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Business idea and feedback thread
I was reading the potential gatorade-esque business idea thread @daychilde put up the other day and it got me thinking about all the potential business ideas my partner and I have been kicking around. I'm hoping folks can post their prospective business ideas here and folks within those industries and provide feedback, insight, or hurdles to the ideas. Kind of like the hobby thread from a few weeks ago. Excited to hear what everyone is thinking about!
I'll kick things off!
I've been dreaming of starting a small to-go restaurant that serves only local fish. We live on the coast in what was a major hub for fishing on the west coast of the United States. It's still a tourist destination for people who are interested in the oceans and for the history of the previously booming fishing industry. The ironic part is it is incredibly hard to actually get local fish here. Almost none of the the local restaurants sell local fish, the ones that do charge an absolute arm and leg for anything and are exclusively fine dining.
The idea is to do something like Hookfish in SF, but even more localized. Sell 3 items - a fish sandwich, a fish burrito, and fish and chips - all for a reasonable price for locals and tourists. And all caught within the bay, so here or at one of the other harbors within 40 miles. There is very little good food in the area, and the places that have it are always packed. I'm hoping to do a takeaway counter with like 8 stools inside and a few tables outside - but all self service.
So why now? There is a really cute, small location that just opened up on the municipal wharf here. It's next to a very popular beach and a short walk from the famous fisherman's wharf. On top of that we are friends with the coordinator for the local fishery CSA and would be able to easily source the seafood. I also currently run a company - though with Trump's cuts to NSF and environmental regulations we'll see how long we last - so I'm familiar with everything from payroll to taxes.
The catch? I've never worked in the restaurant industry. I have heard how difficult it can be, how long the hours are, and how much of an organizational perfectionist you need to be. I'm just pretty far outside my depth with that and don't want to charge into it blind. Any insights or thoughts are welcome!!!
Get a cook. Someone who knows that side of the business. A pair of partners in a restaurant is fairly standard, one person to manage the food and one person to manage the business. Just be sure you work with them well. Starting a business together is second only to marriage in how intense the feelings can be. Your very economic survival is based on working well together, and those are high stakes for any relationship. Let alone a restaurant, where 95% don't last 5 years.
That's great advice, I'll start poking around the area!
Also, I hate you because you do not live here. Damn you. <3
I know nothing about restaurants, but I think keeping the menu super compact is a good idea. In Asia you often have street stalls where they literally make one thing. Then they maybe have cheap condiments you can mix in to adjust the flavor to taste (self-serve).
This is a very vague idea that I don't have any real intention of pursuing and I doubt it would actually be viable but I have thought of starting a nonprofit "church". Instead of your typical weekly religious sermon though, members of the community or individuals we brought in would give a lecture on something they are an expert in. So perhaps one week a cardiologist would come in and give a presentation about the heart. Next week a plumber gives a presentation on basic home plumbing. A geologist teaches us about the Earth. A local artist teaches a drawing class. Etc. As compensation for their time each expert can choose a charity (preferably related to what they taught) that the community will volunteer at during the week or a portion of weekly donations would go to that charity. If I ever win the lottery and want to start throwing money at it I might give it a try but otherwise this one will probably just be a pipe dream.
I've also had ideas about substites for church but not religious. I'm not religious but went to church as a child, and enjoy the ideas of community building but also introspection.
A number of years ago a real social-maverick friend of mine did a casual version of your idea. She had a summer backyard series, with someone presenting on a topic they were passionate/knowledgeable about. There'd be maybe some music, snacks, a social after. It was very cute.
Your friend's series sounds like it would be fantastic. Maybe I'll give that go with some friends at some point.
We take 5-10 minutes after our quarterly meetings at work for someone to basically do show and tell after our quarterly meetings. It's always neat to see some of the fun, interesting, weird things coworkers are in to. That's kind of where this idea started from.
If you organized the idea enough and got some willing volunteers, you could establish a website with a guide for how to host a local chapter, with a searchable registry. I think there's merit to the idea and it would be neat to see a grassroots socialization of it.
That's a website I'd volunteer to host for free in perpetuity.
I think you just invented Universal Unitarianism :)
Which is not to say I don't think it's a good idea, because I do.
One of the things I miss about my religious upbringing is the community of church. Great for fellowship, networking, mutual support.
I'm polyamorous (but in just a coupling with my wife), and that's one thing I sort of see as polyamory kind of providing - if you're okay with the idea that you can have more that one partner working together in life (like you can have "best friends"), being in a policule can mean more people working together to make resources go farther. Not that I'm recommending polyamory, much less for that reason, but I see it as sort of an idea of a mini-church in some ways in the sense of that same mutual-support
But anyway, getting way way off from your idea, which I think is great.
I think there are also some other related ideas - Toastmasters, perhaps. Not quite the same goal. But if anything, I think it helps show that your idea might actually be workable.
But also throwing those out as "related ideas" because it would be nice to have an alternative to religion that filled in some of the same human needs :)
I'm not sure if I'm reading between the lines too much but living in a shall rural town with five churches and no third places, I find myself wishing there were atheist "churches". I would absolutely show up for local talks like you're describing (and do when I find out about them). I would also love to see a return to public forums for the purpose of discussing philosophy. We abandoned that long before social media; maybe it's time to bring it back.
I have this in my local Rotary club, but with a focus in giving back and community service
I like this thread idea. I've always wanted to go into business for myself, but as a software engineer, I always feel short at making things profitable. My ideas tend to focus on how to make things better, but I usually don't know to make them into a business.
One is technically very challenging from an inroads standpoint, and probably would only be used by a small percentage of people. The idea is to have a database of companies, their relationships, and their political records. The idea would be to let users define the values that are important to them (ie. I might indicate that LGBTQ rights are very important to me), and cross reference their values with the above database to give users personalized report cards for businesses they're thinking about doing business with. I have a feeling the demand for this is near zero, and the only way it would be useful would be to get it close to points of sale, the owners of which would only stand to lose sales.
Next, equally something that most people don't care about, I think transparent supply chains would be revolutionary. I got the idea when I bought tomato sauce from a company that let me scan the label and see on Google maps exactly where il the tomatoes were grown. It quickly had me imagining buying with full supply chain transparency: down to what the manufacturer paid to each laborer, for materials, shipping. Of course it sounds crazy, and I imagine the overhead to implement it all would be colossal across industries. But how neat would it be if you knew exactly how people were compensated when you bought, and how might it impact market competition? If your supply chain isn't a secret, then you're value can only be in what you're producing.
Last, most grounded, and I think a socialized video streaming platform would be big. That is, tax funded streaming with no profit incentive, so no algorithm. Everyone gets X space to upload.
Okay I guess none of these really qualify as business ideas. Just technology ideas, I guess.
Oh, in case you're looking for fun project ideas, I've been meaning to hook Strong Town's Finance Decoder spreadsheet into some AI mumbo jumbo (ideally something lightweight, but probably a Qwen vision model) that could consume a list of city PDFs into something machine readable completely automatically. It'd be nice to get more of those stats in front of more people, as it's a pretty important issue that affects tonnes of cities in North America.
Another not-business could be this file converter thing that was discussed the other day. Doing it in-browser should be feasible, and it's something that so many people use that throwing a "click here to buy me a coffee" button somewhere could provide a meaningful source of income. Probably won't pay your mortgage, but it'd basically run itself.
So... a bit like TheyWorkForYou (a website that tracks British MPs/Lords in the Houses of Parliament and their voting records), but for corporations.
This could actually be a very useful website or mobile app for tracking the shitty practices of big corporations or even tracking what subsidiaries a shitty corporation owns, i.e. Nestlé own dozens of brands, which makes boycotting them notoriously hard, even despite being rocked by scandal.
Funny that you should mention Nestle, since that's where the idea cropped up. It was in a reddit thread about Nestle being evil and somebody said they were going to boycott Nestle. The response was along the lines of "good luck, but it's impossible to boycott every evil corporation so just live your life". I've seen that exact conversation play out so many times.
