livejake

This is great. Is there anyway you could use data types other than string? The way it's currently setup makes it hard to analyze.

Like Anderson Cooper: http://twitter.com/andersoncooper/status/31518264634900480

Yeah, it's interesting. The reasons vary for each company and books could probably be written for each one. A key factor is network effects. Read up on network effects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

"In economics and business, a network effect (also called network externality) is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases as more people use it."

Not just internet and software businesses, railroads, telephone networks, and financial markets are other businesses that are impacted by network effects.

Easy to implement ideas are easy to copy, but that doesn't necessarily mean the value of the idea will tend to zero. See Woot, Groupon, Craigslist, etc. There are network effects and first mover advantages that help the first to implement an idea and gain traction. I would say your strategy follows my point. In your case, the ideas that are often simple to state aren't valuable. The value is all in the execution.

The Million Dollar Homepage may be a shooting star, but it is certainly valuable idea. You can make a decent living if you come up with an idea like it every year.

I would argue that Chatroulette has staying power. It's not as popular as it was during the media hoopla, but they still get 250k users day. That's not Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, but that's enough to get by.

I would also look at Groupon, Woot, and HARO. Simple ideas that have created sustainable businesses.

I would say the value of an idea is inversely related to the difficulty to execute the idea. The idea for the million dollar homepage was extremely valuable because the execution of the idea wasn't too technically difficult. There are plenty of freelancers who could implement that idea. Same with the idea for ChatRoulette and Groupon. If an idea is really difficult to implement, such as a better Google, then the idea is much less valuable than execution.

What I submitted was this: rapidintro.com:8000 You need two people to really demo it. Oauth with LinkedIn and then you video chat. The video chat is still buggy. We didn't finish the event system. This is the first ChatRoulette configuration written in Erlang.

The reason the design looks like it was designed by Slovakian college student for $50 is, well, because it was designed by a Slovakian college student for $50.

As I said before, we are now working on a different application and we should be completing that shortly. I'm considering releasing this application, with some design tweaks, as is to Hacker News and other entrepreneurial communities and seeing what happens.

Yeah, you're right about being enthusiastic and professional. Thanks for the feedback.

As for stats and data, I tend to buy Chris Dixon's argument that narratives are more important than numbers: http://cdixon.org/2010/04/03/size-markets-using-narratives-n... Nevertheless, some statistics are useful.

I included additional details about potential users and what not in my application.

An example use-case, which I didn't get into in the video, is an entrepreneurial designers and developers event.

Here's how it works: 1) Designers and developers RSVP in advance for an online event that takes place at a set date and time.

2) Upon joining the event, each designer is presented with a list of developers in the event with basic bio info from their LinkedIn profile. Each designer can then check off who they want to chat with in the event. The same happens for developers.

3) Once the event starts, they are placed in a series of one-on-one chat with a designer (or developer) that they've previously indicated that they're interested in meeting. During the chats, each participant can view the other participants LinkedIn profile. These chats last for a set time, say three minutes, like speed dating. In the event, participants meet a lot of people that they're interested in meeting in short one-on-one chats. That's the general idea.

There are a lot of flaws with this concept. And I've actually started working on a different idea shortly after I submitted my Ycombinator app, but I still think this idea has some limited potential.

Hahahaha.

Stoned guy here. You just need to chill out and recognize the problem of the penis... man. It's giving the internet bad karma.

Seriously, I was a little tired, but I was not stoned. Could I have made an awesome polished video? Sure. But they said talk spontaneously as I would to a friend, and I took their instructions literally.

Any feedback on the concept?

What are the odds on failure?

I wonder how much of their lead in traffic has to do with better SEO on Digg submissions. I see Digg submissions come up all the time in Google searches. I hardly ever see Reddit submissions.