Writing by Peter Hilton

2022 startup company ideas

Another year, more free ideas 2023-05-13 #startups

Daniele Franchi

  1. 2014 ideas
  2. 2015-2017 ideas
  3. 2018 app ideas
  4. 2018 development ideas
  5. 2018-2019 ideas
  6. 2020 ideas
  7. 2021 ideas
  8. 2022 ideas ←

Startup ideas have no business value, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy them. It also helps to reflect on how we might realistically address the struggling moments that inspire them.

Calendars

Status Calendar - a calendar with status codes for more expressive meeting request rejections, based on HTTP status codes, because many categories don’t require a longer explanation:

Code Rejection reason Description
400 Agenda Missing If you don’t know why you want a meeting, I don’t know if I have time
401 Talk To My Secretary First You’re not authorised to claim my time
404 On Holiday You won’t find me at work then
405 Ask On Slack First This meeting could also be a text message
406 I Only Do Zoom You proposed an in-person meeting in another country
409 Conflict I can only attend one meeting at a time
425 Too Early There’s something I can’t get out of then… bed
429 Too Many Requests Make. The. Meeting. Invitations. Stop.
451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons I had to take out a restraining order against you

Categorical - a calendar that lets you categorise events, e.g. ‘pointless meetings’, and shows the total hours per category for the current view and so far, e.g. ‘hours spent in pointless meetings this week’, ‘Tactical naps - year to date’.

Workplace

Meme school - executive training for remote work: memes and emoji training for executives who need to adapt to async remote-first communication.

Meet DJ - Basic DJ skills training for executives who want to master the art of playing intro music to warm up arrivals to their online meetings.

Commute Zero - In-office residential units for companies with under-utilised office space - ‘don’t work from home, live in the office!’.

Social media

Fesshole Poll - a bot that follows every anonymous Fesshole confession with a poll, to give confessors feedback:

Feedback Buddy - provides a platform for people to give each other feedback, promoting consent and trust, to help people get better at giving and receiving feedback and educate companies to replace annual review cycles with immediate feedback.

Birdsong - a Twitter alternative with proper thread functionality, and the ability for me to automatically mute threads longer than three posts, and address Jason Knight’s complaint:

If anyone has any lukewarm exposes today, please start up a 50-Tweet thread. It’s definitely the best way to try to present information 🧐

Fluidr - a dating app that models gender as free text and encourages gender identity creativity, for when it absolutely has to be a post-hipster metrosexual lumberjack or a femme Firefly engineer.

Real world

Pterodactyl Classics - Small (178 mm) paperback editions of classic software development non-fiction, like Penguin Books does for classic literature, but with more stylish retro covers than O’Reilly Pocket Guides.

Smug Cloud - Comparative weather app that compares much worse weather at home with what you get while you’re on holiday.

For more occasional start-up ideas, follow @PeterHilton on X.

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