I feel like a lot of people have the will to vote with their wallets, but truly doing the research to do so would be several full time jobs. It's so overwhelming that they just don't try. My hunch is that most people wouldn't do the work to use a separate app during their shopping, but if you could magically give a score to every product in their shopping cart and they didn't have to do any work, I think people's buying habits would more often reflect their values. A browser extension could do it, with its own list of challenges.
I think the only way to build a database like this is with a team of researchers keeping things populated and current. There are a lot of challenges with respect to doing it in way that is transparent, objective as possible, correctable. Or you pick a single issue and start small to establish the pipelines.
But I couldn't do it without funding for research manpower, and don't know how to make such a concept into a business capable of sustaining itself.
there were a bunch of blockchain-y startups trying to do the supply chains thing, not sure if any of them ever succeeded
I feel like the Company/values idea (which I really like by the way) would only really make sense from a more activist point of view. Of it's a profit driven company which has the companies themselves as the client, there's a strong incentive to misrepresent values. And of course, even if you manage to resist those incentives, I think users of your app would be wary of that possibility.
So I think approaching it like an independent journalistic outlet would make more sense, depending on user donations and upholding lots of transparency. A very hard thing to do of course, but I do think it's the more sustainable solution for creating something that relies so heavily on trust.
Video sharing or streaming, probably?
Oops. Yes, that.
I had a similar idea to the company/values mapping. My thought was to have an app to scan barcodes, and it would present scores for the company on different values. If the company had low scores, it would suggest similar products from higher rated companies. The main issue I ran into was getting a barcode database that was reasonably priced and accurate. As for scoring companies, I wondered if it would be possible to crowdsource it for many cases, with a message explaining if the scores are crowdsourced or verified.
I hadn't considered crowd sourcing but that's an interesting approach. I had similar thoughts about a UPC-based interface but naively assumed that it would be easy to map codes to manufacturers. I also hadn't considered recommending similar products - that is where I could see it being an actual business idea. If I could find the thing I wanted on Amazon and have a tool find me alternatives that align with my values, it would completely change my shopping habits.
I decided to wait a bit before I posted this because I didn't want to be a downer.
I have spent all my life in and around small family-owned businesses. While I think that they are a good thing overall, they take a toll on you in ways that you will not really be able to predict. The last small business I was involved in had me witnessing family members slowly exiting from the business, some members becoming estranged, and the owner serving their spouse divorce papers because the stress they were dealing with were causing them to become very brittle people. It was really horrible.
Of course I can understand why you would want to start your own business; making money doing work you actually want to do is universally appealing. But if you do, I would suggest you avoid involving family members as much as possible. That includes your spouse, too. It can be good to have your kid work in the business to get them to make some extra money, but do not give them work that your business actually relies on and do not make it a regularly scheduled thing beyond maybe come in one day a week and do some cleaning.
I don't mean to say to not involve family at all. To my knowledge, most of that family I referred to are in good graces with eachother and the last I had heard, the owner and their spouse were considering canceling their divorce. But do consider that when you have family work with and for you, risk adding stress to the relationship.
One more piece of advice: invest in more than just your own business. Income will come and go with the tides of the market, so it makes sense to diversify to hopefully have money available for when the tides are low.
As someone who ran a small family-owned business (and helped dozens of others who were my bookkeeping clients) this is absolutely true. Every bit of it.
Yup. When mom and pop are both working one single shop they can't leave employees to run, that's not a business, that's a single precarious job.
疑人不用，用人不疑 -- don't hire sus people, but once hired, rely on them and don't be suspicious of them. If people want to start a business, start one with a business model and revenue stream that allows you to hire people; if it's not making enough money to sustain non-you employees, it's not a business it's a family hostage situation at best, and a family destroying engine at worst.
So... Uhhh... I was thinking about making some electrolyte powder..
;-)
Not so much an idea anymore as what I've done to pivot my income towards means that allow me lots of leisure and control over my time.
My background is first in general IT, then as a low voltage / security & access control systems / telecommunications contractor.
I had an... experience let's call it, back when I was doing residential cable install. Brutal, life-destroying hours. I had one stretch of 101 days without a day off, working 80-100 hours a week. Almost killed myself to escape it, then realized that quitting my job was an option and did that instead. This is to explain my motivation for working towards what I do now.
With my background knowledge of IT / general tech contracting / lifelong electronics nerdery (yes that is totally a word) I decided to try buying stuff I understood at auction and selling on eBay. It started small, and gradually grew both in sales (slowly) and inventory / scope of what I would look for. I look for and buy electronics lab equipment (multimeters, power supplies, oscilloscopes, basically anything in Test&Measure), precision measurement tools (Mitutoyo / Fowler / Starrett...), sometimes name-brand battery power tools like Milwaukee since they always sell, and lots of random industrial liquidation stuff.
It has worked out.
I have managed to put myself in a position where I have no external demands on my time and no one to report to - full personal freedom so long as I generate enough sales to stay in positive cashflow and cover my living expenses. I go to bed when I feel like, sleep in when I feel like, and work or not when I feel like. My focus is on quality instead of quantity, putting in the extra effort on a very small number of listings, carefully testing what I sell and showing exactly what and how I verify that 'yes, this is working and you will get it in exactly this condition, guaranteed'. With enough good to outright glowing feedback built up I have built a reputation I can lean on now and list what I sell often well above the market average since I can demonstrate and guarantee condition and function vs other listings that say 'this is what is for sale, we don't know anything about it'.
Much of the profits from this get rolled back into further building out my home electronics lab, expanding my testing and repair capabilities, but also adding to the.. I guess the marketing effect of listing what I sell with my lab as the background? It seems to work.
Something of a downside is that I have a tendency to be lazy. Upside is that it isn't hard to course-correct if I've let things slip for too long and money starts getting tight - that actually happened earlier this month which led me to getting nervous about it and working harder for a week listing more stuff - and then as is typical for eBay more sales came through (eBay does tons of market f*ckery, it's annoying and didn't use to be that way years back from what I've heard, but oh well) and in the span of 3 days I had a few sales and $900 coming in, then became less worried about income for the month.
So that's my business idea and implementation. I basically float an average of my normal living expenses + what I want to spend on lab equipment and stuff at auction to put up for sale, and am generally comfortable there... being lazy. Given what I've seen when I put in more (and more consistent) hours, I could be a fair bit more profitable... but yeah I'm just lazy... and honestly probably still traumatized even after years from my experiences working those 100 hour weeks.
This is something I would be very interested in doing and I’ve contemplated starting it many times before. I also have a broad background and know my way around machinery. What I don’t see yet is how I would be able to find enough stock to generate enough sales. How do you find these auctions?
Finding auctions:
Search for liquidation auction sites in your state / city / within a short drive radius of you. It's big business these days to auction off store discards (returns / damaged inventory / etc). Make a list of the names of every university / college / trade school near you and search for (university name) store / asset disposal / auctions. Big schools refresh all sorts of equipment and sell the old stuff all the time. Search for industrial auction sites - both physically near you and those that will ship your winnings, hopefully (call/email and ask) for reasonable shipping/handling costs.
Building stock:
From my experience I strongly advise to not try buying things to 'build stock' - you want to operate on a 'watch for and take opportunities' basis. You see a thing at auction - go on eBay and search for it specifically in sold listings - does that item sell? For how much? In what condition? Then search for it in general - are more for sale right now? How many - 10 or 10 million? If the thing has had 10 items sold in the past few months and there are 10 million for sale on eBay, you don't want to sink your money into that thing. Conversely, if there have been 10 items sold in the past few months and there are currently, say, only a handful available, then it might be a good item to get, so long as your out-the-door purchasing price is sufficiently low. You want to see the potential to AT MINIMUM double what you pay for it, and preferably you want a MUCH higher profit margin than that, because some things you buy will not sell for years, and some things you buy will never sell period - it happens.
