Read the post-brainstorming debrief
Source: United Nations COVID-19 Response
I was planning to buy some beer and invite friends to toss ideas around at the pool, except that I’m quarantined in Adelaide after a 54-hour long trip from Brazil. Then I had this idea of posting something on Facebook and calling on folks to collaborate and brainstorm business ideas.
So I simultaneously posted the following message on 4 Facebook groups (Adelaide Startups, Sydney Startups, Melbourne Startup and Brisbane Startups) on Thu Feb 18th 2021 at 10:22 pm:
Some entrepreneurs lack ideas. Creatives have plenty. Share a business idea and convince me to build it and I’ll pay you A$1,000
Unfortunately, my announcement was swiftly deleted from Brisbane Startups 😩 as soon as I posted it.
What followed was absolutely mindblowing. A total of 178 people participated, who shared 85 ideas and made 518 comments in total.
But before diving into the ideas themselves, let’s review a few figures about this experiment. First, the communities are quite different in size:
Two people shared lots of ideas:
- Ruben TY (Melbourne): 13 ideas
- Erika Veloso Wielopolska (Sydney): 6 ideas
Amazing minds Ruben and Erika! Hats off to you 🙌
But what struck me was the similar level of engagement and creativity across communities. Engagement levels were quite similar across all community (~0.4%), except for PEC (1.5%).
PEC members reacted strongly to the topic and were ~4x more active, bouncing ideas and tagging each other.
The number os comments per user averaged ~3, except in Melbourne where the topic faced strong headwinds by some community members who suspected it was a scam.
The number of ideas shared was also quite similar. The figure below is adjusted by outliers (Ruben and Erika):
Adelaide was the most creative community and Melbourne the least creative, possibly as a consequence of suspicion raised by some community members and a sizeable group of “idea holders”.
Below is a summary of the ideas shared and their creators, but first:
If you’re interested in building one of these ideas or any others, I’d love to connect with you.
NOTE: If your name is listed here and you have privacy concerns and would like me to delete it, please send me a message or leave a comment and I’ll do so.
Ag & Food
- Erika Veloso Wielopolska: A my fitness pal but scanning barcodes for product ingredients for comedogenic and irritant ratings.
- Stacey Mills: A browser extension that highlights any products that are in any way affiliated with Nestle (or any other bad company you choose).
- Rhys Cozzi: An online marketplace connecting farmers with restaurants removing up to 7 middlemen and charging farmers 5%. Given the farm gate value of agriculture, we stand to make 5% of a 50B marketplace.
- Claire Harris: Chocolates that sing a random song.
AI
- Steven Hui: An AI engine that filters out stupid questions.
- Valent Lau: Can you build a plugin that filters stupid comments from FB posts?
- Rajwant Singh: Develop an app that suggests the audience appropriate questions to ask.
- Ruben TY: An AI software that trolls through your throw away emails for promotions and summarises when they expire
Blockchain
- Sushant Kurren: Cross-chain crypto decentralized exchange.
- Ruben TY: A platform that allows small business and to buy and sell with Bitcoin
Consumer Products
- Erika Veloso Wielopolska: Men’s makeup line that gets marketed like it’s not even makeup. Early innovator men already using it. I predict in 5–10 years it will be common practice
- Ruben TY: The holeless sock
- Stacey Mills: A browser extension that highlights any products that are in any way affiliated with Nestle (or any other bad company you choose).
- Erika Veloso Wielopolska: An app that lets you throw your ideas in and if it’s “liked” you get paid $1k via insta payid payment.
- Nick Kumaran: Double-sided toilet paper. One side smooth, one side rough.
Convenience
- Louis Sayers: A cleaning service where you get a washing bag with a QR code on it. Leave your wet stinky things at the gym and get them delivered washed and clean back to your home.
- Andria Rose: membership services for everything (car maintenance, dentist, pet, etc.)
Dating
- Raven Duran: Tinder, but for pets. (Eg. Dog, Cats to start). Includes Pet’s details, cute pics, breeding matches, etc.
- Erika Veloso Wielopolska: A dating app that simulates meet-cutes and didn’t actually tell the users who their match is. It just suggests activities to do, etc.
- Joshua Theeuf: Blind dating: the dating app without photos! All you do is write a profile and start swiping.
Edtech
- Caroline Chapel: A designer school for kids where they would learn everything from ideation to sketching and prototyping and testing.
- Ruben TY: A student exchange app for universities across the world, so that people can build connections and rate/get tips on how their student exchange was
- Ruben TY: A VR game experience where you learn survival skills in life-threatening situations. Like if you were James Bond or in a car crash.
Fintech & Membership
- Wasim Qamar: A Netflix of services? Do you pay a lot for many services but sparingly use them. Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Dropbox. I wish there was a way to pay a single subscription and use all of them for my light usage.
Hardware
- Erika Veloso Wielopolska: A mobile that’s really easy to unlock for toddlers to call 000.
- Dawei Ye: Affordable Lego display containers. Lego sales are through the roof but people struggle finding good ways of storing them (keeping models free from dust).
Hospitality
- Ruben TY: A decent hostel in Melbourne
HR Tech
- Jimmy Roa: App to help junior programmers get real work experience by matching with projects, startups and small companies.
- Karen Dalrymple: As someone mentioned previously about an app for employment, I would love to see an app matching mature workers to employers.
- Jonathon Matthews: Re-engineer the way employment sites and apps work. Employers pay to find staff. Employees make a profile almost like a FB page with all their details.
