New product and company ideas

Side-projects and companies that should exist

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I keep a list of new products I wish existed.

Some of the products on my list are big and could maybe grow into multi billion dollar companies. Others are quite niche, and could maybe turn into small lifestyle businesses for someone to run. And others are more on the funny side, but I still think they should exist!

Anyways, below are some recent additions to my list of products I wish were real.

If you are thinking about what to work on, I think you could find the list useful. I tried my best to make the ideas very actionable and concrete as opposed to abstract and fluffy. I want them to exist!

Please do reach out hi@nextplay.so if you end up building any of these or have more ideas.

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Products, side-projects, and companies I wish existed

Idea #1 - References as a service for hiring

Hiring is one of the most important aspects of running a business. If you ask founders what is going on right now at their business, I can almost guarantee you that they will mention their need to hire more great people.

Obvious statement but hiring great people is hard. One reason it’s hard is because the cost of being wrong is pretty high. Hiring a bad person can infect your culture. Slow things down. Get good people to leave. Lower the bar. It’s real bad. Basically a founder’s nightmare.

So why does it happen? Well it’s hard to know who is going to work out before you actually work with them. Of course you can and should try in the interview process to figure this out. But it really only goes so far. You’re still going to be wrong some of the time.

So one thing you can do as a helpful measure is to rely on references. References are when you speak to people the candidate has previously worked with or for, and ask them questions about what it was like to work together.

In my experience, references can be really helpful.

The problem is that most hiring managers do not know how to really do a good reference check. They ask bad questions and leave with unhelpful answers.

So you could build “references as a service.”

Before you make a hire, it could become the norm to call on this special group that goes and does the references on the candidate for you. Similar to how people use a background check service, they could use a reference check service. You could charge per candidate you screen.

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Idea #2 - Wirecutter for X

Most businesses have a similar set of high-level needs. The list is something like this. They need to hire people. They need to pay their employees. They need to build things. They need to track their customers. Etc.

In the last decade, we’ve seen an explosion of services developed to solve these business needs. For any one of those needs — be it payroll or financial planning or marketing tech — there are now hundreds of service providers that provide a solution.

So how do you choose?

Typically what happens is you google around. Maybe ask some other founder friends or VCs. Read the internet. Sign up for free trials. Talk to salespeople.

This process takes forever! And you don’t even always end up with the right answers. Often you spend tons of time and money on non-optimal solutions.

At a big company, you hire a procurement team to answer these questions for you.

But at a small company, you are more or less on your own. I think you’d pay a subscription to solve this procurement problem faster. To know you’re using the right solution to your problem, all the time.

There should be a “Wirecutter” for business software. Wirecutter was a magazine that bought and tested and reviewed many popular consumer products (it was sold to the NYT). For example, they tested all the pillowcases on the market and gave you an in-depth review on which was better for which type of people.

You could do this same thing but for business software. You could review for example HR software in detail and provide the best possible analysis and recommendation for different types of businesses. Someone should be able to read your guide and make an informed decision quickly.

Focus on expensive decisions. Where the cost of being wrong is high. Where there are high switching costs after implementation.

Beware of making money off of affiliate fees. Then you likely become biased and lose trust. Instead, monetize by charging an annual subscription fee directly to the reader. Basically nobody does this because affiliate fees are very tempting. But trust is critical.

You could extend this idea to professional service providers. You could also extend this to consumers, not just businesses. For example, high net worth individuals pay wealth managers, tax advisors, bankers, estate attorneys, real estate agents, etc. You could write in depth reviews on the best versions of each of those people in each geography and niche. UHNW people are paying six figures a year for these service providers. They can afford to spend $1k-$10k making sure they are working with the best of the best for their needs.

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Idea #3 - Personal standup

Many startups do something called a standup. Where people say what they did last week, what they plan to do this week, and what is blocking them for the week to come. They then give each other feedback on the goals and unblock each other. Some companies do it weekly. Others do it daily. Some do it live. Others do it async.

There should be a personal standup. Something you do for your personal life goals. You want to read a certain number of books. Or lose weight. Or travel. Etc.

Maybe you’re paired in a circle with like-minded people. Or maybe there’s just this one service that holds you accountable. It could be live or async. Maybe it’s an AI that calls you and asks you a few questions and transcribes your answers.

You could also still make it about work but be more about your overall career instead of just the day-to-day of work.

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Idea #4 - Monthly tech support subscription

I am somehow still shocked by how bad my parents are at using technology. I don’t blame them. But it’s a bit ridiculous. My parents don’t know how to manage notifications on their phone. As a result, they get notifications all the time and it bothers them but they did not know they could turn them off. They did not know they could rearrange their apps. And so they just had apps they do not even use in their way all the time. The list goes on.

Again, I don’t blame them. But it’s a shame because I genuinely think poorly configured technology very negatively impacts people’s quality of life. And if you don’t know how to fix it, or if it takes a lot of work to fix it, well then you are kinda just screwed.

