Hey everyone! I figured it was time for a new project, so here it is. Darbenghast Ideas, a collection of ideas from Darbenghast’s inner most secret libraries. For the full story, ask yourself what the big idea is, and then read on for the first list of the new project!

Today, we’re focusing on business ideas. As the first day of the project, we can hardly expect any of these ideas to be original, let alone good. Ah well, let’s see what we’ve got:

1. An app that sends pre-defined scary tweets if you don’t wake up on time to disable it. Well. Talk about inauspicious beginnings. This isn’t even a business, this is an idea for a mobile app that can’t really be developed any further.
2. Twitter poll service. Basically, slapping a pretty GUI over basic Twitter functionality for quickly posting polls to your feed and receiving votes in the form of retweets. Again, not much of a business, but at least this has potential to somehow grow into a marketing tool.
3. Anti-procrastination app. This also has ‘app’ in the description, which suggests more of a one-shot-that-can’t-be-further-developed thing. The general idea is to prevent the user from accessing websites or other applications that would otherwise prevent them from doing productive things. This idea naturally followed from the fact that I couldn’t stay on task long enough to actually get on with writing this list.
4. Using shopping APIs to fill baskets according to recipes. I’m sure someone has done this before, but the idea is pretty okay: Either using your own recipe database or an external one, automatically populate a basket at <online grocery service> and place an order for you.
5. Coaching human interaction. This is a real business! I’m terrible at it myself, but I’d like to become a more people-person. What better way than to tell other people how to do it?
6. University textbook sharing/lending/selling service. I think people get sued over this sort of thing, but it would be immensely useful. Let old students trade their old core text books for hard cash while giving the new generation a chance to get through university life with a little bit of money in their wallets.
7. ‘Gamified’ Note Sharing for students. Back when I was a at university, there was an attempt by other students to create a hub where everyone could share the notes they created with everyone. Of course, this was a wonderful idea. Except no one actually did it for longer than a couple of weeks (it also didn’t help that it was started towards the end of that year’s courses). How about ‘gamifying’ the concept with achievements and other such meaninglessness stuff to encourage writing up your precious notes?
8. Play-date group calendar for parents. Meetup/EventBrite for play-dates! You publish an event with properties like child age range, gender, number of kids.. You get the picture. Like other meetup-based applications, but geared towards parents.
9. Strava for Golf. If you’re not aware of Strava, you’re probably not a cyclist. It’s an application that lets users measure their cycling statistics over time, as well as race on user-defined courses for the fastest time. Transplanting that idea into golf makes a lot of sense: You’d measure your strokes over each hole of the course, as well as having dedicated leader-boards for each course. It turns out someone already did this, but that just goes to show how good an idea it is!
10. Vine-like stream for music fans looking for a new sound. This one is kind of cool, but probably hard to implement licensing-wise: Users tune in to a personalised radio station that plays a never-ending stream of ten second clips, and can click a button at any time to hear the full version of the current/previous track. There’d be more complete controls for navigating the stream for paid users, and there’s obvious incentives for musicians to upload their music to the service.

So there you have it! Ten business ideas, and it only took me two hours and a huge cup of Costa coffee to get them out. In a future post, I’ll be covering one of these ideas in a bit more depth, including the first steps to getting it off the ground. That might be a while, because I have a few more ‘idea list’ posts back-logged from when I started this project. Until next time!