Start small. Feedback reputation as a seller on eBay is critical. Pick one or a few things that sell reliably and sell one of them for a tad cheaper than other sellers. Clean what you sell. Max out your allowed pictures and, if relevant, take that 1 minute video as well. DO NOT USE AI DESCRIPTIONS. I hate those and know that there is no reliability from sellers that use them - no idea if it works or not, no idea about specs, etc... Write a quality description. It doesn't have to be long, it does have to be accurate. Look up the manufacturer information / specifications on that thing and add them to the description - make sure to say 'information from the manufacturer' or the like to make it clear what are your words and what are the manufacturer words. Read them over and remove any portion that says 'these accessories included' if your item doesn't have those, as well as removing any mention of warranty unless you want someone to try to hold you to the listed manufacturer warranty.
My first sale was my older version non-Fuel Milwaukee angle grinder. I had upgraded to the Fuel version and had it lying around. Name-brand power tools sell pretty reliably as long as you look at what they actively sell for and price accordingly. After that it was just a gradual buildup.
Things I have learned:
Avoid buying large. Avoid buying heavy. You (presumably) are working with whatever space you have at home for your logistics storage. Maybe a garage or carport. Large takes up lots of space and is orders of magnitude more expensive to ship. I pay between $6 and $20 on average to ship out small things to medium sized things (think on the scale of a hand tool to a small-form-factor computer). If I ship out something large, for example a commercial food warmer that measures 40in x 22in x 20in and weighs a hundred pounds.... I can expect to pay a thousand dollars for freight shipping - and incur the risk of being stuck with double that if the item is refused and the shipping company returns it. Avoid large. Heavy isn't as bad, but try to avoid heavy where possible. That said, no rule is absolute and some things may be worth sitting on taking up space for years. Judgement call.
Think about how much work you are setting yourself up for when considering a purchase. If there is a giant mixed lot of stuff, and you reasonably expect you can sell some of it - are you going to need to clean each individual thing? Research each individual thing? Test? If you don't want that labor investment, do you think a pile of stuff sold as a dirty and untested lot will still sell? For how much? Will you end up having to throw out what you paid money for?
Shipping materials:
You should be able to get most or all of your cardboard boxes for free. Watch Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist in your area for people wanting to get rid of boxes or who just moved in and are listing all their moving materials for free. Watch dumpsters sometimes and if there are a bunch of clean boxes get them. If you have the space, DON'T break down the boxes - you'll be paying for tape - instead every once in a while put boxes in boxes like Russian Nesting Dolls. Also try to buy as little packing material as possible (packing paper / bubble wrap) - look for those as well on local markets. I have had to buy some rolls of bubble wrap, but I actually bought those at the same auctions that I get my inventory from, and for vastly under market price. Same for the carton of tape that I'm still going through.
Shipping labels and printing:
Get a Zebra thermal label printer. Get 'Direct Thermal' labels - these are labels that print by heat directly and don't need thermal transfer rolls - one less material to buy. Call UPS and ask if they still supply free labels, I'm not sure if that is still a thing but often you can get direct thermal labels for free because shipping companies want to make it easier for you to spend money with them for shipping services. Sometimes they'll give you a printer for free. I use a Zebra GX430t and it's a workhorse. I'm still going through the first case of 6,000 fanfold direct thermal labels I bought (this was before I knew it was possible to get them for free - there was an eBay seller selling huge lots of cases and I bought like 43 cases of 6K labels each - then sold 41 of them for profit on Craigslist - this was how I learned about 'don't buy heavy' - cases of labels weigh something like 40lbs and the price to ship them was more than they were selling for...
Packing: the amount of packing materials and work is at first linearly related to the size and weight of what you ship, and then logarithmically related as you get to 'larger' and 'heavier'. Don't skimp a few dollars of packing material or tape on a $500 order. Tape can be used to structurally reinforce cardboard boxes - seams, corners, and axis. Assume anything you ship will be dropped and tossed REPEATEDLY from a 3-ft height and ask yourself if your planned packing job is good enough to survive that.
Don't quit your day job - at first. Seriously - build up a reliable average of sales income before considering transitioning to this as primary or only income. Use local marketplaces as well like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace - you don't pay fees and you don't pay shipping - on that note, don't ship anything that you sell through those sites, do in-person only, CASH ONLY NO EXCEPTIONS with those. You'll have vastly less chance of someone scamming you. Be careful to be very prompt removing an eBay listing if it sells elsewhere - don't get stuck in a situation where you have to cancel an eBay order and get a ding to your account and reputation.
For eBay: communicate. Message your buyers with a short thank you and to tell them when their item will ship out, and with what service. It costs little time and people appreciate it, which improves your average feedback.
For paying for shipping: I use PirateShip and so should you! Well, you should use ANY of the services that get you shipping discounts. Seriously, there are free services out there that if you purchase your shipping through them you get pretty significant discounts. Do research since things change from time to time. Pirateship shows me costs for USPS/UPS/FedEx to allow me to select the cheapest one, and that's important since shipping costs will be one of your larger overhead line items.
That's what I can think of for now. I'll add more if I think of more later.
Edit: look for the online forums and communities of people doing the same thing and read stuff in them for common useful knowledge of the trade.
Edit: list your stuff as Buy-it-now listings with offers enabled, do not list as timed auctions. Timed auctions are for businesses that make money on volume, not margin, and can eat the losses that happen and shrug because of averages. When starting off, you definitely won't have volume and every listing that sells for less than what you bought it for hurts, both financially and demotivationally.
Edit (after your reply): it's useful to stick to buying/selling things you have a strong knowledge-base in - this allows you to speak with authority about their condition and function, and that makes a difference. When a seller that has a thousand listings lists thing X with the description 'Works - no returns' it really doesn't inspire the same confidence as someone who clearly understands what they are selling and can explain how they know it works and what testing they've done (if any is needed). That difference also allows you to charge a higher-than-average price if you're the only seller at your price point who clearly does know and has conclusively shown that thing X works and is in good condition.
Edit: inventory / logistics management. Don't worry about this too much until you get to the point of stuff cluttering around that you need it, but if/when you get to that point: shelving units. Your ceiling is up high, don't waste vertical storage volume. Also plan ahead for how much weight you might need to support - maybe get a variety of different units, some for heavy, some for lightweight. Heaviest stuff on the bottom.
Edit: finances. Keep records. DOWNLOAD AND SAVE EVERY PURCHASE RECORD - NEVER NEVER RELY ON EXTERNAL WEBSITES TO KEEP THAT HISTORY. You will want all of this data later for both taxes and looking back to make a choice on how low you are willing to price thing X when you can't remember what you bought it for. Still on finances - keep records of every expense and keep them separate. Materials you expend and shipping you pay for are categorized differently by the IRS than Cost-Of-Goods-Sold (google that). They don't let you deduct inventory costs unless you sell that inventory, so be aware of that. You can deduct packing materials, shipping costs, miles driven to pickup auction winnings and drop off shipping, etc... every expense you track is money you save in taxes. Keep receipts.
Amazing response! Thanks for all the detailed information, that’s a lot of things I hadn’t thought of yet.
You're very welcome. I'm happy to pass along the experience. I've thought of more stuff - going to keep adding to that first response as further edits.
A few ideas I have, some of which are likely infeasible due to starting capital and lack of technical know-how...
Pub that almost exclusively does karaoke during the afternoons/evenings, with a dedicated KJ around most nights and guest KJs occasionally doing sets. The emphasis would be on creating a very good audio setup, having decent equipment and generally creating a community around regulars and newcomers.
Bar with arcade cabinets. Yes, NQ64 and Four Quarters exist in my country, but I'd take a totally different approach with the pricing model. I would add more cabinets, make the cost to play really bloody cheap to the point where the machines barely break even or even incur a small loss, and I'd instead make the money back on the drinks and food. Another way to bring people to the establishment is to hire small game dev teams to create arcade-style games and release them as timed exclusive cabinets, before giving them an eventual PC/home console release.
