Bullseye Brick and Mortar - The hard part

Without a doubt the hardest part is going to be getting the business location data. You would want to go to Google, Apple, Microsoft or whereever they get their data, and try to strike a deal.

Bullseye Brick and Mortar - The fun part

For me, the fun part would be extracting useful patterns from the commercial business and social media data. If you looked at the type of businesses that are usually around a sample of Peet’s coffee shops, how well could you predict their other locations? If you knew the patterns of social media geo tagged posts, how well could you infer foot traffic?

Bullseye Brick and Mortar - The growth potential

This is somewhat hard to estimate, but I’ll do my best. San Francisco has around three hundred thousand businesses according to datasf. If there is a 10% turnover per year and half of the new businesses use BBM to find their spot and it takes 200 page views to do find a location, that would amount to three million page views per year. If the ad click probability was 2% per page view, there was an average of one ad per page view and the cost per click was twenty five dollars, that comes out to be 1.5 million dollars per year in revenue in San Francisco. I think that BBM could scale up another factor of 100 if it went nationwide.

Bullseye Brick and Mortar - The monetization

There are two ways to monetize BBM: ads or a free/subscription model. I think ads are a much better choice because making a watered down free version may not convince people that the site is really that great (and make them fork over money for the premium version).

Ads make perfect sense for the website because users on the site are already engaging in a commercial activity. The ads would be targeted for people looking to rent commercial real estate in the area (i.e. the users of the site). It would also be possible to employ a combination of both approaches, but I think ads should be the core of the monetization.

Bullseye Brick and Mortar - The idea

Given the problem of finding a location for a business, what do you instinctively do? You look for locations where related businesses are already located.

Bullseye Brick and Mortar (BBM) is a website that helps you find the best location for your business. All you need to do is describe the target demographics of your users or the businesses that you are similar to.

Let’s say that you want to add a location to your high-end tea shop. You probably want to be in an area that has a lot of foot traffic, because you aren’t a go-to store and still kind of new. You also want to be within a few blocks of other high-end commercial shops, so that people who are willing to pay a premium for your tea will walk by.

You feed that information into BBM and it’ll search its index for locations that are highly commercial (lots of shops per block) and also have mostly high-end stores. In the greater peninsula area, it would probably suggest Stanford Mall and a few downtowns like Palo Alto, Burlingame, and Menlo Park. It would probably also find some hidden gems, strip malls with a critical mass of high end stores.

One feature that BBM could have is a search for related businesses. If you are trying to compete with Apple and want similar locations as Apple Stores but not spots that they have already claimed, BBM could figure out what the most common characteristics of locations that have Apple Stores are and return similar results.

More advanced features would involve looking at social media data about where people who you want to target are shopping and hanging out.  For example, social media data could help you determine foot traffic. If there are several chain stores in a particular region and people frequently post about all but one of them on social media, it may mean that the area that one is in  gets significantly less foot traffic. Also, social media data could help determine popularity of an area by ratings of nearby businesses.  It’s better to be within a few blocks of restaurants with 4.5+ stars on Yelp then surrounded by 2.5-starred restaurants.

Bullseye Brick and Mortar - The motivation

Brick and Mortar businesses aren’t going away. One of the first problems people run into when starting a ‘real’ business is finding a location for it. You can search for commercial real estate online, but it’s hard to get at it’s real value.

Line Hopper - The pitch

Are you running late and really hungry. Do you think that there is a good chance you’ll start eating other members of your party before you get seated? Then Line Hopper is for you. Spend a little money and avoid cannibalism, it’s an easy choice.

On the other hand, did you have a big snack before heading out to dinner, would you like to have some extra money for dessert or a drink, hang out a few more minutes in line and get money off your bill.

Line Hopper - The fun part

What I like about this idea is that you have a non-trivial puzzle to solve. Given a line which is a mix of people who are and are not willing to move, find the cheapest route to move a group some number of spots forward. It gets more interesting when you have several lines and can put tables together to accommodate different size parties.

Line Hopper - The growth potential

In San Francisco alone, I would be surprised if there were less than one hundred restaurants that had hour plus wait times on Friday and Saturday nights. If half of those restaurants signed up with Line Hopper and had an average of twenty people jump half an hour per busy night, then Line Hopper would gross around $260 thousand per year.  If Line Hopper went national, I think it could go up by a factor of about a hundred.

Line Hopper - The monetization

The restaurant and Line Hopper make money via a transaction fee. The split is 50/50. Line Hopper adds value by modifying the table scheduling software to handle the swapping seamlessly and by creating the app, which should drive more traffic to the business.

Line Hopper - The idea

You learn about a cool new restaurant in the city and head there on Friday night. You get there around eight, and hear from the hostess that there is an hour and a half wait for a table. Looking distraught, she informs you that you can pay to swap spots with people ahead of you in line. The cost is about $20 per person per half hour. Being pretty hungry, you decide to move ahead an hour and plan on skipping the dessert. Around $15 per person per half hour go to the people you displace in line. The money will be used to reduce their dinner tab.

Everyone in this situation wins. The person who skips in line gets what they want: a dinner in less time. The person who is moved back gets a discount on their check for waiting a little longer. And lastly, the restaurant (and Line Hopper) gets a nice 25% transaction fee.

There are a few ways to get this to work. The simplest is to ask people when they arrive if they are willing to get bumped and if so, at what price. If they aren't willing to get bumped, do they want to pay to get ahead?

It would also make sense to make an app, which allows people to see what the wait time is in real-time and see how much it would cost to get in quicker.

Line Hopper - The motivation

Restaurants aren’t very economic. Trendy restaurants have very long lines and turn people away or scare them off. For example, I got a reservation for Flour + Water at 7PM on a Saturday, and as I was walking in I heard the hostess say there was a four hour wait for table for two. That may be a little extreme, but most even slightly popular restaurants have hour plus waits on the weekends.

Popular restaurants could shorten their lines and make more money by charging more on weekends. The problem is that many people see long lines as an indication that the restaurant is good. When having a line maintains business, there isn’t much incentive to change. This leaves us in a position where someone who values their time has to wait in line for an hour or two for dinner when they would gladly pay more for dinner without the line.

A little background

I'm starting this blog to get myself to write down all of my startup ideas. My tentative plan is to crank out an idea a week, hence Startup52.

If you think it's odd to publicly post my startup ideas, it is. I am currently gainly employed by a large tech company who pays me too well for me to consider leaving. Also, I don't need to work at 52 startups; That would be really crazy.

So, why I am posting these ideas? Because I hope someone else will like at least some of the ideas and work on them. If you do like one of these ideas (and ask me very nicely) I may take down the idea for a while for you to work on it.

Also, something you might notice in my idea are few common themes:
1) Computer vision - a hobby and interest of mine.
2) Economic value - something that's greatly overlooked in a surprising number of businesses.
3) Sustainability - another interest of mine and something that I think will continue to increase in importance.
4) Business models - every idea will come with a way that it will generate revenue.

Something you won't find is re-hashed versions of other ideas. Frankly, the world has enough social networks, photo sharing, and photo filtering apps. I don't need to add to that steaming pile.