10 new interesting startup and side-project ideas

Things you could build that people actually want

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I think the most helpful (and simple!) advice YCombinator ever published was to “Make Something People Want.” Whether you are building a weekend side project or looking to raise millions of dollars, starting with this simple message in mind can be really helpful.

The problem: it’s hard!!

It’s hard to know what people (and businesses) want. It’s hard to build the thing they want, in the way they want it. And it’s hard to get the word out that you’ve built the thing that they want.

I know loads of talented people are asking themselves this same question right now: “How can I make something people want?”

I cannot pretend to know exactly. But I do have some ideas. (Really, lots of ideas)!

Like the ones I shared here:

10 promising side-project ideas

The below are more of my starter ideas. There’s a lot of details you would need to work through to actually get these to work - but they should be a start! If you decide to work on these ideas, send me an email: hi@nextplay.so. Would love to see what happens.

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Interesting startup and side-project ideas

Idea #1 - Problem Hunt

You may be familiar with Product Hunt. It’s a popular website where people share and upvote new product launches. It’s a good way to discover new products.

There should be a similar type of community/forum but specifically for sharing problems that people would like to find solutions to. This could become a source of inspiration for new side project ideas.

There are so many talented people searching for projects to build. A big issue is that so many talented people build products that nobody actually wants. Yes they build maybe pretty software but nobody actually cares about what it does or what it problems it tries to solve.

You could build a community where people share their problems they run into at work or in their personal lives, along with other details like how much they think they would pay for a solution and if they’d be open to chatting.

It could be an apply to join network or something that is more freely accessible. You could also do a version where you aggregate ideas from e.g. Reddit.

You could come up with clever growth hacks to grow the network, like for example focusing on particular niches to start (like IT professionals or wealth managers). It could be a simple forum or even a WhatsApp group to start. Eventually you could monetize with ads or you could even build the solutions yourself.

Idea #2 - Dating app profile feedback

Many people have no idea what people actually think about their dating profile. They would pay money to have their profile candidly reviewed by people with taste.

There’s a few ways I’d think about running this. One idea is to let the customer choose who they want to review their profile. You could imagine choosing like 3-5 men or women, each with profiles, who will give you an honest analysis of your profile. Meanwhile you build a small community of men and women who participant in giving men feedback and suggestions on their profiles. You could have this be a managed service where they pay you one fee and you handle the rest or it could be an open marketplace. The feedback people give could be very actionable, and specific.

Another version is to lean into AI but not sure if that would work better. You could somehow train a model on best performing dating profiles and have people upload their profile and give instant feedback.

On the go to market side, I think TikTok would help this do well. You could if it’s legal (not sure) advertise on the dating apps themselves or even at some point partner with them. You could also have upsells: like giving feedback on conversations and opening lines.

People spend tons of time and money on dating apps. But they really have no idea what they are doing. They are kinda just randomly sifting through people. But I think they want to be doing better. They want to find better matches. As a result, I think the willingness to pay from many people will be in the $100+ range.

Idea #3 - Living capsule

You could build an app or newsletter that asks a group of people a set of interesting questions every week. What was the best purchase you’ve made under $300? What was the best thing you read this week? Etc. You could curate their answers.

You could also ask people to upload photos or record videos for their answers. If they recorded videos, you could stitch together the compilation of all their answers. And then have an app they can review the content. Like reviewing an instagram story or Youtube video every week. It’d feel a bit like personalized content.

This could be implemented in many ways.

One is to make this for families or extended families. It could be a way to build a living time capsule for people. Family members would submit what they did that week via a 1 minute instagram story type response that would also be transcribed and consume-able via a story like viewing experience. Build a web and app platform people can view the content on, a bit like Google Photos.

Another is to focus this on something related to professional development. Find like minded people and build a pod of them and curate their answers for one another.

Idea #4 - Blogging platform with AI comments for feedback

I think writing has many benefits. You get better at storytelling. You get better at thinking for yourself. You get better ideas.

Writing publicly comes with additional benefits. One of them is you get feedback from people which often sparks new ideas. It can also feel nice and interesting to hear what people think.

Writing publicly also comes with some negatives. Once you publish something on the internet, it is more or less there forever. Some people therefore self-censor what they say. Most people self-censor to the point that they actually end up saying very little on the internet. They never start their personal blog. They never start writing. They never get any benefits. Etc.

You could solve most all of the above by starting a private blogging platform that is integrated with AI that automatically gives you feedback. So now you’re writing a personal blog, but you have 5 AI agent personas giving you feedback on different aspects of your writing. You could make this a subscription platform. You could charge based on the number of personas you’re getting feedback from. The UI could make the agents look a bit like people giving comments and highlighting aspects.

You could take this further and build a completely AI-powered social network. Where it’s just you and other AIs collaborating. This could get weird, though. Real quick.

