Startup Weekend is rad. I skipped the first 10 or so of them we had in Seattle because I stupidly thought I was too cool for it. “Every weekend is a startup weekend for me,” I’d say. I finally went to my first one back in November, and recruited a killer team of 3 people (Jason Strutz, Hisun Kim, and Darrell Garbe) to work on SeeSaw (a mobile social app similar to Hashable).

It was an adrenaline rush to work in a competitive environment with great people. I now always recommend Startup Weekend to people looking for programmers or designers. Personally, I enjoyed having the chance to pitch an idea, get people’s responses, and do a basic implementation to get the idea out of my brain.

In preparation for the next event, as a follow up to my post on evaluating ideas, here are some of the ideas I’ve noodled-up the last 6 months or so. When evaluating these, I’m trying to place an emphasis on customer pain, clear business model, and the execution of the idea.

The spreadsheet ranks ideas based on the prospective market, virality, retention, monetization, and level of effort. I have a proclivity for social apps because they are more viral (and I just love them).

I’m eager for your feedback. Please leave a comment if one of these ideas catches your eye. Especially leave a comment if you think an idea is dumb (to save me time working on it).

Use this link to open full spreadsheet.

You should always share your ideas, by the way. In this day and age, if you find yourself saying “we’re in stealth mode,” or worse – just keeping an idea to yourself, you’re stupid. Remember, it’s the execution that matters anyway.

Every week I get a phone call or request to meet from an entrepreneur with a big idea. I am all too familiar with that uneasy feeling you have when an idea takes over your brain. You start to feel like you are a slave to the idea, that the implementation is inevitable. You feel burdened with the realization of the idea. You have to do it.

The problem is, ideas truly are inevitable. In fact, that’s WHY people are so passionate about their ideas. they think because it is inevitable – that THEY have to be the one to do it. Our brains are part of a biological, social, and technical evolutionary system that naturally removes in-efficiencies and synthesizes new stuff. Most are bad ideas that don’t survive, many are good ideas whose time has not come, and a few are good ideas that explode. It is easy to under-estimate the passion required to bring even the best (most-inevitable) idea to fruition.

I’m writing this for my own benefit. Ideas are inevitable, timing is critical, and execution makes all the difference. I want to be better at identifying ideas that just need execution, and be better at executing them.

Say you invented a better weight loss pill. One pill a day and you never put on weight. How will people find out about it? How will you get them to trust you enough to buy it? How will you fund your first batch of it, get it approved for market, differentiate it from your competitors? “One person will be so impressed that word of it will spread and then it will be on Oprah” is not a good answer.

Entrepreneurship is about partnerships. Creating value for everyone involved. That’s the execution of an idea. Ideas are inevitable, but they don’t come to fruition automatically.

Image via Wikipedia

Lookmarks is my simple link sharing site that died under the weight of link spammers (both bots and humans). I’ve been trying to think of a way to re-work the site to capture the enthusiasm of all those unexpected “customers”. I’ve got the site half-way ported to Google App Engine, and I’m taking an internet marketing course (I’m ashamed to admit) that I’m sure will influence my ideas further.

Goal

The goal is to build a quality link directory by encouraging self promotion and harnessing it to enforce quality (like Mahalo or Wikia but with controls instead of paid editors). The business model is AdWords and paid sponsored links.

Idea

Create a “digg” like system where you only ever vote on random links. You gain or lose credibility points based on how many people later vote the same as you.

Detail

The new Lookmarks works like a very simple social bookmarking site (with a search function), except by default links you add are only visible to yourself (and your friends).

In order to make a link appear public (and to other users that are not your friends) without having other people bookmark it, you must spend Lookmarks points (or dollars). You presumably only want to do this when you are trying to promote your own site. Once public, the link appears in anonymous search results and is indexed by Google (what the link spammers want).

Points are awarded to users based on their ability to predict how many other people will bookmark or “vote up” links. The site doesn’t allow you to go around voting on links because this would allow collusion between fake user accounts. One user could follow around another, bookmark everything and earn a ton of points. You can however, visit a special voting page that presents random links that you can vote on. You are presented with a screen like:

When searching for “Seattle restaurants” do you think most people would find the link below useful, informative, or entertaining… Yes or No

The prediction scoring in this case grants you one point for all the people after you that vote the same as you, and subtracts a point for everybody who votes differently. The volume of random links prevents collusion (the database is already seeded with 10s of thousands of questionable links). Even if you teamed up to vote yes on everything with the letter “X” in it, you’d have to wade through too many links to make the points add up.

Once you’d acquired some points, you could spend/deposit them on one of your links to keep it public even if it received negative votes. For example, you could put 10 points on it to counter-act 10 negative votes.

Just to re-iterate, only link spammers and super-contributors would care about earning points. Normal users could ignore them.

Issues, Questions, Refinements

1. Sites like delicious, faves don’t appear to need a points system – so captchas and spam filters are presumably enough to throw away the spam (discouraging the spammers instead of harnessing them).
2. Is the visibility of points (or spending points) necessary? We could just weight the votes of people who make best predictions. The points should probably be visible though as motivation.
3. Could streamlining the voting so that when you are submitting your link, you have to vote right then and there if you want to make your link public. Include paypal pay now button.
4. Scoring would be slow to get going. Could give everyone 5 points to start. Could make “random” selection weighted towards links that had 1 vote to speed up scoring.
5. How would you combine the UI of Digg and Delicious? Since use cases are different, should probably keep them separate. Could be separate views on the same database.
6. Would it be more efficient to force comparison between two links instead of voting on one?
7. Can I add one more feature that makes the world a better place (like improve link sharing for teams) to make this whole venture worthwhile.
8. Other random idea: award one point for each external domain that links to lookmarks (ick !)

What do you think of the points system? Should it be visible or invisible? The question is not whether or not you’d use the site, but whether link spammers would bother to go through the voting exercise.