To be honest, I’m scared to share these because they’re my startup ideas. They pop into my head throughout the day and I have this app that I use to record a quick note.
But there’s little point in hoarding ideas, especially considering there’s no way I can explore them all myself. So here it is, my ultimate list of startup ideas. This is by no means an exhaustive list nor is it well-formatted (yet), but I hope it might spark some inspiration.
Keyword Polling Website
A platform that conducts ‘polling’ searches across various websites for specific keywords or phrases and notifies users via email or Slack when those keywords appear. For instance, as a user of PromptEditor.io, I would appreciate being notified whenever someone inquires about perfecting their prompts for OpenAI’s API.
Marketing Outreach Leaderboard
An extension of my open page to include direct messages, cold emails, and other marketing outreach ideas for indie developers. A platform where the activity is gamified with a leaderboard and insightful graphs would make it more engaging.
Redaction Framework
A local redaction framework in languages best suited for the latest AI rollouts (currently, JavaScript and Python). A tool that guarantees compliance with various regulatory requirements would potentially be a B2B goldmine.
So many businesses are wanting to use LLMs in their workflows, but most have compliance and privacy restrictions holding them back. A business I’m working with, e.g., has to have PCI compliance with one sector of their business that touches millions in revenue. A solid redaction framework might enable them to expunge any sensitive information on-site before any such data reaches the cloud and thus enable LLM integration into existing workflows.
Doing this right would mean not only getting the tech in place to nail it, but also getting tons of insurance and regulatory bodies on board. Tons of moat + tons of money flowing = big opportunity if managed well. Not an idea for the faint of heart though.
AI Legal Document Reviewer
An AI tool capable of parsing a large volume of legal documents to identify problems or loopholes. This tool would serve as an assistant to protect yourself or your company legally.
Restaurant QR Notification Box
A QR code that, when scanned, opens an app to send a notification to a restaurant. This system could be incorporated on a table sticker that customers can easily access.
Time Buying Community
A system where a group of people pool their resources to pay for a person’s time, such as an hour of my time for a group coaching call. This could democratize access to various services, particularly in lower-income regions.
Non-emergency Reporting Line
An AI-operated reporting line for non-emergencies. The AI would analyze recurring themes in reports and, if necessary, notify a human dispatcher who could send someone to investigate further.
Text-to-Speech PDF Reader
A tool that uses text-to-speech technology, like Polly, to read PDFs aloud. Surprisingly, I’ve looked for one of these before and no one could find a good existing one. Which is strange because it’s quite easy to build and I think would have a lot of value.
Book Writing Software with AI
You’ve seen podcast writing AI, SEO AI writers, email writers (like GoClose.ai), but we don’t have a full-fledged AI integration into book-writing tools yet.
Something like Scrivener would be ideal to make this happen, but I sort of doubt they’ll take the chance because they seem more purist than innovative. This is not a book generator. The idea is AI tools that are integrated into your existing workflow to save you time as a writer.
User-Driven Calendly
Calendly that just let’s YOU input availability.
Not every block that doesn’t have a conflicting event is free. Calendly is too complex for me. I want to be able to drag a window for when I’m free and that’s the times people can book.
Yes Calendly can do this, but it’s far more complex than I’d like.
Online FFMPEG with AI
I had to flip a video horizontally and speed it up like 100x the other day (my currently pinned Tweet). GPT is scary good at writing FFMPEG commands that look atrocious, but apparently work.
Only problem was my dying Mac was struggling to let me work while rendering the new video. I would’ve loved to have been able to send that FFMPEG command to a server that processed my video and sent me a download link an hour later.
Integrating GPT means non-nerds can use it too by just using English to say what they want!
Light Phone-like Android Skin
So we know what the Light Phone is, right?
I don’t want one, but I would totally buy a solid Android skin that made my Android feel almost exactly like it (just with better maps, a better keyboard, better touchscreen, and better battery life).
This is what I currently use, but it’s really just a home screen:
Intelligent Support Ticket System
A support ticket website that you go to and it’s got a text field for you to submit a support request.
Except as you type, it evaluates your response for having all the requested details and the more you fill in it has a progress bar that fills in (like a password creation form).
Feature Request Integration with AI
Corollary – a feature request integration…
Everyone can input their features, but then the project owner does not immediately see all of them.
Instead they get a report once a week, and it’s a collation of all of the feature requests where GPT has already organized them.
Feedback Analysis App
An internal app for a company that accepts feedback, performs semantic analysis across all transcripts, and identifies recurring themes. This could be a powerful tool for understanding internal company feedback or extracting insights from large volumes of online reviews.
Summary
I hope this list of ideas encourages you to think outside the box, and commit hard to one of these ideas. Or make your own! Keeping a Google Keep or Apple Notes file full of startup ideas is a great long-term brainstorming tool. Just remember an idea is just the starting point. Taking action is more valuable than anything else.
