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 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.
Have you ever wondered how much electricity you consume compared to others? Probably not, but when playing with the google map api I thought about something that could help reduce collectively our electricity consumption. I don’t remember where I’ve read this, but humans are social creatures and want to be like their peers and if you’re a type A personality you’re probably pretty competitive and want to be the best you can. Imagine then if your electricity consumption was there for everyone to see. You would have an incentive to reduce your consumption to be at least like the rest of your neighborhood to fit in and not be labeled as an energy waster. And if you want to be shown as a true environmentalist, you would want to be among the lowest electricity users.
How can we create something that does that?
With a map api (Google map api or something like it will do fine) and access to your county electricity data. Some counties give the data down by the house, in some cases you need to login to your electricity company to see it, others you only get it by county. The base case scenario is to work directly with your company or state to have access to this. If there is a concern about privacy, only show you compared to the average. Which houses are above or lower average, perhaps color grade houses with a degree of green to red, to see the best average saver to the worst.
You probably get that this project doesn’t have a money incentive. It’s mostly to help people realize how much they use electricity and use herd mentality to make them reduce their consumption. And in some cases electricity is directly correlated to CO2 production if it comes from a coal powered plant, which means there is a climate incentive too. Perhaps partner with local government or electricity companies could do a giveaway to all household who participate, give something for those who use less than a certain % of the neighborhood and send a friendly memo to those who exceed a certain threshold they can probably do better.
Like I’ve told you in my previous post, I hate cleaning and what better guy to run a cleaning company than a guy who hates cleaning. This one is a bit similar to the last. Instead of trying to make an Uber for cleaners, I’ve looked into buying and owning a cleaning company. My competitive advantage is that I would build software to better manage the team and give our client updates of the job done via an app.
This idea came with a mix of the previous idea and a mixergy interview I listened to a while ago.
Getting client
I love what Eddie said in the interview. He called a bunch of businesses, mostly real estate agents and gave them a deal to clean their client’s home. He even offered them a discount if they bought a whole year of cleaning. A lot of them gave him a referral, which helped him get more clients. Answering the phone on off hour seems to have really helped him get more clients too. Users expect a voicemail and are enchanted to speak to a real human.
Getting worker (cleaners)
This is the hardest part, he said. At first, he contacted them on craigslist and was very lucky to find a good cleaner initially. He sent some of them to clean his friend’s home to get honest feedback on how good they were.
He gives back 85% of his revenue to pay them to help with retaining his best one.
The App
I’m not sure if most clients will want to install yet another app just to use your service. However, since it gives them access to the cleaner directly, that might be interesting for them. Here is what the app should do:
the client can enter where they need cleaning via phone location or just entering the address,
they can see when the cleaner is at the location,
they can leave instructions,
can drop messages to the cleaner, it allows the cleaner to contact them without them having their phone number
and let them leave a rating when the job is done.
Closing though
Around the time I had this idea. I stumbled into the cleaning business owner that was selling his business. He was only selling it 20k and included mostly just the brand name and clothing. While 20k seems cheap, I thought it needed a client and staff to really be of some value.
I hate cleaning and what better guy to run a cleaning company than a guy who hates cleaning. This is one of those ideas that popped out after paying for someone to clean our condo at the time. Like a good software engineer, I thought why not do like Uber, but for house cleaning.
The idea
Allows your customer to book a cleaner through your app and let cleaner find gigs through your service. The app could track them that they are actually doing it on premise if the client asks to.
Building the service
First you should find someone who wants to clean for you. Knowing the process of finding and paying for the service will help you understand what you can improve.
Then build a small app for the tracking and ask a cleaner who works with you that they install it on their phone. From them you need then to build the part that connects the cleaner to the user. Note that you could just use Facebook marketplace, google ads before that part is ready.
Maybe it can be like Uber where you call for a cleaning job for a set time and those available can answer the call.
