I can’t think of business ideas
Guys, there are way better ways to make money than sitting in a sweaty office with a bunch of schmucks all day. Ways to make a lot more money than your 52 year old MD can hope his take home is.
I’m just not creative enough to think of them!
Any advice?
I’ll give you an idea. Create an AI PowerPoint builder solely for consultants and bankers. There are a bunch of popular tools out there that don’t meet the commercial needs for these professionals as they are targeted to a mass audience. There’s probably at least a couple direct competitors out there but it’s so early that it’s anyone’s game. Learn how to be good at sales and understand the requirements for the basic build + find a technical cofounder.
Not a bad idea, but limited TAM
I disagree that the TAM is limited. if you can build an AI PowerPoint for the biggest power users (consultants and bankers), you don't think that it could expand to other professional users? you'd essentially be creating a PPT competitor and I doubt MSFT would like that, but if there's an opportunity to disrupt PPT, it's now with new genAI tech.
This is exactly how so many great companies were built. The idea that you first need to find the biggest TAM from start is a mental trap. First, if you find a good idea and for say a trillion dollar market, you’ll be facing a ton of competition as the chance of finding a unique + viable idea for a mega market is unlikely. Second, and I’d argue a more fundamental factor, is the fact that if you build for everyone, you build for no one. It’s a sure fire way to increase burn and end up with a crap product in most cases.
You should start with a smaller market and be the best and then expand adjacently into different market segments/use cases.
Let’s not do this so I can keep my job
Here’s some inspiration from my main man Ali G.
Save enough money then buy a business
Il bite. Build a Vending Machine that can make custom cocktails and all you do is pay with Apple Pay/Tap your card. Basically a CocaCola freestyle for Alcohol. Bars/Clubs get a bunch of these, huge TAM. Might put bartenders out of business tho, no lines to get a drink.
This is a cool idea feature - gourmet ice would be nice too. Select what type of cube you want and how many cubes. One large sphere, small cubes, etc.
For sure, imagine at a packed bar all the headaches of getting another drink go away. Two clicks and you refill your cup.
There are a number of bars like this across the country but only for beer and wine as far as I know. The venues I’ve seen fashion themselves as breweries or beer halls. They do pretty well on a standalone basis, but I have not seen them grow. There are also at least two companies selling technology to enable self-serve beer and wine.
The problem that you’d have to figure out with regards to cocktails is the production system and quality control. Essentially customers like so many different drinks and a lot of them require fresh ingredients. The complexity and cost is just so much higher vs. beer and wine. Maybe a limited SKU count for the most popular items with pre-made mixers + alcohol or even pre-made drinks could work for customers who are not as quality conscious and value speed. Another idea could be to sell the underlying technology and production system to bars to augment more premium drink offerings served by bar tenders.
This Taco Bell offers alcoholic drinks from a machine
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLkY9fEC/
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If your objective is purely profit maximization, then you don't need to be creative. Put on your research hat work the phones. You're going to have to do a lot of interviews - not just googling and listening to people on a forum. Build your own business plan and sell it to yourself. Start with some idea, who cares if its a good one.
+1 to what VBond said about trying to get the biggest TAM possible at the outset. Yes, if you want to potentially go from $0 to $1B valuation in <2 years, you do need scale and market and that's really only going to be done with TMT-esque products. But if you are just talking about earning $1MM/year then you don't need that kind of enormous scale (and competition). Look locally for demand not being met. The number of businesses out there grinding <$10MM in revenues and taking home 10% margins pre-tax would likely astonish you. The entire commercial community banking system is built on those businesses.
If you are going to get into business, you don't need to play in the biggest pool or tap the newest and greatest technology... just be better than the next schmuck. And that is usually going to be "simple, but not easy."
Telepathy. Sounds naive but until we start commercializing the enormous research we will never get there.
At the very least we can try and make discoveries on the way
Another way to tackle this is to look at products and services you purchase. You can attempt to duplicate it or improve it or innovate with a new product or service.
One thing I recently saw on vacation, was these mobile "smoke shops". It was a sprinter just packed with tobacco/nicotine products parked outside some of the bars. I imagine startup cost are probably <$50,000 per unit and can probably clear $1,000 in sales a night. You could probably build to some scale in a year and then pay someone to run it.
Lol interesting - what town or city was this in?
Also, how do you think these could differ from the smoke shops you find in nyc?
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