Ideation & Research
- Azan Dubloo, Greg Hodgkinson: Develop an idea creator app.
- Alexander Katyk, Rajwant Singh, Lara Solomon: What about an app that tells you if it’s a bad deal or not?
- Benedict Harris: Idea harvesting. What you are doing right now is your startup idea…
- Diego Moliterno, Lyn Taylor: An app like eBay where people can bid for the IP of ideas.
- Ruben TY: A platform to connect uni researchers with entrepreneurs who can commercialise.
Life Sciences
- Ruben TY: A mini pocket light that allows you to see germs on surfaces
Marketplace
- Erika Veloso Wielopolska: A marketplace just for people with amazing handwriting to write and send cards. Like Etsy for amazing handwriting people.
- Ruben TY: An ASX company procurement platform where companies can list their needs for small businesses/startups to fill
- Ruben TY: A platform that allows small business and to buy and sell with Bitcoin
Media & Comms
- Kate Burr: An app that collects and helps you manage and reply to all your message, such as email, Facebook messenger, Instagram DMs, linked in and what’s app etc in the one spot.
- Ruben TY: Ads on to toilet paper
- Thomas Gosewinkel, Brendon Meow-Sum, Chris Ma, Nic Cann, Thomas Hegarty, Khiya Barrett, Karim Mouahbi: Build a Facebook clone that allows for news and media to share.
- Ruben TY: A platform that allows you to get the low-down on sports around the world (e.g. football) for people who know nothing about sport so they can fit in when networking
Mobility
- Amit Chandra: The last time when our car broke down due to a flat battery I wished there was an app like “jump starters near me”.
- Courtney Carthy: Horse boat. A boat that goes around your horse so you can go from land to water. Horse boat!
- Ruben TY: Track that food truck
Pets
- Matt Banks: Activewear for dogs.
- Julie Huynh: There are vitamins for pets but not yet vitamin-based snacks for pets eg bliss ball snacks filled with goodness vitamin supplements. People would always spend on pets.
- Joshua Theeuf: Muscle chef for pet food. God, how many times have I gotten back from the shop only too realise I forgot cat food.
- Tom West: Website with pictures of cats. Except with cloud-based ai blockchain crypto image manipulation to put hats on the cats.
Proptech
- Jules Bignell: Building WebGL interactive walkthroughs for prospective tenants, clients are the real estate firms.
- Ruben TY: An architectural software that lets ppl create their dream houses easily. Sorta like canva for ppl wanting to build hosues
Values and Society
- Brian Wong: I’ve got an idea about dealing with the difficulty of social discussion about opposing values.
Work and Productivity
- Peter Clark: Gamification of a “manager’s” role in any business to help them manage people rather than doing the work themselves.
- David O’Donoghue: Fork what matters most and add Jira like functionality to each discussion group/person. Chat on the bottom, tasks assigned, display on top, drag and drop them around to assign them, change status without opening them. If you want your current discussion to goto it’s comments, select box your convo and drag that into the task.
- Cliff Mhlanga: A simple, intuitive, and fluid workspace designed to help you enter and stay in the flow- state of work by aligning your attention with your intentions seamlessly with every interaction.
- Erika Veloso Wielopolska: Hold music plugin for Zoom. Like if someone is working up something and you’re just pottering around until they’re done but then you forget they’re there because you’re on mute and they’re on mute and you end up doing something embarrassing in front of the camera.
- Antonin Ganner: An app for computer screens called Moth Remover. It draws shapes of bright light and moves them outwards to the corners, or direction you wanted to send the moths.
Fun
All in all, the funniest part of the evening was this idea shared by Natana Mayer:
And thanks, Ryan Lim, for sharing a great inspirational video:
Next Steps
For all who shared their ideas, here is the shortlist of the best ideas:
Designer school for kids, Caroline Chapel
A Designer school for kids where they would learn everything from ideation to sketching and prototyping and testing.
Architectural Software, Ruben TY
An architectural software that lets ppl create their dream houses easily. Sorta like Canva for people wanting to build houses
Hand-writing marketplace, Erika Veloso Wielopolska
A marketplace just for people with amazing hand-writing to write and send cards. Like Etsy for amazing handwriting people
Dating App, Erika Veloso Wielopolska and Joshua Theeuf
A dating app that simulates meet-cutes and didn’t actually tell the users who their match is. It just suggests activities to do etc., An astrology based birth chart synastry dating app. Blind dating — the dating app without photos! All you do is write a profile and start swiping.
Opposing Values, Brian Wong
Dealing with the difficulty of social discussion about opposing values
Membership Services, Andria Rose
Pay-per-month membership services for everything (car maintenance, dentist, pet, etc.).
Moving forward, I’ll continue my research and idea generation and if I decide to launch a business based on your idea I’ll send you a message. In case you believe I did so, at any point in time, and forgot to message you, don’t hesitate to reach out to me.
Thanks to all the participants! You were absolutely amazing🚀
Lessons Learned
- Ask for authorization in communities before posting to avoid being perceived as spam;
- Frame the invitation in an inviting way and avoid sounding greedy and selfish;
- Support communities that have been undervalued or marginalised such as the creative community or female and LGBT founders;
- Ask people for their permission before publishing any reference to them or their community publicly;
- Be clear in the invitation so that participants know what to expect to avoid doubts and suspicion.
Based in Adelaide, Rob Blum is a problem-solver engineer and MBA with demonstrated leadership and work experience in technology, finance & retail. Get in touch