I tried a bunch of framework and other language and I usually feel overwhelm when its time to do something real with what I've learned. So that why I created this site, to write my progress and help some noob like me that stumble into the sames problems.
This idea is a follow-up from the previous Idea #35, if you have all the food from the fridge in your app why not enter the expiration date and know which food is going to expire soon. This app or service could be with the previous app or a standalone one.
How does it work
While entering or scanning every food item, the app will have an extra field to enter the expiry date. For certain products that normally don’t have an expiry date, it could deduce the expiry date from the date you’ve bought it. The user will need to enter where the item is stored (cupboard, fridge, freezer) to give a more accurate estimate. Another way would be to detect the date by taking a picture of the date, but that is probably harder to implement.
How does the app notify the user
The app could notify via daily push notification or email when food is almost expired. You could even send notification via text message that is more costly for the provider usually though. It should be easy to remove items once they are no longer in the house so users don’t have notification for food that has already been eaten.
Using the previous app, when entering new items or looking for a recipe to do, the apps will suggest items that will soon expire.
Revenue opportunities?
I don’t see this as a paid service, maybe bundle it with another app and charge for extra functionality. The apps might run on ads and users could pay monthly to remove them. You could target ads at items that are regularly added and are expired or recently removed, making them more relevant to the user.
Expanding from the bot from Hockey season Idea #2, once you have a functional analytic bot, why not make it enter a lot of fantasy drafts to train it.
Training
To train the bot you could create your own pool and simulate against each other. Each one having a different approach and using a genetic algorithm to make it evolve each time.
Since the season takes a whole year, one way to make it work, is to train with the previous year and hide the training year from the training year.
Once they are trained that way, you can do multiple pools for the current year. Perhaps had an external choice in the mix. One of the teams could pick in the order of a listing from the news like hockey news or other NHL fantasy hockey predictions.
Adding human prediction to the mix
While using a listing from a web site or a draft kit is using human prediction they usually lack context of your hockey pool. To get the bot to train against real humans that make decisions in the context of the particular pool it needs to participate in the same draft we do.
The bot could participate in the multitude pool that are available online. If there is no limit on selection except for the cap, you could register a few bot as active players and make a bunch of others following the same format. (like TSN Pool etc) However, if it’s in a draft, a rotisserie or any kind of pool that a player can be only owned by one participant we need to be a bit more creative.
Beat the bot
Why not create an app or website where users can try to beat the bot. You can have a yearly draft where a limited number of people join to draft the whole league and there are 2-3 bots in the mix. It could be free and the site gives some kinds of prize if you finish first. It could also be paid and the money go toward the cash prize for those who beat the bot. Note that the second option could be considered gambling so I don’t know if it could work in all the states.
The second way to make it more dynamic is to have a weekly draft and include 2-3 bots in the mix, give a prize to the winner and if a bot wins you keep the prize.
How this can make money
A hockey pool is a great way to drive traffic to your site or app. Since they are games almost daily, users will log almost daily to check how their teams are doing. This is great for ads impression and you can offer a mailing list with the result and it should have a pretty high open rate. That money can go toward the giveaway and operating the site.
Giveaways could be done in partnership with other companies, brands, etc. This allows them to get new users to their list, follower count or whatever. You can get access to their user base and you might even not have to pay for the giveaway.
Since hockey season is starting soon I decided to do some ideas on hockey and sport related Ideas. Food related ideas will appear in between don’t worry if that’s what you’re in for.
A while back, my friend convinced me to join a hockey simulated league. What is a hockey simulated league? It’s basically the equivalent of starting a season as a GM in EA NHL with a bunch of friends and all games are simulated instead of played. You and your friend you only play the GM side of things and your goal is to win the Stanley cup.
How it work
The owner of the league, or the commissioner as it was called needed a few things to get the game going. He needed to buy a tool that simulates the game and the season. I think ours was called (simont hockey simulator). This tool generates the page that the owner would update on the site of the league after each game.
There are other games like this, usually all it’s done on the app or site and the game is played daily. Members of the league can prepare their team for the next game.
The only unique thing I’ve found that none of these games do is the ability to load a roster from a year and start from there. Most can’t do it because the game needs the nhlpa license.
The other feature interesting in that kind of game that is not always implemented is trading players, probably because some could create fake accounts and make bad trades from their fake account to their real account. Since this was a managed league with players that mostly knew each other, we could do all those things.
