Running list of startup ideas for things I think would be fun or interesting to build and have in the world (not in any sequenced order). Inspired by Dan Romero’s open startup idea list. I’d love to work on these as side projects so feel free to reach out if you’d love to pair.

“Sorting Hat” or “Impact” Graph”

It bums me out that social media companies have perfected ML to hack our generation’s attention and hook them on addicting but often unuseful content in exchange for ads. It’s also hard for people to identify the intersection of what’s meaningful to them + what’s useful for the world.

Inspired by Eugene Wei’s essay on TikTok creating the “interest” graph, I’d love to see an “impact” graph of curated entertaining and informative content and job opportunities vertically focused around things that are positively impactful for the world. Imagine something like 80,000 Hours which helps people navigate impactful world problems but less pessimistic and making use of better content, recommendation engines, and opportunities.

“Co-Live”: Living closer with friends and community

General problem statement of making it seamless to find or build housing together with your friends, family, and general community as means of reducing loneliness + improving happiness. I’ve had chats with a ton of friends that say they’d love to live near each other as we get older.

  • Easiest MVP could just be an opt-in “find my” type app to know address or general vicinity of where your close friends live to keep in mind.
  • Next up might be a group search, filter, and bookmarking experience layered on top of Google Maps, MLS data, and homebuilder data. Social alternative to Zillow + Streeteasy.
  • Very ambitious would be collaboratively finding land, sourcing developers and home designs, shopping leads to homebuilders, and building out sections of neighborhoods from scratch.
  • I guess the most ambitious version of this would be the physical implementation of Balajis’ The Network State and just straight up offer a service to build new cities from scratch 😂

Crypto Tumblr

Fun and easy way to collect your favorite content on internet, mint your own media, and share it with friends. Connected to your wallets so in 5-10 years, I’m less likely to lose my content and repositories as platforms die (👋🏼 Myspace and Xanga). Less professional and performative vibes than current social media but more authentic, fun, and vulnerable. Absolutely needs to have zero gas fees.

Token Economy Management as a Service

Any crypto team introducing a token into their game, protocol, or application is venturing into creating an economy, whether knowingly or not. They need to have a robust toolset to moderate it (supply release, sinks/faucets, engagement incentives, etc.). It feels like many teams have to rebuild many of those economy management functions from scratch but I think it’ll be hard to get the features right, on-time, and is time-intensive which distracts from the actual fun and useful work of a game or protocol.

Personal Health Dashboard

I’d love a video game-like dashboard for my personal health. I have a lot of data sources like Apple Health, Oura Ring, Nike+, Withings, and others that give me a fragmented view on my health and activity data. I’d love having an integrated single source of truth for my health data paired with models like Med-PaLM to push light recommendations and forecasts on how to improve. I think it’d be super helpful even acknowleding there’d be a wide error bar on accuracy.

Just one Generative AI tool, please

It feels pretty obvious at this point that generative AI will be ubiquitous in our workflows and apps over the coming years. The way things are trending now, every existing app will have AI functions (think Notion, Office, GDocs) and there’s also a huge amount of vertical use-case specific apps (think Jasper, Copy, or Copilot).

Honestly, it’s going to be a huge pain in the ass having to manage 10-20+ individual AI apps specific to a given use case, having to integrate my personal data sources with each, and managing prompts and workflows for each. I’d much rather just a single playground to experiment and tool to deploy all of my models from. Think Zapier (no-code) and/or Linear (best in class on design and details) but for consumer AI workflows.

Partiful for Favorite Spots or Travel Recs

Everyone has their recs stuck in their personal Google Maps and random Google Sheets or Apple Notes (I like sharing my Tokyo streetwear shop list 😄). Make it stupid easy for people to share their food and travel recs on social, mobile optimized, and earn referral + affiliate revenue. Everyone hates Yelp and Facebook at this point, Partiful seems to be doing well, so IMO it might be a great time to try new things in social.