Neer Sharma
Appearances
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
The last thing that I really look for is distribution hacks and formats. So for instance, if you can break the TikTok algo, then the scale at which products can grow is just so immensely huge. That's definitely like a big thing that I look for.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah, that's a really good point. And I think part of the motivation for doing it is trying to alter behavior, which makes it way harder to do. And I think one thing I was thinking about, which is semi-related, was I was thinking about Apple Pay. and how Apple Pay is very much the way that I'm making a lot of these purchases.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And I was thinking about Opal, the app that is about reducing screen time and stuff. I was thinking about what does an Opal look like for making payments with your iPhone? Because on the iPhone, you know, you're tracking like all of the payments you're making with Apple Pay. You know, is there a way of just accumulate, like consolidating all the data
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And even just doing things like, are you sure you want to make that purchase? Or can you set a hard limit on your Apple Pay? Like, you know, I just want to have a £10 budget. You know, I don't want to spend more than £10 with Apple Pay on like thoughtless purchases. So set that hard limit. And then when you hit that limit,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
There's like a notification being like, are you sure you want to make that purchase? Are you sure you want to make that purchase? Or take a minute to decide if you want to, which maybe is a little bit more, I wouldn't say necessarily downstream, but if there is that motivation to be like, hey, I want to...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
I want to control my spending, then, you know, you convert that high intention to an action, which is I'm going to set a daily budget. And then the app just continues to work in the background. Unlike the anti-spend app, which is every time you're about to make a purchase, you're swapping the app and adding, you know, the payments.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So I think there's maybe ways to make it a little bit less, yeah, a little bit less effort and more autopilot. Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Um, another idea, which again was related to it and going back to what we were discussing earlier, um, was, and this is not a really good business idea at all, but, um, I, uh, I was thinking about a, uh, if you did want to control your spending, like a Chrome extension that would basically show the true cost of the items on the checkout page. So the true cost of that, uh,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
£10 sweater from Uniqlo is £10 invested in the S&P 500 over 30 years.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So we can start top of the list if we want to just kind of work our way down. So the first idea was something called Baby Fund. And the principle of Baby Fund was basically a just giving for parents to raise money for their kids. And that money can only be invested in index tracker funds. And the idea is...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
My next idea related to... The last few ideas are focusing on trying to create dopamine hits for doing something good or creating a friction when you're about to do something bad. And the other idea that I had that's kind of around that theme is an app called Cold Turkey. And I have a lot of friends who are trying to give up vaping.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And I was crawling through the subreddit on people trying to give up vaping. And there's a lot of... People find it really hard. People find it really tough to quit. And I saw people sharing screenshots of very much like habit-forming apps, the really kind of boring, stereotypical habit-forming app of, look at my four-day streak and look at this calendar of how many days I haven't vaped for. So...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
One thing I was thinking about was, firstly, really going niche with the problem. If you were to just take some elements of those habit-forming apps and just focus on one thing, which is, let's say, quit vaping. And secondly... How do you create that dopamine hit from wanting to quit vaping now?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So rather than, oh, if I make it through to tomorrow and I say that I haven't vaped, I get my one day streak. How can I... create a dopamine hit now. So what I was thinking was, you know, as soon as you, um, decide that I don't want to vape, I'm going cold Turkey. You're just seeing like, okay, instant dopamine hit time is going up. This is how long you are cold Turkey for. And I could
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
You know, there's timers going up. There's some cool visual thing happening as you're just progressing and as that counter is, you know, going up and up and up. And then there'd just be like one button. The one button would be, I've got a craving. I'm craving. And then if you press that one button, there is just something that takes place to try to distract you for five minutes. So usually...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
When people talk about how do you distract yourself from craving, there's like advice around take five minutes to breathe, distract yourself for five minutes, you know, all these kinds of things. So what I was thinking was, well, what about if it was just... you know, a series of math questions that were just getting progressively harder for five minutes.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
if you invest X amount of money and you maybe keep topping it up, by the time the child is 18, that money will be worth quite a lot of money. And the reason why I thought about it was a whole confluence of different things. So I'm at the age now where all of my friends are thinking about having kids or deciding, oh no, I can't afford to have kids.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Like, could you embed these like mini games into it? And for like a bit of a viral loop, there'd be maybe one other button, which is just like share. And you can share your timer. Let's say it's coldturkey.com forward slash at Greg. You know, you share that with all of your friends and they can just get real time updates of how long you were cold turkey for.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah, just the idea of basically how can you spice up the design of something that is now, I think, a little bit boring, at least with like habit forming apps. And then how could you like niche down on one really important problem right now that people are trying to tackle? So, yeah, that's the idea of cold turkey.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
