Tag Archives: steal this idea

Steal This Product Idea #5 – Personalized Retail Shopping

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Find the stuff that suits your tastes quickly

For all the advances in consumer technologies, walking into a retail store and making a purchase still feels like a “outdated” experience.  There’s a ton of relevant public information that I’d gladly provide to retailers in exchange for a more personalized shopping experience.  But despite the proliferation of social data, most retailers don’t know anything about me until I make a purchase.  

Here’s the idea:
  • A mobile app that links with your Foursquare/Facebook account.
  • You fill out a basic profile including your size and (possibly) the types of items you are interested in purchasing.
  • When you check into a store a salesperson gets a notification with your first name, photo, size, history of check-ins at that store, things you might be looking to buy, previous purchases and relevant notes that have been inputted by previous salespeople.  This may include previous items you’ve tried or comments about your style/preferences.
  • Future iterations might:
    • Notify you when an item you like is on sale/in-stock/available in your size.
    • Send you in-store offers on items you might be interested in purchasing.
    • Notify stores ahead of time that you are coming so they can have things ready to show you.
What’s in it for the shopper?
  • First and foremost a faster, more customized shopping experience.  Salespeople will know the size, style and preferred brands of shoppers.  Get in and out faster.
  • Targeted discounts on items they want to purchase
  • Perks (glass of champagne for those who share their info?  5% off?)
What’s in it for the retailer?
  • Push people through the sales funnel faster by showing them products in their size or those that suit their style.
  • Upsell shoppers on products they’d be likely to buy.
  • Build loyalty through a higher quality shopping experience and rewards/incentives.
Target Audience – I imagine this would be tough to implement in the larger department stores at first, but there are plenty of smaller retailers with fewer customers that would have the ability to really tailor the experience based on shopper.

In the end we don’t have the domain experience to be able to execute on this well.  If there’s any retail guru’s out there who want to collaborate, get in touch.

Update: Signature got a nice Techcrunch writeup and seems to be attacking the same problem.  I still think there is huge opportunity in this space for multiple players.

Why it’s Important to Share your Startup Idea

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We speak with a ton of idea stage entrepreneurs through StartupGiraffe. Many times, people think we’re going to “Zuckerberg their Winklevoss” and steal whatever brilliant ideas they have. Because of this, they speak in generalizations and vagaries (it’s like LinkedIn meets Yelp for Healthcare with Farmville-style gamification). Unfortunately if you don’t tell us the details and motivations behind your project we can’t give any feedback or really figure out if working together is possible. We feel that you should not only tell us your ideas but share them with others too. Here’s why:

Talking is the Easiest Way to Get Feedback

The whole Lean Startup movement is about validated learning. You want to accomplish as much learning, as quick as possible with the least amount of effort. The easiest way to do this is by talking to trusted people.

Validation of the Problem Space

You need to find out if this is really a problem that other people have. While you may think it’s obvious that everyone would want to rate and review their pet food, that might not be the case. Research and fall in love with the problem not your solution. Find people who feel the pain most acutely, they will be the most enthusiastic about describing their troubles and why current solutions don’t suit them.

Developing Relationships with Early Cusotmers

Mark Suster talks about investing in Lines not Dots. He doesn’t want to invest in a single meeting with you, he wants to understand how well you work over time. There is a strong parallel here between getting early customers for your startup. The more you check-in, listen to feedback and demonstrate progress the more likely early customers will advocate and stick with you.

Here’s the #truth. No one is going to steal your idea.

Everyone has their own “Great Idea”

While your idea might seem brilliant to you, until you validate it/show traction/make money, it’s just another idea. Everyone has their own set of problems and set of experiences. In Eric Reis’ new book The Lean Startup, he suggests trying to take your (third) best idea and trying to find someone to steal it. Write blog posts , email product managers at Google and Facebook, go to meetings, tell everyone! Everyone’s busy with their own priorities and ideas, no one has time for yours.