A website/app for tracking where local pub karaoke nights or live music gigs are being held. The user could open the app and see a map showing all the pubs hosting events on a particular evening. I'd grow the idea by pitching it to pubs, musicians, DJs, KJs, etc, encouraging them to register and advertise the app, at first keeping it local to my city but eventually branching out to other towns when it grows.
Online wiki which I wanted to call "HowDoIBeat", for looking up how to beat certain bosses or counter strategies in video games. I don't know whether to keep it to a specific video game i.e. WoW, League of Legends, or whether to make it an overall game wiki. Yes, StrategyWiki exists but it lacks content. Also, GameFAQs has kinda been enshittified by CNet lately.
Dating app which aims to address the flaws of its enshittified competition (egregious monetization, men being ignored, women being inundated with creepy messages, etc.) Something with user verification standards to deter fake/fraudulent users, an algorithm that rewards the user for having conversations, more stringent house rules, a decent messaging system that actually discourages people from taking conversations to third-party apps from its sheer quality. I had thought of a system where you could leave reviews of your dating experiences with other users, but this would have been ripe for abuse and would have been a content moderation nightmare.
I can't comment on an absence of starting capital, but re. technical know-how, LLMs are doing an incredible job of catching up to even mid-seniority devs these days. If you're comfortable with working with one, you can probably get going relatively quickly.
Additionally, since several of your ideas are software only, I'd point out that the cost of operating a web service -- where, critically, you decide from the get-go that it should be low-cost to operate -- can be extremely low. Like, if you're only servicing a few hundred users, you could throw something together on Scaleway for less than ten bucks a month. (tbh I'm now curious how much deimos spends on Tildes ...)
There are definitely regulatory hurdles that you'll need to clear if you'd like to work in the EU or accept payment, but typically you can figure those out once they become a problem rather than attempting to handle them from customer #1.
I'm very skeptical about using LLMs to write code, and I say this as someone with a friend who has a computer science background.
My programming knowledge is at a very beginner level. I can understand basic elements of HTML and CSS code, and once taught myself (through trial & error and looking at reference manuals on the Microsoft website) how to write VBA macros to automate the process of converting aged debt reports at work - but that's about it.
Last time I even touched PHP and MySQL was in 2010 when I tried to make a database-driven website for an A Level Computing project fifteen years back. I taught myself it because we were being taught Visual Basic 6 in our class (which was 12 years old and highly obsolete at that point.)
As a software developer with a decade of experience, I can assure you that these tools are the real deal. There’s a trick to using them properly (ie you need to force it to work on bite sized chunks), but for anything common, they’re nearly as good as writing the code yourself (you just have to reign them in a bit).
I only use it for dealing with repetitive work at the moment, but they’re absolutely going to replace large swathes of the labour which previously required skilled employees.
As someone whose field is NLP/AI, I deeply distrust anyone who believes that these tools can effectively replace software engineers at anywhere remotely close to their current capabilities. They can be super useful tools to help existing devs, but they are much better at writing small scripts than they are at larger software engineering projects. Even when using them for small scripts, some domain expertise and/or preexisting knowledge of the relevant programming language is generally necessary to catch mistakes, but more importantly they're really bad at designing a larger codebase that remains maintainable over time, which is what a company actually needs. Someone who is not themselves a developer starting a business based on a software product is absolutely one of the worst use cases for LLM coding tools and one in which their flaws will become the apparent the most quickly. I think ultimately it's pretty foolish advice to give someone looking to start a business.
I would argue that the definition and perspective of the following terms is skewed in most conversations in this area:
I would argue that most businesses need to present a case for their product rapidly — an MVP — which entails getting a barely functioning prototype in front of as many eyes as they can, as cheaply as possible. No code or low code solutions have been historically very valuable as a result of this: many businesses ideas are modest modifications of existing tools, or could otherwise be cobbled out of them.
For example: one of the business ideas that was proposed in this thread was a wiki focused on beating bosses. To do that, you’d want to:
If you’re a curious and thorough individual, I’m fairly certain you could push that through an LLM tool and have it provide the correct educational resources + code to make it a reality in short order. Throw some evenings or weekends at it before quitting your day job, ofc, but I assume that anyone planning to start a business will not do so recklessly.
If you want to make the argument that the above business case is a high skill, large scale engineering project, I would disagree strongly. In which case we’re probably talking directly past each other.
I think getting a working concept out rapidly — even a wireframe — has been absolutely vital to the success of projects I’ve been a part of over the years. Anything that needs to survive contact with the customer must do so early and rapidly, since the first revision will likely fail. A project that only exists on whiteboards and in the minds of product owners will spontaneously combust upon release, months to years later of heads down development, if you let it.
If flaws become apparent in the LLM-generated prototype, then great, use all of the money you saved by not wasting it on a human-generated prototype to have a dev rewrite it from scratch (following your improved requirements) or attempt to fix the pile of AI slop masquerading as a codebase.
Tacking on, if the product is something created mostly with AI, there's effectively no moat since these tools are publicly available. A more skilled engineer could replicate your software with higher quality easily in that situation.
Perfectly fine if it's something you're just making for fun, not sustainable as a business though.
I think there have been a lot of attempts at this, one of the more successful ones I'm aware of being Blindmate.
I can help with the wiki thing. You might stalk my other post on this thread although this would be a bit different.
For a project like this, I could offer technical support of the project along with free hosting until the project needed more resources, and discounted hosting even after that. Can discuss details if you wish.
Wiki is absolutely the easiest idea both to execute and to turn a profit in that list.
And the name is catchy. If it fails you can pivot to a sex ed wiki.
And frankly - I've hosted the Simutrans community for decades. It takes a LOT of usage to need to monetize to keep my hosting workable.
I’ve thought about creating a deshittified dating app as well. There’s a difficult balance in designing an app that balances forming genuine connections and safety. Never mind how to scale an app that’s jammed with intimately personally identifiable information.
Another is trying to educate users how to approach dating. I’ve see enough Reddit threads about people bombing women with match requests to know dating culture is busted. And, well, educating users…
The final and most difficult thing is getting users to pay to use a dating app. Nobody will pay to use an app with no users and an ad supported app will be forced to enshittify to generate any reasonable amount of revenue for development.
Looks like someone is trying this in the US? Features seem to match but I'm not sure they have anything mapped.
Ahhh, not the only one who thought of that idea then....
The closest I have here in Bristol is a Facebook group started by a locally famous pub singer, but the only reason I really go out to karaoke nights regularly is that I'm actually friends with three different KJs who host a lot of different nights.
If you ask in this Discord maybe you'll find someone interested in working on this. There are several of them there. It's also a good community if you're interested in karaoke creation and online karaoke events.
I think it's a very good idea for a website and Android/iOS app if I expand it to also helping people discover local singer/musician gigs and add some basic social media functionality (i.e. following a singer, DJ or KJ you like and getting notifications for future gigs.)
My plan for getting the site off the ground if I ever do build it would be to pitch the idea to local pubs and the KJs I know. If they're on board, they could advertise it within the pub to users, and just organically build a following from there.
The service would probably be free/ad supported, but I would do what I can to not make the ads egregious.
I am a game developer. As a game dev, it is painfully obvious that you are a small fish in a big pond. There are so many games on steam and other platforms, why would anyone play your game?
One idea I have had is to leave the digital medium and embrace an old school physical medium in the form of an arcade machine. Not just any old arcade machine though, one with a new set of games created by me, each with a high score or multiplayer component. Then, try to sell the machines to breweries, colleges, or place them in other public locations. I never settled on whether I would offer the machines for free and try to make money off of plays or sell the entire units.
