I mentioned this in another topic, but grocery shopping. The entire process seems inefficient. New idea...
You place an order online or on your mobile phone while you're at work, or on the bus. After you decide on your order, the app generates a unique code. The grocery store is now replaced with an automated warehouse, with pickup or drive-through windows. You walk up to a window, scan your unique code that was generated earlier, swipe your credit card to confirm, and the warehouse automatically picks your items and out they come in bags. You toss them in your trunk if it's a drive-through, or just carry them away if these are city center stores.
Optionally, the store could have a little room to pick your own fruit and veggies, in case you prefer to see them.
This makes the whole process a lot more flexible. You could even remove the concept of placing orders and generating codes, and instead have a grocery store account for your household. For example, you ask your son to pick the groceries down the street. After he leaves, you realize you want some curry powder. You just click a button on your phone to add curry powder to the online list, and that's it. Your son doesn't even need to know, he just shows up at the window, scans your family card or enters a password, and out comes your groceries, including the newly added curry powder. After he gets the groceries, the online list clears.
Or even better, you could order your food in a mobile app (or on a website), and the supermarket would deliver to your home later at a time you choose, e.g. between 4 and 5 PM. Several supermarkets such as http://www.nemlig.com/ do this in Denmark for a delivery price of just $3.5.
I agree, we actually sketched a very similar process (and a business model canvas) with some friends during a brainstorming idea :) .
One particularly promising idea was combining internet orders, with a pick-up place like BufferBox.
We also added some ideas to our canvas that were more specific to my country, but it's definitely viable and among my favourite things I'd do if I was able to do a startup. I hope someone is able to do it.
This exists for certain stores/markets in the US. Its called Peapod and is available for Ahold subsidiaries. (mainly Stop and Shop) The problem with it is their interface/website is terrible and I would rather not get my groceries from Stop and Shop, so if you could provide this for arbitrary stores that would be awesome. I know other startups have tried in this area since the dot-com boom. (the semi-infamous Webvan) Currently it seems like Instacart is the lead contender in this area. I haven't tried them, but it looks like they just came to my area recently, so I might in the future.
Comparing products across brands (they all have specs but the way they sort the specs is different and it's a pain to flip through tons of tabs).
Finding a chair to fit my kitchen table (given the dimensions of both).
Diagramming my bedroom to try to figure out if I can build a better bed.
Finding furniture that fits in a given volume (in my case, I want to find a trolley or counter that's Y cm high, at least X cm long, and between Z1 and Z2 cm deep).
Regarding your first point I recently used www.transferwise.com recently to transfer money from my UK bank account (GBP) to a US bank account (USD). It was pretty quick (took 3 days) and I got a very good rate (taking into account the fees involved). I'd definitely recommend them.
> Y combinator startup regalii is working on the first point.
They seem to be aiming to pay bills from the US; I want to send money from another country to the US and just do whatever I want with it.
> Autodesk Homestyler
I looked it up and it doesn't quite seem to be what I want. For one thing, I live in Japan, so none of my furniture is in the catalog.
For another, want to find a chair that physically (not cosmetically) fits my kitchen table. This goes back to my complaint about comparing specs, actually. :)
I want a content marketing platform that let's you easily turn blog posts into other units of content (videos, infographics, slideshows, whitepapers) without going to 9 different systems.
I've been wanting an easy way to gauge opinions and ideas on a topic between a small group of friends/co-workers without creating accounts on a service.
For example, I want to ask "what are your thoughts on the new logo?" and have my co-workers leave comments and upvote/downvote each other's opinions.
Ideally, like a HN/Reddit-style upvote/downvote comment system where they could just type their name in and comment/vote.
One of my main use cases are company email chains of 50 or so employees where I think it'd be annoying to send a link asking for everyone's opinion but requiring them to sign-up for a quick, one-time voting.
For Facebook, not all of us are friends, and a few of them don't have Facebook, so it might seem a little rude to request that.
Interesting.. I've ran into similar situation before although it was not at a work environment, more like an email thread that contains ~30 friends to ask for opinions on some activity, and not everyone is facebook friends with each others.
I do find email threads create "spams" for people who do not have as strong of an opinion on the topic, but it didn't seem annoying enough to piss anyone off. Are there something else that you really dislike about using the email chain itself to ask for opinion/suggestions?
Moving my single-player game progress between computers.
A few months ago I completed a game on an old Windows PC. Recently, I acquired a new PC, and had to unlock all the levels of the game again by playing through the game from beginning to end.
It's just a minor inconvenience, so it doesn't really "piss me off"; it is just something that would be nice to have.
