100 Wild Startup Ideas

Costa Michailidis - July 5, 2021

0:00|1:43

Imagination might just be the single most valuable skill you can develop.

Even Einstein called it out. Scroll down to the bottom to learn how to cultivate your imagination, but first, let's check out some startup ideas 💡

Let's Go!

3D printing for clothing 🥻 Plug the machine in, put old clothes in one end, select a design, print new clothes out the other end.
Self-cleaning bathroom tiles - What if you never needed to clean your bathroom again?
An alarm clock ⏰ that simulates the sunrise and sounds of nature to wake you up.
A smart coffee pot ☕ that brews your coffee just before your alarm goes off - This might sync well with sleep tracking watches.
A smart phone app that replaces your TV remote - You know how annoying it is to type with a TV remote!?
A crowdsourced effort to get thousands of local business that aren't yet online to leap-frog right past web 1.0 and 2.0 and join the modern internet world - The Bitcoin community and the digital nomad 🧳 community might make natural partners in this endeavor.
Toys designed by psychologists to build good character.
A bedtime stories 📚 database sortable by what type of difficulties your child is having.
Pants that heat up or cool down depending on the weather.
Bathing suits that let in UV light, but not visible light (no tan lines).
GPS for pets - No more missing cat 🐈 flyers.
Art that activates with music.
Ships that sail on top of the atmosphere the way ships sail on top of the sea (okay, now we're getting crazy) - Elevator to space this way?
Shock collars for politicians and other people in positions where corruption is likely. They get at least one shock per day, but get more as their approval ratings drop.
A sink that doubles as a dish washer - Why isn't there just a lid on my sink? Why do I have to bend over and drip dirty dish water from the sink to the dish washer? Just put a lid on the sink. (If you really wanted to do this right it would be a module about the size of your refrigerator that had 3 different identical compartments: One in the ready-to-receive dirty dishes position, one in the currently-washing-position, and one in the ready-to-dispense position. It would have its own dishes, silverware, and glasses that each fit into precise positions. You would just put dirty stuff in the right compartment. It senses when it's nearly full and begins a cleaning cycle. Fully automated!)
Email 📨 you can sort by who sent it to you or what it pertains to, rather than by date.
Hats with solar panels to charge your phone.
GPS trackers for expensive jewelry 📿 that are built directly, and beautifully, into the jewelry.
Word-of-the-day unlock screens for smartphones.
Cable car systems for traffic dense cities - The value here being that the system can expand in three dimensions not just two.
Moving sidewalks but with faster speeds the further left you move on them - You have to mount and dismount on the slow lane, but you can move to the fast lane with ease because the relative speed changes are minor. That said, the fast lane can move quite fast.
A speed dating app that's video only. No profiles, you just go straight to a video chat with someone. You're both talking to each other and all you have to decide is if you want to add another minute. If you both want to add another minute, you get a happy chime and you both stay on. If not... on to the next!
Uber for private charter planes 🛩️ I hate airport security. Don't you?
An app that calculates the nutritional value of your food when you snap a photo of it.
TED Talks (or something like them) from historical figures (Aristotle, Cleopatra, et cetera) - These could be researched and scripted by historians and delivered by actors. The point being, what would great thinkers and doers of the past have to say about our world? Might be fun and interesting to explore.
A theatrical performance that takes place in the streets, parks, and public places (or some enlisted private venues) of New York City (or another city) - The idea might be a social media phenomenon. Think Sleep No More escaped the McKittrick Hotel.
Pockets, or pocket liners, that clean your smartphone screen.
An app called serendipity that your shared your location with and some preferences on the type of person you'd like to bump into, and it made the magic happen.
A digital comedy cellar - Imagine it structured as a tournament. You pay $5 to start in a level 1 room. The app either tracks audience laughter 🤣 or the audience clicks a laugh button. If you're bombing after 1 minute you're out. If you make it the full five minutes, you bump up to a level 2 room (bigger audience). A portion of the $5 goes into a pot and is given as a reward to the winning comic each hour. Instant laughs anytime. Instance practice for any comic. (The pricing needs some work, and it might be worth charging the audience if they want to skip the level 1 room.)
Smart outlets that tell you how many volts and amps are going through them and report stats to an app on your phone.
Streets that are sterling engines - A sterling engine runs on heat differential. For the winter and especially hot summers, the temperature difference between to top of the road, and the neutral ground temperature beneath can be quite dramatic. Why not harness this energy?
Packaging that decomposes into fertilizer.
A custom multi-vitamin company - You work with your health care provider to figure out exactly what proportion of micro-nutrients are best for you, then you enter your order and it's made for you in one capsule or powder (rather than the 15-minute supplement routine of some athletes and health nuts).