The original idea was to use a cheap computer chip (raspberry pi or something else), left over monitors that I could find, and 3D print the rest. Unfortunately, I think that the tarrifs are going to make access to cheap compute more challenging... and frankly I doubt the effort would be worth the potential profit especially considering that physical machines would likely require maintenance.
That being said, I think if you reject the idea of making money it is still an interesting idea to get folks playing.
Honestly, there's strong nostalgia for actual arcades, and the Neo Geo proved you could have options in a single cabinet. Maintenance of the physical components is absolutely one of the major issues, but it's an existing industry. Talk with an arcade machine repair and management company. Most bars and other places with a single machine don't manage them themselves, they're like vending machines; there's a local operator that manages arcade cabinets around the city. They may be willing to buy the machines if you make them.
Alright I'll bite. I've thought of starting a small independent business teaching English online to Brazilians. I am Brazilian myself, but grew up in the US so I'm way more comfortable in English than I am in Portuguese. Not looking to do this full-time or anything, just figured that maybe a lesson or two on the weekends could bring in some extra cash. Plus it's something I enjoy doing.
Also I have dreams of moving back to Brazil in the nearish future and this feels like something that would be extremely easy to pack up and move locations, unlike a lot of other small businesses or jobs that might be more location-dependent. For comparison, my wife and I ran a small in-home daycare business for the last two years, but just closed it because... well we sold our home. The exact opposite of portable. (If anyone has daycare-related questions, feel free to reach out).
I know that there are a million options online and in-person for learning English, and many Brazilians already understand some level of English, which is why I was hoping to maybe specialize in something like professional-level English or accent coaching. So think less teaching of ABCs and more coaching about specific accents/sounds and helping with fluency. Figured there's bound to be some interest there with business professionals that deal internationally and with people looking to move abroad.
And again, I'm not looking to replace my full-time job or anything, if I could just get a couple of clients or teach a couple of lessons in a month I would already consider that a success because it's money that I made on my own time and out of my own volition. So if anyone has any experience teaching languages or online classes, especially independently, I'd love to hear it. I was thinking a simple website for information/booking, then any of the major video calling services for the actual classes, plus emails as needed. Though I know nothing about SEO or the digital side of businesses, which sucks because this one would be nearly all digital. Our daycare was extremely location-dependent, so just being listed on Google Maps was enough to get us plenty of calls/emails. But for this new business it feels like I'd be competing with the entire internet for clients, clicks, and eyeballs.
Consider including cultural things as well, if you're a good teacher. Cultural competency is a real skill, but most people are bad at having it and worse at teaching it. Cultural competency isn't, like, "Spanish people like to eat late!" - it's all the small things that aren't obvious. The stuff that's not quirky, but annoying.
As a simple example: to an eastern european, Americans smile too much. A Russian meeting you shows respect by being serious; an American meeting you shows respect by beaming and saying how nice it is. This leads to obvious faux pas.
What's worse is when these people have been taught (poorly) about one another. Americans start trying to glower and get really confused when the Russian has an actual sense of humor, and then the Russians start trying to make awful small talk and say "jokes" with creepy smiles that freak everyone out. It's because most teachers just say what the other culture does without explaining why.
Another example - a swedish friend did some work in Hollywood. They failed, miserably, for the first year or so because in Scandinavia, one simply doesn't self promote. It's a whole thing.. So the whole time they thought everyone in Hollywood was an arrogant, brash, asshole and all the Californians figured my friend must suck at their job, because they kept saying things like "our product is pretty good" and "we might be able to help you."
Anyway, the point is - if you're aiming at businesspeople, consider including cultural competency tips. You want to teach about the stuff that Brazilians would find irritating about Americans, not just funny. And the ideal would be to explain not just how something is different, but also why Americans value it the way they do.
Hey, great tip! And hilarious examples! I’ll definitely look more into what those differences might be.
It's true that you'd be competing with the whole Internet, but you've also developed a specific niche already. Helping your clients develop the "right" accent and business vocabulary is both a specific service and one that people would be willing to spend money on regardless of the state of the economy, so you're halfway there. Targeted advertising will matter, but you have a strong idea of your target market and the kinds of places they're likely to be (universities, MBA programs, LinkedIn or local equivalent) and so you can target your advertising fairly narrowly.
Those are the same places that I was thinking, so glad to hear other people thinking the same thing! It’s just daunting starting off and having no clients whatsoever. We went through the same thing with the daycare at the beginning and it’s hard convincing people that you can and will provide them with some value. Once the ball gets rolling and you have a few reviews and possibly even word-of-mouth, suddenly it gets way easier. The first month or two of the daycare we were desperate for clients, and the last month or two we were flooded with calls and emails and had to turn everyone away because we were full already and about to close.
At least this business venture feels like there’s much less riding on it since I’m just doing it because I’d like to. Compared to the daycare where we actually needed the income. So hopefully the start can be less stressful, however long it takes.
Online is probably not the best way to go IMO, you'd be competing with absolutely massive online English companies.
If you want to do corporate English, then that may work, but would probably be better in person, especially helping with presentations, meetings, and writing emails....Although AI can pretty much do the third one for anyone.
Each country has their own giant English center monstrosity that kinda takes over the in person stuff unfortunately, so this would take a lot of work to make it unique.
Good thing is, once you get a few fancy clients who like you, they will send you more work for organization training events, which can pay very well.
Large corporations, governments, and NGOs tend to overpay if you do group training.
I did this for an agency when I was younger, and another friend hit the jackpot with a corporate gig. Thing is jackpot generally means good hourly rate, but not many + infrequent hours.
I would love to do it in person, but am currently not in the country. I was looking to start online so I can start now before I’m actually there, then continue/expand once I actually move. But I like the suggestion of the group sessions. Seems like catering towards companies would be just as good or even better than trying to attract individuals.
The infrequent hours thing actually sounds perfect for what I’m looking for, so fingers crossed! Thanks for the insight.
There are language tutoring apps and language exchange apps that include paid tutoring features. I'd maybe start with one of those because they do a lot of the logistics for you and you just have to present a description of why you're a good choice. It gives you a bit of a captive audience and gives you an easier starting point before you go all-in on it elsewhere.
Huh I didn’t know that, thanks for the tip! Do you have any specific app in mind?
I believe italki is the main one. I think Tandem used to have it, but it seems like they got rid of the feature.
I love giving back to my community.
I'm on my phone at dialysis which limits my typing a bit, so I can expand on this later.
The main business I have started up -all the talk about the electrolyte thing that's probably not going to work out - is my hosting business.
My main intent is to provide turnkey solutions for aspiring designers - providing all the back end support and technology. But I am also a web design firm.
But the nice thing about where technology is is that whereas I'm days past, I hand-coded sites (and still do some), I (and many design firms) use WordPress with a theme and page builder called Divi.
And the nice thing about that is that while it does take experience to design good websites, it's also accessible such that if I did your website, you could learn how to make some updates on it, meaning spending a little bit of time in exchange for not paying me to make those changes.
Also, while I am at a moderate level in my seo experience, I have a friend and contractor who is an SEO expert for a coalition of design forms. So while I can't donate her time, I can still get her service at a discount.
I've been working on all of the parameters and pricing, but this is something I've been working on getting set up to offer the Tildes community.
If you'd like to talk more details at some point, please let me know :)
This thread hit slightly before I was ready. Lol
There is a library extension that I use in Firefox. It does this for books in general, but it is not manga or comic specific and it doesn't include paid services. You can select your local libraries and hoopla or similar apps. Library collections are so individualized And while hoopa says the same overdrive/libbean generally is by library
But just in case that's helpful for folks
Third one is an thing and climate town (or was it City Beautiful?) has a video on it. It’s not as great as it sounds because malls are out of the way, car centric places and turning them into walkable places fails unless you transform their surroundings as well, which is too big a project.
I'm honestly more confused by "convert a college campus" -- college campuses usually already feature the stuff that would be in a community center and are often examples of the types of walkable neighborhoods with a lot of social and hobbyist activities and clubs already. What exactly would you need to convert on that one? Just allowing people who aren't enrolled to participate?