Domain Expertise and Execution Matter

If someone can steal your idea based on a 30 minute conversation your idea is not defensible. Most likely you bring some secret sauce to the table (knowing the vertical really well, knowing people in the industry that you can sell to, etc…). You’ve been thinking about this problem/solution for weeks and months, it keeps you up at night, you get all hot and bothered just thinking of the potential. Anyone who steals your idea will always be one step behind, waiting for you to lead the way while they copy features. Your experience, execution and vision matter as much as your idea.

You will have Competitors

If your idea is based on the convergence of multiple trends (i.e. daily deals, group messaging, check-ins, photo sharing, etc…) there are likely multiple people with the same exact idea at roughly the same time. Regardless if you start to show success you will have competitors. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as it validates the space, creates competition for funding and creates buzz/pr/publicity.

Anything I missed? Any reasons why you still don’t want to share your ideas?

Steal This Product Idea #4 – CricketFaceoff.com

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I’ve been playing Fantasy Football for the last 8 years and absolutely love it.   For those who don’t know how it works: you join a league with your friends, draft real players, and accumulate points based on how the players do in real life.  Each week you match up against one of your friends, if your team accumulates more points you win the match.

There’s so much to love about Fantasy Sports:

  • There’s constant interaction between members of the league through a live draft, trades and sh*t talking.  It’s a great way for me to stay connected with my friends from High School and College (I play in two leagues).
  • It makes me a much bigger sports fan by forcing me to read up and watch games I ordinarily wouldn’t care about.  I couldn’t care less about the Houston Texans but if I have Andre Johnson and my opponent that week has Matt Schaub, it makes for a thrilling, must watch game.

It turns out I’m not the only one who loves Fantasy Sports:

A 2006 study showed 22 percent of U.S. adult males 18 to 49 years old, with Internet access, play fantasy sports. Fantasy Sports is estimated to have a $3–$4 Billion annual economic impact across the sports industry. ~ Wikipedia

A few weeks ago two of my friends and I were discussing how Fantasy Cricket in it’s optimal form doesn’t exist and came up with an idea:

CricketFaceoff.com will allow fans and their friends to create virtual cricket leagues and compete against each other.  Users can manage their team and get access to live scores, stats, scouting reports, news and expert advice.

Considering that in India, ‘Cricket’ is the largest religion with a billion fanatic followers, Fantasy Cricket in the country has great potential.

Fantasy Cricket is at the hub of three dynamic industry spokes, namely, Internet, Gaming and Cricket. In a country like India, where cricket is almost the only sport, and with industry projections putting Internet penetration at an encouraging $300mn and online gaming at $200mn by 2010, this sector is definitely headed towards growth. [Wikipedia]

There are two main competitors: Dream11 and CricInfo.  Both of these sites lack:

  • An online draft system – Currently you can pick the same players on every team without penalty or restriction
  • Integration with Facebook/Twitter – Sign in with Facebook, Publish sh*t talking to news feed, Vote on who you think will win published to news feed, etc…

We actually went so far as to buy domains (CricketFaceoff.com and CricketSuperstar.com), get a logo (see above) and create mockups for the site.  There are two versions, the first is a full-out draft based fantasy cricket site:

 

The second is a “minimum viable product” pick the winner version.  There’s no live draft, less engagement, but still retains a lot of the core elements that we think can be successful:

 

Cricket faceoff simiplified

 

We have thought through a number of monetization strategies and strategic partnerships but in the end we didn’t have the patience to go through with it.  I’d still be interested in pursuing this in the future.  Get in touch if you are interested in collaborating…

Steal this Product Idea #3: Get Together

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While staying up all-night in your mom’s basement, battling magical orcs and pounding Cheetos sounds awesome to some people:



most of us would rather meet up with friends and do fun stuff in the real-world.  Virtual worlds are dying.  Instead, we use status updates and check-ins to show off how awesome our first lives are:

Our yacht is incredible! Has its own pool, hot tub, movie theatre, recording studio, spa/massage room, gym, (cont) http://tl.gd/2jgpcsless than a minute ago via UberTwitterParis Hilton
ParisHilton

Mobile, social, real-world games (like Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown) haven’t hit the mainstream because the “games” aren’t all that fun and the right incentives aren’t there.  In other words, a mayorship and 10% off my next slurpee ain’t gonna cut it.  I want a game with rewards like the NYC Key to the City project, which:

…invests regular New Yorkers or anyone else who happens by with the powers of magnanimity usually reserved for the city’s highest officeholder: to bestow a key to New York on a person of their choice, granting extraordinary access to generally off-limits parts of a no-entry-to-unauthorized-personnel kind of city….

The key… opens locks at two dozen locations in the five boroughs, from the baptistry at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan to a locker at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn to a very private and humble room (no spoilers) at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens.

This is so awesome.  I imagine an augmented reality future where life is a game, the world is your board, and the points you accumulate for having fun can be redeemed for new experiences. I’m thinking a mobile web powered version of The Game.

Gaurav Mishra and I have recently been discussing these concepts and came up with an idea he coined as gttgthr.com (Get Togther).  He does a better job then I can of explaining it:

Step 1: You sign up using your Facebook ID and indicate your interest in joining different types of get-togethers: meet up for coffee, watch a movie, listen to live music, go shopping, learn how to dance etc.

Step 2: You browse through a list of awesome things to do in the city around your interests. Like Thrillist.

Step 3: You indicate that you will attend a proposed get-together, or suggest a venue for a proposed get-together, or propose a new get-together. Like Plancast.

Step 4: The system will connect you with [friends and] friends-of-friends who have also expressed an interest in attending similar get-togethers. Like Thread.

Step 5: Once a group has decided to attend a get together, they might get a surprise group deal offer from the venue. Like Living Social.

Step 6: Users can be designated hosts for venues, activities, or even cities. Like Foursquare.

After some debate we both felt that although this app had all the overhyped elements of group purchasing, game mechanics and FB/Foursquare APIs, it wasn’t “the one.” 

What do you think?  How can we leverage the mobile web to create fun, real world experiences?  Do you know of other companies like SCVNGR and Geocaching doing cool stuff in this space?

Steal this Product Idea #2

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So it’s 2010 and according to the 80′s movies I was obsessed with as a kid we should have hoverboards, flying cars, sexy robots, and violent but thrilling reality tv gameshows.

I can forgive scientists for failing to deliver on the important stuff, but at the very least, they should’ve come up with a really easy way for me to stay up to date on the music I love.

Here’s my problem: I love music, but downloading it is a pain in the ass.  Many times:

  • It’s not the right version (terrible sounding live album or kung-fu panda in croatian)
  • The quality sucks (camcorder rip)
  • It’s not tagged properly
  • It’s not what you are looking for (self-promoting rappers, porn or just plain weird)
  • It’s super slow (maybe that’s just cause I’m in India)
  • It’s “illegal”

So in order to satisfy my cravings for new music without the hassle, I buy albums on iTunes. The issue is most of the time I have no idea what to buy.  The only way for me to stay up to date is to manually browsing the iTunes store, explicitly ask my friends for recommendations, listen to internet radio and write down the tracks I like or browsing hype machine, pandora and other music sites and just sampling music.  That’s is a lot of work and I’m really lazy (which is why I don’t buy a lot of music).

I don’t want to go out and look for music, movies, games, books and apps I want stuff I like to find me.