Example of what already exist:
Has a standalone game: Eastside hockey manager
Web based: Senior Hockey league, football-gm.com
Standalone game & web base: Soccer manager (soccermanager.com)
Mobile: Hockey Legacy Manager, Hockey General Manager (make it so studio)
How to make money
From these games there seem to be a variety of ways that they make money. Some like to ask for a flat fee, others have ads in game, others have a subscription to update the roster, some use in-app purchases to customize the team or others have partners to promote other products.
Since hockey season is starting soon I decided to do some ideas on hockey and sport related Ideas. Food related ideas will appear in between don’t worry if that’s what you’re in for.
Sport analytic is a super interesting field and with all the api available nowadays you could probably create your own analytic program to help you pick the right player for your fantasy teams or your betting needs. There are the standard stats that you can find almost everywhere, which is game played, goal, assist, point, shot, plus/minus, time on ice (toi), etc. However, you might not know that there are advanced stats like corsi, fenwick, etc. (See https://www.hockey-reference.com/analytics/).
Using an available api and a web scraper for stat not available via api to create a more complete portrait of the players and the team they are on. With past data and current trends it could help you find if a player is on a downward trend or an upward one.
How to build your own analytic software (bot?)
The first step would be to gather the data about the team and the players. In (Idea #1: Manage your fantasy hockey draft or any other sport via facebook ) we discuss different api to get the data so this is a good start. Once you get data from the previous year and daily updates you can find a way to display the trends efficiently to be usable for your fantasy hockey and betting needs. Example, when a player is injured, it can help you pick the right player to replace him from waivers. It could identify underperforming players that usually bounce back later in the season.
If you’re feeling fancy and have some knowledge of AI, you could feed the data to a neural network to see what kind of selection the analytic software will pick. With enough training, you might just let the bot do the job for you.
You could probably predict if the player will have upward or downward trends according to past statistics, age and line composition. Not sure any analytic tool would have predicted Kadri or Letang career year though. Your model should be reevaluated at the end of the year if your analysis were right and correct itself. If you have access to a competitor you could verify who was right or wrong and find out who year after year has the most accurate prediction.
Why build that kind of analytic bot?
The original idea came to me while reading about robo advisers and bots picking stocks. While there is a whole other world on stock picking, balance sheet, forecast and all jazz that I don’t think I’m qualified to give you advices about. The base idea is similar, you have a set of data that help you predict whether the stock should go up or down and you (or the bot) buy or sell appropriately. My first usage was going to be for a frozen pool I do with friends every year. The goal was just to help us with the pick, we would be mostly making the decisions ourselves at the end. However, with the rise of online betting recently with Draft king and others betting platforms, I wondered if it could be used for that too. Therefore, stacking the odds in your favor. And finally, with the plethora of pools only, I thought building a bot to manage them all would be a good idea, helping finding gems, managing it instead of myself and helping the bot learn.
Since hockey season is starting soon I decided to do some ideas on hockey and sport related Ideas. Food related ideas will appear in between don’t worry if that’s what you’re in for. Since I did the food series first I though of keeping there original number and hockey & other sports will get it’s own ideas.
I used to do a fantasy hockey draft with some buddies every year before the season started. However, when some of us moved to different cities, it became harder to have everyone in one room to do the draft. We tried other formulas like having a defined set of players by round and everybody could pick on a player of each round (it’s called a Box Pools). The problem with that is that some rounds the winner seems so obvious that everybody picks the same player.
With our preference set on a draft for our hockey pool and the recent rise of chatbot on facebook I thought why not mix the two.
Why a chatbot and not over messenger or zoom
Sure probably a meeting over zoom would do the job. There are even websites like poolExpert or marqueur.com offering a draft feature. I’ve tried them, but right now they are pretty clunky, they don’t offer the bells and whistles that we wanted for our draft.
Using a chatbot to fill your pool could be a really dynamic way to do the draft.
One of the advantages of the chatbot is that it could ping the user when it’s their turn through notification and give a longer time-frame to enter their pick. The bot could register all the picks and save them, making it available via a website, app or a bot command. You could allow pre-selection for each pick in case you’re afk when it’s your turn.
How it work
A chatbot could be used in conjunctions with a group chat. A bot could chat individually to each participant to tell them it’s their turn, pick their selection and in the group chat it could show the pick by the participant. The bot could have a search command to find the statistics of the player for the last few years and a command to show previously selected players.
Where to find the player datas when doing chat bit command?
You need to have the up-to-date data when doing your draft. The bot will need to use an API to access the list of players. It could be build its own database and use the api only to keep its up-to-date.
It could be a subscription like pools expert or officepools.com.
You could create a mailing list of the user that use the bot and contact them with other hockey, fantasy sports or gambling related offers. The mailing list could give prospect list, draft guide and ranking, etc.
