A Startup A Day

Just got a comment from Justin asking where I’ve been. The simple truth is that I’ve given in to my innate laziness and have been posting all of my new startup ideas over on Twitter. What’s nice is that instead of needing to find the time to write up a full post around each idea, I can instead just throw out the ideas in real time, especially if I’m not right in front of my computer. The basics are there, and definitely feel free to reply if you want more details about any idea.

You can follow me at http://www.twitter.com/astartupaday.

Wow – just checked the blog and realized that it’s been almost two months since my last post.  I know I’m a slacker, but that’s bad even for my loose standards.

Lots has been going on over here, but the biggie was a long and amazing trip to Tanzania.  It’s something that Heather and I have been planning since the early days of our relationship, and the major component of our around-the-world-in-five-years, pre-family travel adventures. 

I’m not going to go into too much detail here, partly because I like to keep this blog’s gaze focused away from my navel, and partly because it’s difficult to find the right words to describe the experience.  I returned with some great photos, but like any good travel experience, the real takeaway is the slight alteration to my sense of perspective.  That, and the unforgettable memories that will be forever shared between me and my beautiful wife.

Anyway, here’s some pics, and stay tuned for more of the usual stuff coming soon.

Tomorrow’s the big day – the Startup Weekend crew are back in Seattle for another fun-filled, three-day, caffeine-and-subversion-fueled, startup-creatin’ marathon.  And just like last year, I just plain forgot to sign up and the darn thing sold out again.  But, as luck would have it, I sent out a sad little tweet that happened to catch the attention of this year’s SWS orgainzer (the esteemed Robert Eickmann) who extended me an invite to take one of the last-minute cancelation spots!  Big thanks to Robert – not just for the invite, but for opening my eyes to the real power of Twitter.

Anyway, to help get ready for this awesome event, I’m going to dig through the archives to revive some of my favorite ideas – and even post one of my all-time favorite ideas that I’ve purposely held back in the off chance I might actually get around to implementing it someday.  I’ll probably be pitching one of these ideas tomorrow, but definitely want to throw a few more out there to other SWSer’s who may be looking for a bit of inspiration.

Idea #1 – Raising John Stamos

So here’s the idea I think I’m going to pitch for tomorrow.  This is an idea I’ve had for a long time, and actually was almost the idea I used for the first episode of “A Startup A Week”, but changed my mind at the last minute after getting inspired by John Wood’s amazing “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World” book.  Here’s how it would work.  It’s an iPhone app that follows the basic format as the Tamagotchi or (fluff)Friends virtual pet – but with a twist. 

Instead of raising a cute little fuzzy animal, you would instead start off with an egg that hatches into a baby John Stamos.  Your job is to nurture your little Stamos from a fussy little baby into an international superstar.  Along the way, your Stamos would evolve from being an out-of-work waiter to landing his first TV commercial to getting cast in a pilot to becoming the uncle we all wished we had, Uncle Jessie in Full House.  

Besides being just a heck of a lot of fun to put together, there’s some serious potential to this one.  The unique celebrity angle is a good way to generate some viral buzz for the app, and there’s a very big monetization opportunity by tapping into the $1.5 billion virtual goods market.  And, of course, there’s an infinite number of spin-off possibilities – such as Scott Baio’s path to Charles in Charge, taking Obama from law school to president, Brittany Spears from backwoods hick to, well, a much richer backwoods hick. 

Idea #2 – PressBoxx

This idea is one of my all-time favorites – if I were actually going to start a company tomorrow, this is probably the one that I would pursue.  It was one of my ideas from my 30 day Y Combinator challenge, and the one that my readers chose as their favorite as well.  The basic idea is to create a interactive site where users could combine the fact-checking effective workflow of mainstream news reporting with the cost-effectiveness of user-generated content.  For more info, check out the original post.

Idea #3 – MST3K for YouTube Videos

The name pretty much says it all.  The idea is to take advantage of a new trend I’m seeing a lot of lately where people are ditching their cable in favor of a combination of web-based video content from Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube.  It’s a lean-back experience that would allow people to create funny commentary on top of popular YouTube videos to create a continuous stream of hilarity.  For more info, check out the original post.

