Ask HN: I have three good ideas. Help me choose idea 1, 2, or 3.
Hi guys,

I have three good ideas, each of which I'd be capable of creating. But they're all significant investments of my time, and I really need help deciding which one is better.

My goals are: a business that will provide me with a reasonable income, in an interesting problem space, that will grow quickly allowing me to become self employed.

Having made a decision I can work much more quickly on the best idea.

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Idea 1. Decent Performance Tools for Linux

Problem: Performance data on Linux is distributed in many places, obfuscated, and very poorly documented.

Idea: This started out as a better version of the unix top command that I mentioned on Hacker News at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=405361. I'd like to expand on this to offer a full suite of performance analysis tools - eg, an visual strace analyser, allowing you to:

* highlight errors

* focus on just what happened to a particular file

* fold 'the looking through every folder in ld.co.conf' into a neat summary of whether a library was found or not

* allow context for each recorded system call, eg, what each system call argument means, what package owns files being operated on, etc.

Pros:

* Its an area few people have explored, that I'm interested in.

Cons:

* I haven't figured out a decent way to monetize this. The community is used to free tools. Perhaps a Ghostscript style setup, where older releases are Open Sourced after a year, but the latest features require a subscription?

* Unix people often blindly prefer the way that Unix implements anything by default over alternatives - selling to them could be frustrating.

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Idea 2. Overseas Buying Agent

Problem: When you travel, you can often find particular clothing brands are cheaper overseas. Converse is cheap in the US, but expensive everywhere else. Hugo Boss is cheap in Germany, but expensive in the UK. Australian Swimwear labels are cheap in Australia, but expensive in the US. Agent Provocateur is available in the UK, but sometimes not available at all overseas. Prada is cheap in Italy. But you can't travel all the time.

Idea: A web based overseas buying service. Full service, deliberately targeted at the fashion market, not a re-posting service. Users would log in, provide some instructions, and have a human agent purchase whatever they need in another country. The agent would open the package, insert a card, send the now 'as new' (but second hand) goods onto the user.

Pros: As an Australia -> UK expat, I have good contacts in Australia, the UK, Germany and the US. The business could be quite fun. My wife is in the fashion industry.

Cons: Potential for legal hassles, even though the goods are now second hand. Can I rely on my close friends to work, even if they're being paid?

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Idea 3. Security Analysis Tool

Problem: Large business need to check server's compliance to a known standard (eg, ISO security standards) and produce a report stating the compliance results. Have noticed in my last two day jobs that the solutions to do this are incredibly poor - unpackaged software, which don't comply with modern operating systems (eg, the Linux definition files are for Solaris circa 1992), far too many false positives, and no proper guidelines to actually fixing the servers.

Pros: I know businesses want these tools. They're easy to program. The competition is both technically poor, and poor to look at (making it hard to sell).

Cons: I'd be competing with some very large software companies.