Have you ever gone to the grocery and bought something only to realize you already have some in your fridge? It does have to be items that are in the fridge. I’ve recently gone to Costco and bought a pack of three dishwasher liquids, only to realize my wife already bought some earlier this week.
Would it be cool if you could just check in your app what you already have so you don’t buy unnecessary stuff. Or even better you could check on the app and realize you’re almost out of milk and buy an extra (my kids drink a cartoon of milk a day so we are always buying milk).
Why not build an app that lets you track what is in your fridge (and everything food related for that matter). Then, when you’re at the grocery store and there is a deal on yogurt you can check the apps if how much you got at home and buy accordingly.
How it work
User input what they got in their fridge from a free text field that searches what you got in your db of produce. The app could have a barcode scanner component and allow users to scan what they have in their home (this could be a paid feature).
Other usage
You could even do like myFridgeFood.com and suggest recipes based on what you got in your fridge or do the reverse when you’re at the grocery store. You could check what recipe you want to make and it will tell you what ingredients you are missing to complete the recipe.
Revenue opportunity
There are the classic ads in the apps, the apps could probably target depending on what they usually buy or what is missing from what is usually in the fridge. Perhaps a custom meal plan using what the user got in his fridge and charging it has a custom feature.
We already talked about receipt scanning in the idea #32 crowdsourced grocery apps, but I’ll like to expand a little on that.
There could be other usage to an app built around receipt and bills management.
A place to store your receipt.
A straightforward usage for that is simply a place to store your receipt. It could be on device or in a cloud service (Dropbox, S3, etc.) or the apps could have its own cloud storage. This kind of service could be useful to freelancers or anybody that needs to keep their receipt for tax purposes.
Make the app detect potential errors in the bill or receipt.
If you can store the receipt, why not scan the receipt to detect potential error. Type of error the app could check for problems reading the receipt. If the app has access to the store prices it could compare from that data with your receipt and detect if you paid the wrong amount for an item. This one is probably harder, it’s entering AI territory.
Calculate your bills for you
If the app can detect errors in the price it can probably calculate your bill for you. This is particularly interesting for freelance, independent contractors or anyone who is self-employed. If they need to report their expenses this will be very useful to pay less taxes.
Make the app track price change after you buy
Sometime, a week after buying something, what you buy becomes on sale and some shops, like Costco and Walmart, give you some money back if it is the case. However, usually when you buy something you don’t actively look up if it is on sale the week after. Having an app track that, by scanning or entering it in it, you wouldn’t have to actively check if the price changed or possibly miss on some savings.
Cash back for scanning your receipt and sharing it
A few years ago there was a proliferation of apps and sites that exchange micro-payment in exchange for a small task. One interesting app was a scanning receipt app. It gives cash back for scanning your receipts, the catch, however, is that you have to submit all your data for marketing purposes. If you’re looking for another way to make money with your receipt scanning apps that is another way to do it.
Would it be nice to get a coupon when you enter a store?
Imagine an app like Foursquare meets Groupon. (They tried but could you make a better version of it?)
How it works
To work the app will need to have access to your location and let you build a profile by selecting your favorite stores and items. Over time, the app will have the stores you go to often and try to find relevant deals for them.
Example: you go get a morning coffee at Starbuck every day then after a while it will send you a deal for Starbuck.
The app & service
The app itself would include your profile with the standard login, preference, etc. Where you can change your favorite store and see which store you tend to go and decide which one you want to get a deal from. The main app would be an endless feed of all the deals you currently have access to, maybe an ad inserted in between here and there.
When at a location where there’s a deal a notification will be sent and clicking on it will lead you directly to the deal in question.
There should be an app or service for advertisers & stores to submit their ads.
How to make money?
Find stores that want to be part of the program.
They pay to be on the app, monthly fee, per user fee and a commission on the item bought.
Stores might be willing to pay to send deals when users go to a competitor. Kind of like you can have google ads that send you to a competitor when you are searching for a store.
Interesting service that can come from that is to create a personalized newsletter for each user base on where they usually go shopping. You can slide in some ads and affiliate offers there too.
This next series I’m surprised how many ideas I got concerning grocery shopping and meal planning. It seems it’s a real pain for us and I didn’t really realize it until I started writing these columns.
The first idea from this topic is quite old, I added it before the IPhone launches. My girlfriend was making trips to multiple supermarkets to buy our groceries and to save a few dollars. I was wondering if this grocery price comparison could be done by a service. The idea makes even more sense with a phone app since you don’t need to print out all your receipts before going grocery shopping.
