I am hoping that this will become a very long thread about new startup ideas and be an inspiration to all.
The idea itself isn't the hard part. I come up with dozens of ideas every week. The hard part is turning that idea into a successful business. That takes lots of hard work, sleepless nights, pounding pavements, fruitless sales calls and emails, the list goes on. The old adage of finding a problem and solving it still applies. Just today, one problem that presented itself that a startup could solve is:
Employee Scheduling. My wife is a per diem float team nurse at the number 3 hospital in the United States. When she wants to work, she calls in to an automated phone system, and records a series of messages after the beep to schedule herself (day shift, 12 hours, department, name, phone number, etc). Someone then listens to all of these messages, as well as messages from department heads looking to fill staffing needs. This person in the staffing office then calls my wife at 4am to let her know where she should report (or if they don't have anything for her). Tell me why that can't be a simple online/mobile app, with Twilio integration to send a text message, voicemail, or email confirmation? The same app could be used to schedule appointments for nearly anything...dentists, hair salons, you name it. You could beef it up by offering options such as realtime availability, payment processing, etc., to make it applicable to multiple industries. And you could charge a monthly fee, or per appointment, you name it.
Of course to turn this into a startup, you'd have to build the backend, the app, and have a sales team to sign up businesses, but it could be a hit.
Why is it that our greatest idea hasn't really been capitalized or used to its fullest. I am referring to the internet. We keep touting ourselves as "being connected"; we really are not, but can we become more connected? We are effective in Tweeting for a flash mob to occur in central station at time X, but why is it that we cannot issue an Amber alert of a missing child by the same means?; most of us now use mobile devices more than ever. Perhaps, because incidents like the NBC Twitter account being hacked and posting a bogus tweet on 9/11, just doesn't instill a lot of confidence in such a system. Nonetheless, it seems silly to me that we have to issue an Amber alert on highways for maximum exposure when we have the internet and mobile devices.
I'm really talking about our inter-connectivity and maximizing it to its full potential. Forums come close to making my point. For example, when was the last time you searched for a medical condition using Google. You often have to filter through a lot of pages to get the answer that you are looking for. The problem with forums is that the anonymity of the internet doesn't really afford the luxury of trusting Dr. Quack on the other side of the post. Wouldn't it be nice to just get more than a 2nd medical opinion? What about 1000 or 10000 medical opinions in a forum-like setting? It is unlikely in the current infrastructure because 1) we cannot verify whether the people posting are indeed professionals, 2) legal and liability issues, 3) compensation? (just listing it here because it's inevitable that people might want to be $ for their advice). Disregarding #1 and #3 for the moment, we could negate #2 if we could get an aggregate graph or pie chart of the responses. For example, "My son has this disease and he exhibits x, y, z, symptoms. What could it be?" Imagine how much more confident the parent would feel if he/she had an aggregate result of 80% respondents said disease x and 10% said disease y - from 1000 or 10000 medical professionals. Too far fetch of an idea? Perhaps, if we had a private and secure network along side the current internet, I can see it working. Social media forums, like FB, could take this on. Unfortunately, they exist as part of the current fabric of the internet and, by default, anonymity is rampant, and users in this forum I described would be less likely to submit their professional information to be stored in a server ‘out there’ with the risk of it being misused. Mistrust is the underlying issue; remember, the internet was built for 'trusted' parties - that is a rare commodity in this commercialized internet.
Forums (of all shapes and sizes) from legitimate people/professionals existing in this so-called private network could take on a whole new life of their own; and if you still want to post things anonymously, just go back to the old internet. But imagine the power of the 'many' -it clearly outweighs the 'few' and we aren’t really maximizing it; the internet has become a dumping ground for data...
Be my guest on taking on this idea, otherwise, we could use more apps =)
In general, ideas are easy to create and essentially free. They become great because of the time, energy, and determination of people.
What you could do to generate possible ideas is take an bland industry and challenge the assumptions around that industry. From the assumption challenges will come the seeds to create a statrtup with potential. But the greatness will only come from people tackling those initial idea seeds.
However, after diving a lot into Lean Product and UX Design, I have learned that the hardest part is finding problems worth solving. In my opinion, being able to discover problems that have terrible solutions and workarounds are really where good ideas are spawned, then "hypothesized" and "validated".
Also, for helping to formulate your ideas (I am assuming a business model), it has helped me to use a business model canvas. I like the "lean" one from http://www.runningleanhq.com and there is a link to one from Steve Blank's blog article: http://steveblank.com/2011/09/22/how-to-build-a-web-startup-... and a good slide explanation: http://steveblank.com/2010/11/15/creating-startup-success-cu...
Hope this helps.
1) (top down) check out www.crunchbase.com - there are about 75k companies there, a significant portion that are startups. Browse privately held companies in a category interesting to you -- you'll see 'current problems' that entrepreneurs and VCs believe are commercially viable.
2 (bottom up) Take a few areas of professional or personal interest, look at the leading tools/services/companies related to each of those interests, and for each check out discussion boards, FAQs, blogs, etc. to see where there is a lot of interest (via suggestions, complaints, work-arounds) for getting something fixed, or doing something better.
As you start to think of how YOU might tackle the problems you see from above, you are generating startup ideas ...
For example something like www.metrolyrics.com is within my ability to execute. I wish I came up with that idea. Oh well. Anyway the story of this site and his founder is very educational. I can't find the link right now.