📖 A 3-for-1 Special (Idea Edition #7)

Idea #1 - Social media analytics for emerging creators 

⚾ The Elevator Pitch - Help new or emerging social media creators learn what formats, styles, and content types work best for the successful creators in their niche.

💡The Idea - The ability to generate additional income and career freedom, along with the vainer prospects of receiving more attention, all attract people to becoming a social media creator. For most, however, it can be very difficult to start that journey, as even if you know what content YOU want to create, that does not mean it is the best content to attract more viewers. Furthermore, the content you are going to post may be exactly what the audience desires, but the format and styling could be poor.

Our idea is to start an agency that leverages social media APIs, databases, and AI to help emerging creators know what content works best in their niche. For example, if a client is an emerging influencer in the personal finance space, the agency team and tools will work to take the content of the top personal finance influencers and break it down to provide quantitative and qualitative insights into what makes their content so successful. There are almost endless insights that could be pulled, but examples include:

• Content Type (Photos? Short Form Video?)

• Captions and hashtags

• Frequency of posts

• Timing of posts

• The video editing tools that the creators use

👷 The Work - Start with one platform (i.e. Instagram) and leverage the API and other databases/APIs to pull quantifiable user data and post statistics. AI tools and an analytics team can be used to determine more qualitative information such as color scheme, video caption fonts, etc.

💸Revenue - Charge a flat fee for the analysis, offer different packages for the level of insights you can provide creators.

🔻Expenses - API/database costs, AI tools/the cost of resources for analyzing content, advertising.

👍The Good Stuff - You can leverage the creators you work with for shoutouts/advertising; there are rather small upfront costs.

👎The Risks - Data access issues, data inconsistency issues and sample sizing, keeping up with the algorithm.

Idea #2 - Revolutionize your coat rack

⚾ The Elevator Pitch - A multi-pronged add-on hook to make hanging clothes easier and more accessible for future use.

💡The Idea - In lieu of individual coat hangers and closets, many homeowners and public locations leverage coat racks to for quick access and retrieval of your coat/clothing. You probably have one in your own home. While multiple designs and styles exist, many look like this:

One problem with this current design is that many homeowners have limited hooks and thus coats and articles of clothing get stacked on-top of each other like this:

When this happens, clothes can get buried at the bottom of the pile and become inaccessible. To counteract this, we propose a slide-on hook attachment that adds additional hooks to the coat rack/hooks. See a sketch below. Reader be warned, this is only a 2D frontal view:

👷 The Work - Build a prototype and validate it with some customers, apply for a patent, work with a manufacturer to mass produce the product, market the product.

💸Revenue - Product sales, licensing fees.

🔻Expenses - Manufacturing and shipping costs, advertising, human resources.

👍The Good Stuff - DTC (Direct-To-Consumer) Product, straightforward design.

👎The Risks - Potentially unnecessary, production costs and product testing, variations in existing coat hooks (the product may need to be flexible somehow)

Idea #3 - The “Name your price” housing marketplace

⚾ The Elevator Pitch - Open up the housing market and attract dreamers/high net-worth individuals to this real estate website.

💡The Idea - The housing market is arguably in the worst shape it’s been since the 2008 financial crisis. Combine that with the fact that interest rates are unlikely to decline any time soon, many prospective sellers are keeping their houses off the market, choosing to keep their current mortgage. This shortage of sellers peaked last September, when supply hit all-time lows.

They say everybody has a price for their possessions, and this idea tries to open up the stagnant housing market, especially for wealthy prospective buyers. The idea is to gather the “What would you sell your home for” price from as many homeowners as possible, and list the homes and prices on a website with a similar format to Zillow. This would attract prospective buyers who want to look beyond the existing market and purchase homes or spaces that they would find beneficial to them, even if it would be overpriced.  

The website would also attract “dreamers”, or people who drive past a home and say to themselves “I wonder how much that house would sell for?” While tools such as the Zestimate® exist, the estimated value of a home typically differs dramatically from what someone actually would list their home for.

👷 The Work - Create the website with a database/map of all US homes, start collecting data points/prices from homeowners in one area, expand through advertising across the country.

💸Revenue - Commissions from connecting buyers and homeowners, selling data and ads

🔻Expenses - Advertising, website costs (hosting, design, maintenance), potentially payments to homeowners to provide their “price”

👍The Good Stuff - Simple tech stack (just a website a list/map of all homes in the US), stable industry (real estate will never go away), limited downside for either side of the marketplace.

👎The Risks - Reaching critical mass (there are 144 million homes in the US), reluctancy of homeowners to list their prices, potentially a redundant tool (i.e. Do people care about what the homeowner would sell for, or is something like the Zestimate® what they really are interested in?)

📚For the Road

• Will The Housing Market Crash in 2024? Experts Give 5-Year Predictions

• Is the TikTok Ban Really Going to Happen?

• How To Successfully Get A Physical Product Invention Idea To Market