Problems
After having a couple of cleaners clean our apartment, I’ve discussed the experience with my wife and realized that there is a problem with that model. People don’t like strangers going through their thing and they rather have someone they know and trust to do the job.
Second problem is nothing prevents the user and the cleaner from coming to an arrangement and bypassing your app to not pay your fee, wherever little it may be. Contrary to Uber, where you usually need a lift asap, it is not usually from the same place and you won’t ask the driver number for future lift. With cleaning, you usually always want to clean the same place, your home, your office if you’re a business owner, etc. So there is not the same urgency to have someone coming in to clean as there is to have a ride home or to the airport. I think by including an urgent cleaning service you might be able to part of all of this. If a big mess happen or a big event that comes up, your user will need cleaner asap and they might not be able to get one they know quickly. Calling a service that helps you connect to cleaners quickly would make sense here.
Money
The money part would be to take a cut of the cost of the job like Uber. I could charge cleaner to pay to be on the platform, but you guarantee that once they meet the client in person, they’re going to try to bypass you. And charging the cleaner means your client has a smaller pool to choose from.
Did I already tell you that in the mid 2010s I worked on a social game and everything looked like it could be a social game? Yeah that right I’ve talked about how to make a wedding planner social game. Here, the same principle applies to making a society about managing a baby daycare center.
Managing a daycare center has all the things you need for a social game, a building aspect. You can build your daycare center and have room for different groups and purposes. You have different kinds of workers to manage. You have ‘clients’ that can cause a ruckus if left on check and parents that can put you in trouble if you don’t take care of their kids properly.
You can even have an evolution from a family daycare with few children to ‘upgrade’ to a proper daycare with a park, train professional and meal plan.
Game loop
The main game play is quite simple, it’s to build your daycare center. Find a good spot, buy the material, hire your team, put ads to advertise your new daycare and have some parents register their kids. I could pretty much play out like the lemonade stand game.
Perks can be bought to make your daycare center look pretty.
Monetization
Depend on if you make the game free or not. If it’s free, then ads and cosmetics upgrades are the way to go. If users have to pay, don’t add ads and let them get cosmetics through reward during gameplay. Note that if the game has to interact with a server for gameplay or storage, a way to keep generating money from use should be added. Perhaps promo with other games, offers, etc.
There was a time where daily deal sites were popping up every day. Groupon, Yipit, Living Social, JetSetter, Appsumo (before it became a platform instead), you name it. I thought, “Why isn’t there a daily deal for baby stuff”. There were probably some, but it was hard to find. The format of the site could be like Groupon, with limited time promo for the first time users of different services or more like a place to showcase various sales or both.
How it would work
These sites usually started as a newsletter or an app with notification. People would log on daily to see what news or would receive notification on what they are following.
The problem with this kind of site is that you need to get a good deal to entice your user to join and buy. However, if you don’t have the users, getting a deal will be harder and you won’t have a position of leverage to dictate a big cut of the sale.
Getting the deal
Before getting a deal from business you are going to need traffic, but to get traffic you’re going to need a deal. Kind of a chicken and eggs problem. There is a way to get some deals without much effort through coupons and daily deal programs.
The problem here with this is that probably everybody got these deals and you won’t stand out having deals available elsewhere. These deals should at least get you some traffic and affiliate commission.
Another good way to find deals is that you watch brands that post deals on Twitter, Instagram, etc. Once this is done you can post them on your site. You could make a bot that aggregates this for you. You could reach out to these businesses or influencers to get affiliate commission and maybe get the deal before they post it.
Next step you need to get a unique deal by contacting other businesses and brands.
The trick is to have good traffic to your website and a sizable email list so you can increase the probability that business will have significant results.
Once you get to a sizable size, you can have a form or leave an email where other businesses can contact you to create a new unique offer.