The anti-college - Higher education is going online, but students are still going to want a college experience. They might be wise to get a little cultured too. What if there were a program that took a cohort of students and housed them in historic and ecologically incredible locations around the world (beats a dorm-room upstate), planned activities, kept them safe, and even automatically sent postcards to mom and dad? Students in the cohort could be enrolled in entirely different online universities, even come from different countries.
A bar that only people going out alone are allowed into, called... Solo.
A marketplace that connects bazzars in developing countries with ecommerce customers in developed countries.
A freediving stadium built into underwater canyons - Freediving is not yet an Olympic sport, partly because it is difficult to spectate in person. The world record holders dive down to 120 meters and more. That's a 36 story building or so. You'd have to angle the glass of the submerged building so you can view up and down more than just the few seconds a diver is swimming by.
A custom fit snorkel mask 🤿 I've searched and don't believe this exists. It would have to 3D scan your face even as your change facial expressions a little, and then print a mask skirt that fit your face perfectly, preventing leaks.
Relationship therapy on call anytime of night - A relationship therapy service you can call right when you get into a fight with your partner. I mean, I don't like the thought of this, but... people might value it.
An automated spice wall garden 🌱 for your city apartment kitchen - The technological feat here would be to build it with UV lights, sprinklers, and the sensors to know when to use them.
A surrogate tourist experience - It might be that the technology is ready for a surrogate tourist experience. You, the customer, put on your VR headset, pay, and you're transported to Egypt or Brazil or New Jersey, or whatever happens to be an exotic location for you. On the receiving end, your surrogate (an employee) is wearing your 3d camera and microphone, and can take you on a walking tour of the city that you direct. You tell them to make a left toward something, they do so. You ask a question, they answer as best they can. This also offers the possibility of recording these tours and publishing some of the best ones as VR content that other users can watch, but not direct in real time.
Zip lines for public transport. I mean, why not, especially for cities built on slopes like Barcelona.
Standardized organic shipping container restaurants - We can already run vertical farms in shipping containers, how about putting a restaurant on the roof?
T-shirts 👕 with adaptable designs - When we travel we brings lots of clothes with us, like 40 pounds of clothes. There's got to be a better way. You really only need one of each type of clothing item and the ability to change the color/design and to be able to clean it. Maybe synthetic biology offers the tech needed for this leap. I can't imagine humans will have whole wardrobes the way we do now.
Windows with adjustable opacity so you can forgo curtains and control how much light comes through and how see through the windows are.
A shoe rack that cleans your shoes.
A food company or credit card company that can tell you how much of each macro- and micro-nutrient you've purchased from them.
A crowdfund for scientific research based on what people are most interested in discovering.
A platform that invites people to add and upvote questions for data scientists.
GMOs that maximize nutrition - GMOs are often designed to resist pesticides rather than maximize nutrition.
A lobby for the middle class - Most special interest groups have the power to lobby and get favorable laws passed or blocked. The middle class might be able to buy back it's influence in public policy.
A school for the children of digital nomad communities - There are more and more people living the digital nomad life, but when they settle down to have kids, often the traveling stops too. Perhaps there's a way to nomad with a tribe, and bring the school along with the tribe.
A social media protocol to take social media out of the hands of large companies - Email, SMS, and HTTP are all successful protocols. What if there were an open social protocol, so people can use the app of their choice, while retaining some autonomy over their data?
An art 🎨 commissioning platform for people moving into a new home or apartment.
Drone-based automated event photography.
A real estate broker service that works on a fixed fee system rather than a percentage - I still don't quite understand how real estate brokers have survived this long in the internet age.
An algorithm that invents drink recipes - Might be something machine learning can optimize. The challenge would be how to get enough data.
A software development effort for small businesses that leverages large volumes of a particular kind of small business. Start with bakeries for example, and build awesome modern take for every aspect of bakeries. A single bakery can't higher a excellent web development team, but a group of them can.
Tax-minimized legal entities for sale - Dealing with taxes can be complex and a major burden. What if you can prefabricate ways to handle it and simply sell them to businesses in need?
Crowdsourced infographics - Infographics are cool, and surveys are interesting, so... let's combine the two. You click the answer to a question and the graphic completes with your input included. You subscribe at the bottom and it'll send you updates as the graph/survey group grows.
