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What are the wackiest, craziest far fetched and above all EXCITING startup ideas you've ever heard of or had yourself?

Hanging out in startup land you come across startup ideas from the downright bonkers to the unbearably dull.

Dalton Caldwell recently said to me, successful startups are usually boring. They are usually 'turning the handle' on someone's pain point getting the job done and getting paid.

Whilst he definitely has a point, there are startups that don't fit this theme. Maybe they exist at the edges of innovation like electrified commercial aviation or protein replacement or a guy I met called James that's working on Hellosauras.

Please check out The Birthday Show on the home page, you will not regret it. "Everyone is here cos you grew another year!"

Sure boring startups are probably a safe bet but can we call out the awesomist, braveist, boldest and most exciting startup ideas out there?

Let's not optimise for the safe bets, let's optimise for Moon Shoots!

  1. 5

    Help students figure out a fulfilling career path. Many students leave college not knowing what they want to do.

    The solution: get a hypnotist to help experience different professions. The hypnotist will make you believe you're a lawyer, an engineer, a veterinarian, etc. for 10 minutes at a time. During the experience, the team measures your emotional responses to the different professions. After the session, a recommendation is made for which profession to pursue.

    Is this even possible? I don't know. But this could be big if it works.

  2. 5

    Let's do commercial spaceflight with random second hand rockets for one tenth of the price of NASA. Oh and you know how everyone else has always thrown the rockets away? Let's make them reusable.

  3. 3

    This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGUor824a74&ab_channel=SportsOnScreen

    Put 10 people in an indoor soccer field, give em Oculus headsets plus knee sensor pads. Simulate a live stadium environment. Sell the experience for $2500 an hour (250 per person)...get it down to $100 per person per hour with scale.

  4. 3

    Whelp, you asked for it. Don’t judge me...
    A mobile app that is sort of “Shittter Twitter”. It uses GPS to find the bathroom you’re in, then lets you write and draw all the trash you would normally see carved into bathroom stalls.

    1. 2

      Lol, are you using Augmented Reality?

      1. 2

        It's important in our industry to use all cutting edge technology available to us. Augmented reality is critical to the development of the Shitter Twitter.

        Our B2B model allows business to add reporting of occupancy using additional sensors. With occupancy data we can use our proprietary machine learning algorithms to estimate smell strength, seat warmth, and more!

        Of course our end users can also just report these things, think Waze, but for stalls.

        1. 1

          Oh I understand better now, interesting.

  5. 1

    Building a digital currency that'll be incorporated into every like, share, upvote in social media. RN since everyone has unlimited currency, they can upvote the silliest things and the reward system in internet is twisted. But with a digital currency, people can only spend what they have earned to make anything viral. Best contents will be rewarded and definition of money will change. I don't want any free exchange of this currency with "real money" for first few years so that big corporates can't buy into the democracy of small internet users :)

  6. 1

    After the app Yo went viral. I had an idea of creating an app for a never ending story called Endless. There would be a chapter 1 already started and the users would have 50 minutes to add their part to the next chapter and then 10 of user voting with no writing.

    After the vote the winners part is added to the story and the process starts again.

    After X amount of chapters the story would split and branch out creating..... Endless timelines.

    ...younger me was so optimistic lol.

  7. 1

    A social media called "Roast Off"

    It's chat roulette, but the purpose is to roast/make-fun-of the other person on the call.

  8. 1

    Fillmore Pants - Stretch Pants for Men

  9. 1

    Not really a serious idea since I'm at Empire Flippers. But I always thought it be hilarious to start a marketing agency where all the marketing I do to promote the agency is pretending my agency sells a valueless service with upsells how we can minimize your net profit as our client.

    Kind of like JP Sears how he trolls life coaches but is a life coach, only an agency trolling agencies a bit lol.

    I could see bunch of ridiculous ad creatives and weird youtube videos. No idea if it would work, probably wouldn't, but be super fun to do

  10. 1

    Though the development of electric aircraft is exciting, running an airline using electric aircraft isn't so much. That'll probably be a company run by economists, just as is currently the case with airlines. Pilots and aircraft are just assets, and there's an insanely small margin of profit on each seat.

    Electric aviation will change that just slightly. The profit margin will become bigger at first, but slowly shrink. As for now the size of electric aircraft is the biggest issue, we can expect the first players to have big fleets of small aircraft, which in turn would need to heavily compete against companies such as Uber. Aside from that it's a question whether they can find the pilots needed to man these small aircraft. It's a numbers game, and with regard to pilots. Incidentally COVID managed to free up many pilots, so if anyone wants to start, this is your time!

    All in all it's promising, as it'll become possible to travel from Amsterdam to Paris for about €15/seat cost price, assumed airfields manage to modify their infrastructure to accommodate much more and much smaller aircraft.

    So yes, I have thought about starting an all electric airline, though I'm in no way equipped to handle such enormous endeavour. Let me just stay in the supporting role for aviation I'm currently in.

  11. 1

    Definitely not awesome nor useful but definitely bold, I made social network app for haters a couple years ago. It was called… I Hate. 😬

    I'll go cringe internally for the rest of the day

    1. 2

      Social media without the dopamine rush.

  12. 2

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 3

      I once had this exact idea and then thought "Naah! wouldn't work!" Happy to see you are making it work. Best of luck to you!

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted a year ago.

    2. 1

      How do you get around local food service regulations? Are they just operating these kitchens illegally? As far as I'm aware there are far stricter regulations on restaurants than hotels.

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted a year ago.

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