If there was a defunct one that was no longer in operation, have that repurposed. The problem is that the ones with the sprawling campuses are usually the ones in good health, so maybe it's too situational.
I'm familiar with a ton of successful public and private universities that are well-integrated into cities, and I'm not really sure how a "sprawling campus" conflicts with that. Perhaps a difference in experiences there.
Umm. Can you worl on the self driving apartment van thing? That would be amazing. Lol
Tildos, Personal Autonomous Vehicles are going to be an option available to the common consumer in but a few years. Tesla is "beta testing" their solution with consumers, Waymo is looking into licensing their brand to privately owned vehicles, and every car company is looking into their version of Advanced Driver Assistance. As cars become more and more capable of driving themselves, why should we stop at cars? We could automate vans that can be converted into portable domiciles, giving those who are interested less of a commute, a way out of renting, and an ability to at home on the road in a way that we can't reproduce without it.
(This is probably more of a luxury item than a panacea for American car culture and the housing crisis, but it's my dream, so I get to moralize it however I choose.)
One idea I've been toying with is essentially a more legitimate version of The Pirate Bay.
It would consist of a online service that users would use to clone and upload their movie collections (probably along with a photo of the DVD and case as some kind of proof of ownership). Once uploaded the service would de-duplicate the upload against other users' submissions. If more than two people have uploaded e.g. the extended director's cut of Highlander 2 we only store one of them, but if someone uploaded another version of the same film we would store it as a separate copy. We would keep track of how many copies the collective of users own. Now if one of the users wanted to watch a movie and someone else had uploaded a copy they could lend it. The service could track how many copies were available and only lend out the number of copies available.
After the movie has been watched the movie would be "returned" to the lender and could potentially be loaned out again to someone else.
How could this make money? Well, one way would be to sell movies. If a movie is just released and I couldn't lend a copy the option to purchase the movie would be available (potentially always an option). That way you'd be able to watch it immediately and it would then increase the pool of available movies.
In order to reduce distribution costs members could share a portion of their storage and bandwidth with the service. Then the service could assign some chunks from various movies that would be stored and seeded by the member. Essentially no one (beside the original owner and the main servers) would have a full copy of any movie that they haven't lent. Once the loan period (typically short) is up the movie would be automatically returned to the pool.
So in essence it's a community powered library for movies.
Not 100% sure if this would be legal in all places, but it feels fair. It does have some perverse incentives from a business standpoint and might not ever be truly profitable, so might be better set up as a foundation/club for its members.
I know that libraries have been adding services to try and stay relevant and serve their communities. It seems likely to me that someone has thought of this general idea - which is not intended as discouragement; rather, the opposite: I wonder if you might get in touch with libraries to see if you can talk to folks who organize them - to find out what efforst they've worked on similar to this; to see what they think would be legally doable.
Someone approached a library and said "What if you lent out tools?" and a lot of them do now. I know a lot lend out videos - but maybe finding out that this is an area that could be worked on, you could help make it happen. Find out what sorts of things they've looked at with lawyers to save you time going down paths that won't work, I mean.
Yeah, one issue for libraries that lend out e.g. ebooks are the exorbitant fees they pay for these (much more costly than lending out physical books). So setting this up as peer to peer lending is aimed at circumventing that. Infinitely reproducible goods should be free from a moral stand point. Sure, movies cost money to produce, but the financing of them is really what needs to change when they are (almost) free to distribute once complete. Then again, starting a business from a moral standpoint isn't really a viable business model!
There are some tool lending services and we even have a sports gear lending "library" here in my city which is pretty nice. It's great for lending e.g. kids slalom gear and such. The tool lending services are usually some form of renting service from peers akin to Airbnb, but for tools.
Oh, like Lendle back in the day? That was a fun way to get through a big chunk of my reading list.
This would probably be closer to Screen Pass when that was supported through Movies Anywhere. There was probably a reason why they sunsetted that...
Most recently an app/website that handles submitting the receipt for Menard's purchases to receive the 11% rebate. But because a big part of that is handling other people's money, I really don't think I have mental fortitude to deal with that for more than a few months. There is a website that does it currently called DoNotPay but they require you to spend money on a membership every two months.
I’d be happy to have a rubber stamp with my info on it for filling it out. And another stamp with their address on it.
I'm double-posting in this thread. I think it's about time to talk about my main business in slightly more detail, because not only would I like to see it take off — I think there is a good chance I can actually be of use to people. Possibly in this thread.
While it is not my intent to make commercial sales per se, i.e. I'm not trying to sell my services… if anyone does become interested, I'd love to talk. But for the rest of this comment, I'm going to outline my idea for the purposes of discussion and feedback.
I love web hosting. I'm good at it, and I enjoy it. But web hosting is cheap. I can't compete in that market — and I don't want to. Too many scammers sign up, put a spam site out there, and it lives and harms the internet until it's caught and shut down. And they use stolen cards anyway. So screw that.
So how do I differentiate myself?
I'm also going to be working on getting some good folks that I can oursource some things to. Like my good friend who works for a design firm and spends a lot of her time on SEO. She's an expert. She's also an artist. So, for example, for https://TheatreBunch.com/ - once we had the idea for the logo, I had her do the shapes of the actors and the spotlight, then I took it from there and finished up with the colours, some tweaks, the text…
I'm still working on my pricing, but what I have so far that I'm thinking for businesses:
$35/mo - WordPress hosting
$65/mo - WordPress hosting with 1 hour per month of editing time
From my research, these prices are around the level that a professional design firm would charge. And frankly, my hosting is superior.
I'm thinking that for a design firm that would like to use my services wholesale, I would offer a discount-per-additional-site of a dollar, taking it down to $25 or maybe $20 per site, i.e. host five sites and that's $35 + $34 + $33 + $32 + $31 per month. Add a site and it's a buck less than the previous.
NextCloud kind of excites me a little. It's not huge, but there are apps for NextCloud Talk, which is basically similar to Teams chat. But it's self-hosted (well, me-host-for-you-'ed hehe) meaning your data is under your control (via me, okay okay technicalities). I need to come up with pricing for that. But in addition to the Talk, area few other things such as Passwords that can be shared with team members with a one-click copy and an android app at least; shared files, and Deck which is a card app, i.e. create lists of cards, and each card can be assigned to someone, each card can have a due date, be open or completed, files attached, a chat pane just for that card and you can @ people and it'll notify them in their Talk app...... Few more things, but that's a good start to it.
On the WordPress side of things... I can offer dev sites and clone WordPress i.e. to clone a live site to dev or clone the dev site to live...
So basically, I can offer hosting to small to medium businesses, aspiring web designers, firms from small to medium-large, individuals even, though I might have to offer a steep discount to make it make more sense...
On top of that, though, I'm working on two tiers of pricing: One for my customers that I hope to get, but one for the communities and friends that I want to help and support. So for example, I'd offer straight-up $25/mo for anyone on Tildes, and throw in the editing time on top of that.
I'm thinking of targeting $100/hr for my design services, but I would offer Tildes (and my friends elsewhere) $50/hr. I also would be billing that conservatively, i.e. underreporting my time, if anything. I find there's always a bunch of overhead when doing stuff that I just don't tend to bill for, especially for a client I like. In fact, for TheatreBunch, I'm at about half billed and half unbilled hours. And that's fine with me. I'm involved with that project not just as designer and host, but hopefully eventually helping out in that community.
So I basically want to help new designers - or small businesses who want to handle their own website who are willing to learn how to use Divi (and if you can use a word processor, you can manage Divi with some practice. Certainly easier edits; maybe not a full design from scratch. But even there, there are remplates you could work from).
I want to be support for those folks - not just hosting, but helping them. Because I hate calling companies for help. The person doesn't really care about much except getting you off the phone. Installed something like WordPress and it doesn't work? Well, bucko, figure it out.