A guide on great things to do with elderly loved ones before they die - There are so many things many of us wish we did with loved ones before they died. For me it's rent some time at a recording studio for my dad (he loved to sing).
Pockets - Hear me out : ) Pockets that you could attach to clothes that don't have pockets, maybe with Velcro or something heat activated.
An adventure exchange community - I have certain adventures I know and love (a rough and amazing hike in New York, a snorkel adventure on Big Island Hawaii). What if I could host an adventure for a group, and trade that for joining other people's adventures?
A dating app that your friends have to run on your behalf - Call it "...asking for a friend." Sometimes your friends know you better than you do. Also, it's probably useful to have short video clips of people instead of photos and writing. The app could direct you to record your friend and ask them specific questions in order to generate their profile.
A vicarious explorers subscription - You, and many others, sign up for a small fee, and the pooled funds hire a modern day explorer to take you along on an expedition (filming, photographing, and connecting with you live along the way).
Unique travel experiences for the most adventurous - Tomb raiding in Egypt, flying gliders in Kitty Hawk, Thai boxing for charity Thailand, Volcano hiking in Hawaii, coral gardening in the Florida Keys.
A crowdfunded coding 💻 school for kids in developing economies - A lot of community are still just coming online, and typically there's some large tech company that dominates their experience of the internet. A coding school would enabled them to make the web work for their local community.
High end, digital nomad co-working community - What you had a service you could subscribe to for yourself or your small team and they charter private flights, rent villas in exotic locations, hire chefs and trainers, and plan weekend adventures for you? You just focus on work, they take care of the rest. With remote work situations picking up, there's room for a very high end version of this service.
Space Pets! - Private trips to space 🚀 are just starting up, for humans that is, and they are mighty expensive (six-figures per seat), but no one is doing it for pets. Now, it's insane to send your pet to space, but then people have done crazier things for their pets. Plus, sending a goldfish might have some scientific value and it's way smaller, so the cost of a seat would be drastically smaller. All you'd need for pet owners to absolutely love this is a pet selfie from space looking down on the Earth. I bet a pet selfie from Space happens within five years.
Underwater hotels - These likely exist in some forms, and they're quite technically challenging, but with all the increased awareness around ocean environmental awareness, I bet there's room for all kinds of interesting ecotourism experiences centered around the ocean, and why not put the living accommodations down there to. Imagine waking up to a school of fish peaking in your window.
Elevators that recharge batteries (or generate electricity) on the way down - I'm guessing green buildings already do this, but if not, opportunity!
Virtual reality haircuts - Put on the VR headset and sit down at a virtual barbershop, and get a virtual haircut. Okay, this one is here, because it's completely ridiculous. I have a weird feeling it will come along with a lot of other Virtual Reality services and products.
Virtual reality dating services for video game avatars - There are endless possibilities here. Because it's virtual reality, you can overlook many common factors of the normal dating experience.
A refrigerator magnet that speaks up when you open the fridge - You can set it to say things like, "Do you really need that extra piece of cake, Liz?" Or things like, "You did a great job today!" Or, "Did you call your mother this week?"
Triple and quadruple reversible t-shirts - I'm sure there's an origami champion out there who could figure this out.
A calendar addon that randomly adds breaks into your calendar 📅 with encouraging messages.
Custom chapstick - There are chapstick aficionados and lip balm addicts out there, I'm sure they'd love a kind of custom chapstick service. Customize the packaging, customize the flavor, the consistency, the green ingredients, et cetera.
Ecommerce delivery doors - Package thieves are a real thing, rare as they may be. A possible solution is a one way slot (just like a mailbox), but big enough for your Amaz-- I mean, ecommerce packages. I'm imagining a doggy door, but bigger, higher up in the door, and with a slide built in so it slides the package into the house, allowing for lots of packages to be dropped in. A security concern of course is that now, everyone else can slides random things into your house.
Smartphone chargers or an app that reports out how much charge you have - It can say things like, "We're at full power, Captain!" 🔋 or whatever nerdy or wacky way of letting you know you're charged up.
A flash mob crowd sourcing platform - People can add their flash mob ideas, vote on others, and decide which ones to join. Imagine the chaos, haa!
A restaurant or chef at home experience that's custom and spontaneous - You just let them know the dietary restrictions of each person, and they plan the whole thing. If you're brave as the entrepreneur, you might even set this up as invitation only and donation only. If so, you'd need to maintain very high end clientele.
