I'm a friend of http://guestlistapp.com/ folks and it's a great alternative to EventBrite and TicketMaster. It's fairly minimalist and is still a huge undertaking for several people.

I suggest that you step back, take off your programmer visors and start listening for people who say "I wish" a lot. Chances are that if it's obvious enough to brainstorm, someone has already lost a lot of money discovering that the customers love it so long as it's free. You need to find something that's niche and causing great pain.

However, I think I can safely say most midsized resident arts organizations would love a social media reporting app. Most non-profits can only hold a social media intern for the summer, and they dip off and seem awkward during the main part of their season. To alleviate this would be awesome.

First of all I'd like to thank everyone who has voted for the story, and particularly to the commenters, which we'll be responding to individually; because we really want more feedback.

Second I'd like to give some background on what this is.

Last weekend we spitballed a list of 37 ideas which we thought could be made into something. Some were brand new, some we'd worked on for some time but most were harebrained.

This list of 5 are the survivors of our own elimination process. We made this landing page to send to friends in the industry whose opinion we trust. Giovanni (flexterra) decided to post it on Hacker News to see what the community thought and here we are.

We have other projects that are very close to launch (receiptsloader.com [if your purchase receipts are a mess, you want this]) and this 5 piece voting site, is to help us decide on what to concentrate our efforts on next.

Again, thanks to everyone for commenting and voting.

Personally I think you'll get much better ideas than the ones you've listed.

Customer Service a la Zappos

I like the area that you are targeting, I think there's opportunity, but I don't see/understand what you're providing that's new. Are you managing/offering awesome people to provide the customer service or is it software that will help guide an existing company's support staff to be awesome? Perhaps a training program with some sort of systematic reminds of how to be awesome (could be interesting).

While You Were Out Notes

I know people use different hardware/software for communications but I don't see how there's any value here. Making voicemail accessible outside the office? If someone visits, do they need to know YOUR system for leaving a note or is someone in the office going to add it to this unnecessary system? There's a thing called email, and it works if you don't suck at it. Not convinced there's a pain/need here.

One Click Social Media Reports - My pick

Another area that is appealing to me, but I'd like to know more. List the kinds of things you'll be collecting. I do think there's data missing from other related services/tools.

Recurly for Dummies

Not to say there isn't a market/possibility to make money here, but doesn't Paypal offer subscriptions. Not everyone is accustomed to using/managing their subscriptions with Paypal but how will you make it any easier with your service?

Online Ticket Sales

Again, with limited information it's hard to see how you're going to approach this differently than Eventbrite. I think the opportunity here is the promotion aspect, but how you accomplish this is a mystery. I just feel a lot of people aren't aware of events in their area until it's too late. However, getting them to subscribe to your service to receive updates about events is going to be hard. You have to solve the relevancy/quality issue in addition to marketing to these people who don't search out for things on their own. Maybe some sort of partnering/incentive program can make this more possible. Make it fun and rewarding.

I am not sure people would pay for it though.

Your Recurly idea will also probably be a headache regulation and compliance-wise.

Not to say they aren't great ideas, but probably not something you'd want to get in to without investor backing and a specialized team in mind to maximize your chances.

What if you simply run on top of Paypal?

Plus Paypal's reputation might make them think twice, depending on how they plan on implementing things.

PayPal is great if you're selling physical objects delivered within a day or two preferably with trackable delivery methods - thats PayPal's most favored transaction type since it minimizes their possible fraud losses about as far as you possibly can. The further away from that you move, the more likely you are to end up being another one of the many PayPal horror stories that are all too common. Things that can't be confirmed "shipped" by a disinterested 3rd party raise a flag. Things that can't be verified as having been delivered to a specific physical address raise a flag. Things that have long delivery lead-times raise a flag. I suspect recurring billing rasies a flag. I suspect high dollar amounts both raise a flag and act as a multiplier on other flags...

I strongly suspect this idea would end up with the PayPal account being stuck in the "can't make withdrawals for 180 days, but we'll continue taking your customers money so you're still on e hook for providing the goods/services right now" state, pretty much permanently...

I have both recurring payments and one-off payment for virtual services on my website and never had any issue with Paypal.

