📖 It's a 3-1 Special! (Idea Edition #10)

🧠 Top of Mind Technology

• Having dreams of visiting Mars? Did you just watch The Martian and want to be Matt Damon? If so, think again because, according to a new study, humans who travel to Mars risk permanent kidney damage.

• Watching cars go around in circles for hundreds of laps may seem like a drag, but you should be thankful that some people find the sport of racing cars so exciting! There are many modern car technologies that came from the racing community, including these 10.

• Living somewhere with no or crummy air conditioning? We’re here to help. It’s summertime, and you shouldn’t have to deal with the heat on your own. Check out these innovative tips for cooling down a room without AC.

🍪 Business Bites

• Boeing has had a ton of rough days over the past few years, and yesterday wasn’t much better, with US prosecutors recommending to the Justice department that the company be formally charged criminally in connection to two deadly 737 MAX crashes that occurred in October 2018 and March 2019.

• Thanks to the performance of stocks like Nvidia and Microsoft, the MSCI Large-Cap to MSCI Small-Cap stock ratio is at its highest level in over 20 years. The stock market is currently being carried by these large-cap stocks, and Reuters has issued a warning about what this could mean for investors.

• The amateur/youth sports world is changing, and decisions are being made through a business lens now more than ever. Christo Lamprecht knows this better than anyone. He turned down an invitation to play in the U.S. Open two weeks ago to play in a Korn Ferry even and work to qualify for the PGA Tour as soon as possible.

Idea #1 - The Infinity Swing

⚾ The Elevator Pitch - A lightweight golf swing tool that can be attached to your golf bag and let you take unlimited practice swings while on the course:

💡The Idea - Going to a driving range before a golf round takes time and costs money. At the same time, hitting a ball before you start playing, or even while you are playing, can give you invaluable feedback on your swing. The Infinity Swing was a lightweight device we created to allow you to take practice swings during your round with a dangling ball on the side of your golf bag.

👷 The Work - The prototype has two parts: an acrylic rod with a string and squishy ball threaded through it, and a 3D-printed attachment that lets you slide the rod across the bag and dangle the ball off to the side.

💸Revenue - The idea never made it past the prototype phase, but we would have loved to use better materials and sell it DTC. We filed a provisional patent for it 3 years ago, but never did anything with it.

🔻Expenses - The cost of creating each prototype was ~$15 at the time. Using better materials but ordering the product in bulk, we estimate the unit cost could be as low as $10, even with surging inflation (it’s a really simple device).

👍The Good Stuff - Simple idea, great market (golf), easy to use.

👎The Risks - Does not use a real golf ball, and since the ball just goes in a circle around the rod, the feedback is not very useful

Idea #2 - URL Appear

⚾ The Elevator Pitch - A browser extension that allows you to save any URL and set it to open at specific dates and times.

💡The Idea - Another idea that we already prototyped, this idea came to life during the COVID pandemic shift to remote work. The browser extension still exists on the Chrome Store today, but it doesn’t work anymore (the code needs some updates). One of our editors was in college at the time, and he created the extension so he would never be late to online class. There is a timer built into the extension so at a certain date/time, the link is opened without you having to search for it:

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👷 The Work - All it took was writing JavaScript code that was compatible with the chrome extension library. Developing a chrome extension, or an extension for any browser, is fairly simple as there are many courses out there that show you the basics.

💸Revenue - No revenue was ever made from the idea, and a path to making any significant revenue would have been difficult without a significant pivot.

🔻Expenses - There is a $5 developer fee to put your extension on the Chrome store, and that was the only expense.

👍The Good Stuff - Easy to make, intuitive, very low expenses, plethora of use cases: meeting links, sports games, etc.

👎The Risks - Not really needed/wanted - people would prefer to open meetings/links when they are ready, or use reminders instead, not easy enough to use (many clicks – people would prefer one click)

Idea #3 - Bed Sheet Magnets

⚾ The Elevator Pitch - A method of keeping the top layer sheet and/or the fitted bottom sheet of your bed stable and easy to put on through the use of magnets.

💡The Idea - It has never made sense to us why it needs to be so hard to make a bed. Sticking the sheets underneath the bed so they hold seems a bit archaic. What if, instead, magnets were attached to not only the bed, but to the top layer/fitted bottom sheets so they stay in place? This would prevent people from having to lift their mattress to put their sheets back underneath, something which can be especially difficult if your bed is tucked into a corner.

👷 The Work - Anyone can sew magnets onto sheets and into the side of a mattress with a few YouTube tutorials. To make this idea into a product someone would buy would need to have the following characteristics:

• The magnets are cheap

• They can be easily installed onto existing sheets/beds

• If the magnets are removed, they do not leave marks on the the sheets/beds

• They are hidden and cannot be seen (they should be installed on the corners of the sheets)

And of course, they must work. Perhaps a lighter, small sheet-like piece of magnet would work best at all four corners of the sheets/bed. It may also be possible to place them onto the sheets spots via a sticker-like mechanism.

💸Revenue - Magnet sales

🔻Expenses - Initial research and development costs, market research (would people even want this?), manufacturing and shipping costs, marketing

👍The Good Stuff - Targets a common pain point (everyone has dealt with the troubles of making their bed), simple design

👎The Risks - Depending on the material used, magnets can be expensive; It is also not a necessity product

🤔 Musing of the Week

Will AI have a creative ability to generate brand-new, novel ideas?

In our last musing of the week, we discussed the implications of AI Chatbots/LLMs such as ChatGPT on SEO, and that got us thinking: If ChatGPT uses the internet as its source of training data, what happens if the majority of the content on the internet becomes AI generated? Is there any impact on the training data? To us, it would not make sense for ChatGPT or another LLM to train on data that was generated by itself. This is because the outputs of the Chatbot were based on a predictive analysis of the original training data. This led us to ask: will AI have a creative ability to generate brand-new, novel ideas?

Albeit an older study, this article from Forbes article discusses this same issue. A couple quotes from the article that we found intriguing:

• “AI will not develop fundamentally new ideas on its own; however, there are ways in which AI can support humans in doing so.”

• “AI can also take over more creative tasks by identifying patterns in data that humans would not have found. AI does not just take over tasks that would be time-consuming; it might provide insights humans would have never found themselves”

📚For the Road

• 21 Best Golf Gadgets for 2024

• 13 Competitors of Boeing