Tag: startup ideas

Business Ideas VI: Run My House

Idea: Run My House – manage all your household services from a single app

MVP: Running your own house sucks – even if you outsource tasks like yard service, gutter cleaning, pest control, and cleaning, it’s still a challenge to deal with numerous service providers by inefficient means like phone calls. What if you had an app that enabled you to simply check off the service subscriptions you desire, and to take pictures to show problems needing resolution? Even when homeowners work with their existing service providers, there are major communication inefficiencies – not to mention the difficulty in acquiring good providers in the first place!

The difficulty with an MVP in the home services market is chiefly a business problem – a substantial percentage of home service work is performed in the informal economy, and as a result it’s highly fragmented. As a result this business is best attacked in a single test market to start, as providers need to be secured across all major services in order for homeowners to realize value in the service.

Market: The combined household market for home cleaning, yard service, pest control, gutter cleaning, and related scheduled services exceeds $100 billion per year, and including non-scheduled maintenance the total market may exceed $500 Billion annually. This market is currently incredibly fragmented, in no small part because there are limited economies of scale in providing most of these services.

Unfortunately for the consumer, this leads to a terrible experience. If Run My House can capture a 10% fee for delivering volume to providers, while keeping the cost to consumers static, it should be possible to capture meaningful market share. With a total addressable market greater than $10B, there is true unicorn scale possible in this market.

Idea Score (0-10 scale): 7.5 points

Feasibility of MVP / Market Entry: 0.5

Building an MVP for RunMyHouse could be daunting, given the number of service providers that must be secured before the service becomes compelling. This sort of “full-stack” startup, providing a complete service rather than just software, has larger potential but also substantially greater risk and capital requirements. Typically it makes sense to attack individual metro areas individually, starting with a beta market and working through challenges there first.

A simpler alternate MVP might simply help homeowners organize communication with existing vendors – perhaps by providing the software for free, with vendors selling their services via the app. This Zenefits-style approach (the give-away-the-software part, not the HR disaster) could enable rapid expansion at lower cost.

Revenue Market Size: 4 (out of 4)

As noted above, the total market opportunity in the residential space is several hundred billion per year – a 10% take rate implies a true addressable market size of 20B+. Numerous public players in the home services and home sales space (ANGI, Z) point to the possibility of a unicorn valuation for a successful player.

Difficulty, Barriers to Entry, and Competition  (out of 2): 1

A large scale b2c rollout of this sort would likely require substantial funding. HomeJoy was a substantial failure in this space, showing that giving away services at negative margins can take even well funded startups down. Handy, its largest competitor, has since worked hard to get to profitability, underscoring the risks of the home services market.

Taking a software-only approach could lower the risk of rollout, but substantial marketing spending would still be required to get customers and providers onboard.

Riding Hype or a Trend? 2

Bringing fragmented, illiquid, hundred-billion dollar markets online has been one of the key success stories of the last 20 years of the internet. Home services has been among the final frontiers because of its deep fragmentation, but Uber and ride-sharing proved that change will come to even the most glacial industries.

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Business Ideas IV: Follow My Diet

Idea: Follow My Diet – Help users follow their diet’s guidelines when eating out

MVP: Eating within a diet’s guidelines is challenging for most, and is further complicated when eating out at restaurants. FMD solves this problem by detecting when a user is in a recognized restaurant, and showing only those menu options that meet their diet’s rules (the app would also show how to custom order at restaurants to stay within the diet). At launch the top 100 restaurant chains in America would be supported, representing the majority of all American restaurants – crowdsourcing additional restaurants and menu items should enable coverage to expand quickly from there. FMD will also enable the tracking and optimization of a user’s diet over the course of time – fall off track and the app will let you know what sorts of food choices would put you back on track for the rest of the day or week.

Market:

Roughly 15% of all Americans (45m people) are trying to follow a particular diet at any given time, with total spending in the diet and weight-loss industry exceeding
$33B last year. FMD could market the app toward existing diet providers in the space, as a management tool for their clients. FMD could also find a market in the management
of diabetes and other diseases where diet is an integral part of managing a long-term chronic disease.

With a large potential user b2c user base, freemium or advertising-based business models might make the most sense for FMD – but the possibility of a disease-management oriented approach remains open as well.

