10 promising side-project ideas
Ideas that could help you start something new
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I know many really smart people who are looking to start something new. Some are looking to build a venture-backed startup. Others are more interested in bootstrapping their own side project.
They all have one problem: they are not sure what specifically to build.
They feel like they are searching everywhere. They have scanned Twitter for new ideas. They have cold emailed investors asking for suggestions. They have read biographies looking for inspiration. They still feel like they have no good ideas.
In hopes of helping out, and because I would like to see these ideas exist in the world, I put together a list of ten ideas that I think, if somebody took them seriously, could be successful.
Many of these ideas have low barriers to entry. You should not need to be highly technical or have loads of capital to get started. What’s stopping you from making one of these ideas, at least from what I can see, is pure execution. Putting the hours in. Figuring things out. It won’t be easy but, and this is just my gut opinion, I think there’s a path.
The below are just starter ideas with a lot of details you would need to work through. Hope it’s helpful though! If you decide to work on these ideas, send me an email: hi@nextplay.so. Would love to see what happens.
If you are looking for job opportunities, check out our recent essay highlighting 25 companies that have the best chance of growing to a >$20 billion valuation in the next five years.
Idea #1 - competitor listener
Build an app where you enter your company URL and we generate a monthly report that gives you an overview of everything going on in your industry. You could imagine us scanning Twitter and Linkedin for information about your competitors. Tracking employee movement information. Seeing who companies have hired. Seeing who has left. Looking at job postings made by your competitors which often leak information. Tracking funding rounds. Looking at product and feature launches. Summarizing all of this in one presentation so you can stay apprised without needing to scan the news all the time. Another option would be to turn this into a feed you can stay up to date with. Charge a monthly subscription fee and target founders and VCs.
Idea #2 - The Society of VERY Interesting People
Over the next 24 months, build a private, application-only community of 100-200 members. Start with a high-end service: each member pays something like $2500-$5000/year. As part of the community, you interview each member three times per year. In the interview, you ask them a bunch of questions about their life: Life questions (How is their year going? What is important to them?), Financial Questions (How much do they pay in taxes? Who is their tax advisor? What credit card do they use?), Travel Questions (What trips have they taken this year that they recommend?), Health Questions (What health decisions have you made that have been helpful?), and more. You record their answers for them and store them in a sort of private video time capsule that only they have access to. Over the years, it becomes a sort of personal documentary. Perhaps you create a platform where they can watch their old video clips. Importantly, you also anonymize their information, and create a sort of internal quantitative/qualitative benchmark that’s accessible only to people in the group. People use the benchmark to get information and learn. People sign up to the group because they trust your judgement and taste in people, that way the benchmark they’re seeing ends up being actually useful and a high bar that they trust. This is a community but it’s not designed to help people meet each other; just learn from their answers.
Idea #3 - DateMyFriends.com
One hard part about dating apps is building your profile. You do not want to brag too much about yourself. But you know who can? Your friends. What if there was a dating app where your friends could promote you? They can also be your “middleman,” and need to approve any introductions. That solves another hard part about dating, which is knowing who is a good fit for yourself. Sometimes your friends actually have opinions on who you should be dating, and so this would be an opportunity to let them play a role in matchmaking you with the perfect person. You could also have your friends search for dates for you. DateMyFriends could also lead to less awkward first dates; you are essentially being set up by your friends. I would start in NYC or LA or SF but you could start this in any city. I think this could grow quickly if you had a few “super-connectors” building profiles for their friends.
Idea #4 - Granola for Salespeople
Video chat recording and note-taking software has gone mainstream. Granola is a personal favorite. But, as far as I can tell, nobody has fully automated the manual follow-up. This is particularly relevant to salespeople, who are often looking to move quickly and send a personalized follow-up based on the meeting they just had. You can build a platform that automates the process of: taking notes in the meeting, uploading the notes to the CRM, generating a follow-up email, including bringing in contracts, sales decks, quotes, and whatever else is typically found in the follow-up email, perhaps even mentioning a personal anecdote from the call. You would charge a subscription fee. I would start by convincing a small sales team to let you automate their workflow, maybe they would even pay you to let you do this. And then scale from there.