Well, I can help figure it out.
So what do you think, Tildes? Does it sound like a compelling service to you? Gimme all the crap like in the electrolye thread. :) I feel much more confident about this idea, mind - I have just shy of 30 years experience in hosting and design, although I have not been successful in the business side of things much of my life, but that's an ADHD issue. I no longer have imposter syndrome on this stuff. lol. But that said, I'm open to ideas and feedback and discussion. Y'all are good at that. <3
I work for a company selling training and tools for the locksmithing industry, and I've come up with several products for my company. But I also have some ideas that are beyond our internal production capabilities that I'm thinking of doing myself. The company has a history of buying tools from employees to resell in situations like this, and I'm not worried about my ideas getting ripped off or anything. I don't care about patents for my stuff at all, the kinds of tools I design are just not good candidates for it.
So, my question is this: if I go for this, how soon should I be getting a business license/LLC/business insurance? (I'm in the US, btw) Am I good to try selling them a few products first, or am I taking a huge risk?
I have three immediate thoughts:
First, check out your employment contract and make sure you own the intellectual property you create in the space. GPT can help you do that.
Does this mean you'll need machined parts? That gets expensive quick. Just calling out that my mom started a company that made customer laser housings and she went $300k in the hole getting things machined and remachined. So be careful there.
The last thought is to check out your local Small Business Administration Office. They offer free support in everything from setting up a business plan to IP issues to incorporating. Anecdotally, we set up our little company as a multi-member LLC and when we went to take on equity, it turned out we needed to be a Corp. So figure out what you're going to need and talk to some folks in the know.
Feel free to reach out with any other questions if you want additional info!
Most US employees don't have written employment contracts, and with or without one I wouldn't trust GPT to give legal advice.
I'm pretty sure a written contract is a legal requirement in most if not all states - if they have a copy is another question - but for the company's sake they probably do. And totally understand not trusting GPT for legal advice, but LLMs are great at looking for specific things - like IP clauses. Then they can read that section themselves or take it into a local SBA office to verify.
In most US states, terms of employment do not need to be recorded in writing. That's just a fact. It is thus very rare for US employees to have a copy of a written employment contract that could be fed into an LLM, even if it were a good idea to use LLMs for legal advice (which I maintain that it is not).
That’s interesting to learn it’s not a legal requirement. It hasn’t matched my experience at all; I always had an employment contract when I lived in the US, as have my friends in various states.
I never did when I was employed in the US, at least not a formal written contract like the ones I've had here in Europe! My impression from my friends is that they haven't either. Some specific industries may have them more often in the US, but not having one is the norm in my understanding. Technically you still have terms of employment of course, parts of which are sometimes recorded in writing in various places, but the type of formal written contract that both parties sign that lays out the terms of employment and which is required in many other countries is extremely rare in the US by comparison.
I would give advice between the two of you. LLMs are great at identifying specific things, but today bad at understanding them. As in my day job, I wouldn't trust anything from an LLM that I didn't have the capacity to verify myself.
Having said that, I think LLM + confirming what it tells you is a good way to start, and then having a professional at some point reviewing the information before your make any big moves.
Thanks for the response!
I don't have one of those, so that part is easy.
Fortunately, no. I'd be using my own tools at home.
That's a great idea, thanks! I'll have to look into that.
I think not having an employment contract actually makes it harder - they may still have some rights to your IP, it's just harder to find confirmation one way or the other in writing than it would be if you had an employment contract (or if you'd signed a specific waiver of those kinds of rights). I definitely think the advice to visit your local SBA is good though! They'll probably know where to point you for more information if they don't know something themselves.
Yeah, the "in writing" part is definitely lacking, but historically they've operated with a very open hand when it comes to employees making things at home and selling them back to the company. Definitely going to look into the SBA though.
In most states, an LLC is a pretty easy process and relatively inexpensive. While it's not necessary, I personally like the barrier between myself and business activities, your risk tolerance may be different. A business license is usually a whole different issue, sometimes a super local issue. If one is needed in your area, I would highly suggest getting it because local enforcement seems to have all the time in the world to cause cascading issues. Business insurance is... well that's up to you. Are you selling .22lr powered lock picks? I'd probably get some insurance. Are you selling a new style of manual lock pick? Probably not strictly necessary. Your city/town/county probably has some form of small-business incubator that can be really helpful in sorting out some of those concerns.
Thanks! I think it's unlikely that the sorts of things I make are likely to lead to lawsuits, but the protection of an LLC seems nice. Will definitely be checking in to local resources.
I've been thinking of creating an online Scrabble tournament site/app that only allows words that are also the brand names of products on Amazon.
I figure it's a no-brainer. Hire a couple twitch streamers to promote it and I can probably get partnerships with Hasbro and Amazon, as well as sponsorships from such brand names as MBDOFLY, QXBLONK, or ZYMBLYX.
(edit: seven letters)
Lol what a nightmarish dystopian idea! I love it!
I wish I lived in a world where my shitposts weren't an actual viable business model.
Can I share the business idea I actually pursued but put on the backburner permanently after a couple years?
I started my career as a CPA auditing community banks and credit unions in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, and I was working in the state with the most bank failures of any state in the US (Georgia). My clients all had a ton of foreclosed properties on their balance sheets (known as OREO or Other Real Estate Owned in the banking world), often sitting there for years. They did a poor job of marketing their OREO because selling real estate was not the focus of their business, and when they did eventually sell, they often had to be self-financed (i.e. the bank financing the sale of their own property), which limited the bank's ability to recognize gain on the sale and required a larger downpayment from the buyer to do so (due to accounting standards).
My angle was to connect banks with each other to share financing opportunities behind the scenes through a paid community membership and allow them to recognize gain on OREO sales more easily while having a consumer-facing property listing website like Zillow, Realtor.com, etc. on the front-end to market the properties that banks were trying to sell. I spent a couple years validating my assumptions, interviewing dozens of bankers that I knew, pitching investors, and building out the prototype all with my own time and money. I had some angel investors lined up but no bites from institutions because I was still a 1-person team with no revenue stream.
Then I realized I was happy with my job at the time doing forensic accounting, litigation consulting (like financial expert witness reports/testimony), and business valuation. I lucked out with my bosses too - the sweetest people you could work for in the public accounting world. I had just moved back from the big city to my wife's and my hometown and wanted to start a family, and although my wife had a great job that could support us both while I pursued this idea, I didn't want to take on the risk, especially with money from people in my friends/family network once it got to that point. I did work with a tech co-founder for about 8 months, someone I'm still good friends with, but he bailed because he was happy with his job too (what a great problem to have, right? Lol).
Well ultimately, accounting standards changed several years later. The entire premise could have been upended depending on how it developed. My bosses also retired in 2021, which led me to my current job at a top craft whiskey distillery. You know what they said to me during the interview process? One of the things we like about your resume is that you've been at your job for almost 7 years. We've just seen a lot of job hopper resumes, and we are truly looking for someone with local roots who can be here a while and grow with us.
That still sounds like a really cool idea that make Zillow and one of the big dogs can pick up.
But nothing beats job security doing good work with great people. :)
I recently started a business. Recently as in a month ago. It's a cybersecurity firm. I'm currently in the pre-launch phase, but have a presentation coming up for my local small business development office. That's in preparation for a workshop they're hosting.
I've already received positive feedback from the SBDO, so hopefully I can use them to get my first client. I'm trying to set myself up for success and so far so good!
Good job!! Hope for all the best for your new business!
A new clothing company. I don't care about clothes and I wish picking them were more streamlined. Maybe something like this exists already, I don't know, but this imaginary and never to be realized (at least by me) business of mine would have an extremely simple website and we'd only work online. The landing page would have a few options of clothing:
SHIRTS / PANTS / SOCKS etc. The list can be extended to your heart's content. Say the user clicks on SHIRTS, the next page would be for SIZE then COLOR. And then the payment screen. Boom, done.
