random_user

I can't really argue with your logic here. Yes, ideally you want to do something you are passionate about.

Now, to be fair, that isn't always the case. I have a small business running almost in auto-pilot that is generating probably $10K a year. Not a ton of money. At the same time, it requires almost no attention. I am not passionate about it. It isn't a scalable business. With a lot of effort it might generate $20K, tops.

That said, yes, if something is going to scale and grow beyond a hobby business you really have to want to be in it because business is hard work. For me it is easy to become passionate about something if it starts making money. It might not be the love of my life, but I enjoy making money. I hope that's not a bad word on HN.

[6] Hold on to it

    - Do nothing right now
    - Elections and voting will never go away
    - Keep thinking and look for other opportunities to build a
      product or brand around the domain

[5] Sell the domain

    - Less work
    - Far less money than a successful site could generate
    - Currently working on other products, including:
          - Redoing an existing mobile app to start monetizing
          - Planning another mobile app with a partner
          - Chipping away at two web projects
    - Only the right person or organization is going to put the right
      number on the table not to make me feel like a moron after
      selling it.  My guess is that this is somewhat unlikely to
      happen but you never know.

[4] A platform for voting and survey taking online

    - Not necessarily limited to politics
    - Site provides the tools to organize voting for whatever purpose
    - Embeddable voting forms 
    - Possibly self-hosted solutions
    - Free and a couple, or more, paid tiers
    - Mobil integration
    - Aimed at C2B, clubs and any instance of needing to get people
      to vote or opine on something
    - Provide analytics, etc.
    - Not a new idea; many competitors
    - The engineer in me likes this far more than any of the above
    - Monetization is based on actually selling a product
    - Could also have ad-based revenue in the free tier
    - If approach is unique, intelligent and hits a nerve the service
      could be an attractive acquisition target

[3] Build something that Democrats or Republicans can use

    - Make it a useful get-out-the-vote tool for young people
    - Aim squarely at providing it as a service to one of the parties
    - Perhaps even look at selling the site to on of them
    - It still requires articles and becoming an educator of sorts
    - Lightweight content that is easy to digest by a younger audience
    - Not much effort in terms of immediate monetization
    - Focus should be on content and tools that bring that younger
      audience to the table
    - Not an easy task
    - Two major election events coming up in 2014 and 2016.  These
      will be highly contested and are potential opportunities for
      a brand like "ClickTheVote" to rise to the surface.
    - People getting more of their news and info online.  With elections
      taking place constantly a brand like "ClickTheVote" could be
      positioned to be the party-independent go-to resource for
      relevant information
    - Probably easier to liquidate than [1] and [2] but just as hard to
      build and position

[2] Political blog, again aimed at younger audience

    - Also easy to setup: Wordpress
    - Seeding with posts happens more organically than forum
      because one or two people write
    - Probably takes just as long as [1] to build an audience 
    - No need to depend on members for content, which can be 
      a big advantage
    - Possibly better SEO ranking due to issues with user generated
      content sites and how search engines treat them
    - The easiest ways to gain traction are the extremes:
      - Be the voice of reason: analytical, research and fact based
      - Be an asshole at one or another extreme of any issue
        (Howard Stern "shock jock")
    - Far more people will levitate towards extreme views than 
      sit there and read through well reasoned arguments backed
      with facts, calculations, models, etc.
    - Have to be comfortable with this reality and be able to 
      consistently be that persona under a pseudonym
    - Still competing with biggies
    - Monetization: AdSense, affiliate, etc.
    - Maybe even crazy ebooks
    - Not an appealing idea intellectually speaking but have to 
      recognize that in today's political climate the extremes
      probably convert better than a reasoned middle ground
    - Not sure about liquidation.  Could be a flipper site.

[1] Political discussion forum aimed at a younger audience

    - Relatively easy to setup.  vBulletin or phpBB would do.
    - Needs seeding with lots of posts in order to even begin to pull
      real people in.
    - Fighting spam posts is a daily reality.
    - Site depends on converting enough eyeballs into posters
      (not just lurkers) in order to gain position and value
    - Monetization through AdSense
    - If it gets real traffic you can sell advertising space directly
    - Some affiliate potential
    - Liquidation is far more likely to take the form of selling
      through a site flipping service

Anyone serious enough wanting to have a conversation about what I've got on the table can easily contact me off-list and have detailed discussions. I've already had a number of them with people who reached out.

I understand you might want to see more info exposed publicly. Sorry. Not going to happen. I suppose you might not understand this until you experience what it is like to be open and have a good opportunity taken away from you by a competitor. Having lived that wonderful experience I chose to conduct things using a different approach.

Well, I think we can agree on some points. There are tons of web businesses that can be started and run with $100 per month...you don't even need to buy the hardware. All you need is a few Linode's and you are good to go.