Service #1: centralize all store price (from circular and flyers) in one place
The first part is to have all those pesky circular we receive in one place, nowadays they are sites like this (like flyerbox). You could use them or create your own. The other part would be to take these circular and put it in a db, so we can run some comparison.
The thing here is that not all items are available in the flyers. If the store has an online store, we could build a bot to scrape all their data weekly. If not we could ask our user to do it for us and reward them for doing so through a karma system (more on the later) that gives reward on a certain threshold.
Service #2: compare prices between providers and make suggestions based on the user.
While getting customer data might be hard nowadays compared to the far west of the 2010s, if your customer uses the app for shopping you should have enough to start making predictions after a while. Depends on how much your customer want to let you tracks. It could only be their actions in the app (searching for a store, location, deal they save, etc.) or more intrusive like ask for their texts so it allows their significant other to text to get some milk and add it to their list.
If they make their grocery list on the apps, the apps can then try to find the best deal for the user. It can ask for each item what is the cheapest place to go or where is the best shop for the lowest grocery bills for this list.
How to make money from all this
Coupons
With all those coupon flyers the service could partner up with local grocery stores and offer in house coupons targeted at what the user usually buys. The service will get a cut of the offer like an affiliate marketing offer.
Ads
Ads on the app are another straightforward way to get some revenue. Since we know what they buy could be targeted instead of using a generic service or even sell some to the local store. On the spot discount.
Since the app would be used in store to look at the list or to scan in store items. The app could detect the user location and offer a coupon for the store they are in. It might be for something they might not have the intention of buying at the moment, making the store an extra sale and your apps will make an extra commission.
Survey
Some stores offer surveys on their receipt for a prize, the app could do that. Store would pay a fee so the app would offer a survey to a customer after visiting a store. The app could use that money to give prizes to the user or/and use the karma system to reward the user when completing the survey.
Receipt scanning
Some apps give money or reward for scanning your receipt, the app could do the same. Receipt scanning could be used to store what has been bought and at what price too. Helping build the user profile and suggest similar items in the future.
Premium feature
To help users fill their shopping list you could allow them to take a picture or scan a barcode to find what they are looking for. There are many barcode apps these days and most of them are paid so this could be a paid feature.
Every time we stay in a hotel for more than a week we need to do our laundry at some point. You could always pay for the laundry service at the hotel, but these usually end up costing more than buying a new piece of clothing instead. With the rise of smartphones (that we just call phones now) and Uber clones, why couldn’t you make an Uber for laundry or maybe something smaller just a simple laundry pick up business.
Idea #31, part 1: Uber for laundry
Everybody who has a car could be an Uber driver, then why not do that for the washing machine.
Everybody who has a washing machine and a car can be a cleaner for your new cleaning service with a cool apps and everything.
How it work
When you need laundry to be done you go on the app and tell them what you need to clean and when they can pick it up.
The cleaning consultant receives a notification and can take the job or not.
If he picks up the job, he needs to get the dirty clothes and then wash them at his place of choice.
How it make money
The cleaning consultant receives 70% of what the client paid of the job, but they have to provide laundry detergent, softener, etc.
Note that probably it would need to have standard bags and have a rate for each of them to control the price more easily.
Problems
My wife quickly pointed out a few problems with it, aside from letting strangers wash my torn out underwear. Why would you give your laundry to a random person instead of just dropping it at your local laundromat for probably cheaper. How is the service consistent if it is a random person each time? If that is not a problem, and price is the issue, why not use task rabbit or Craigslist to find someone and use that person every time instead of a random service who takes a 30% cut.
Alternative, Idea #31, part 2: Apps for a laundromat
This business model is probably well suited for laundromat. You can usually do this kind of service where you can drop off your bag of dirty cloth and they will wash it and fold it for you.
The cost is lower than in a hotel and it could charge a little extra for the pickup at your place instead of you dropping it off.
You could either pay for a delivery guy (or gals) or use a service like Uber deliveries.
Alternative, Idea #31, part 3: Offer multiples services like mixing laundry pick up with cleaning services
You could integrate previous Idea (#29, #28) and offer cleaning service while taking care of the laundry. Either your cleaning staff pick-up the laundry when they’re done cleaning or they do it on site (not really a good idea, you’ll be liable if you broke their washing machine).
Services like this elsewhere
I had the idea back in 2010, but since then a lot of these services have popped up. Some, like wash.io, started in 2013 and have failed for some of the reasons my wife described. Others are still going, like Naki Laundry and Press Cleaners just to name a few, so the model still holds up. They usually include washing and dry cleaning.
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