More 2024 startup company ideas

Another half a year, more free ideas 2025-01-14 #startups

If you have a new product idea, you might as well share it for the entertainment value, because you shouldn’t expect anyone to pay you for just an idea.

Restaurant streaming

Recorded music, cinema, and other leisure activities, changed from one-off purchases to long-term monthly subscriptions. However, happy customers of streaming services, and other fixed-price all you can eat luxuries, don’t have the same options for eating out.

Solve the restaurant-underspending problem with a restaurant subscription model for a weekly or monthly meal, excluding drinks. The price also varies by number of diners, and which restaurants it covers.

Conversation coach

Help people who don’t know when to stop talking, once they get started, by nudging them towards social norms for conversations.

Solve the conversational horror problem with an AI wearable that enforces a 30 seconds talking limit. Dad Edition features a special alarm for when you start telling a joke that didn’t land the first time either. Business Edition syncs with other people in a conversation, and enforces equal talking time.

Gifted

Some people find inspired and unique Christmas presents for lots of people. The rest of us have fewer good gift ideas than recipients, such as the best book you read that year, and know that family members will judge us for duplicate presents. You could give the same gift to several people who don’t know each other, if you remember who you already gave it to last year.

Solve the gift idea problem with an app that optimises gift duplication among friends and family. Calculate a score for how much they’re likely to appreciate their gifts.

Sandwich engineering

Cater to people who like food preparation precision, and who don’t like unsatisfactorily irregular bread slices. A bread overhang especially annoys them, when slicing bread and over-correcting to avoid thin slices.

Solve the bread knife alignment problem with breadknife-orientation sensors and alignment indicator lights in the knife handle. Add a strict mode, with annoying warning beeps to prevent irregular slicing.

Coastal night ferries

The increase in flight shame, in Northern Europe at least, has increased demand for low-carbon long-distance travel that night trains cannot keep up with.

Solve the long-distance national transport problem with coastal night ferries. For example, start in the UK with an overnight Newhaven to Newcastle service, and later extend from Cork and Falmouth to Edinburgh. Later, extend the route internationally West from Cornwall to Ireland, France and Spain, and East from Scotland to the Scandinavian capitals, and other Hansa ports.

Adaptive code review

Blocking code reviews slow down development teams when they can’t keep up with them, and developers have to wait for code change approvals. Meanwhile, these reviews don’t always prevent defects or deliver other value.

Solve the review theatre problem with automated code review that blocks production deployment when needed. This will happen rarely enough for the team to enjoy immediately fixing the issue in a team programming session, when the alarm goes off.

TV character profiles

Unlike modern real life, historical television dramas often feature large casts in identical historical dress, and characters called either Thomas or Mary.

Solve the character identification problem of failing to keep track of them all. For example, show on-screen annotations that name and introduce them when they first appear in each scene, or when you pause playback.

Writing by Peter Hilton