I am very close to donating! This describes exactly how I feel about the Silicon Valley publicized on HN. Surely there are plenty of start-ups solving real problems, hard problems -- what can we do to make sure those make the front-page more often? I guess all of the Instagrams getting acquired for hundreds of millions doesn't help.
Small business gets reamed on store fixtures and any sort of furniture.
Creating a market for piece work (people working at home doing small assembly / sewing / Etc functions) with folks who want to do small production runs.
Fasteners on demand, making the kinds of fasteners you want how you want them right now in reasonable quantities.
Inventory management for one/two person shops.
Phone customer support on demand.
Essential network service (DNS/Email/Web/File/Fax/Media) for small businesses. (I did this once before but its becoming more relevant, could be a 'software only' solution these days)
We treated this as a quiz for how familiar we were with various startups. Got a good chunk of them right, too. I may need to spend more time working and less time on Hacker News.
Did you consider just making it a list of links? If you want to hide the link targets you can do that with JS. Dropdown list is kind of unnecessary, I think.
I think you're missing the joke. Most of these apps are some nth-derivative of those industries. Instead of "make me dinner" it's "an app to aggregate apps that help me find someone to make me dinner, plus social networking." At some point the value-add is so small it's truly a "first-world problem."
I got the joke. I found it funny. I also found it thought provoking to examine how spoiled I am as a first world person. But that also got me thinking that to some level even basics are first world.
Movies: If your starving in some 3rd world country I doubt you care about when the next Hobbit comes out
Games: you'd have to be able to afford a game console before you care about games.
Cars: I lived in a 1st world city for 7 years where most people don't own a car which point out how much they are not really needed
He definitely got the joke. The point is that you could apply this to anything. Most of what we have now went through some kind of value-add process. Isn't that how evolution works? That smallest "value-add" could make room for bigger change later.
The interesting curve is the hyperbolic one, for two reasons: One, it matches the
real-world data. And two, it goes to infinity in 2015. And how are you going to
get an asymptotically-accelerating number of blades onto a razor? Why, you’d need
godlike super-technology to do that.
Soon, I don't think even Instacart will be able to help with my Twinkie cravings, considering Hostess just went bankrupt again, and stopped production.
Don't be surprised, it's classic marketing. The easiest problems to solve are the problems your customer didn't know they had. The marketing pitches for such solutions always begin by introducing you to a problem you didn't know you had.