And I too, have many happy clients who've never had Paypal issues, even ones doing some of the things I listed above.

_BUT_, if you think Paypal in general are _not_ a source of _major_ headaches for some people, "I suspect" (there's my phrase again) that you've not been here long. Paypal account freezing has a long history of being discussed here (and elsewhere). I've been through that particular drama myself, in fact I've got one client who it happens to annually when he starts accepting pre-orders in Sept for a book that gets printed every December...

I disagree. There are kick-ass startups already doing this, e.g. TicketFly, Eventbrite, and TicketLeap. That isn't to say that you couldn't beat those folks, but I don't get the sense that there's a desperate need in the marketplace that those companies aren't filling. The real battles for promoters are structural and legal (Ticketmasters long-term exclusive contracts).

Social media reporting, this is a tough one, as someone who built an early social media reporting tool years ago, I'd say the market is tough to get people to pay for the functionality. However, if you can get the right clients they will pay large sums. The market for this is very fickle and competition is tough (salesforce/radian6 for one). One key thing I learned: small business/midsize biz don't have enough chatter to validate spending on reporting yet (imagine how many people are talking about John Doe dry cleaner in San Juan on twitter on a given day).

recurly for dummies, can't you do that with a paypal widget that is an embed code anyway? right now my fav of the ideas though

i don't see value in while you were out notes system. maybe the way its presented doesn't make sense. i could definitely see a use for a push notification of incoming things (i.e. voicemail to your desk line, package received via fedex at front desk, etc)

zappos customer service one is tough to do, as a huge part of zappos customer service is not the crm they are using, but the policies they've put in place.

One at a time.

Until you win.

You don't know which one is the best idea, so just pick one you most want to finish and build it. Market it. And if it doesn't work pivot or move on to the next idea.

The way I look at it is you build ideas into products and sell those products. Always charge. That way it is relatively easy to turn a small, but meaningful profit. Then, keep building products until you find a "hit".

Even if you don't get to your home run you have some nice cash flow so you can keep doing what you love.

Think of yourself as a band. You love making and performing music. The first record might not be a hit but you keep making music until you come up with something that resonates. Your startup is a band. Keep cranking out albums until something resonates.

I hear so many people saying "just build it". Do these people have so much time in their lives that what they build is irrelevant because they will have time to build everything anyway?

Time is a precious resource to me and if I must build something, I'd rather increase my chances of success by picking the one people need more.

It's just an opinion until you find out for real. We all bring our own biases into what is essential/pain point for people.

Until the rubber meets the road, you never know.

It's fine to fail, but don't set out to fail. Failure can be forgiven, but somewhere people got it into their heads that they should brag about it.

Lots of people wore bellbottoms, too. Doesn't mean it was an idea for the ages.

I am not sure which one works. Being a coder and as someone who tends to code before evaluating, I would like to know specifics on how to do evaluation before execution.

A Psychological Tip:

Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,

and you're hampered by not having any,

the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,

is simply by spinning a penny.

No - not so that chance shall decide the affair

while you're passively standing there moping;

but the moment the penny is up in the air,

you suddenly know what you're hoping.

None of the others really cover the main problem you're aiming to fix, and you don't sound like you are excited about the task they exist to help with.

You don't have to be personally invested in a problem to build a winnning application solving it. But you need to have became excited by the possibily that you could solve it - that suddenly, you will be making someone's life better. Withouth this, you'll just repeat the existing mistakes with what's on the market.

But if you must I'd possibly look at the social networking reporting for a couple of reasons.

- The market is hot and you might be able to get funding or flick it easy

- It looks like all the other projects are going to need an decent advertising base, and (as long as you build carefully) you'll be able to re-purpose parts of the social networking... so can look at as an investment

The Ticketmaster clone won't work due to venue lock-out, as others have mentioned. "One Click Social Media Reports" seems kind of vague. "Recurly for Dummies" - the name is kind of a turnoff. One would also need a high volume of recurring payments to make such a service attractive. Then it also has to interface to existing accounting systems. "While You Were Out Notes" seems a bit too trivial. Who will pay for it?

Yeah, it comes down to execution. But if you can execute it so well that it is dead easy and doesn't require any technical know how, you might win over even technical people.