2.5 million people, and was voted (by whom, IDK) one of the "most livable cities in China." He worked for EDS for years and wanted to be transfered to China because of how much he loved it. When they wouldn't transfer him, he FOUND a way to move there. He ended up building a factory there to manufacture leather goods. Get the best leather he can from N&S America, and manufactures it there. He now has hundreds of employees, many with some form of disability, and is incredibly happy.

So I wouldn't call Xiamen itself a village, but you may be referring to a small village nearby.

He's talking about Xiamen Wushipu oil painting village. It's a part of Xiamen, there is a subsection about it farther down the wikipedia page.

Or in the streets of Montmartre, sold as genuine Parisian paintings...

> If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen.

Conversely, people who believe ideas are a dime a dozen tend to focus on shallow ideas. The lack of deep interaction with technology (and whatever a pivot is supposed to be) forces you into businesses with a more social rather than technical role: web design, blogging, social networks, etc. I don't see much of HN's advice working well for a company developing asynchronous CPU chipsets. In theory they should be the same; the advent of fabless semiconductor shops and hardware synthesis languages lets someone design chips in their garage in Iowa, but the depth of technical knowledge required makes it a much different game than starting up "a distributed Facebook" or "a Foursquare but for X."

Just want to point that the most underrated reason why people choose the social app path is not the cost but politics (i.e. asking for permission). You have to ask the permission of fewer people (actually 0) to launch a social web app than to build a new hardware product.

Oddly enough my friend paints famous people as cats. Her Chairman Miaow is incredible and I am sure people would love the prints.

Exactly! Idea generation shouldn't be mental diarrhea, which this reads like, ranging from ho-hum, it's already obviously been done ("Brainstorm Consulting - Teach companies how to brainstorm", "Replicate reality TV shows for foreign countries.") to frivolous ("Herbal Flavored Gum").

I think that idea could actually make some money.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, but great ideas are not. Some ideas are better than others, and some are much better than others. It would be easy to argue that someone who could consistently come up with the much better ones would be worth just as much if not more than a great executor.

Great ideas are only great in hindsight.

I really don't think so. If in at least your own mind it is not a great idea then you shouldn't do it to begin with.

Why on earth would anyone pursue an idea they themselves didn't think was great?

Make money.

Nothing is worth without some level of testing. this also applies for execution.

But testing/evaluating an idea can be easier than full blown execution. and you can use it to estimate how likely your idea would succeed.

And at this point your idea has some value.

I don't understand all this pooh-poohing of these ideas.

None of them is great, but the point is that every one of 'em (well, all the ones I've read) could be, if executed correctly, a perfectly viable business. Picking out a few at random:

Presentation Consulting - Teach companies how to improve their presentations

That's not a bad idea. Is somebody already doing it? Possibly, but that doesn't mean you can't do it too.

Online flower shop with one-hour delivery

Sounds tricky, and you'd need to restrict it to a couple of major and dense cities, but again there's no reason it's not a viable business. Market it correctly by encouraging men to send their ladies flowers spontaneously, and you could surely make some money.

Build Your Own Back Pack Shop

Damn you, random numbers! I don't much like this idea, but there's gotta be somebody out there (schoolkids, I guess) who would love to build customized backpacks for themselves. Great idea? No. World changing? No. Profitable if you get the product and the marketing right? Sure!

> Build Your Own Back Pack Shop

Timbuk2 have a successful business offering customised messenger bags.

Presentation Consulting - Teach companies how to improve their presentations: Duarte http://www.duarte.com/

Famous, because they made Al Gores Climate Change presentation.

For what it's worth, here is the subset of the ideas I came up with from that list:

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/68-free-bus...

The point of the exercise is that most people think of five or ten ideas, and then go with the first decent idea they come up with. But if you actually force yourself to come up with 100+ ideas then it's more likely that your idea will legitimately be a good idea. Which is important since the first .1% of the work you do on the project has a large influence on whether the next 99.9% will make you either millions or zero.

Fred Wilson also recently said that he would use one of the 999 if someone made it, in case that means anything to those perusing the list.

Quickly scanning the list, I see we did #712 as an intern project: http://www.elmoreclub.com/ I'll be looking for Fred's steps soon!

>A paperless hostpital

may as well have suggested an lunar-orbiting space platform that launches rockets to mars...

Corollary: Some ideas are vastly more lucrative than others. Which is why it's useful to spend a week listing your top 999 ideas. Execution is a PITA so choose carefully.

Interesting list but the notion that "ideas are only valuable when someone (like you) makes something happen" can only go so far. If you have a bad idea that you make happen it doesn't automatically become valuable.

