Some Assembly Required - The pitch

Don’t get frustrated with confusing and cryptic instructions for furniture assembly, there is a better way. Companies that partner with Some Assembly Required have products that tell you how to assemble them one step at a time, even telling you which of those two pieces that look nearly identical you want to use next!

Some Assembly Required - The fun part

Extensive testing with real people would be required to iterate on the design of the software. Small changes in assembly instructions and procedures could have significant impacts in construction time and frustration. Ironing out all of the problems and making a truly smooth assembly experience would be fun.

Some Assembly Required - The growth potential

If SAR partnered with IKEA (which has $35 billion a year in sales) it would have $700 million a year in revenue. There are many other companies that could be partnered with, which would make it possible to exceed one billion dollars in annual revenue.

Some Assembly Required - The monetization

Some Assembly Required (SAR) would work with furniture, electronics, and toy designers to put the RFID chips in their products, design the assembly instructions, and develop the software. SAR would take a percentage of revenue from the product, say 2%.

Some Assembly Required - The idea

Assembling furniture requires sorting dozens of pieces and fasteners, reading a 10+ page instruction manual, and incredible patience.  DIY assembly needs to move into the 21st century.

Instead of getting a manual with the furniture pieces, the consumer would get a RFID scanner that can connect to a smartphone or tablet. The RFID scanner and the companion app would be used to scan the embedded RFID chips in the different pieces.

The user would start by quickly running the scanner over all of the pieces in quick-scan mode. If any piece was missing it would be immediately clear (not a last minute surprise). Once the quick scan is finished, the app would instruct the user on the first pieces that are needed for assembly (with pictures). The user would then scan the pieces to verify they are the correct ones. Next, the app would describe how to combine the pieces together. This process would repeat throughout the assembly process.

It’s easy to see how this could make the frustrating process of furniture assembly much better, but it could also enable people to put together different products that would otherwise be too complex. This same idea could be applied to home assembly of some home electronics and children’s toys.  The task of assembling a toy that is made of 100 pieces is pretty daunting unless it’s made completely simple and straightforward.

Some Assembly Required - The motivation

Assembling furniture can be a pain. Trying to keep everything straight can be especially difficult when there are nearly identical pieces that serve different purposes. A little technology would go a long way to make this painful process easier.

Supporting artists - The pitch

If an artist’s music bring you entertainment for ten hours a month, it would be nice to give back. Supporting Artists makes it easy to do just that.

Supporting Artists - The fun part

Making a UI that makes it simple and engaging to analyze what music you’ve been listening too.

Supporting artists - The growth potential

I think there are at least a million people who would be willing to give a little back to artists. At $2 a month, that adds up to 24 million dollars a year in revenue.

Supporting artists - The idea

Buy a special set of headphones. These headphones listen to the music being played and match the songs to a database of music. At the end of each month, you are given a detailed summary of the music you listened to and options for giving money to some or all of those artists. Supporting Artists would also collect information about the wealth of bands and artists, so you can choose to support artists that aren’t already multi-millionaires.

Supporting Artists would make connections with bands and give donated money to them directly.

Supporting artists - The monetization

There would be a monthly subscription fee of $2 per account (up to 10 devices).  

Supporting artists - The motivation

We listen to music all the time. It’d be nice to track that and give back to the artists we listen to a lot and need the money.

Video Board Games - The pitch

Don’t fill up another closet with board games you only sort of like. Video Board Games allows you to play dozens of different games with the same board. It blends the best aspects of casual game apps (cheap and downloadable) and board games (tactile and fun to play with friends).

Video Board Games - The fun part

I think the hardware development for this project would be fun. How do you make a cost effective game board with programmable cards that works with a variety of games.

Video Board Games - The growth potential

I expect that if this caught on it could sell a 100 thousand units a year with ten games downloaded per unit. Using those growth numbers, the revenue would be $40 million per year and $10 million in profit.

Video Board Games - The monetization

There are a number of costs here, first of which is the board. I personally like the e-ink board idea, which would cost around $200. The cards, card programmer, and the dice would cost another $100, for a total production cost of $300. The product would be sold at near cost ($350). The other revenue source would be the games, which would go for $5 to $20 per game with an average of $10.  The revenue from the games would be split 50/50 with the creators. The user would be given the option to “return” the game within the first month if they don’t like it.

Video Board Games - The idea

To make board games easier to collect and try out, they should be more like video games. For that to happen the game board and cards would need to be able to change for each game.

The board

There are two ways to make a board that can change for different games. First, you can make the board a screen. The screen could either be a touch LCD screen (imagine a big iPad) or touch e-ink. I like e-ink more of the two because game boards are usually fairly static, which is what e-ink excels at. It’s even more enticing since color e-ink is almost ready. The board would have a microprocessor and be able to keep score and adapt to keep track of state as the game goes along.

The other way to make the board is with a pico projector with a camera. This would be functionally similar to the touch LCD screen. The biggest benefit is that it could create boards of many different sizes including ones much larger than possible using an LCD or e-ink screen.

