I don't know about billion dollar ideas, but I encourage you to make a product even if something similar exists.

If you squint enough there is nothing new under the sun and chances are that you will take a very long time to find something that hasn't already been done!

But doing your own product does several things - you learn a lot, you position yourself for future success, you see future ideas differently. And maybe you're okay for something to not be a billion dollar idea and you can outlast a venture funded product.

Maybe I'm just projecting, because I've put of building something for such a long time!

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atourgates 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I was joking about the billion dollar idea.

My actual "MVP" was some kind of automated neighborhood newsletter, that'd monitor emergency services radio traffic, and put together some kind of "here's what happened in your neighborhood" daily newsletter.

Maybe I could get it packaged in a hardware/software package that let anyone set one up in their neighborhood.

But I mostly got stuck in privacy concerns. I'm not sure it's a valuable public service to let people know that, for example, someone had a heart attack a few blocks over.

I did think about the scientific value of some kind of statistical database that process and recorded emergency services calls though. But mostly, my ideas for commercial and moral opportunities were half-baked at the point that I discovered citizen.

One of the technical challenges I came up against was finding transcription software that could semi-accurately transcribe UHF/VHF radio traffic. However, it looks like there's some progress that's been made there since I last checked: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/radiotransciptor-real-time-radio-spe...

	▲	toast0 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> But I mostly got stuck in privacy concerns. I'm not sure it's a valuable public service to let people know that, for example, someone had a heart attack a few blocks over. In the moment, notifying people who know CPR and may be nearby and able to get to a nearby location and start CPR before emergency services arrives is the base of PulsePoint [1], which seems like a useful public service. As a digest, yeah, I don't think any usefulness outweighs the invasion of privacy. Maybe just a count of health emergencies responded to for observing trends. [1] https://www.pulsepoint.org/
	▲	SpicyUme 5 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The privacy concern is real and not something I'd want to think about too hard myself. One night I heard sirens and checked one of the local scanner type sites. I could hear enough about the call, and that combined with a record of previous calls to that address made me wonder if I really wanted that information. Maybe some obfuscation of the previous codes to the address would have been enough to reduce the feeling of knowing too much. None of that is to say it isn't a good idea. I appreciate the ability to see roughly what is going on when I hear sirens. Even if the sites aren't always able to show the calls. I think highway patrol doesn't show up for me.
	▲	gosub100 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Many metro police are moving towards encrypted communications but it varies by location. Regarding medical emergencies, I'm pretty sure EMS just says "medical emergency" and gives the address. I've never heard them say specific patient conditions, although sometimes the ambulance can forward that to the ER. If there were any risk, it would be making it too easy for criminals to monitor and allow them to commit crime more effectively.
	▲	Royce-CMR 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I’d encourage you to pursue it. I remember the old @breakingnews on Twitter when it first started, people listening to police scanners and typing info-dense one liners on what they heard. To this day the best news service of my life (until someone bought it). A real time, AI snips version for my area in a running feed would be amazing. There are lots of formats and use cases; and the info is already out there. It’s a great idea. Don’t let citizen sway you away from it.

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ghurtado 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> I encourage you to make a product even if something similar exists.

This is very good advice: we often give up on "great ideas" once we find that they have already been done.

But the vast majority of people we consider successful did not invent anything completely new, they just made a better kind of XYZ, sometimes not even that dramatically different. If you think about it, it's a much more logical path to success than expecting to be the next DaVinci.