Here’s what I’m thinking: create a service that lets you “follow” your favorite digital content: music, movies, games, apps, and books and receive notifications any time new related content is released:

  • Phase 1 – Music over Twitter:
    • Put in your favorite artist, band or genre (similar to iLike or Pandora)
    • Decide how and how often you’d like to receive notifications (as soon as it happens, daily, weekly) and how (tweets, @mentions, direct message)
    • Link to a summary page which shows an activity feed (new tracks, alubms, remixes, videos, etc…) for the music you have decided you like
    • Link to iTunes for affiliate sales
  • Phase 2 – Other content: Movies (Actor, Director, Genre), Games (Game, Genre, Studio), Books (Author, Publisher, Genre) and Apps
  • Phase 3 – Recommendations: Tie up with services like Netflix and Pandora to start making recommendations on content you may like
  • Phase 4 – Other Notifications: Email, SMS, Facebook, etc…
  • Phase 5 – Incentivize users to repost content, by sharing revenue

Great Scott! Music Hack Day is coming to SF in a few weeks.  Someone please build this, I’d use it.

Steal this Product Idea: Sign.al

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We are overloaded with information.  During the course of my day I email, tweet, comment, post, chat, message, buzz, check in, call, sms, mms, bbm and sometimes (if I’m really lucky) actually talk to people.  We are moving towards an ever increasing flood of content (much of it automated) and it’s only gettin’ worse.  One day soon everything will tweet.

It’s not the the sheer quantity of information that’s the problem (faster flow of information will only help people achieve more), it’s how we send and receive it:

  • Sending: How do I send out information so that it reaches it’s intended audience only.  In the upcoming era of persistent, public online identity, how do I can still share my green-beer, toga party pictures with my friends and make sure potential clients don’t see it?  Additionally, I want to publicize my boring social media posts without spamming my friends who I know really, really don’t care.
  • Receiving: With all this content around how do I make sure that that important stuff gets to me FAST, while the stuff that matters stays buried (until I get really bored or have lots of time to look through it).

The idea that’s been bouncin’ around my head tries to address the second point… enter: sign.al.

I have a dream… that one day my phone will ring when my buddy is callin’ me up to go grab a beer, while calls from vodafone bill collectors stay silent.  That my blackberry will only flash in meetings only when really really important stuff happens (like the Mets scoring a winning run).  That one day, we’ll be able to ignore the tens, hundereds or thousands of messages that don’t matter, and focus our attentions on the ones that do. Here’s how sign.al would work

  • You give it all your account information (gmail, facebook, twitter, etc…)
  • It starts off like any aggregator (Seesmic for instance), showing you a timeline of emails, facebook messages, tweets, yadda yadda:

  • Aright, now’s where it starts getting cool… after a little while, it moves away from a timeline view, to a priority view.  It starts guessing knowing what you are most likely gonna want to read and respond to and starts moving those to the top.  This shift is already happening (FB news feed vs time line, Mozilla Raindrop, Xobni for Bberry)
  • Sign.al can know what’s important by:
    • Frequency – How regularly you read and respond to individuals
    • Speed – Of your read/response
    • Popularity – The number of comments, retweets, likes, and mentions
    • Proximity – Number of shared connections
    • Medium – @mentions more weightage the email cc’s?
    • Geolocation – Are messages from Mumbai and NYC more important to me?
    • Time of day – Are certain types of messages more important at a certain time?
    • Content – Am I more likely to be interested in content about the Jets regardless of where, when, how it’s getting to me? (yes)
    • Recency – Moving away from this but still a factor
  • Phase 2 – Phone app
    • Incorporating voice and SMS into the mix of content to prioritize
    • Different types of notifications instead of timeline: ring for an important sms, vibrate for a somewhat important @mention, silent for a newsletter.
  • Phase 3 – Setting status (implicitly?): In a meeting, driving, out to lunch, available – Based on this reduce/amplify notification methods.  If I’m sitting at the airport bored and normally my phone vibrates for an important tweet, now ring.
  • Phase 4 – Anticipate – Based on where I am, the type of message, who I’m connecting with, the medium, the format etc… start anticipating how I may respond to them (in a totally not creepy big brotherish way)

Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution’s what matters.  Take this idea, build it, I’ll use it and be happy (just be forewarned you need to legal operations in Albania to actually register the sign.al domain name :p ).

quick update: my buddy Aditya actually wants to make this happen… check out his blog for more info.