At the same time, there are web businesses that need cash, people and resources. VC's can be a good match for that type of business.

The other variable is time to market. This is something I did not fully appreciate when I was younger. There are lots of cases where time to market can make or break a business. This is yet another variable or qualifier on the concept of good vs. bad ideas. An otherwise good idea can be rendered bad simply because of an inability to get to market fast enough. Often times this is a matter of the money necessary to bring to bare the resources necessary to accelerate execution.

As is often the case, there are tons of ways to approach a problem.

Thanks for the recommendation. If I could use a bad analogy I'd compare the two world, setting up servers and engineering software to selling marble and being a sculpture.

Part of what drives those of us who write code is that we use that code as a creative outlet. I'll generally extend that to the process of designing products, be it hardware or software. Mechanical design isn't about setting up the CNC machine but rather about the creativity and the designer's expression of interesting ideas. I've walked away from designing sheet metal parts with a huge sense of, yes, artistic and creative accomplishment. Designing something that is beautiful and well done in your eyes are the highs that drive some of us. Software or electrical engineering have similar embodiments of the same concept.

I can do Linux at a reasonable level and know most of the tools you listed, some superficially and others reasonably well. However, setting up servers isn't something that appeals to me as an occupation. At some level it would be dishonest to go work for someone knowing that I would not bring a degree of passion to the job. As an entrepreneur I would feel cheated if an employee took a job with me just to get by and not to knock it out of the park. There's a huge difference between a business where everyone is really engaged and one where nearly everyone thinks "it's just a job". Perhaps the canonical example of this is the contrast between a rocking startup and a large, stratified and somewhat stagnant company with tens of thousands of employees. There's a huge difference between what both of those can accomplish given the same time and resources.

I am not diminishing what you do. You seem to be passionate about supporting servers and that's fantastic. Those of us who prefer to create software products need people who can provide us with solid systems on which our software can run reliably and efficiently.

A long way of saying: It's not for me.

Cash is like the blood running through the veins of a venture. You need it to survive. You also need it to walk and you need more of it to run. There are web businesses that can certainly be entirely bootstrapped, sometimes by a single coder/designer/everything.

On the other hand, most businesses that scale need more people and more resources and more of everything. This is where the "it's just a server in a rack" model breaks down quickly. Scaling means, at the very least, hiring people and providing them with all of the resources they'll need to do their work. You could very easily be at a $50K per month burn rate very quickly after launch, say, thee months. That doesn't account for legal fees and other expenses that might not be obvious on first inspection.

If you have the money and the ability to scale a business and are willing to risk it all, by all means, do it. You don't need external money for this.

Most of the young folks who seem to make-up the HN audience there are lacking three things: money, experience and the business network. All three of these are critical when you need to press on the accelerator and go. Learning while doing is possible but far less than ideal. If a VC can offer smart money this is probably the best bet for young HN'ers. In this context "smart money" means that a VC makes an investment and also contributes experience, guidance and contacts to the process. This can often mean the difference between success and failure.

In many ways this concept of a good vs. a bad idea has to be qualified with a set of variables. Off the top of my head:

    Startup cost
    Market
    Competition
    Barrier to entry
    Cost of sales
    Capital intensity
    Regulatory landscape
    Technology risk
    Intellectual property ownership
    Intellectual property minefield
    Domain expertise
    Funding
    Business operating expertise
    Marketing expertise
    Local labor requirements
    

I could go on and I could expand on all of the above but that's besides the point which is that a business that isn't a hobby and can scale is far more than a server in a rack.

Money comes with side effects and it also comes in various grades. At the extremes you'll find smart money and dumb money. The latter is the most dangerous.

Not all money is created equal.

Email address now in my profile. Here it is:

[email protected]

I'd appreciate contact with identifying information such a LinkedIn profile. I'll reply in kind, of course.

With respect, I think you are drinking too much of the cool-aid. Yes, in general terms you are right. The difference is that if you have thirty years of entrepreneurship under your belt, having tried, failed and succeeded you should develop a good sense of the good, the bad and the ugly. I am not coming here as an idealist who's never done a thing to proclaim I can save the world.

No. I have logged somewhere in the range of 500 ideas over the last three years. Most are not what I would consider to be opportunities. And that's the way it usually goes. I am fairly certain there are a few that are very interesting and, yes, they are true opportunities waiting for funding and execution. One of them is based on years of using similar services in the context of running my own business and then realizing there's an interesting approach that could do very well. The other, as I said in another comment, is one that's the result of constantly thinking and being involved in one way or another in a couple of market segments and finally having "seen the light" that connects the two worlds. The markets are there for the taking. It's all about funding and execution.