Idea #5 - Costco for Business Software

Software is becoming easier and easier to build. Companies, however, are still paying huge amounts of money for specialized software for every aspect of their business: revenue tools, headcount planning tools, culture tools, compliance tools, etc. The list goes on and on. As a venture-backed startup, maybe this is okay, and maybe you need the full-fledged versions of each of these products, but what about for a small or medium sized business?

Do they really need all the bells and whistles for their HR software? What sort of “lite” version could exist that would satisfy their needs?

What if you built a Costco for Software?

Here’s how you’d think about it: rather than think about the software as the moat, you’d think of most business subscription software as a commodity. You’d build an underlying set of components and primitives that exist across many different aspects of the software suite. Things like money movement and dashboards. And then you’d build out “lite” software for everything an SMB needs. You’d charge a subscription fee - similar to Costco - that gets you access to the growing suite of solutions you provide. And then people pay to add on each solution, but what they pay is a lot less than what they would pay for anything else they’d find on the market. The whole experience could be self-serve.

This would work if you undercut the market and gained synergies from having everything in one place. The hard thing here I think will be customer acquisition.

Idea #6 - Fantasy Football for Everything

People love Fantasy Football. And there is more and more talk about Prediction Markets and generally being able to invest in other types of events. But there’s no equivalent today of Fantasy Football for these other types of events. No real game that people strategically play with their friends that’s more generally “betting” on culture and real-world events.

Kids used to want to play in the NFL. Now they want to be Youtubers.

Someone should make the equivalent of Fantasy Football but for other categories. For example, for betting on Youtubers.

It’d be as simple as picking 10 youtube accounts and seeing which would grow the most over the next 6 months. Can you spot the next breakout star?

You could extend this many other places though: X accounts, Substack accounts, movie releases, etc. You could come up with more sophisticated “points” strategies, but I could imagine people really getting into being good at playing these new sorts of games that are rooted in reality.

Idea #7 - Customizable Parental Controls

You are probably familiar with parental controls. They allow parents to block explicit content from devices. There should be parental controls - not just for parents and not just for explicit content.

So many of my friends are addicted to social media. They spend hours a day checking their feeds on their computers. Probably the best solution to this today, at least that I know of, is to download a website blocker on your computer that prevents you from going on Twitter or Youtube. There are also “feed blockers” that prevent you from seeing the feeds on these sites but still allow you to search for content.

What if you could set up this sort of software at the “operating system level.” Here’s what I mean: instead of blocking the websites, what if you could block particular types of content. For example, content about certain topics (e.g. I don’t want to read about AI!). You could then still use the underlying products but they’d be filtered through this sort of operating system level filter. A sort of customizable set of parental controls. You could charge a subscription fee for this. Focus on people in the productivity world.

Idea #8 - Interesting datasets and trends

This is a pretty straightforward idea but I think there are many profitable businesses that basically do exactly this. There should be a Google Trends for other platforms.

I’d be interested in understanding what’s trending in the tech world by looking at like certain list of profiles on X, HackerNews, Product Hunt, IndieHackers, Reddit, Substack etc. How you legally scrape this data is an open question that I do not know the answer to - and I think it’s important you figure it out early. But if you’re able to, using publicly accessible data being the key, then there are a few directions you can take this.

One is to package the data as something human readable. With graphs and dashboards. Like Google Trends of sorts.

Another is to package the data as an API and sell it to other businesses to build on top of. You can probably do both - the question is really how do you go about finding ways to get interesting datasets.

Idea #9 - AI transformation firm

Everyone is talking about AI these days but is it actually useful? I think one of the biggest risks you’re thinking about as a founder these days is not simply AI taking over your business through automation—though is one of them—but also AI distracting your employees so much that they become much less productive.

Your team is really worried about AI. They read all the headlines and X. Everyone is telling them that AI should be making them more productive. They are spending lots of time figuring out how to use AI. And a lot of that time is completely wasted. AI is really good at helping you think you’re doing a good job or getting close to it but in reality you’re distracted and not actually being valuable to your company.

So a solution to this is be the one-stop-shop that business owners and GMs need for all things AI.

Right now what’s happening is business owners are telling their teams to figure out how to use AI. Instead, they would pay this AI transformation firm some high amount of money to audit their business, identify opportunities for AI/automation, and optionally pay for implementation. They could also pay for training their team. This would be a much more efficient route than having the whole team “learn AI” on their own.

I would start with professional services firms. People with lots of headcount and lots of ops people. Where there’s room for automation but also still have humans in the loop who are not exactly sure where and what and how to automate things.

Idea #10 - Private internal podcasts

Startups should have an internal podcast that all their employees listen to. It could cover a behind the scenes look at important things going on across the business. You’d have a host that’s not the founder interviewing different people on the team and getting their reactions and thoughts to current events like product launches or competition.

They should start recording the podcast in the early days of the business. This would be particularly useful for new hires. So they can really ride along for the evolution of their business.

Internal podcast meaning it should be completely private. It should be on an app that is private so there’s reduced risk of it being shared publicly.

You can build a service that makes this easier for companies to implement.

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I have many more ideas. You could read Free Ideas in the meantime - but let me know if I should do more of these!