Getting the user
The hardest part is probably getting traffic. Probably having a mailing list is the first thing you should set up and you could grow the mailing list by giving perks to those who bring new users. Social media is a great way to recruit new users for your mailing list or redirect your followers to a specific deal on your site. If you’re willing to spend advertising on other mailing lists, social media or adsense can help bring up some subscribers. Perhaps even giveaways might a great way to get users (check Appsumo stories on giveaway)
How it make money
Well that one is easy to see, you promote some deals and you get a cut, voila.
Affiliate marketing works well here too. However, Ads or offer on the wrong product might cannibalize your site by pointing to other daily deal sites. You could be combining deals into a bundle to increase items sold, perhaps even take advantage of a juicy deal and bundle it with deals that have a better commission.
This one comes from personal experience. First, when my wife was pregnant with our first kid, she had complications and had to stay put between the first and last trimester of pregnancy. However, there was basically no information about the impact of food on what she was living. Other than don’t eat sushi, don’t drink alcohol and what not, there was no information on what food can help and what food to avoid. Second, when our first girl was born, she seemed to have a certain problem with bovine protein. We met with a nutritionist, but her input was not that helpful. My wife ended up not eating anything related to dairy, beef and soy, and my god soy is everywhere. Even every day bread has freaking soy, we had to buy a specific bread brand or make our own (which came handy in the pandemic). My wife had to find all the information online through forums, facebook groups and studies.
This made me think why aren’t they nutritionists with targeted meal plans available.
What we really wanted at the time was a list of what we can eat and suggestions of alternatives to what we are used to eating. My wife went on a research spree and was basically an expert on knowing what food may cause problems for our little one and which didn’t. Like we discovered that farmed salmon would cause a reaction, but not a wild one. Turns out farmed salmon might have eaten soy in his diet.
That is where I should have suggested she start a blog (she didn’t want to) and post recipes she used that worked for us. From there create a meal plan and sell it to your community. Perhaps even create a customized meal plan for users who ask for it.
In the end she didn’t want to do it, but if you’re in the same situation maybe share what you’re going through and offer help to others, you might even find a new venture through that.
The mySmartHands model is simple, she teaches sign language on her Youtube channel for free. It is geared toward babies and people who want to teach it to babies. On top of the Youtube channel, there is a website MySmartHands.com, where you can find classes for your kids, online courses and merch like books, CDs and flashcards.
The company has grown internationally and now offers courses around North America. You can even apply to become an instructor.
How to expand the offering
There are a lot of cool things on the site that could be expanded.
You could become an instructor for daycare service or help daycare workers to learn and teach to the kids and baby. The material could be offered in other languages than English (like French, Spanish, etc). You could work with a speech therapist to apply the learning to kids with learning disabilities. The last one is close to my heart, and as of the time of this writing, my youngest child has difficulty speaking and understanding other kids and adults. Perhaps a more visual language would help him.
How does it make money?
You could make money with merch and courses like they did for mySmartHands . Perhaps extra by teaching privately and helping out in a daycare center.
Finding a daycare center that has some space left can be a pain. Sometimes you have to clinch a spot months before the baby is even born. So, I thought of a service or app that could do that. Note that most government sponsored daycare have that kind of service, but they don’t usually include private daycare centers or family daycare.
How to make it?
The main problem is getting where the daycare centers are in a region and how to know if they’re good or not. The simplest way is to crowdsource the information and allow users to enter daycare centers they know of and let them review them. Getting users to fill in the missing information can be tricky, gamifying the site so users can get points and badges to motivate them to fill in more information. It will need a forum where parents can discuss and ask questions.
The remaining part of the site or app is pretty straightforward. It needs a search engine to search daycare centers based on zip code, address, city or name and a map to show where they are.
The site could link to kids and baby products for some advertising and affiliate marketing revenue.
Making Money with the app or service
There is probably not a lot of money to be made. One source could be kids and baby products ads and affiliate offers where the parents search and on the result page.
Another option is to let daycare services advertise on the site.
These type of site already exist, you can check some example here:
Recent Comments