Startups & Ventures
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A hub for startup news, trends, and insights, covering the global startup ecosystem for founders, investors, and innovators.

Community: @startupdis
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Idea: AI swimming coach
A swimming pool that has this automated system that watches how people swim, analyzes their movements, counts total swimmed distance and other related metrics. It gives everyone personal recommendations.
Idea: Recaller
A platform to help you to keep knowledge of read articles, books, etc. by employing learning techniques such as writing questions when you're reading. Then answering them once per X period.
The platform shows the highlights you made, the questions and notes you wrote down.
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Common reasons why startups fail by Failory.com:
- Marketing mistakes were by far the most common, and they were generally speaking the most deadly with 69% of all mentioned marketing mistakes being fatal. In fact, the fatal marketing mistakes were more numerous than all other fatal mistakes combined (56% vs 44%), as can be seen in the pie chart below. By far the most common reason for shutdown was lack of product-market-fit which constituted more than half of the marketing mistakes, but more on that below.

- Team problems – friction, lack of experience, lack of motivation, etc., were the second most common. They were some of the least-deadly percentage-wise (only 39% of all mentioned team problems being fatal), but because they are abundant they were still the second most common reason for shutdown.

- Financial problems and mistakes were the third most common. That said, bearing in mind more than 50% of the projects didn’t have any budget to begin with and more than 75% of the projects were self-funded, it’s a surprise that only 16% of the projects point at financial problems as the major reason for failure.

- Tech problems were extremely rare, which is surprising considering almost all projects in the data have a technical side to them. The most common remark was that too much time and effort was spent on tech that proved to be useless in the long run. The most common answer to β€œa thing you would do differently next time” by far was β€œI’d talk to customers and validate my assumptions before writing a single line of code”. That said, a big % of tech problems were fatal: e.g. relying on a 3rd party API that changes can ruin a business overnight.

- Operational problems were quite rare and not that deadly, but it’s important to mention that most interviewees ran software projects, so operational problems (e.g. suppliers, distribution) are not as common as in brick-and-mortar and physical product projects by definition.

- Legal problems were rarest, mentioned only four times, but two of those four proved to be lethal. For most early-stage startups the legal side is a non-factor. Yet, there are still industries where you can’t afford to ignore it (food, finance, etc.).
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Idea: Hover and learn
A browser extension that randomly replaces some words on websites to be the words in the language you learn.

You can hover on the unfamiliar word and see a translation, pronunciation, songs containing this word, a few movie clips with it and other usage of the word in different contexts.
Example.

This helps by allowing users to browse the web and learn more effortlessly. Anyway they should do a mental effort to learn and you can determine how they'll do it. For example, add the hovered words to a vocabulary and show them to repeat and learn (spaced repetition).
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Idea: Auto presentations
A tool that converts information into digestible slides of a presentation. It should split the data wisely and extract the important parts. In such a way, it delivers only information that people would benefit from the most.

Why: it takes time to extract the important pieces of information from texts, charts, etc. Then, you need to pick a nice design for slides, fonts, colors. It can be automated.
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Idea: Shareable bookmarks
A social app where users share their useful bookmarks for websites. They are be grouped by folders, labels, tags, and are searchable. Users can follow each other to read their bookmarks feed. The service can be integrated with the browser bookmarks addon.
One nice feature that might add more interactivity among the users is the possibility to ask others what websites they could recommend for X or Y.

Such a service requires you to attract users when there is not much activity(because of the lack of users) - the chicken and the egg problem that occurs on social platforms and marketplaces.
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Idea: Pillow & blanket temperature regulation
Smart bed linen that regulates the temperature of your pillow and blanket when you need to. It monitors your sleeping activity. If it sees you need more warmth, it warms a pillow(blanket) up. Or cools it down.
It also cools down the bottom of a pillow by default before you go to sleep.
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There are painkillers and vitamins as analogies to the problems people pay to solve. There are critical problems(painkillers), and there are not such significant problems(vitamins). However, they aren't so black and white. Here's a good analogy I found on Reddit:

- TurboTax - painkiller
- Dropbox - vitamin
- LinkedIn/Facebook - methamphetamine (makes you paranoid and look busy without being productive)
- Fortnite - nitrous oxide (feels good but causes brain damage)
- Coinbase - vaccine (resistance to inflation)
- Oculus - lsd (transports you somewhere else)
- X1 - dental floss (finds the thing you know is there)
- Ad block - sunscreen (protects you from harmful bombardment)
- Reddit - cigarettes (an unhealthy way to kill five minutes)
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Idea: Entertain me!
A website that recommends you some activity to do when you're bored. For example, it hints you to listen to music(a specific playlist, group, or a song), if you like it, the system will recommend similar activities in the future. If you prefer other things to do in your current mood, it'll try to suggest to you other activities, like watching a specific movie, visiting an online museum, gallery, having a conversation with a person, or, maybe listening to music with a group of people online.
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πŸ’‘Idea: Blog articles distribution
It's difficult to get views on a blog that doesn't rank well on search engines. You post an interesting article and no one is reading it. This distribution problem hit authors hard. They decide to stop writing.
How can we improve this? What if we have a platform where an author adds his blog, and the platform shows the articles to relevant people? One may state it's Medium, but no. First of all, you don't own the content there. Plus, Medium doesn't show the relevant content to people. For example, I wrote multiple posts there and got 0 views.

The platform will keep track of new articles in an author's blog by RSS. When a new material releases, the platform shows it to people. If people like it, the platform shows it to more readers.
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Idea: Trends monitoring by industry
A tool that helps you to see current trends divided by industry. They are aggregated from various sources such as social networks' activity, news, etc. Since such tools exist, not many of them provide a possibility to search for trends in a particular industry, category, niche, or all of that, plus a search term.
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Idea: Cloud Factories
One of the largest β€œtaxes” on goods that are purchased in person is the cost of shipping that product to its retail location.
Replacing β€œdead space” or β€œdying spaces” in malls with smaller, robotic factories that can decrease shipping costs for end-consumers; thus, decreasing the average price of goods or allowing merchants to sell less while still maintaining revenues. This business would be like Travis Kalanick’s CloudKitchen business (which has already raised over $400M dollars). Cloud Kitchens are commercial facilities purpose-built to produce food specifically for delivery. This business would do the same thing with factories to either be delivered to end users or picked up β€œin-store” (really, just a store-front with a few items of clothing that you can try on for sizing, not for style). The thesis of this business would be that bringing the production closer to the end-consumer could actually reduce pricing.

Monetization: Subscription fee to be able to use these cloud factories. Perhaps a % per good sold.
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Idea: YouTube studio rent
A studio where people can record their YouTube videos without the need to buy all the stuff by themselves. As an owner, you may create an app to help bloggers scheduling the sessions, notify them about news, price/schedule changes, etc.
β€”-
Fit whole picture on Instagram without border
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Do you want to start a blog? If so, what's your struggle? Let's discuss. I'm thinking about improvements in this domain.

If you're here for an idea: A minimalistic blog engine.
It lets you start writing articles right now. You choose some template and your website is ready to be presented. Later you can buy a domain and link it to the blog.

Why not other solutions for blogging? They're bloated with unnecessary features. The heavyweight Google Analytics? A few more tracking scripts? 50 features no one uses? Such a website loads for 3+ seconds, who likes that?
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Idea: A platform to craft courses and projects from most liked YouTube videos.

It solves following problems:
Why to opt for a paid course, if we can learn for free from YouTube.

YouTube has the best quality content, but they are not organized.

YouTube content is not organized in form of courses, where we can track our progress, meet the like minded people working on same course.

how my idea solves mentioned problems:
Our Aim is to provide the best experience of learning with free courses crafted from most liked videos.

We want to create a learning community by providing the free courses and projects.

The community will bring us the set target audience. We can use this audience for running the paid promotions or we can use them for our next ideas.