This story might prove that ideas are a dime a dozen, but one can argue that good ideas are not.

My favorite, #469: "A YouTube VC firm, that will invest money in people who are willing to do stupid stuff on video in hopes that the video will go viral and they will make a profit."

Could happen, in today's angel investment climate...

Rebecca Black?

She gave money to somebody to film her doing stupid stuff.

I love this idea- like a cross between Kickstarter and "I'll eat a bug for a nickel".

I have read a couple of hundred of them and thats the most useless ideas I have ever seen.

Most of them seem to be a solution to really mundane everyday consumer quirks. None of them attempts to use basic human needs such as need for communication and approval. Its just "somebody could do my laundry" and "somebody could write something on a website".

They are only useless if your goal is to address one of the basic human needs you mention and even then maybe they do. "Someone could do my laundry so I can complete my research paper on curing cancer"

I'm sure I saw this here first, but "Ideas are just a multiplier of execution." http://sivers.org/multiply

"Microbrewery with high-octane beers with boutique labels that cost as much as good wines"

32% beer at £35 a bottle:

http://www.brewdog.com/

http://flippa.com, where you get a stream of business ideas that are mostly proven to work. Due diligence required as usual to identify scams, future market demand, revenue/effort, competition, profit margin, etc.

This list is actually pretty awesome. I had my doubts, but wow, very nice.

Funny: #120 A travel company that arranges people to stay at others houses.

http://www.couchsurfing.org/ ?

or http://www.airbnb.com/ ?

by travel agency he probably meant someone who takes the home-finding job off your hands.

Ideas matter. So does luck, timing and many other things.

Not ideas like "I want to create a backup tool" but rather ideas like "I want to create a backup tool that allow the user to simply drag and drop the files they want backed up into a folder on their machine". In other words ideas that are followed by an insight.

When people walk around saying ideas are a dime a dosen and execution is everything they forget that execution in itself is empty. You need to execute on something and that something is ideas.

#8: A gadget to cook beans/lentils/vegetables/rice for the same amount of time (quicker than what can be done in a slow cooker.)

Ah dang, I was just about to re-invent the microwave too!

Naw, the microwave is still pretty much a one-thing-at-a-time device. Do one thing after another, and the first is cold when the next is ready; do them together, and you either have to pop stuff in at different times or some stuff will be over/under-cooked when it ends.

Methinks the idea was something crockpot/rice-cookerish which you dump all the stuff into at once, say into different sections of the cooker, and it ensures everything finishes cooking at the same time even though everything cooks at different rates. Lower/higher temps for some things, delayed start for others...

...and twitter integration! Let's get rich!

Ideas that are based on making money for the sake of being rich are the worst.

But that's kind of the main reason why you start a business, you know, to make a lot of money.

Otherwise you're talking about charities.

Really? I've talked to a number of entrepreneurs who are in it because they have an idea they'd like to see happen or they think it's fun or to try to leave a mark on the world or a number of other reasons where the money is only a side effect.

Well put, money happens when you scratch an itch that is keeping you from sleeping basically. Many people got lost somewhere in the way and think of ideas as machines that will squeeze wallets and make them rich. All people I know that made money actually solved a personal necessity or where so excited about wanting to see something happen that their own genuine excitement attracted natural attention from people that where at the same time excited to see that.

Also see

http://www.ideaswatch.com/

968. Make a Triple Snuggy.

What exactly is that? I'm scared.

Considering there is also the "double snuggy", this idea is pretty much 7 minute abs.

The magic number is 6, not 7.

I think that's called the human centipede

My response: http://www.nbashaw.com/2011/06/09/ideas-matter-too.html

Yeah, but you know they aren't giving away their most valuable idea.

Typo. Dosen -> Dozen

Not to mention "hampster," regardless of how "Hampster Dance" was spelled

I built a paper airplane and sold it for a penny. Therefore, airplanes are only worth a penny. Quick, let's all go get our own Airbus!

Rent-a-wife – a woman who cleans, cooks, does laundry, picks up dry cleaning, mail, etc but without the emotional relationship. I'd rent...

You could simply hire an assistance and have a maid at home. Of course, there could be a service where you can pick them based on their looks, though it would be a little discriminatory.

I know a number of places which have a rent-a-handyman service for lonely women (or I suppose men), who do all the handywork around the house.

They are reasonably popular on a small scale.

This made me lol. They interchanged 'maid' and 'wife.'

Yeah exactly, haha. Just one of the more entertaining points

Isn't this just a housekeeper?