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Idea #5 - “Undercover boss/customer,” as a service
As a CEO, it’s really hard to manage the company when you have limited insight into what’s actually going on with the product. It’s hard, for example, to understand why the sales funnel is broken if you cannot, yourself, see how the complete sales funnel actually works. And it’s hard for you to do that as a CEO or even a manager because the salespeople cannot really sell to you, even if you ask them to show you their process. Someone could launch an “undercover customer” as a service who’ll come into your company and, for example, try to buy your product. They would document their experience and also provide suggestions. It would require this service to really inhabit the mentality of the buyer. Another variation of this would be for them to create a friction-log of sorts and document all the parts of the UX they find frustrating. This service only works in my opinion if you find a way to do it ethically; you’d have to let people on your team know that for example once a quarter this sort of service may happen, but this could lead to suspiciousness throughout the year which could degrade productivity.
Want more ideas? Check out freeideas.net
Idea #6 - Memories for your email.
Google Photos and Apple Photos both have a popular memories feature that surfaces old photos from years past. This should also exist for your Email. The MVP UX would be: authorize with Google, and then you’re presented with a feed. The feed could contain emails you sent on this day years ago. The purpose of this app would be: nostalgia and also remind you to get in touch with people you may have long forgotten about. I think people would eventually pay for something like this, perhaps if they wanted to access more email data or if there was a way they could then one-click get back in touch with people in their contact list. There’s probably a whole bunch of useful information you could learn about yourself by analyzing your emails. Maybe more to do there.
Idea #7 - 360 life audit
Service that audits your entire life and gives you suggestions. You upload your wardrobe, your diet, your skincare routine, etc. You also mention your hobbies, what you spend money on, etc. The service then gives you a bunch of well-researched suggestions. At first this is manual but over time you find ways to automate it. You would need to be able to sell your ability to make very high quality recommendations. You could attach reviews and well thought out reasoning for every recommendation you are making. There are different levels to this. One is you recommend things based on Reddit and just other research you do. Another is you actually order all the items to try them out and build out a repository of internal assessments and information. You could promote this all on Youtube. Eventually, you could create a sort of Wirecutter but for everything else in your life.
Idea #8 - great emails
Cold emails are highly under-utilized. Sending cold emails can absolutely change your life. It can help you find a new job. Meet new like-minded people. Sell whatever it is you are working on. The problem is that sending a great cold email takes some time. Time to find the email address of who you’re targeting, research their background, and send a highly personalized email (that does not read like it was sent by AI, because people can still very much tell it seems!). There should be a service that helps you scale sending personalized cold emails. It does not need to be, and probably should not be automated. Startup founders today are often bottlenecked by not being able to send enough highly personalized emails. This could help them scale founder-led sales.
Idea #9 - Productivity palace (retreats).
It’s become a bit of a trend to go on a retreat at some point in your life. To take some time away and focus on your health and do yoga and relax. You hear about these popping up all over Costa Rica and Sri Lanka. I think the opposite should more or less also exist: productivity retreats. You sign up so that, over the next 30, 60, or 90 days, you’ve become extremely productive. Here’s an example of what that experience could look like: you fly to X city. They pick you up and take you to their productivity palace/retreat. There, you have a private chef who cooks every meal. You have a strict bed time. You have a skincare routine setup for you. You do a workout. There are no smartphones during the day. No doomscrolling. You are around people also working hard. I think there’s a market for this.
Idea #10 - Substack analytics
There are more and more businesses built on Substack. Publication creators are starting to make six and seven figures and are continuing to grow. But they have access to way fewer tools than other types of businesses. For example, Substack today provides a very limited set of analytics. You could help publication creators better understand their audiences, understand what to write about, and more. The way I’d start is by contacting popular people on Substack and offering to consult for them to help them grow. Do this for a few creators and see what the overlapping strategies are and then try to automate it.
Was this helpful? Should I send more of these? Let me know what you think: hi@nextplay.so.
this is pretty cool. would love more of these.
number 1 is pretty cool. I was thinking about doing this but actually the opposite . When someone is asking for your services then a agent can respond with your company information.