A prospecting artificial intelligence bot - This is for business that need to generate leads. Many of them surf Quora or LinkedIn or other platforms looking for people that meet certain criteria. What if you could automate this process? Quality control might be the Achilles heel on this one.
A way to cancel all your month subscriptions all at once - It's amazing how much money people waste on things that just auto-renew. Might be nice to have one button that nukes 'em. Canceling all your credit cards would be the crude way. Perhaps something more elegant, that even gave you a report of how much you were losing and which services you were subscribed to.
A random notifications of important things service - What if there were a service that sent you random notifications like, "You have approximately 200 weekends left in your twenties." Or, "You will spend more years of your life with your friends and siblings than your parents." This might be a great fan account for social media, and you might be able to sell life coaching or a self-help book to some followers.
A book on basic manners - It's astonishing how many people have trouble saying, "Please, thank you, you're welcome, I'm sorry, I forgive you." Considering all your relationships improve if you can genuinely say and feel each of these (Asking for help, gratitude, pride or self-worth, ego checking, forgiveness or peace), they might be worthy as the focus of a book or ebook.
A betting platform 🤑 for anything digitally verifiable - Any user can propose a bet and odds, and any other user can take it. The money goes into escrow on a Blockchain and upon digital validation of an outcome, the winner is paid. You can also add derivatives, but you shouldn't.
Light bulb paintings or stickers - Imagine stenciling something onto a light bulb and the projected shadow puppet it would create.
A treasure hunting scuba diving vacation tour - There's actual real live treasure hunting that goes on. You might be able to recreate it, perhaps even with the original treasure. You'd add more clues and provide certain resources so a dive tour might actually pull it off over the course of a week or weekend. This doesn't have to be underwater. It can be in the mountains, etc. It might be quite lucrative as team building for corporations. There might be an even simpler kids' version.
A stock trading app that made the top traders' strategies public and allowed other users to follow them - This would accelerate what already goes on in actively traded markets, not sure to what end.
A build-your-own trading algorithm platform.
An amusement park or immersive college summer course that has you live in a particular historical era - Imagine spending the summer living in Ancient Greece or the Wild West. What better way to experience or learn history, than to be in it?
A massive multi-player nutrition game/study - What you could get a crowd of people engaged in a game to improve their health and in the process generate scientifically valuable data on nutrition and health?
Mystery adventure travel experiences - You pay a fixed fee, fill out some dietary and physical activity restrictions, and that's it. You don't know which country you're headed to, what the itinerary is. Real, true, spontaneous adventure. Of course, there's a tour guide who's planned it. You just don't know what you're in for. Truly adventurous people might really love this.
Taking escape rooms up a notch - Escape rooms are pretty interesting. You and friends are locked in a room, and need to solve a series of puzzles to escape the room. What if you flipped this? What if a mysterious person has escaped, and you need to follow a series of clues to find them? Actors could be planted in various restaurants, clues could be embedded in a city's features, and the plot can reveal itself in live performance or recorded pieces. You might pay to play, and the fastest timed players might win a prize.
Handcuffed bar crawl - Haa! What if there were a bar crawl you did with friends, where they handcuffed you together at the first bar, and you had to make it to the last bar to get the key and escape. (Obviously, you could put an emergency phone number on the cuffs just in case.)
What if there were a crowdsourced list of America's most corrupt? It's like America's most wanted, but focused on people who cheat, steal, lie, and are basically corrupt. Then of course you might invite people to boycott them or prank them, or stop voting for them.
Precision nutrition granola bars and smoothies - Cooking is such a hassle. What if you could just prefab most of your meals to be perfectly suited to your particular microbiome/DNA/health status?
Jurassic Park 🦕 I'm going to put this one here, because I think it's going to happen within our lifetimes. Synthetic biology is some pretty incredible stuff. It's a wild startup idea that I think is coming.
Times Square Bungee Jumping.
A civilization insurance policy that rebooted civilization in case we messed things up real bad : )

Learn How To Innovate

Innovation Bound hosts creativity and innovation micro-courses directly on our social media (links at the bottom) so you can practice the same innovation skills we use with business leaders and scientists as part of your usual social media browsing.

There are also a few great articles to start out with here:

What Is Innovation? - The word 'innovation' has become more and more common, but what does it mean?

First Rule of Creative Thinking - Want better ideas? Come up with lots of ideas.

Giving Feedback to Improve Ideas - When someone asks you for feedback on a new idea, are you helping them improve the idea, or evaluating it? Hint: Ideas are like babies.

Sources

We borrowed and adapted some ideas from our 2013 list: 100 Crazy Ideas.