These are some ideas for products, services, or general life improvement that I’ve had over time.
- A better way to track your habits. This isn’t really social right now like a lot of things are - if a group of people want to get together and improve their life in some way, such as by exercising daily, what service is there to let them easily do that?
- Inspired by some new years resolutions I’ve made, but no way to be held accountable.
- Better software for runners (and similar endurance sports that have an improved experience when done with groups)
- Route planning, see what routes are popular in a given location
- Good for travel, and can crowdsource
- Connecting with other runners nearby - create some sort of post for when and where you want to run, verified users, etc
- Somewhat similar to Strava, but with better route planning?
- Personal finance: A simple service that sends you an email (or message or something) with your weekly, monthly, yearly spending summarized
- Plaid API, can get transactions data
- Many similar services exist, but are either too complicated to setup/use, or their categorizations aren’t good enough. Providing an easily digestable email with key points could provide info a lot of people may want
- This one would be very barebones
- Personal finance: A chatbot for your finances. Why do I have to regularly check my checking or go into an app to determine my spending?
- Can ask basic questions such as how much did i spend last week? How much did I spend on food? What can I spend on entertainment this month to stay under my yearly goal?
- Simple queries of, how much did my investments return over the last week/month/year? How much did I invest over the last week/month/year? How much do I have in my 401k as tof today? What is my latest credit card bill amount? etc
- Link accounts will be a nightmare
- Literal billion dollar business
- Software for the subletting process - really broken right now, primarily done through FB groups
- Limited options, have to manually search for it, don’t really know your subletter or who you’re subletting to
- No checks whatsoever done on individual’s ability to pay, primarily done through trust, college students don’t really have ability to run comprehensive background/credit checks
- How to build trust into the process? Should it be similar to leasing an apartment?
- Issues with scams, stolen identities, people pretending to be someone they’re not
- related idea: use Facebook API to notify users in real-time via email or message when a new sublet is posted that matches their parameters
- Better software (i.e. enterprise) for usage by doctors, to improve the patient experience and to let the doctor have more time with their patient, and focus on their job, the software should be an out of the way thing.
- Video conferencing with patients as well
- Billing
- Better software for learning languages
- Duolingo is great, but what about a more social experience
- App where 2 users can compete to see who can translate more sentences correctly over a timeframe
- “Living CS spec”
- Often, a spec is posted and there are tons on questions on piazza to clarify it
- A student who wants to succeed in the project will generally have to not only understand the spec, but also search through all the piazza posts to get clarification about ambiguous parts
- What if the spec was a living document, and discussion was done directly by highlighting parts of the spec and having notes on it pop up on the side? Really similar idea to hypothes.is
- Basically can be done in google docs, but with a more streamlined discussion feature.
- One-click vacation booking
- Enter in your destination, some preferences, etc and retrieve a list of possible vacation arrangements
- Including plane tickets, airbnbs, reservations for food, things to do, etc
- Click one of these, enter info, and it is able to book everything
- Might be useful for recurring trips that people take
- Specify parameters, but the key is to book everything in a compatible way (i.e. hotels and flight) in a single click
- Social media feedback extractor
- App/API that summarizes how your company/product is being perceived on social media right now Start by scraping reddit/twitter, and use NLP to extract sentiment
- Provide weekly email or digest about products/companies or potentially competitors
- Could be a market for this, as a lot of companies have slack channels where app reviews are posted, and engineers are @’d when someone sees a review talking about a potential bug
- Potentially provide as a plugin for shopify shops?
- Lots of startups manually look through twitter/reddit for feedback about their product
- NPS data analyzer
- Lots of enterprise software companies have options to not only rate your experience after using the product but also write about any issues you’ve faced
- Company either doesn’t look at these and only values the score, or have to spend their own resources either manually analyzing the data or using NLP
- What if there was a service to do this for you as an API?
- Could figure out positive sentiments, if there are any negatives, and even uncover potential bugs
- Integrate with bugsnag/airbrake/user logs
- Similar to delighted
- Responsible investing solution
- Vanguard is great though
- Robinhood is great, but a common criticism is that it encourages uninformed investing/stock market speculation
- Robinhood encourages day trading
- What if there was an app similar to robinhood, but a fund for retirement or something like that? Investing in indexes/bonds etc, without fees
- Probably similar to robo advisors, Betterment, Wealthfront come to mind
- Too complicated and market is too large