Idea #4 – Yellow Ribbon

While the original idea was proposed as a MySpace app, I think it may get more traction on the iPhone.  The basics of the idea is a way to show your support for our troops who are serving overseas.  The goal is to recruit as many people as possible to install the app to show their support to the troops.  Each person who installed the app would be represented as a point of light on a map, with the end goal to light up the entire country in support of the men and women who are bravely serving our country.  For more info, check out the original post.

Idea #5 – TweetDate

Didn’t think you could get through this list without having at least one Twitter-related app, did you?  This one is actually my all-time most viewed post on the site (over 50 uniques!!!).  The idea is a way to use Twitter to create a basic dating site.  There’s a matchmaking angle to this idea that i kinda like, but to be honest, my favorite part of this one is the mock-up I did – the “Fear” button cracks me up every time.    For more info, check out the original post.

Thanks for reading, look forward to meeting all you SWSer’s tomorrow at the event – should be good times!

Today’s game idea comes from an epic Obama action figure I saw on Gizmodo the other day.  It’s an awesome-packed combo the likes of which the world has never seen.  President Obama.  As a ninja.

Are you kidding me?  Can you imagine how sweet that game would be?  You would play as President Obama during the day, but as soon as darkness falls you can slip into the Oval Office bathroom, don your ninja gear, and slip past the secret service agents to kick some serious worldwide ass – ninja style!  The game would consist of a series of GTA-style missions, such as:

• Rushin’ the Russian – Ninjobama would need to stealthily sneak past Vladimir Putin’s guards to find the right guest bedroom in the White House where Putin is sleeping.  The mission is accomplished by slipping a laxative into Putin’s bedside glass of vodka, thus preventing him from casting a critical un-American vote at the next day’s top secret UN meeting.
• Oh No She Didn’t – Ninjobama’s sources caught wind of Hilary Clinton’s secret plan to send Obama’s limo to the wrong address so she could swoop in and deliver the State of the Union address herself.  The mission: defeat a throng of guards and release a group of hot female interns that Hilary is keeping in cages under the capitol building, and leading them across town to Bill’s office.

Anyway, you get the idea.  Even if you couldn’t get to that level of detail, just putting the Obama-as-a-Ninja concept into the Xbox community games store would definitely get some great buzz and attention.

Not sure whose copyright wrath I’d rather avoid, ABC’s or NBC’s.  Anyway, today’s Xbox Live community game idea is pretty basic.  It’s a puzzle game based on the MacGyver concept of escaping a difficult situation using some basic everyday items, such as diffusing a bomb using only a pair of shoelaces, a ballpoint pen, and a piece of aluminum foil.

There are a couple of different ways you can approach this concept, but I’d probably take the SNL angle of doing a spoof of the original, and focusing on a series of quick mini-game style puzzles with completely unrealistic situations.  For example, the game may start with a Richard Dean Anderson-like character who is sitting in front of his TV playing the MacGruber game on his Xbox.  He clicks on an item on the screen and suddenly his TV is taken over by Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”.  Your task for puzzle #1 is to use the correct combination of items that MacGruber has around him to build a flamethrower to make his TV explode in order to stop the video from playing (in this case – a straw, the batteries from his Xbox controller, some steel wool, and a glass of Tennessee Whiskey).    You have a timer that is counting down on your screen, and if you don’t get the correct combination of items in time, your punishment is a mandatory 30-second rickroll that you must watch in order to move on to the next situation.

Rube Goldberg: “Of, relating to, or being a contrivance that brings about by complicated means what apparently could have been accomplished simply.”

You’ve probably seen a video of a Rube Goldberg machine, such as this one the MythBuster guys put together a while back.  My idea is pretty straightforward – a video game where the goal is to earn points by putting together the most complicated possible Rube Goldberg contraptions.

Instead of just starting with all of the parts needed to build a Rube Goldberg Machine (RGM), the player would start the game with a small number of parts, such as a bowling ball, a ramp, a helium balloon, and a set of dominoes.  The goal of round one is to release a trap door that drops down new parts that would allow you to build even bigger machines.  Each round gives you the opportunity to get access to more and more parts, while each new set of parts allows you to get the next set of parts. 

Users would be able to make choices that lead to different paths – for example, you can light a fire to burn the string off a helium balloon, but the fire would leap up and light a box of dynamite that would blow up an unlocked set of parts.  Ultimately, the game would end with the massive final machine accomplishing something ridiculously insignificant, like opening an option in the game that allows you to change the background from black to dark brown.