The cards

Small e-ink screens could be used as the cards. They would be stacked into a card programmer at the beginning of the game which would program each of the cards with an image. The cards wouldn’t need batteries as the card programmer could power the cards as it changes them.

The pieces

The product would come with a variety of standard pieces including colored player pieces, development pieces (colored by player colors) and resources (colored by non-player colors). If the user happens to have a MakerBot, then they also have the option of printing any game-specific pieces.

The dice

Throwing dice is much more satisfying than pressing a button and having digital dice shown. Throwing dice makes one feel like they have control over the outcome much more than pressing a button. The dice that come in the package will be special dice. These dice will have gyroscopes that can tell which way they landed and a radio chip to pass that information onto the game board.

Developers would buy development kits (at cost). They would develop their games and post them to the game store. Users would browse games in the store and download them into the board.

Video Board Games - The motivation

Board games are starting to make a comeback thanks in part to Wil Wheaton. A big downside to board games is that building a collection takes up a lot of space and finding good games can be hit or miss and expensive.

Rapid Home Construction - The pitch

Heating and cooling bills got you down? Let Rapid Home Construction build your next house. You could go from a virtual tour of a house to be custom-made for you to living in your new home within a month. Best of all, you’ll never have to pay more than $120 per month in utilities in the next twenty years!

Rapid Home Construction - The fun part

I like the idea of designing software to make the architect more efficient at making stable, long-lasting houses that are extremely energy efficient.

Rapid Home Construction - The growth potential

If this became popular it could replace many existing homes maybe even at rate of 10,000 a year. That would amount to $2 billion a year in revenue.

Rapid Home Construction - The monetization

These houses could be sold like normal houses, where a buyer purchases a plot and pays for the house. An interesting alternative is to have a cost sharing scheme that would decrease the up-front price of the house for the buyer. The buyer would agree to buy the house for a reduced price and pay $120 a month in utilities (heating, cooling, water) to the construction company over the next twenty years (assuming that a similarly sized house would have to pay $220 a month on average). The actual cost of providing the utilities would be only $20 per month.

Both parties benefit from this arrangement: the buyer get utilities at $100 less a month than their neighbors and the construction company gets to cut almost $25,000 off its selling price while still making the same amount of profit. It also incentivises the construction company to make the most well-constructed house possible because they would be guaranteeing a relatively low utility cost.  I imagine that the houses would sell for $200,000 (including the $25k discount).

Rapid Home Construction - The idea

I see two problems with modern housing. First, we’re fundamentally constructing houses the same way we’ve been doing it for at least 50 or 100 years. We can build a computer chip with billions of transistors (each only a few dozen atoms long) for a hundred bucks. Yet, building a house still involves going to the hardware store and buying lumber and nails. Second, houses are not designed to be taken apart, and yet, the median house age is 36 years.

The way forward is to continue to move in the direction of prefab houses and modular home construction but with an emphasis on energy-saving homes made of reusable materials. The trend is to build modules of the house in a controlled environment (i.e. a factory) where everything can be measured, cut, and constructed accurately. But, the materials used now are fundamentally the same: wood and drywall. These should be replaced with better materials like insulating concrete foam (ICF) and steel (at least for exterior walls).

My vision is that architects could design houses using modern materials and custom CAD software. The goal of the software would be to take the burden off of the architect to calculate the structural and energy efficiency properties of the house and let the architect focus on the design. The software would also determine how best to make the house into modules as well as keep track of what level of LEED certification the house is on track to receive.

Once the building is designed, virtual tours would be rendered for potential buyers. After a copy of the house is ordered, a team of skilled laborers would construct all of the pieces using high precision tools. The pieces would then be built in about a week and then shipped to the construction site. The assembly would only take another week as very little would need to be done on-site.

One thing that would be important is lego-like construction. This clearly makes assembly quick, but it could also make easy work of disassembly. Once a house has outlived its usefulness, it should be taken apart (not torn down). If the primary materials were ICF and steel, they would be recycled and nearly nothing would go into a landfill. If the foundation didn’t need to be remade, another house could be built there using the reprocessed recycled materials.

Rapid Home Construction - The motivation

The housing needs of a society change over time. Right now, there is much more demand for small houses than the mega mansions that were built over the last ten to fifteen years. It’s a huge waste to tear down a large house, throw all of the materials into a landfill, and start again with fresh materials.

Village in Crisis - The pitch

Instead of doing in-app purchasing for a virtual cow, what if you could help buy someone a real cow or save a life with a mosquito net while leveling up your city? That’s what you’ll do when you play Village in Crisis.

Village in Crisis - The fun part

Warm feelings about saving people aren’t enough to get people coming back to a game. This would need to be genuinely addictive like farmville. A key factor could be how much fun the mini-games are. If it’s actually fun to make money for charities, it would make the process much easier. I don’t think this would catch on if the mini-games were very boring.