Tailored Cuisine - The pitch

At Tailored Cuisine the food is made just for you: the perfect amount of seasoning, spice, and salt.

Tailored Cuisine - The fun part

I think the fun part about this idea is figuring out how to calibrate food to people’s preferences. How much variation is there in salt and spice preference?

Tailored Cuisine - The growth potential

I think Tailored Cuisine’s most similar peers are restaurants like Applebee’s and Chili’s (you can tell by the ‘s). So if it grew to be as large as those two, it would be a one to three billion dollar a year restaurant chain.

Tailored Cuisine - The monetization

Tailored Cuisine would operate as a normal restaurant. Fee for food.

Tailored Cuisine - The idea

After being seated at a restaurant, everyone at your table is brought a number of small items to taste. For some items you’re asked to evaluate how salty it is, others how sweet, others how spicy. This initial tasting is used to learn everyone’s individual preferences for these flavors.  Everyone in the party notes their choices on the digital menus (think iPad). Next, the party members note their dietary restrictions and preferred total calories for the meal: everyday (400 - 699 calories), once a week (700 - 1099 calories), and special occasion (1100 - 1700 calories). This choice then exposes menu options. At most restaurants restricting to at most 699 calories would knock out most of the menu, but at Tailored Cuisine the amount of oil and fats used in food preparation are tailored for each person, so even at the lowest calorie level they would see almost the entire menu. For example, steak with a side of vegetables could be prepared with a small lean cut of meat and steamed vegetables for about 400 calories or with a large marbled steak and buttered vegetables for 1,000 calories.

In the kitchen, the computer figures out exactly what should go into each dish including how much oil should be used for the sauteing and how much salt should be added. The cooks only use their discretion for cooking doneness.

For repeat customers, they could forgo the initial tasting and just use their profile that they previously developed.

Tailored Cuisine - The motivation

It seems that nowadays we can get everything customized perfectly to fit our preferences. One area that has not caught onto this trend is the restaurant industry.

Last Mile Solutions - The pitch

Mass transit not convenient enough but hate driving in traffic? Try Last Mile Solutions.

Last Mile Solutions - The fun part

There is a fun combination of demand estimation and resource routing in this idea. What will the commuter demands be tomorrow and where are the best places to locate the cars throughout the day?

Last Mile Solutions - The growth potential

There are over 400,000 daily mass transit riders only counting BART. The roads likely bring another 200,000 people into San Francisco per day. If LMS were able to get 10% of the total commuters, that would be a profit of $60,000 per day or roughly $15 million per year. Expanding to other cities, this could grow by 10x to over $100 million a year.

Last Mile Solutions - The monetization

The pricing would be $12 per day (or $3 per day for self-driving cars) for cars where the longest trip is 1.5 miles, e.g., a 1.0 mile drive to the metro, ride the metro, and a 0.5 mile drive to work (and the reverse in the evening). For bikes, the cost would be $6 per day.

The car costs

Driving costs At a cost of $0.25 per mile for gas and wear and tear, and an average 4 miles per day per user, the total cost would be $1 per commuter per day.

Parking costs (city) In many cities it costs $15 per day for parking. It would only cost one fifth of that for the smart cars because of their size and that they can be perfectly packed with no need for isles. The result is $3 per day per car in a garage designed for Last Mile Solutions (LMS). LMS would also lease 2-4 spaces near most mass transit stops adding another $3 per day per car. (suburbs) Parking is the suburbs would be at least three times cheaper than in cities, so I expect the cost to be $1 per day per car. I think each car could serve 7 commuters per day. So the cost per commuter would be $1 per commuter per day.

Relocation costs (city) I expect city elves to use bikes to move cars around. I expect it to take 15 minutes to move a car from where it was left to where it is needed and get to another car. If each biker is paid $12 per hour, that’s $6 per commuter for the city-side of their commute. (suburbs) In the suburbs, it’s more realistic to use large trucks to move the cars around. That reduces the labor costs significantly. Being able to pick up and drop off four cars at a time helps to amortize the costs to $1.25 per car or $3 per commuter for the suburb-side of the commute.

Those costs add up to $11 per commuter per day, $9 of which is labor. Wow, that’s a lot. So, really for this idea to be viable, we need self-driving cars. With self-driving cars, the labor cost goes to zero, and the parking costs are reduced (just drive around to park further away where it’s cheaper, or even better, work as a taxi during the day). With self-driving car technology, the cost per commuter per day could be as low as $2.

Things look slightly less bleak for bikes, as there would be very little parking fees and bikes could be picked up and moved much more easily than cars, cutting the labor costs in half. So the total cost per commuter per day using bikes would be $5.  

Last Mile Solutions - The idea

The goal of Last Mile Solutions is to be the connection between the start and end of a journey and the mass transit system(s) that do the bulk of the transportation. There are two flavors of this idea: self-powered and motor-powered.

Self-powered

Each night before going to bed Alex schedules a bicycle to be waiting at his door when he leaves for work. The bike is dropped off the night before by an “elf.” The bike is unlocked from its mobile bike locker by Alex’s smartphone. He then bikes to a subway station, where he can lock up the bike. At the end of the subway ride, he unlocks another bike with his phone and bikes the last bit to work and locks it up outside.

Motor-powered

Like Alex, Alicia schedules transportation to be waiting for her in the morning (a smart car). Alicia drops the smart car off at the bus, which she takes the rest of the way to work.

The magic behind this idea is the Last Mile Solution Elves that move all the bikes and vehicles around town. For bikes, the Elves move bikes from people’s houses and their other destinations to the start points of other people’s trips. The bikes are dropped off with a heavy, but mobile, bike locker, which is unlocked via wifi when a user needs it. If a bike is dropped off near where someone will need it in the next few hours, then it’ll be left there. Also, elves will need to move bikes from one mass transit stop to another as needed by commuters. The bikes are moved by loading them into trunks and driving them to their destination. The elves will know where to distribute the bikes from a combination of the day’s user requests and previous user request patterns.

The same pattern would happen for the cars. The other difference is that the cars would need to be moved by elves who use bikes to get to the cars and then put the bike on the car or use a large truck that could hold 4 smart cars.

Last Mile Solutions - The motivation

Mass transportation systems have scales at which they operate efficiently, e.g., planes are best when traveling 400+ miles and subways and trains are best for 2-100 miles. There is a hole in this system at the shortest distances: transportation of 2 miles or less.

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.