Project/business ideas, loosely prioritized - Aug 1

01 Aug 2023 | Tags: creative ∗ project_ideas ∗ funemployment ∗

As I mention in my badge post I already had a quit by day for a while. Because of that, I could plan. Or at least, dump ideas into a notebook.

Section of a notebook that I started some point 2020 or early 2021. 1

Not going to list all of them but I figured it’d be worth putting the better ones somewhere, plus some new ones that’ve come up in the time since².

Ideas I bothered to flesh out until I realized this post was taking too long #

…intent had been for this to be a “quick fun diversion” from other things; then I realized I was stressing myself out looking into the viability of things lol.

DISCLAIMER: I’d rate this entire thing as maybe a 5/10 on the “how fully thought out is this” scale.

Reasonable Medium-Sized Projects #

• Quantified-self Digitized Journals (+ Customizable Journal Stamps)
  • What: App + website that is a digital data companion to journals (freeform or bullet) that you may have.
    • OCR + template editing system where you can digitally mark how to structure uploaded content (ie, “always dump boxes with the label ‘art’ in the upper left corner into a file”, “interpret normal pages as journal entries indexed by date”, “record items in the box labelled ‘mood’ as an integer”)
      • Some sort of system to order the template designs as a stamp for notebooks.
    • Site provides intelligence like sentiment analysis on freeform text, correlations between different fields (ex. food/exercise with marked or sentiment analyze’d happiness, etc), summarizations + observations about what’s happened.
  • Why:
    • Things I think are useful:
      • Journalling in a physical notebook, so that it’s one less screen that I’m looking at, especially as a wind-down before bed
      • Quantified self style tracking, to know that stuff is trending correctly for goals
      • Auto-magical data analysis that can figure out subtle correlations that I might not notice on my own.
    • Things that don’t exist to make the above easy:
      • If you’re going from a physical journal you gotta OCR it all, and there’s nothing that’ll nicely automagically format it for you
        • …plus you’re either making all the columns yourself every time and it’s annoying or you have to buy a journal that has fixed lines that you might realize a little while in don’t actually fit what you want ³
      • If you’re doing a digital system well.. then it’s digital and you can run stuff on top of this already.
  • Commentary: This is probably a medium-sized company/small-business as opposed to some sort of large venture-backed thing⁴. That said, even if no one else built it, I’d probably make it just cause… I’d use it.

• Pet + Baby Monitor w/ Behavior Detection + Tracking; Interaction Suggestions + Non-verbal Creature Translation. :P
  • What: AI-powered baby + pet monitor platform
  • Inspiration: Friend had a kid; she was able to pick up on some needs of the kid (ex. feeding/burping) better than her husband but her husband was able to pick up on others better than she was (ex. temperature/diaper cleaning). I’d also been doing a decent bit of petsitting for free housing and it was fine but could tell I probably wasn’t picking up on subtleties of the animals as much as I’d have liked to.
    • Plus, a dog translater is just cool.
  • Risks: Hardware lol. Also definitely seems like there’s some companies (Cubo AI, Eufy, Furbo, etc) working on it… answer here might be pure software play, but still.

Useful things I don’t think I’d build #

Either cause they’re features, not a business, or involve things I would (personally) probably never want to get into.

• Button on recipe websites to auto-add ingredients to a Whole Foods, Instacart, [insert grocery delivery service of choice] cart.
  • Did a quick Google and looks like Instacart made a Chrome plugin for this recently; there’s also this plugin from 2020.
  • A straight-up button probably also just nicer though.
  • Why I wouldn’t build this: Makes more for the grocery delivery provider to be the one to make this. There’d also (probably) need to be some notion of a referral kickback to the recipe site makers to make the inclusion of this worthwhile.
• A weekly meal prep kit delivery service
  • The term “weekly meal prep” as it’s used by delivery services as compared to once-a-week-at-home weekly meal prepping are related but slightly different. Notably, the former tends to be “pick single meals until it adds up to a week’s worth of food” whereas the latter is “make a bunch of base things, the linear combination thereof (plus simple sauces/seasonings/etc) which make for a great meal”
  • Why I wouldn’t build this: I don’t want to be in the business of running a grocery store (similar to above). Also, I bet someone’s had the same thought at this, but they’re just dying under the inability to SEO cause of subtley overloaded terms… Also probably another feature for the grocery delivery services to make.⁵

Long-term moonshots that are too early to build now #

• AR-glasses + body sensor system that detects emotional stress; preempts bad behavior
  • Think: You’re home from a busy, stressful day at work. You come home and the entire place is a mess. Your child is being needy and terrible and loud and making everything worse. You know you shouldn’t snap, but you’re overwhelmed.
  • Commentary: There’s prolly a Black Mirror episode about this sort of behavior management somewhere. Also, the line between “useful”, “annoying”, and “cringe” is a fine one.

Stuff in the original notebook (# for my reference) #

• Legal startup where you take photos of legal contract and it tells you clauses in particular (both in the contract that you’re dealing with and against public laws) to look into (1)
• Camera-enabled TV attachment that records you while working out and gives you form suggestions (2)
  • Could be tied/related to a projector
  • Fitness chain from this idea (3)
  • …networked system where image data from AR glasses (ie in fitness classes) (4)
• AR glasses apps
  • …that tracks food you eat + calorie intake (5)
  • …behavior + activity + time tracker (6)
    • Automated correlation analysis for this (7)
  • thought on these - you don’t actually need a display for any of this right now.
• Community-building as a service (7)
  • I have no idea what I was thinking here; I’m assuming it’s someone that sets up social media + events and the like, white labelled somehow?
• House manager (ex for cleaners, laundry, etc) as a service (8)
  • This one definitely inspired by r/FATfire
• breakdown.care (therapy chatbot-ish website)
  • I actually still own this domain and should maybe put something there.
• Civics + Staking
  • Stake an amount that you want for public works to tackle an issue (ex. pot holes, police) (20)
  • Social media site where you stake some degree of reputation to post/get more of an audience/etc (21)
• NSFW things
  • Straight up chatbot parter with stable diffision content (51)
  • ^ but platform where individuals can design avatars and the partners are those (ie sketchy character.ai lol) (52)
  • ^ but with therapy for individuals built in, as they develop the relationships with the characters (53)
• Record-only life transcript device; subscription for analysis on top (54)
• Hotel/nomad chain where you need to show minimum net worth to stay but cheap otherwise (55)
  • Imo, wifitribe seems pretty decent for this
• Boda borg but bigger (ex escape room + climbing wall + educational programs) (22)
  • I want someone to have this be a thing. Have it be an alternative to after school programs or otherwise some form for moderately-stimulating childcare.
• ML-feature-y things
  • System that differents between “this is a guess of what is right” and “this is something almost certainly definitely correct” (like a confidence measure or self-calibration but more strong than that? not a fully formed thought but I always felt like LLM systems were missing that and they’re out there in smaller papers but…) (34)
• More general investigation-y things
  • Comparitive study of beuracracy of different countries (33)
• Resurrect old OKCupid with all the quizzles lol (35)
  • … but take the user embeddings and make events for folks to meet up based on interest (also physical proximity) (36)
  • … also for friend dating rather than just dating-dating (36b)

In addition to all of these, I wanna make a blog post on the feasibility of someone like Elon building up an end-to-end (ie, starting from oil + minerals) supply chain for rockets in Uganda (+ estimates of needed military protection), since there’s an equator crossing there and that country is sorta stable. But that’s an idea completely divorced for the rest of these.