Ideas you will want to steal 😀

Welcome to Part 3 of our Building in Public journey.

We've appreciated all of the feedback on the journey so far, it's motivated us.

We've fleshed out some of the ideas outlined in Part 1 and added some more, we are looking for feedback on these areas:

• Which ideas seem like they could be profitable businesses and why?

• What might be some good next steps to further validate these ideas?

1. Lost data in podcasts

Problem

When podcasts mention external resources it can be difficult to track it down again if it’s not in the show notes. It’s also hard to get a sense of what a podcast is about if the host has not written detailed show notes.

Who wants this today?

• Podcast hosts would benefit from a tool that could automate some of the process of show note collection, which would save them time and fuel growth.
• Marketers could better target specific podcasts with more knowledge of their content, improving their conversion rate with ads.
• Podcast listeners would benefit from more easily searching for podcasts that mention their interests, improving their listening experience reducing time spent searching for podcasts.

How much will they pay?

Larger podcast hosts might be willing to pay 1000s of dollars a year if it can help grow the podcast, smaller would probably need lower tier pricing but may be willing to pay hundreds a year if there are also.

How many of them are there?

• Five million podcasts around the world,
• Podcast advertising is a 3 Billion dollar industry in the US.

Distribution

• Targeting mid level podcasts and using word of mouth between podcast hosts to grow.
• Engaging with podcast hosts and marketers online, possibly on reddit and twitter to understand their pain points.

At what frequency do they make this purchase?

Monthly subscription or on a per podcast published basis, some podcasts publish episodes multiple times a week.

2. Time wasted collecting insurance information on the phone

Problem

Massive amount of time wasted calling people and collecting personal and insurance information. The main pieces of information that people need in order to move forward with checking eligibility is:

• The patient’s name and date of birth;
• The name of the insurance company;
• The name of the primary insurance plan holder and their relationship to the patient;
• The patient’s policy number and group ID number (if applicable); and
• The insurance company’s phone number and address.

I personally have manually given this information over the phone countless times.

Who wants this today?

• Patients calling various medical services offices passing along the same information over and over again.
• The medical office as it would drastically reduce incoming calls and hold time.

How much will they pay?

I could see the business paying a few hundred dollars a year or more. It would decrease incoming calls and increase patient satisfaction. Patients wouldn’t be expected to pay for this service directly.

How many of them are there?

Tens of millions of patients in the US. Hundreds of thousands of medical offices in the US.

At what frequency do they make this purchase?

They would receive tens of calls per day, the purchase would most likely be a monthly subscription.

Distribution

• Selling to larger chains of medical offices first and trying to get a foothold in the market that way.

or

• Targeting local mom and pop shops and relying on word of mouth to spread

Depending on which has less friction.

Possible solutions

1. A phone number routing service that collected the information the first time from the caller and any time they called a number that was connected to the service subsequently they would be prompted to share their information with the caller.
2. A link that can be shared with patients that they authenticate through and subsequently can opt to share their previous information with a new provider.

3 . Penny budgeting chatbot has not been replicated

Problem

The penny app was bought by Credit Karma in 2017, but was not put to use for its original purpose, and seems to have been completely killed. The UX of managing personal finance and budgeting through a Chatbot interface was phenomenal, most budgeting apps are complex dashboards that don’t feel fluid.

https://www.pennyapp.io/

4. AI Marketplace

Problem

The ai craze has caused a huge influx of new software tools. I don’t know what is trust worthy or if there has been ai development in my industry. Whether I am actively looking for a solution or stumble upon someones new company on Twitter, I would like to validate the tool using a 3rd party. However, it seems like most of the current directories can’t keep up with the rapid development of AI.

Solution

Yelp for AI Software. This would be a comprehensive directory of modern AI based tools with user reviews and rating for each tool.

5. Freelancer Expense Tracking

Problem

Freelancers, Contractors, Single Member LLC’s, 1099’s track their expenses for schedule C write offs to reduce their taxable income. I can’t find a bookkeeping tool that will automatically match my financial transactions with my receipts (this is critical in case you are audited). I’ve tried all the popular solutions in the space, but they work terribly. None of them can accurately sync transactions with receipts. Often times they can’t associate a transaction unless the date is an exact match, this causes a huge error because most credit cards don’t process transactions for 24-72 hours after the purchase was made.

Solution

A simple platform that associates receipts with transactions. Transactions with receipts that are a close match are automatically associated, but flagged for approval. This would be automated through email forwarding, or even connecting a customers email inbox to the tool.

6. Email Newsletter Summarizer

Problem

I get a bunch of emails from subscriptions like Morning Brew, TLDR, Milk Road, The Hustle… and many more. These quickly flood my inbox with emails that I am interested in, but can’t always read. I wish I could read a comprehensive summary of all my subscriptions and click on titles where I’d like to learn more. I also hate all the gif images so let’s get rid of those too.

Solution

not sure how this would work.

1. Chrome plugin for gmail to validate the idea. This would replace each individual email body copy with a summarized version and no-images. Links to read the full email and/or links to read the actual source article.
2. A platform that you subscribe to where you can pick the email newsletters you’re interested in and get a single daily email from our platform summarizing all of the subscriptions you selected on account creation.

7. Charity Indexer

Problem

Let’s imagine that I have a large sum of money I would like to donate. But, I don’t know if the charities that I like actually serve the communities with the funds that I donate. How can I validate the amount of money that I donate, gets delivered to the correct people - not in the hands of the Charity’s board.

Solution

A website aggregating popular charities financial statements. All charity financial statements are public so this is simply making public domain information more understandable.

8. LMS for Webflow

Problem

I want to create a self hosted educational course, paywall and everything. I already have a webflow website and don’t want to direct people off of my website to purchase my course or engage with my learning materials.

Solution

Learndash for Webflow. Learndash is an LMS plugin for WordPress. Leverage platform arbitrage to create the same platform for Webflow.

9. Conversion of ClassPass users to members in exercise studios is close to 0%

Problem

Exercise studio owners who accept ClassPass are offering their classes at a high discount. ClassPass probably tells them that they’ll have a good chance of converting these discount participants to full members, but conversion rate is close to 0% anecdotally.

Excerpt from this blog post
One thing that I found surprising is that based on our internal data, 1.5% of Classpass users did convert to memberships. That is, that out of 1259 students who attended through Classpass from 2016–2018, 20 students became members. The rate of new memberships purchased by all non-Classpass users is almost double the Classpass rate — 2.9%.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHeuCJEtSOQ

https://www.mindbodyonline.com/business/education/blog/how-convert-studio-hoppers-and-drop-ins-full-time-members

cc: @radby

Part 1
Part 2