Sifted reporters cover tech day in and day out. So by now, they’ll have collected some pretty good ideas for a startup of their own (right?).
Let’s see. We asked our colleagues to pitch us their best startup ideas.
Investors, form an orderly queue: here’s what they answered.
(One of these ideas is actually in development. See if you can guess which one.)
Anisah Osman Britton: “Heartbreak Locker”
I have so many stupid startup ideas. The one I’m currently obsessed with is the Heartbreak Locker. When you break up with someone, you have all these memories together. Back in the day, you would have thrown letters, photos and gifts into a box in the attic — but now you have this huge shared digital footprint of texts, photos, voice notes etc. You don’t want to see them popping up all the time (thank you, Google Photo memories) but, if you’re like me, you also don’t want to delete them.
The Heartbreak Locker app lets you safely store all of that stuff from across different apps in one place — and helps you delete it from everywhere else. It can also have a secret passcode — which a friend can set — so that you don’t check it every day! Is there money to be made? Probably not, so VCs will love it.
Freya Pratty: “The Chesse Board” or “towers for undersea cables”
I know consumer isn't the trendiest vertical of late, but I think there’s innovation still to be had. Enter the "Chesse Board": a cheese board shaped like a chess set, where every piece is carved from a different type of cheese. Capture an opponent’s piece, and you get to nibble on a Roquefort rook, or perhaps a Stinking Bishop bishop. I’m targeting the John Lewis, M&S, 50-something dinner party market.
And because the Chesse Board only requires small pieces of cheese, I’d source waste offcuts from larger cheese manufacturers. So, yes, this is climate tech.
But if we’re talking about larger-scale bets, I’d be pitching an undersea cable manufacturing outlet. As the world transitions to renewables, we need to build a whole load of cross-border electricity cables to move renewable energy between countries. Creating the cables — which are often kilometres long — means first constructing a tower tall enough to hang the cable from as you build it. So, should the Chesse Board fail to take off, I’ll be getting into the tower-building business.
Daphné Leprince-Ringuet: “Real-time bakery updates”
Is there really anything better than arriving at your local pastry spot — be it an artisan boulangerie or the nearest supermarket — to find the baker pulling out a rack of hot, crispy pains au chocolat, just in time for you to enjoy while they are still warm?
I’ve tried calculating, based on a very much empirical estimation of morning customer flows and average croissant yield, when that moment is most likely to happen. But I would love to see an app do the work for me, mapping the state of pastries in all the bakeries in the neighbourhood — and sending me an alert whenever a fresh batch has just come out of the oven at my local spot. So no one ever has to eat a cold, sad, couple of hours-old viennoiserie ever again.
The business case seems solid too: you’d take a small cut of each pastry sold. That’s true unit economics.
Sadia Nowshin: “The Halfway app”
This is one for the big city dwellers, for everyone who has ever had to join a frustrating group chat with friends who can’t figure out where to meet on a weekend. People down south want you to come there, everyone west objects and the one guy out east insists his neighbourhood is most convenient for all. How do we get past this?
Behold: the Halfway app. Input everyone's addresses and it'll calculate the most convenient area to meet, based on public transport options and desired activity. How do we make money, you ask? Well, restaurants/pubs/etc can pay to be bumped up to the top of the list when their area is recommended, boosting the chance of being booked — you can also filter by what football games are being shown, or green space options for a picnic, outdoor heaters in the winter or fun things happening that weekend. Freya [Sifted’s climate reporter] has pledged £5 as my first angel investor.
Tim Smith: “SpareGlove.com”
Every startup needs a clear problem to solve, and there is no more annoying a problem you can encounter than losing a single glove. You are left with the remaining glove, an item that has worth, while being completely worthless at the same time. Enter SpareGlove.com.
It's a marketplace where you upload a photo of your sole, lonely glove — outlining which hand it fits. Then, with all of the magic of the internet, you will be alerted when a matching glove fitting the opposite hand is uploaded to the site.
But “what,” I hear you ask, “Could happen next?” We now have two glove owners, both vying for ownership of the final pair — a fatal impasse, you might imagine. Here we meet the bidding system: each user enters how much they would happily pay for the glove, with the highest bidder taking the spoils. Now, everyone is happy — one person has made some cash, the other reunited his spare glove with a partner.
I’m thinking of expanding the idea to airpods, socks and Nintendo Switch joycons.
Éanna Kelly: “A voice-activated rolodex”
I run into the same problem a lot where I get a story idea and then rack my brain for ages over who’d make good interviewees. Often, I end up manually sifting through my 1,992 connections on LinkedIn — about five of whom I’ve met in real life — to try to figure out who to contact.
Instead, I’d like to talk to LinkedIn — as though it was Siri — and get it to help find suitable people faster. “What’s the name of that guy I met at that conference last year — I think he worked in a space agency — who told me he liked reading Sifted?” LinkedIn will probably get a feature like this at some point, at which point we should talk royalties.
Steph Bailey: “Someone beat me to the best idea”
I unfortunately discovered one of my ideas has been done: the scootcase — half scooter, half suitcase.
