Startup ideas that you'll never do?

Packet switched pneumatic tubes. Back when pneumatic tubes were a big thing we didn't have a lot of the technology we have now. I think a lot of the inefficiency in pneumatic tube networks could be made up for by modern computing and robotics.

Obviously a lot of challenged but if you could get the downtown core of a high density city on board as a trial project you could be delivering everything from packages to fast food. It's an expensive piece of infrastructure to invest in, and I know big companies like Amazon are expecting drones to solve all their problems, but I can't help but think the answer is to just lay out some pipe and build the network.

I think once you have a network like that it changes the economics of a lot of stuff. Maybe you can even use return packets for garbage collection. I think if you can get the per packet price low enough it opens the doors for a lot of new business ideas.

Bitgrid - A new computing architecture, which seems absurd at first, but might be the one that democratizes access to Petaflops/second.

Take an FPGA, rip out all of the routing hardware, and basically have a sea of LUTs in a grid, clock them in two phases like the color on a chess board.

It's a huge waste of transistors, but every single bit of compute is pipelined, so you could run an LLM with one output per cycle, for example. I'd estimate a 8192 * 8192 array could fit in a chip the same size as my i7 processor.

(Assume an FP16 multiply fits in 1024 cells, there could be 65,536 of them, each giving an answer each clock cycle, at 2Ghz --> 131 TFlop FP16) If you manage to optimize the multiply to fit in a smaller area, you can immediately get more TFlops out, something that an FPGA can't do.

I'll be glad to help anyone who wants to make this thing go.

A way to crowdsource patronage - everything/everybody seems to be asking for subscriptional support (Patreon or the like)

I would love to support a lot of the creators I know more personally ... but if I were to add-up even the $1/mo they each ask for, I'd be into the $100s a month easily ... so I live with the ads they have

Something a la Brave Browser's tokens, though, would be great - pitch, say, $50 into a "patronage bucket", and then pay a penny for every page/video/podcast/song/etc you read/watch/listen to OR allow the ads to load/display/stream

Data driven astrology, numerology, or similar divining tools. Find out your compatibility with a date! Should you take this job? Make this decision? High risk or low risk investments this year?

Potentially fun, but seems like it would get too cultlike if it works. More likely it could end up disproving astrology and pissing off certain people. Numerology would be interesting as there's no preset canon that 14 exudes leadership skills or whatever. Nobody minds if you process some numbers and spot some pattern.

A federated technology co-op that serves local needs, like rideshare or food & drug delivery or point of sale systems. It'd be entirely employee owned and operated, shared between the people making the tech and the local drivers and restaurants and technicians and the such. Needs trickle up, app & hardware dev is done collaboratively and centrally and the output trickles back down to every chapter, profits are split among all employees accordingly to some formula. No outside shareholders.

It might also be possible to organize this as a worker self directed nonprofit, such that you have no profits at all (still pay salaries and benefits, but removing speculatory investments and controlling shares from employee owners).

Similar businesses exist in other fields, but tech is uniquely reusable between chapters once developed.

Gain the efficiencies of scale of a small national command economy, with democratic input from co-owners/co-workers, without the bureaucracy and corruption of the formal government.

It would never be able to directly compete with the VC bubbles of Uber etc., but it would be a more ethical and sustainable operation, and maybe can win some government contracts and protectionism if it has a special nonprofit status...

A search engine for physical shops, which indexes their items and inventory so you know where to go when you want a specific type of cheese for a recipe and you're in an unfamiliar small town.

Of course you can just ask locals but that's so analogue.

Serial cereals. It's a breakfast cereal, but each month the box comes with the next installment of the next Dickens.

Bulk laundry service using RFIDs. The economics of scale are different when you can just throw all the fabric into one giant washer/dryer, like the type they use in hospitals, and let robots sort out who owns what. My province has one central laundry facility that services basically all government buildings (hospitals, prisons, etc) using giant washing machines. RFIDs let us turn something like that into something that can service an entire community.

Of course last mile transportation remains a problem.

Creating food forests in cities - changing "traditional" city landscaping into perennial forageable forests - fruit & nut trees, berry bushes, etc

A way to integrate digital conversations a la mind mapping[0] or a Zettelkasten[1] - allowing for branching, parallel conversations (that could be remerged later (eg like git's development branch concepts)), private conversations (which might be ephemeral (disappearing after X period of time (like Snapchat, Signal, Telegram, etc offer - or like unlogged IM clients, irc, etc)) chats)

Bring all your social media, messaging apps, and email into a single app

If you want to add someone to a conversation they were not previously in, you could have a set of approvals that need to be granted by X-many members of the chat group to allow/disallow certain content items to be visible

Being able to easily search across all those communication mediums would be a godsend - can't remember if you sent something to Bob via Messenger, Signal, or email? Open this tool, and they are all in one place

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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten

Developing software for small, independent cinemas is a notable idea. While I can't speak for the global situation, based on my experience in Europe, many cinemas suffer from outdated and subpar booking software. Creating an aesthetically pleasing platform akin to Shopify for webshops could prove to be a lucrative endeavour. My research into existing solutions revealed a dearth of options, and the few available ones look crap.

A services where you order used bike parts based on request. The local bike chop shop can then fulfill your request and send you the part. Kind of like eBay or Amazon marketplace in reverse with buyers driving orders instead of sellers listing inventory.

A startup to build bike lanes, and other tech/policies that allow people to bike.

This would be similar to the functions provided by orgs like https://sfbike.org/ but we'd be for-profit and have billions in funding.

A startup that can get rid of Health Insurance companies butting in between Doctors and Patients and existing only for catastrophic events (cancer etc). Get rid of Insurance premiums, copays, deductibles and all the other crazy stuff. Let patients pay out of pocket directly to Doctors. That would bring down the cost of healthcare like crazy. Yes I know this will require some legislations etc and I am a nobody in this field but man I would love for this to happen. Hate the Health Insurance bullshit with a passion.

Autobiographies. A platform to write your life story. Free for basic text, premium for extra features, subscribe to read more than n per month etc.

Here're 999 you might find interesting: `Hamster Burial Kits & 998 Other Business Ideas`

https://web.archive.org/web/20090213131053/http://www.sixmon...

A sort of "temporary building constructor" like a LEGO for sheds, made from small pieces like interlocking plates/hinge blocks of standard size to build cube-like shapes extending from each other like Minecraft blocks.

I wrote a list of startups I would like here:

https://github.com/samsquire/startups

A replacement for Uservoice that doesn't suck - a public/whitelabelable RFE service that companies could subscribe to (SaaS) or deploy and manage on-prem

Enabling libraries to become print-on-demand centers for public domain / out of print / old / unusual works

Whale farming - building the containment nets is probably tricky, but if you had a big enough area to cordon off in the ocean, you could raise them for meat etc

IMDB for books