Traditional Innovation
Easy Clothing Recycling
The EPA estimates that textiles make up 5% of all landfills in the US and only 15% of unwanted clothing is actually recycled. The average US citizen throws away an estimated 70 lbs worth of textile waste each year. Textile, or clothing, recycling services do exist, but the market is incredibly fragmented and sometimes you have to pay more than the clothing items original value to get it recycled. If a company could make it as easy as putting out your cardboard boxes and actually turned the textiles into either a yarn is re-spun and ready to be knitted or weaved into other garments, or in the case of synthetic fabrics, shredded, granulated and then melted to create new fibers for use in new polyester fabrics…it could be a billion dollar business.
Sustainable Water Desalination
It’s pretty well known at this point that pretty much every country is facing a water crisis. Environmental researchers estimate that 60% of the world’s population will experience water shortages by 2025. And already today, water some nations resorting to desalinating seawater to provide drinking water. Desalination is the process of removing salt and other impurities from seawater. It is expensive, time consuming and uses a lot of energy. For example, in Saudi Arabia, around 10 percent of the [country’s] electricity is used for seawater desalination and in Abu Dhabi, the desalination plants contributes more than 22% of the Emirate’s total CO2 emissions…and that’s for one city. This is why sustainable, energy-efficient desalination is a billion dollar industry. We’ve seen solar powered water desalination proved effective, but we have yet to see it on an industrial scale, or incorporate complementary technologies, such as wind power.
Nuclear Power Systems for Deep Space Exploration
For exploration in our solar system, solar power is currently pretty common, but to go into deep space, exploration teams will need something that doesn't rely on sunlight. Nuclear power systems can also be smaller than solar arrays, making the spacecraft easier to maneuver in space. If the mission is manned, the nuclear power system can also be used to power the life support system, cutting down on costs and flight time, according to Space Daily https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Nuclear_Power_In_Space_999.html given the restrictions and hazards associated with working with radioactive materials, there's been relatively little innovation in this space (no pun intended), and to successfully pull off such a venture you need a combination of nuclear engineers and literal rocket scientists. That team is not going to be easy to put together but if you can pull it off the payoff will be a billion dollar business and then some.
Personal Finance
Holistic Investment Portfolio Analysis Platform
An investing platform that takes into account all types of assets include crypto, owning stock multiple ways (for example owning Amazon stock, Amazon ETF, Amazon in an Index Fund), owning NFTs, that works with multiple accounts. Platforms like mint.com sort of do this, but not really. The account links are also prone to breaking which messes up that great dashboard view that is the whole point of the app. Easily a billion dollar business, I would use, I couldn’t find anything like this already existence, so if you know of something like this let me know.
Dividend Investment Strategy App
Millennials, especially in the wake of the pandemic, are investing with the goal of living off of dividends. If you invest, you may have receive a ‘dividend’, which is a cash payment to the shareholder, typically paid out each quarter. The amount of the dividend paid is based on a number of factors, including, profit and amount invested. An App to help you meet your dividend goals and probability of meeting those goals could be another billion dollar company. There are lots of regulations and finance…or is it fin-nance?…laws to abide by here, so a money background would come highly recommended if you go after this one.
Creator Economy
All of the ideas in the Creator Economy are ones I would love to work on. There’s so much opportunity.
NFT Avatar Services
so you can own the rights to your likeness in virtual worlds. With the proliferation of virtual reality and mixed reality, people are spending more time as avatars or holograms. Right now you can use a service to create a life-like avatar based on your appearance or you can use a standardized avatar with customizable features such as hair color and eye color. If you get that life-like rendering made, there is actually nothing stopping someone from copying your likeness and tearing around the meta-verse as you. Right now the average person might not care too much about this, but they will. When you look at celebrities and creators that make a living based on their likeness, they care and would pay a lot of money to secure not just their face, but their whole likeness. Could you imagine if someone made a life-like Kim Kardashian avatar in VR? I don’t think she would be cool with that.
Accelerator for Creators
In the startup world you can apply to programs such as Y-Combinator, 500 Startups, MassChallenge and Techstars to get a cash injection and go through business bootcamp to see if your idea is viable. Usually you give up some equity, or ownership, in your company to do this. No such program exists for creators and it should. A good percentage of the under 25 population wants to be some kind of creator and that is a massive opportunity. Unlike startups, creators don’t really go venture scale so you’d need a slightly different model, but the same architecture of some upfront cash, a creator bootcamp and giving up some equity would work. With the rise of NFTs and tokens there are some more nuanced opportunities there to invest in a creator by tokenizing their community. That’s happening today, but with established creators, but it would be interesting to see it done with rising creators.
Creator Support Services Platform
(i.e. video editors, thumbnail designers, podcast producers, etc). This is another one that if I had time to work on, I would. As a marketplace app you could get an edge over platforms like Fiverr, UpWork or Freelancer is by 1) niching down and specializing in creator support services and 2) qualifying the candidates through a course or certification so you can compare apple to apples and 3) embrace growth and long term partnership. The other problems with freelance platforms is that the people who end up staying there are often the ones who are not savvy enough to run things on their own. Sometimes it’s because they are just starting out, and that’s fine, that’s what these platforms are for. But then you get this layer of freelancers that have mades hundreds of thousands of dollars through the platform, charge high rates, but never graduate to running things on their own. So I think there’s opportunity there to also launch these freelancers, which the other platforms actively discourage.
Education
Online Course Aggregator
Online course industry is growing like crazy. There are dozens of platforms like Udemy, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, Skillshare, Udacity that serve millions of people. And then there are platforms like Teachable and Kajabi that allow users to post individual courses under their own company branding. What we don’t have is a way to see all the offered courses for a given topic across all of these platforms. It’s a huge discoverability problem. An aggregation tool also has the advantage of being able to offer *more* objective reviews and is a billion dollar idea inside a billion dollar industry.
Hydrogen Industry Safety Training
If you work in the energy sector you may have noticed a spike in “green" hydrogen production project lately. Green hydrogen means either the carbon generated during production was captured, or the facility used renewable energy to break apart water molecules, and is carbon neutral. As production increases, so does transportation and use of hydrogen. This is great for reducing CO2 emissions, but that the caveat is that hydrogen is much more hazardous than most other hydrocarbon gases, like natural gas or methane. A lot of the companies going into hydrogen production are new and while production is on the rise proactive safety training for the transportation and use is not. This is a massive “heads up” to the industry that the appropriate training needs to take place now. While a training company would not be venture scale, it could still do very well, especially if the offer remote options and hit the billion dollar mark.
Lesson Learned Database
or “failure database” for companies that don’t make it and why. We have Pitchbook for the venture capitalist community to see how startups are funded and they charge $1500 a month for a subscription. Imagine the value in a database of business ventures and what was their fatal flaw. In silicon valley there is a good "pay it forward" culture where if someone comes to you with questions about a previous venture - success of failure - you pay it forward and take the time to educate that founder on what you learned. But that system is not universally available, But a database could be. This model is not just for companies, lots of industries that do project based work have a “lesson learned” database that is rarely, if ever, actually used. So there is a massive opportunity to reinvent how we view failure and turn it into a business.
If you decide to start a company based on one of these ideas, or if you’d like me to do a deep dive into any of these let me know your thoughts in the the comments.