It also sucks when you go to get help and it’s not helpful. When you call tech support from Apple and it takes forever and the solution ends up being a 3 minute fix.

There should be something better.

There should be a tech support service that sits above all the other tech support services. You pay a subscription fee for this or for your parents, and then they can text or call it whenever they want in order to get tactical advice on what to do with their technology.

Lots of ways to actually implement this. This service could do ongoing checkins. They could audit do an audit of all the tech in their life. They could recommend products. It could be a human. It could maybe be AI but that feels less likely to be great as of yet.

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Idea #5 - Vintage tech clothes brand

Every startup gives out company swag. Tshirts. Coffee mugs. Stickers. You get the idea.

You could build a marketplace or collection of retro company swag.

Imagine 2009 Meta shirts. 1990s Apple mugs. 2015 Stripe jackets. You get the idea.

Who has the best company swag? I don’t know. But I should know. It should be possible to know.

Another thing you could do is build a physical storefront in SF and I imagine it could be an attraction to come visit. It could also be a Thrift Store that only sells company swag.

You could also make it a museum, where people explore the history of company swag and how it has evolved over time.

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Idea #6 - StumbleUpon for People

StumbleUpon was a popular mid 2000s website that you could go to, click a button, and it’d randomly bring you to an interesting page on the internet. It was random. It was silly. It was fun. A bit like the I’m feeling Lucky Button on Google.

There should be a StumbleUpon for discovering people.

This could take many forms.

One idea is to focus on the professional world. Who should I meet in the world? Maybe you get a certain number of “searches” per week. Maybe you have to be approved to enter this network. Instead of manually combing through Linkedin, you can use this platform.

Tell me who I should cold email based on my goals that I have given you. This app is an AI agent that searches the directory for relevant folks and gives you suggestions.

Another idea is to focus on making friends. Another idea is just to focus on personal websites that are interesting. You get the general concept.

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Idea #7 - Adventure list

I meet many people who are looking for more adventure from their lives. They want to sign up for a 1 or 2 week adventure in some random part of the world. Do something physical. Get outside. Etc.

If you google for adventures, you often end up with very touristy options. It feels a bit like going on one of those terrible cruises.

There should be another option. A sort of Airbnb for adventures. They have tried with experiences but I don’t think they’ve really captured the adventurer spirit. Something more outside the box. Like camping. Or sailing. Etc.

You could build a marketplace for these experiences. Or you could just build the experiences yourself. Or some blend of the two.

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Idea #8 - Landlines

This is a bit of a bigger idea but someone should make landline phones popular again.

You don’t really need to be reachable everywhere you go. But it may be fun to be reachable some of the time by some people. Not spam callers. But your close friends.

So bring back the landline. Only give the number out to close friends. Or maybe it’s free for people who also have the same landline phone.

Maybe there are no private chats. Just channels you can create and join. So you and your friends can join the channel and see who is around and talk in it. Maybe there’s a light indicator on the landline phone telling you if people are in the channel or not. And it has a light ding when people join. So you can join and chat with the people in the channel when you want to. Maybe there’s a companion website where you can set up the channels for your device. But once you set it up there’s no need to login anymore. No notifications. No missed messages. No worries. It’s all chill.

There’s probably also a video chat version of this. A sort of mirror designed for group calls. The modern landline phone could be a video chatting device.

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Idea #9 - Roast Please

If you’re bored at any point today, I highly suggest you spend five minutes on Reddit’s R/RoastMe. If you are not already familiar, R/RoastMe is a sub-reddit with over 5 million people focused on one thing: roasting people.

The “roasts” are pretty funny (and often pretty harsh). It is fascinating to me that people are comfortable posting.

I would imagine that many more people would post if it felt more private and wasn’t so public. You could build that. Upload a photo. Get a bunch of AIs commenting on how you look.

You could also build that for more specific professional domains. For example, get feedback on your dating profile. Or get feedback on how your business’ website looks. You’d want to train a bunch of AIs to embody particular types of personas. And they could all give you feedback

You could make money by charging for additional AIs to give you feedback.

You’d want the humans to be able to like particular comments training the model on what good feedback looks like.

You could make it fun or entertaining etc.

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Idea #10 - Side project marketplace

We are seeing more and more people build tools and apps and companies. But there’s still no great place for these people to sell their side projects. No trusted place where it feels like you’d likely be able to get a fair offer and an easy efficient process.

At the same time, there’s no great way to buy a side project. I know loads of people who wish they could purchase a side project that has even a little bit of traction.

There should be a solution to this. Some vetted community where people can buy and sell projects in a streamlined way.

We’re often talking about in the order of 5, 6, or 7 figure outcomes - not necessarily billions of dollars going around. But that’s fine. Especially if the community was highly automated there would be very low costs to running it.

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