 

Idea Score (0-10 scale, up to 2 points per question): 4.5 points

(Overall this idea scored relatively poorly – I think pivoting it toward the health management space, perhaps diabetes or other food-related disease management, could strengthen the business case substantially)

Feasibility of MVP / Market Entry: 1

A substantial amount of restaurant menu data needs to be gathered and maintained in order to enable the app to function – but most of this is readily available and can be parsed online. With major restaurant chains commanding a huge market share in the restaurant industry, it should be possible to gather this data pre-launch in order to enable a functional product at launch.

Revenue Market Size or Eyeballs: 1

While the market size is large (as discussed above), advertising-supported products need to gain substantial scale in order to support a meaningful revenue stream. Since FMD is initially focused on helping dieters eat out, restaurants may be interested in sponsoring the app in order to drive traffic.

In a Growing Market? 1

The market for weight-loss and diet solutions is well established, and on the whole can no longer grow faster than single-digit growth rates. But the market for apps
that help manage diet-related diseases continues to grow rapidly, providing a strong potential growth niche.

Difficult, Barriers to Entry, and Competition 0.5

Numerous competitors exist in the diet app space, and apps even exist to find healthy restaurant options – but none attempt to analyze the mass market restaurant space. This is the opportunity for FMD – fast casual and similar restaurants can be hard to navigate for dieters, but it seems that there are no apps that attempt to solve this menu navigation process in a comprehensive way.

Riding Hype or a Trend? 1

Digital health apps, fitness trackers, and similar are a fast growing space. While diet-related apps operate at the edge of this space, the relationship may provide some halo for a business like FMD.

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Business Ideas III: HalfTimer

Idea: HalfTimer – Link employed developers with spare capacity to half-time positions

The economy is going full steam. The number of job openings is at an all time high [1]. Technology positions are particularly in demand, with hundreds of thousands of developer positions unfilled nationwide.

MVP: Halftimer.com places developers interested in long-term part time employment with companies looking for experienced development talent. We have found that experienced developers are willing to lower their hourly rates by up to 40% in order to secure a long term contract that is in addition to their full time job. This differential enables savings for companies that work with HalfTimer – a substantial competitive advantage in the staffing business. The initial MVP need not involve more than outreach to employers and developers via LinkedIn, to staff the first several candidates and prove the model.

Market: 5M full time technology professionals

Halftimer.com builds on a concept successfully used by my other ventures to tap an underutilized resource: experienced, full-time employed developers. Many developers, particularly at large corporations, are not fully utilized whether in terms of mental capacity or even time (this documentary details the situation at length). There are almost 5m individuals employed in development-related positions in the US today – if even 10% have excess capacity, this represents a pool of 500,000 potential resources.

Scoring (0-10 scale, up to 2 points per question): 6 points

1. Feasibility of MVP / Market Entry: 1.5 points

The HalfTimer concept exploits an inefficiency: most employers historically won’t buy limited hours for professional work. On the developer side, developers looking for additional freelance work find it difficult to consistently find small projects that fit around their day jobs. HalfTimer attempts to solve this problem, and market entry is straightforward as this is just a new spin on existing staffing concepts.

2. Revenue Market Size or Eyeballs: 1.5 points

500,000 potential HalfTimers, with net revenue per resource at $15,000 = $7.5B/yr total addressable market. Put another way, staffing ~100 HalfTimers would generate 1.5M in net revenue (against roughly $6.5M in gross revenue), enough to run a profitable small startup. The crucial question: cost of acquisition of both employers and employees.

3. In a Growing Market? 2 points

The technology employment market continues rapid growth, and the core constraint remains supply – which is precisely the problem HalfTimer seems to resolve.

4. Difficulty, Barriers to Entry, and Competition: 1 point

Many existing players in the staffing space could potentially attack this idea, and technically there are no real barriers to entry. Gigster, Gun.io, TopTal, and FlexTeam are startups attempting to ease companies’ ability to find freelance talent – these are similar but not identical to the HalfTimer concept (startup competition bolsters the strength of the idea, as it confirms an idea is worth exploring).

5. Riding Hype or a Trend? 0 points

The gig economy has grown substantially, and HalfTimer represents an evolution halfway between freelance and traditional full time employment. But it’s not clear that concepts in this space have much mind-share at the moment.

[1] The JOLTS survey shows the number of openings to be at an all time high, even when compared to 2000 and 2007 on a relative basis.

Note: I changed the first scoring question to address feasibility rather than whether the idea is “transformative”, which seems to be an imprecise concept at best.

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