If the Discovery Channel can dedicate an entire week to shows about sharks, I think it’s about time to have a theme week over here on the A Startup A Day blog.  And as much fun as it would be to come up with five consecutive shark-related iPhone or Facebook apps (Sharkster, anyone?), I’m going to be focusing my ideas this week around games for the new Xbox community games platform. 

I’ve been playing around with some of those games, and along with being a fun side project for hackers, there’s actually a pretty good mechanism to allow developers to get paid.  And with the ad-based revenue models starting to shrivel up, this is one of the few areas where users are conditioned and willing to pay real money for some electrons whirling around on a screen.

Also, if anyone has any game ideas they’d like to throw out to the community, just let me know and I’d be happy to post it up.

Last week this question was floated out on a mailing list I subscribe to, and I put in my 2 cents around my ideation process.  A while back I included some thoughts around my process, but here are a few more tactical approaches.

So that’s my process?  What about you?  Where do you find that your best ideas come from?

I’m following up on Monday’s celebrity guest post from Mark with a insurance-related startup idea.  I’d love to go into some deep actuarial analysis of a Baysian system to better calculate insurance odds or a mashup featuring a heat map of the most common locations of auto crashes, but I’m gonna keep this one pretty simple.

The basic idea is a Mint-like site that pulls together all of your insurance information into a single, consolidated location.  I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve got separate auto, house, life, wedding ring, and travel insurance.  With this site, you can add in all of this information and get updates on the renewal dates, premiums, deductibles, and all that other fun stuff.

The revenue potential is what’s really interesting about this idea.  Users can enter some basic demographic information and see how their prices compare with other users.  The system can also suggest other carriers who can provide lower rates, and generate revenue by passing these leads along to the insurance carriers.

Any thoughts on this one?  As always, give it to me in the comments below.

I’m slowly inching up on my two year blogoversary and one of best outcomes from my blogging adventure has been the opportunity to meet interesting new people and discover new ideas.  Way back in the early days of the blog I started receiving a few insightful comments from a reader named Mark.  He had a great startup blog that I enjoyed reading, but over the past six months it had gone a bit dark.  However, Mark sent me a message the other day letting me know about his latest venture and asked if I’d like to do a post exchange.  I’m always up for giving my readers a break from my drawn-out blatherings, so here’s a post by Mark on the power of execution over ideas.  And if you’re interested, I’ll be thinking up an insurance-related startup idea that may be posted over on his new blog shortly.

Mark runs a startup insurance site, covering a broad array of Insurance News, called CrackInsurance. He is a long time reader of A Startup A Day (always wondering why there isn’t actually "a startup a day") and jumped at the opportunity to help readers of this blog practice the art of execution.

People have often approached me with different business ideas for the web with grand thoughts about being the "next big thing." It’s actually pretty easy to come up with new web-related business ideas. The difficulty is coming up with good ones Frankly, some of them are easy to throw away, but others actually need execution and not just market research. To generate the ideas, you may read A Startup A Day, which manages to enlighten us with all sorts of great business ideas, or search Google, or go to multiple sites that discuss idea generation/actual ideas that are in play. Since they will get your creative juices going, they are all great places to visit and browse. In fact, some of them may be great businesses themselves (e.g. one of the great business ideas on the web has been teaching people how to make money on the web, ironically enough).

But let’s talk reality. Execution has been and will always be the key. In fact, I know this sounds heretical, but I’ll go so far as to say that when it comes to the web, we’ve entered the maturation stage. Meaning, the majority of new businesses have been thought of (e.g. try to find a good domain name) and tried. Does that mean there’s no opportunity? NO. It means that you will have to execute better then the next person and, as scary as that seems, that’s the true art.
So here’s a game plan, in order:

• Find an idea that you are willing to throw yourself behind 100%.
• Start running the site.
• Map out why you will be better than the competition.
• Run the site for a defined period of time.
• Now, map out why you will be better than the competition, one more time!
• Re-tool the site to fit your refined vision.
• Methodically execute on the tactical steps that need to be taken.
• Repeat the prior 3 steps, until you achieve ultimate success!