In our search for a good place to start our venture, we’ve been discussing a number of ideas and areas. I’ll list them here although I know the discussion is far from finished. We haven’t done much research yet either. This is for you to join the discussion.
- Analytics: It seems people are data hungry. Money is being made by scraping statistics off sites such as iStockphoto and presenting them in a better way than what’s already available. Users sign up for premium accounts over at Soundcloud because it gives them more and better statistics. There is likely room for add-on tools to existing platforms which provide all kinds of analytics.
- Weddings: We honestly haven’t done too much research in this area yet so I’m still somewhat cautious. This is an obvious choice because we all know that people don’t mind spending lots of money for this once-in-a-lifetime event. There are lots of wedding portals already so I don’t believe that’s a good area to enter the business. But we live in web app land now so there may be a good niche such as a seating arrangement planning app from where we could start growing. Maybe it’s just our age but it seems like in Germany, more people want to get married now than before. (We haven’t seen the stats, though.) Also, in talking to couples who got married and people who attended weddings, we found there are many pain points to be solved. We know that wedding magazines in Germany are the only ones that are still growing in distribution so it’s an uphill market for now. However, there will most likely only be one-time customers. So there’s probably no subscription money to be made. We will permanently struggle to get access to new customers.
- Translation: How many times were you in a foreign country where the people didn’t speak much English but you needed to tell them something important? What if we could connect hobby translators to people in need of translation services? In real-time? Per phone, skype, or whatever?
- HTML5: YouTube became possible when Flash introduced video playback. Flash is dying, Canvas et al. is on the rise. What does that give us? I’m sure we will see some exciting projects coming out of this development and not just games and pretty animations.
As this list grows, we will post our thoughts here. Let us hear your thoughts!