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.
Here are some of the ideas that were on the original list that didn’t make it that might be interesting. The main reason they didn’t is that I didn’t have much to say about those ideas to make a full post and I found some of them silly.
Idea #1: Have a bot that generate hockey quote from article (twitter)
The first idea is one that is mostly a marketing one, it is not really about making a buck or two.
Why not have a bot that reads from an article it gets via RSS or twitter and grab the most interesting quote and tweet it. This could be useful to gather followers to send them to other products or a mailing list where there is a paid product.
Idea #2: Have a card game with hockey cards
When I was a kid. I used to collect those hockey cards and around the same time Magic was all the craze. Why not mix them both. This might already have been done though, I know at least a mobile game has that concept. However, having a trading card game instead of just being for collecting the card might increase the value of owning the card even more.
The main problem with this idea is the distribution if you go with the physical card route. Even with the digital one, you still need to pay the NHLPA fee for using the players names and a NHL fee for using the teams logos. So out of box you already got a bunch of fee without even having built and play tested the product.
Perhaps start small with a fake league and make up players to have the idea out and test if it works, then go physical and with official branding.
Idea #3: Hockey/sport comics & meme collection
Sometimes we like to post a gif to our friend in chat and it usually never finds the one we want. They are apps that do that on slack and others like giphy. It would be nice to have one only for hockey, NFL or your sport of predilection. I could even be set up to give gifs for your favorite team by default or before any other result.
Idea #4: mobile app / hockey with coins and fingers
This one is kind of silly. Some of you might remember when we were kids, we used to pick a coin (usually a penny) and play hockey with our fingers. The defending player makes a goal with their two hands and the player with the coin tries to shoot it with a pinch. I wonder if something like this could be done with a mobile game, without the coin since it could break your phone.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about here a video explaining it to you:
Like EA churning out a new NHL game at the start of every hockey season, a fantasy guide or draft kit brings revenue constantly every year. However, each guide or kit is obsolete after only 2-3 weeks into the season. There are many ways to create something that lasts the whole year. It can be a guide or mailing list that sends updates each week or every game day via email or by creating something a little more evergreen that is still relevant season to season.
So why not create a guide that explains all the advanced stats and type of pool and how to create them.
How to build it?
A main guide could be created explaining how each type of pool works, how to optimize for them, stats and advanced stats and how to optimize for the best player to pick. The main guide could be exploded in many mini guides that can be given away when people buy a draft guide or sign in for a newsletters. Each mini guide could have a referral to a site (like poolexpert, etc) that allows them to build the type of draft in the guide and extra link to site or paid resources to help them further.
How to get people to buy it?
By giving away each mini guide, it should have a promotion for the main guide and other fantasy guide or draft kit available.
Like we said in the last paragraph, some mini guides could be given away when users sign up for free newsletters. From the newsletter, the other paid guides, draft kit, paid newsletters and what not could be promoted.
In the free newsletters, it could include affiliation to other guides, sites to build your own pools or to bet against your friends. It could include ads of podcasts, other hockey newsletters or even Youtube channels.
With all those predictions done with Hockey season Idea #2 and Hockey season Idea #4, the bots might even be able to make complete predictions for each kind of pool available. From those predictions you could create a draft kit or ebook that could be sold or giveaway for free.
There are a lot of draft kits out there and there is a good reason why. Every year, some players have breakthrough seasons, others have down year, roster changes, some prospect might play.
Because of that a new draft kit must be released and that is a good thing, it means every year poolers who are eager to have an edge buy these in hope to beat their competition.
However, building them might be a problem. It requires a deep analysis of the changes that were made in the off season, knowledge of past performance, possible critical power play minutes and if they are ready to play or not. Like discussed in the first paragraph, the bot form idea Idea #2 and Idea #4 already did most of the work for us. You could add a section for prospect, possible new line, a breakdown of analysis out there, etc.
How to get people to buy your stuff.
There are tons of these fantasy guides, draft kits, whatever you call it online. How do you get people to buy yours ?
First probably it is to ask how to get buyers instead. A simple way might be to create a mailing list where you give a sample of the draft kit when they sign up. Having a demo will allow potential buyers to see if it’s worth it and the mailing list could be used to give updates and promote other third parties.
How to package it?
The guide could be sold as a one off every beginning of a new season or it could be sold as a subscription service where you give updates weekly even daily during the season. Subscription service then returns more money over time, but this will require more involvement on your part.
The guide could include participation in a global pool where they can win prizes.
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.
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