A system for better communication during different crises. People always complain when things go wrong and the authorities in charge don't give away information, or give it away in such a way that all people involved don't receive it.
I.e. my girlfriend was on a train recently, which stopped for one hour outside of the station. No information was given until nearer the end of that. Why?
A system that everyone could use: the first responders could provide information on the situtation. Editors could then format this for customers / people affected. Some other system could deliver it (something like iBeacons?).
Trains in the UK are a nightmare when they're delayed.
I spent seven years working from home, making a trip from my home to company-HQ every few weeks. The train information board would also say "Train Late: ETA $(current time + 1 minute)".
Even if they knew in advance it had to be 30+ minutes behind schedule it would always say something like "Time: 13:30, ETA: 13:32" or so. Then keep updating. It meant you never had any idea if the train would genuinely turn up in a minute, or if it would still be lying to you an hour later.
I did seem to suffer from bad luck on the days I travelled, due to land-slides, rain, wind, or power-failures on various parts of the line. I usually kept waiting, but some days you could tell there would be no useful service. (i.e. They'd offer buses instead of trains, and that meant a 2 hour trip down, a working day, and a 2 hour trip back was just written off because a bus might take 4-5 hours to make one leg of the journey.)
A shopping list, but the trick is it knows where the food is in store, and arranges the list so that items on list are located close in store. For example, this is original list: apples, milk, hotdogs, chips. Lets say store has milk and meat on one side, and apples and chips on the other side. The app will rearrange to: apples, chips, milk, hotdogs. And perhaps give you a little map of store to show you were things are.
This is a great idea (had it myself at one point); the problem is you would have to have buyin from the grocery store itself, and like a casino...the more time you spend in it the more money they make.
That's a good point. Still, it's probably manageable to accomplish for major stores by manually mapping some out (or letting your app users map it out). I usually go to bigger stores, because you can find everything in one store. People who shop often wouldn't need the app, since they remember where everything is.
The same idea expanded a bit, could be to optimize for money. For example, if your list is going to be $200, you might save 20 dollars by shopping in two/few separate stores (accounting for gas), and app could divide the list into multiple lists per store.
This is way harder, because prices change all the time (store layout doesn't change as often), and usually you can't look up prices online. The app could take into account any store coupons (assuming manufacturer coupons could be used in any store).
The target audience for this are people who are willing to trade in time to save few dollars. I'm not sure they will have smartphones.
A cheaper CRM that I can extend with plugins. Really, right now these things are super expensive for a small company in, say, east Europe. Also, there are tons of them for developers, none very good for businesses. I want the “standard” goodies (teams, tasks, admin panel, etc.), but then I want to be able to easily build on top of those.
The lottery pool manager where we work keeps a physical list of who has paid up. Email invites were being sent through our company emails, but the higher-ups put the squash on that. She then scans the tickets, makes copies, and hands them out.
I decided to build something that would automate all of this except the buying of tickets.
Let me clarify -- let the user choose what music they would want to hear. I.e. let them listen to the music on their iPhone and then have the conference call interrupt their music playback when ready. Not sure if technically feasible.
I get pissed when reading an article on CNN and end up clicking a few click-bait type articles or videos in the right column. It takes ALL of my self control to avoid some of these. Maybe a browser plug-in that removes all these annoying recommended things which have NOTHING to do with the article.
They're so so great. Unlike plastic wrap which inevitably gets wrapped in itself and you have to cut it and mess with it, this is really substantial, you just pull it out of the drawer and you're done. And I have no problems washing it. I was using foil before I found this and that's even more of a waste...
You place an order online or on your mobile phone while you're at work, or on the bus. After you decide on your order, the app generates a unique code. The grocery store is now replaced with an automated warehouse, with pickup or drive-through windows. You walk up to a window, scan your unique code that was generated earlier, swipe your credit card to confirm, and the warehouse automatically picks your items and out they come in bags. You toss them in your trunk if it's a drive-through, or just carry them away if these are city center stores.
Optionally, the store could have a little room to pick your own fruit and veggies, in case you prefer to see them.
This makes the whole process a lot more flexible. You could even remove the concept of placing orders and generating codes, and instead have a grocery store account for your household. For example, you ask your son to pick the groceries down the street. After he leaves, you realize you want some curry powder. You just click a button on your phone to add curry powder to the online list, and that's it. Your son doesn't even need to know, he just shows up at the window, scans your family card or enters a password, and out comes your groceries, including the newly added curry powder. After he gets the groceries, the online list clears.