Business idea giveaway

Discussions
#1

Post ideas you’d like to see become businesses, pain points you’d like solved, etc. but you don’t have time to pursue.

I’ll start:

Social networks have the problem of people using one account for everything they want to talk about, but often you are only interested in part of their lives. Keyword/hashtag muting doesn’t do a good job.

A solution: a social network where, instead of having a Tweet or Post button, have two or more buttons, such as Personal, Professional, and Political so posts are automatically tagged and can be muted/unmuted en mass for that user. I.e. user writes a post and then has to choose if the post is personal OR professional OR whatever, and can only press one button to post. Have some logic to prevent people posting the same text under more than one tag without deleting the old post. Perhaps have a couple fixed buttons and a couple buttons which are configurable, so people could make a Sports button or the like to auto tag sports posts. Charge people each time they customize a button (and monetize the network in other ways, of course).

#2

Steve, that’s something I would love to see! For instance, on twitter, I have several different things I talk about: 1) “computer stuff” 2) startup stuff 3) bicycle racing, and 4) italian politics (in Italian), or just 5) life in Italy in either English or Italian. Clearly, the ‘audience’ for these things likely does not overlap in many cases.

That said, I see these as features for existing networks, rather than standalone businesses. I’m not sure you could build a competitor to twitter on this idea alone, in other words.

#3

Thanks David. I would certainly like the idea to be retrofitted to Twitter, but I’m not sure they have any incentive to do so. People should feel free to suggest this idea to the social networks they use. Ideally the tags people use to post and the tags people have muted for each person they follow would be handled on the server side. Twitter’s restrictive rules make it hard for this to be done by a new or existing client, AFAIK. Also, the tag would eat into the 140 characters available for a message, so ideally the tag would be in the tweet metadata instead.

Whether or not it’s a standalone business idea or just a key feature, I for one would pay $5/month to filter out all the food/weather/politics/sports messages from people I don’t know but who occasionally post something interesting on programming/game design/technology/business.

#4

Hi

That is definitely a pain point and one of the main reasons why I don’t consume a lot of stuff on Social networks, I just don’t get how to sift through all the trivialities.

I have another problem and there might already be a solution for that: I’d like to have some sort of “global address book/meta chat”. I have friends that prefer a certain channel to communicate, so I visit the channel to communicate with them (like via a Facebook chat).

But that can become messy when you need to check several channels. So I’d like to have a contact aggregator where I can see all my contacts and the messages we exchanged in one place, aggregated from several sources like facebook, email etc.

As I said, a solution for that may already exist.

#5
#6

I waste a hell of a lot of time reading news. It’s important to be informed, but they way I do it now is not effective.

I’d pay for a news filter. I’d be paying for less, but higher quality news. It would be delayed, necessarily, by fact checking, and waiting to see if a story was truly important. Rather than having updates every two seconds, updates would be provided only when something has actually happened. And, unlike mainstream news (which rapidly loses interest in stories once the blood is mopped up), important stories would be followed up on periodically. (What’s the current status of the Arab Spring?)

This wouldn’t be original journalism. That’s important, but there’s too much of that for me to handle already! (Although, I’d also pay to assure more & better original journalism.)

Instead, whoever ran this business would read, assess, and summarize existing journalism. An important part of the assessment would be fact-checking and filtering out speculation. As stories evolved, they would update one single entry for that topic. That page would include links back to the original articles. If I’m interested, I can subscribe to that page, but more likely, I’ll wait to be notified that a major development has occurred.

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#7

I would definitely pay for iOS version of RescueTime. I contacted them and they said that given the current iOS framework restrictions this can not be done. This solution is available for Android phone.

If I had the mental bandwith or who knows in the future, I may pursue it. I hate wasting time on iPhone. So this App will identify which Apps/Games are wasting my precious time on iPhone/iPad

Thanks

#8

A physical business idea, but definitely a multimillion dollar opportunity: office chair piston* replacement. Seems like every conference room is full of chairs with failed pistons. A service to replace them should be able to make some money, esp. if they get state/federal contracts.

  • the part which holds the chair seat up at a certain height.
#9

What do you think about creating a new category for posting this type of business ideas?

“Business idea giveaway” is a great name IMO.

1 Like
#10

  1. Product photography for ecommerce.

  2. Baremetrics for magento.

That second one I’m going to build once my first product is mature, unless you beat me to it :wink:

1 Like
#11

http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-226-everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-churn-but-were-afraid-to-ask talked about the difficulty of tracking churn and the expense of setting up churn tracking. Perhaps providing metrics about a SaaS app’s churn is a viable (small) SaaS business. With the data from customers, you could also compile anonymized statistics about churn in different kinds of businesses and use them to create reports, drive traffic, etc.