A Startup A Day

Cookbooks, websites, T.V. shows.  There’s lots of help out there for any aspiring chefs.  But where’s the innovation?  It’s all the same – throw together some ingredients, cook it for a certain amount of time, and you’re done.  It’s amazing to me that an industry this big and profitable is so incredibly void of innovation.

Today’s idea is a completely different take on the concept of the “virtual cookbook”.  I’ve thought of several different problems that I personally encounter, and a few ways to solve them.

Problem:  Finding the right set of recipes is too time consuming. 

Solution:  Woot-cipes!  Each day the site would have one featured set of 4-5 recipes that work together to create a complete meal.

Problem:  Cookbooks are full of recipes that have ingredients people are allergic to or just don’t like

Solution:  Users would create a profile indicating where they live, the types of foods they don’t want to eat and other basic preferences (vegetarian, fast vs gourmet, heathy vs greasy).  The daily recipe would be customized to the specific users.  Also, based on the location and time of year, the recipes would offer fresh vegetables and regionally-specific foods.

Problem:  Many recipes call for ingredients that you don’t currently have.

Solution:  A full shopping list that pulls ingredients for all 4-5 recipes that can easily be printed and brought to a store.  The ingredients would be separated into catagories such as “Probably have on hand”, “Probably need to buy fresh”.  For example, “flour” would be in the “on hand” catagory, while “artichokes” would be in the “buy fresh” catagory.  This could also be tied into a grocery delivery service to automatically get the ingredients delivered to your door.

Problem:  It’s difficult to time the preparation of several dishes so they are all ready at the same time

Solution:  Provide a breakdown of the meal preparation not by individual recipe steps, but by time.  Here’s how it would work:

45 minutes before meal – Chop onions, carrots, and peppers for stir fry.  Pre-heat oven to 350 for cornbread. 

30 mins before meal – Brown beef for stir fry.  Mix cornbread ingredients.  Start water boiling for green beans.

And so on and so on…

What do you guys think?  Am I way off base here and there are lots of innovative cooking sites out there I just don’t know about?  Let me know in the comments below!

OMG!  I just thought of a GREAT idea.  It is a “Jump to Conclusions” mat. You see, it would be this mat that you would put on the floor… and would have different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO.

Michael Bolton: That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life.

All right, so this one started off as a joke.  But then I got to thinking…maybe it’s not such a crazy idea after all…  So here goes.  Today’s idea is a Facebook app that allows you to post your own “Jump to Conclusions” mat on your profile.  It would be very simple, you’d ask a question, hit the “jump” button, and there would be some funny animation showing the guy from Office Space jumping on a conclusion.  In many ways it’s the perfect Facebook app – simple, fun, highly viral.  As long as you can skirt around any potential legal issues (play the satire card?), it should be a hit.

And the monetization scheme?  That one is easy – just find the nearest moving vehicle. 

I’m off to Colorado for the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.  If anyone knows a good bar in the Denver area, let me know in the comments below.  

Wow.  That is one incredibly boring title.  I should change it to “Top Ten Reasons Why Bikini Models Think the iPhone Will Kill Microsoft”.  And throw in some pictures of lolcats. 

Anyway, back to domains.  As the Internet has grown, more and more people are skipping search engines and are entering a domain right in the nav bar.  For example, if I’m looking for a restaurant in Seattle, I can type in www.SeattleRestaurants.com into a browser.  Now, check out that link.  Someone has purchased that domain, but instead of a page with content about Seattle Restaurants, it’s just full of random non-targeted ads.  I’m sure the domain owner is making some decent money from this domain, but just think about how much more they would be earning if the content was even slightly relevant.

Today’s idea is a web service that provides specific content for a parked domain.  Here’s how this could work.  A domain owner could submit the domain along with several tags describing the type of content requested for that page.  The service would search sites like Wikipedia or Yelp to pull in some relevant data.  This data would be sent to a human reviewer (maybe via a crowdsourcing service like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) who could verify the data and contribute additional data via a Google Live search.  Once the data has been gathered, the data would be added to the content database and available via a web service.  The original content requester could then access this data using their domain as the unique key.

Sound complicated for the requester?  Here’s the catch.  This service wouldn’t be aimed at the individual user, it would be sold as an add-on service to existing registrars like GoDaddy.  The registrar could do all the backend calls to and from the service, and would be responsible for displaying the content and managing the advertising.  Our service would just outsource the raw data gathering piece, which is not part of the core competency of the registrar’s business.

What do you guys think about this one?  It’s not a simple quickie Web 2.0 consumer-focused site like most of my ideas, but I think there’s definitely some untapped value here for someone who can execute this properly.

In honor of tomorrow’s holiday here in the States, today’s idea is all about the difficult dilema many of us face when a semi-obscure holiday rolls around.  Let’s take Sweetest Day as an example.  John and Sally Hallmark would have me drop a couple bills on some cheesy card and a creepy little stuffed animal.  But, of course, it’s not about the gifts – it’s the thought that counts.

Today’s idea is a solution to that problem.  You want to do something nice for your sweetie, but don’t want to give in to the conformist pressure of the greeting card moguls.  Instead of giving in, why not surprise your sweetie with an IOU for a fun little surprise sometime within the next six weeks.  The Holiday Surprise site allows you to choose a gift package and print out a nice certificate to give on the holiday.  The HS site would randomly choose a day in the future to deliver the gifts.  This could be something like a dozen roses delivered to the recipient’s workplace and a card that would be timed to arrive on the chosen day.