How it will help people:
My idea will help people get the same level of experience they get in paid courses that too for free. It will help them build their skills for their next job.
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Idea: Educational app for Gen Z's & Millenials
From @joshuang35

Gen Zs and millennials are always offered services tailored to either process (etc. tuition or game coaching) or outcome (assignment service or boosting)

Would it be feasible to create an app just purely for middle ground for Gen Z and Millennials which focuses on assistance and improvement, which can provide options for those that do not want options at both end. For example, for education, the helper will help with crafting the structure of your assignment and help you but not do the assignment for you. Whereas for gaming, the higher skilled player will coach and help you during the game itself.
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idea: Replacing faces service
My friend makes videos where he substitutes people's faces. He tried a few paid services, but there are problems: the video quality is low, the faces aren't replaced right.
So, the main issues are the quality of the video and the substitution. We might build a service that provides a better video quality which means higher processing time on a server. To leverage this issue, we could provide custom plans where users would choose video quality. For example, 720p is priced more than 480p. Notice that it's hard to render such videos and probably you'll need performant GPUs for cloud hosting.

The second issue is the quality of the face substitution. To handle this we could use custom parameters provided to end-users but simplified to their understanding. So the service can be used by not only programmers, video professionals, or deep learning engineers. Our target is regular people that aren't familiar with underhood face replacement magic.
There are some open-source projects for that, so probably you don't need to re-create a wheel. I guess it needs a custom configuration to handle various kinds of videos and faces to be handled in the service and to provide a friendly API for users.
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Cryptocurrency is the tip of the iceberg. Do you think you missed out on $100 bitcoin?

I'll tell you no! Now there's the NFT, the meta-universe, and a lot more to come. Maybe you should start figuring it out so you don't end up a fool.

I'm broadcasting about the metaverse, come on in -https://t.me/+Vkm-1H4VDsMyZmFi
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πŸ’‘Idea: Developer digest
A website or a newsletter that collects the last day/week best articles, links, new good newsletters for developers.
I spend some time going to multiple websites to get the latest information such as articles about some technology, what's interesting in new releases, what new interesting Github repositories appeared, the top posts on HackerNews.
All of this takes time to filter and read. It'd great to have one place where only the best articles appeared.
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Open-sourced fitness bracelet
Recently I've got a fitness bracelet(Honor) to track my sleep better and other metrics. I had an idea to collect as much data as I may through API, so I'd build an app to get my(!) data and analyze it in a way I prefer. Why? I'd like to have data for the years I wear the device to make my conclusions and visualizations, rather than just what I see on their app.

Why would anyone care? A bracelet app may show you how well you sleep, but not raw data you or other people would analyze better. You may scan the data through more advanced algorithms(e.g. employing ML) than just doing "if sleepTime < 6 hours { return 'You slept too little' }". There are good data though my bracelet app presents to me I could handle it to make some other aggregations.

The other thing to mention is it'd be nice to have all your raw personal data that the device collects, right? Why can't you upload it all and analyze yourself? Yes, I bought the thing, give me the great API. Instead, there are many obstacles. In my case, I should register in some Huawei(the Honor parent) company development program, then get their development kit available only on Windows. It's ridiculous.

A potential solution? Well, some (nerd?) human-oriented devices and open API to do what you want with your data. Analyze it. Make your server the device will send the data to. Do whatever you want. No closed APIs and unknown policies regarding your data that is being sent to some big company servers, so they can "improve our metrics".
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πŸ’‘Idea: Algorithmic Casting Director
Problem: There about 135,600 actors in the US that are both employed and unemployed. Globally this number is even higher. Given this, it is extremely difficult for casting directors to find high-quality talent.

Solution: An algorithmic casting director that can analyze the audio and video submissions from candidates to determine if they would be a good fit for the role. Right now, casting directors have to watch each individual video in order to determine whether or not to move someone forward in the process. Given that these directors are looking at hundreds or thousands of videos, this leads to implicit bias. Thus, the business would attempt to eliminate bias and increase diversity in casting by being more objective and (hopefully) more accurate in finding high-quality artists.
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