No item would have any branding whatsoever nor any kind of over the top design. Quality items in various solid colors with no exceptions.
I recently came across blanks when I was looking into customized clothing. There are companies that sell plain clothes in a lot of different colors. The two I know are Gildan and Bella+Canvas. While these are only wholesale that I know of, I think you can find these through other distributors to order smaller quantities. It would be nice to have the same thing targeted towards regular customers.
Solid colored cloths with no branding certainly exist, but they're all over the place. I've not heard of Bella+Canvas but I have several Gildan shirts. I bought a couple a few months back and I was disappointed with the drop in quality. C&A makes some nice and cheap stuff that fits the criteria, but again, the whole process has so much friction and uncertainty. I wish it were easier. I'm glad I don't buy clothes often.
American Apparel is Gildan now, but I like B+C and LA Apparel tri-blend shirst the most. Jerzees makes a really nice, inexpensive hoodie. For hats, I like the Yupoong Jockey Cap (five panel) -- they're about $6 each low-MOQ and are adjustable with a really nice fit and flat.
Especially with the jockey cap, if you look around for hats, you'll see a lot of companies slapping a patch with their name on the front onto this thing and selling it for $30+.
Back to shirts, the Gildan 2000 is the standard, but its a very boxy shirt. The AA 2001 is a little better, but not as nice as the AA TR401 or the LAA TR01. They cost more, but the quality is superior and they only improve with age.
With all of these companies, after a certain MOQ --- I think it was a few thousand of one style, size, and color, you can get custom labels. That or you can do your own. Every city has a place that will make these tshirt labels. The better option is to screen the info on the inside of the shirt and the cost isn't that much more compared to the benefit.
With all of these, you can find local resellers and they'll have an MOQ of 1, for the most part. If they want more, they'll likely do cash and carry (same with GFS and most b2bs).
Even though Dov (founder of both AA and LAA) is pretty sketchy, the LAA stuff is made in South Central LA. AA used to be here, but Gildan moved it to Central America. Back when Dov was with AA, he was big into paying great wages and everything for his staff. AA had Legalize LA, which is worth reading into if you're interested. LAA is likely the same, but I haven't looked into it as much.
You're describing the design philosophy of MUJI (literally, "no logo/brand) but with a more straightforward site. It's been decades and I'm still very happy with the quality and feel of their offerings.
Kind of! At least if we're only talking about the products they're offering. I'm only familiar with their stationary products and I like them well enough, but unfortunately they don't sell clothes where I am.
MUJI clothes always seemed nice when I’ve browsed. I just wish they had more of a color selection than earth tones and muted mustard yellow.
Their clothing is super nice! But yeah the very limited selection is kinda why I mentioned it to @kwyjibo to begin with hahaha
You might be more interested in Uniqlo, they have a lot of graphic prints and more seasonal styles. Still nothing loud but a bit more
Living in SG, Uniqlo is the male uniform, hahaha. I’ve noticed the quality of their basics has gone down a lot in the past few years. Simple chino shorts I have are tearing at the hem and in the pockets after only a year or two of mostly work-from-home life. Neck elastic on some of the t-shirts stretched and wavy. It’s sad when some free conference/company swag shirts hold up better than these brands (I still have some free tshirts 10-15 years old in regular rotation)
Now that you mentioned it....I have noticed a bit of a quality decline as well....
I asked someone over chat and after they "escalated" they're sending me a $20 credit. Dude that's not even one T Shirt, and my whole deal is that the quality isn't good enough to keep buying. :/
If you're are fairly new (under 1 year) it might be worth going to a physical store and asking for refund.
someone should just do this. Basically a QR code when you enter a building that leads to a repo with blueprints and other documentation that tradespeople need.
Damn, that's quite the idea! I used to work in building documentation and man was it a nightmare trying to find all the elevations, plans, etc. It always felt like we were archival detectives!
right! So as a service, collect and organize it all, keep it updated... pretty straightforward. That or have a training tool like Duolingo that teaches HVAC guys how to take their tools and old parts home with them when they leave a job. Either or.
hahaha, I don't think the second option is an engineering exercise ;)
haha
for the first one, though, 'blockchain' is all buzz, but a centralized, running log of modifications to a building would be invaluable. It'd be pretty straightforward once it got going.
That's a very good idea and easy to start without needing a critical mass. Even if you're the first tradesperson to use it in a house, the benefit of an electronic record that you don't have to write/maintain is pretty great. You could use tradespeople to try and push the product ("May I stick this QR code to your house? Here's what it gets you...")
It could also serve as a record for tradespeople - if they register, each job they do could be linked between them and the job. Over time they could see a database of houses they've visited and when, that they don't have to manage themselves. Just scan and add some notes/photos/video.
Effort to start is low for the homeowner, and the incentives are, again, electronic records that you don't have to keep.
I wouldn't use a service like this but I could see it sweeping the industry and making home maintenance a lot easier. Then selling to Google to pump it full of ads and service recommendations while you kick back on a rich person beach.
Brainstorming, but could it also let homeowners scan barcodes on their appliances and have it register automatically, and recommend needed services based on specific products?
I wonder if something like this already exists. I feel like it probably exists in the form of a hundred different low quality product-specific apps.
i wouldn’t bother with homeowners — focus purely on big ass buildings with in-house maintenance teams.
A shack somewhere in the community that you need to scan a piece of ID or credit card to enter. One ID per person please.
Inside, you'll find various things for sale:
pieces of original artwork signed by painter
small craft items for cheap
cool beverage fridge, wholesale prices
strange snacks from far off places around the world
random cute knick-knacks
bulletin board for if you have other things you're selling or giving away, and also info for community events
table of free "take 1 leave 1" items
mini library book exchange.
The basic "need" comes from wanting to have a miniature art gallery to display a growing collection of paintings, and a "I don't want to hear your rejection if you hate them" policy. If someone happens to want to buy one, great! If not, I don't want to hear from you, but sure grab a cold drink.
Pay digitally please. Help yourself, no one is operating the shop but there is a camera. Shop remains open until I lose faith in basic decency for humanity.
I have some ideas that I’m tempted to share to get feedback on, but the urge to avoid getting scooped is tremendous. I’m aware that ideas are mostly valueless until proven otherwise, but the aversion is there all the same.
So, ah, sorry. I’ll be watching this thread though!
Totally understand! I was thinking more for brick and mortar rather than web based ideas so I can totally understand the apprehension.
I will say as someone who started and runs a web platform business, we were incredibly hush hush about everything when we started and in hindsight I regret doing it. There are so many vehicles to a successful business, and even though we've been able to keep ours without taking dilutive funding or a parent company - it has its own tradeoffs. Most folks just want to point you in the right direction or connect you to people who will help. But again, we didn't do that and we didn't get scooped so I might have a different opinion if we had gone a different direction.
I think that, once I have a bit more set up, I’ll probably share more! I’d just like to be far enough along that I’m both invested well enough to get running at short notice, but also early enough that pivoting is not overly expensive. I think that’ll be optimal point to look for public feedback (and I’ll probably make a post here, too XD)
It’s cool to hear about your business (es), btw! It certainly gives me more confidence to think more about what I’d want to pursue :)
Awesome! Can't wait to hear about it!
Unsolicited advice: If you're based in the USA, I'll also advocate for checking out your local small business administration office. The first time I went in to talk about IP law - I was in gradschool and trying to ensure the UC System didn't get equity in something I'd already developed - and a guy started talking me through the process in terms of pizza recipes. I was like "why is this guy talking IP with wet and dry ingredients, I'm trying to patent a computer vision output!" but it turned out he was a co-founder of Pizza-my-heart and ended up being really helpful. They also turned me on to the Small Business Development Center in the bay area which has been by far and away the most helpful group we've worked with - including accelerators at Google and Stanford. Just my little PSA for public support!