One of the things I was thinking about loosely was, you know, in the same way with just normal gaming apps, you have... the ability to pay for boosters or you need an extra life. And I was wondering whether the same thing could happen here. You know, let's say it's like two lives. And if you want to have an extra life and not have all your progress kind of gone to waste, maybe you have to pay to
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Get that extra life. It's probably a little bit evil in light of trying to help people. So maybe that's not the right play. But I do think whether... the models that have existed, you know, like the gamification of like real world things is something that I think about a little bit.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And then you hear all of the discussions around the demographic worries in the Western world. cost of childcare, at least in the UK, is a really significant problem and something that is putting off a lot of millennial potential parents. So that kind of drew me to the problem in the first place. And the second thing I was thinking about was, do you know the idea of wedding registries?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And, um, can you begin to just inject some of those monetization mechanics that have worked really well for games and apply that in these other contexts that are like real world contexts, um, and real problem contexts.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
No, what's that?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
That's awesome.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So my next idea, semi-related to this, was... I was going through the subreddit for parents. And one of the common problems that was discussed was, how do I get my kid to do things they don't want to do? So my kid never wants to brush his teeth. They never want to eat their dinner. They don't want to do all of these things.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So when I was in, uh, you know, we call it primary school when, between the ages of like five and 11, um, we had this idea of like gold stars in class. So you do something good, you get a gold star.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And then at the end of the semester, there would be this counting of like gold stars and, you know, whoever gets the most gold stars, you know, get something, um, you know, you get a little trophy or a badge or whatever.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Um, so I was thinking again on this theme of like gamification, um, would you be able to create, let's say the gold stars app, uh, a gamification app for parents to use with their kids. And it's really just tracking the behavior of their kids in a really fun, highly visual way where you just, here's a star for brushing your teeth today. Here's a star for cleaning your bedroom.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And then, you know, what you could do is set like milestones where let's say after a hundred stars, you can buy something. Uh, maybe you can buy something. Maybe you can set the milestones before like Jimmy, when you've got a hundred gold stars, pick anything from this Amazon site. And that's going to be a reward. And when you've got a thousand gold stars, dream bigger, let's have a bigger budget.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Let's have $500, you know, get that PlayStation five you've always wanted. And it could, you just set this, uh,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
um reward framework for you know the gold stars that becomes the thing that's like mediating the parents and their kids in terms of trying to reward good behavior keep track of good behavior um in again a really fun way like a lot of the parenting apps i see are just really boring they're just like really boring looking um
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And I think you'd want it to be so visual that the kid and their parent are like looking at it together and, you know, tracking how many gold stars they've got. But yeah, again, this theme of gamification of getting people to do good things.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
No, he literally stars, okay.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Is that a thing that you guys have?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah, yeah, I love that. Yeah, I think there's a lot of... A lot of the problems we've been discussing are really just dealing with behavioral things and trying to gamify, you know, good things and punish bad things. And then it's just a case of picking who the person is and what their problem is. So it's like, okay, you got a vape addiction, cool. Here's the app for you.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
You're a stressed out parent with a really naughty child. Like, this is the app for you. So yeah, I really like... this uh this gamification kind of um process for real world things
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
It's still definitely a thing. And a wedding registry is basically two people are going to get married. They send around a link to all of the, uh, all the people attending being like, here's a list of all the things you could buy for us, um, for our wedding. You know, it's a fancy plate. It's a nice spoon. It's a honeymoon. I've always really disliked it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
No, that's, that's basically it. And I think the, the last thing that I really look for is just like distribution hacks and formats. So for instance, on TikTok, like, okay, these people are getting a lot of views for talking about giving up spending. Okay, that's interesting. Like, you know, that to me says that there's something about this behavior that breaks the algorithm.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So if I can reverse engineer a product to arrive at that output easily and faster for people, then that to me feels like, oh, okay, there's a way for this to get
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
distribution um or to like crack the algo and the thing is if you can break the tiktok algo then the scale at which products can grow is just so immensely huge that's definitely like a big thing that i look for or in the case of like a reddit um thread it's just like okay this is a common problem that is top of mind for some people um so maybe the first thing is dropping into that
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
subreddit with hey by the way like here's a thing for you guys um i think maybe the you'd have to really engineer the viral mechanics i think a lot better because you're i don't think there's necessarily like algorithm breaking moments um but but yeah that's that's generally the the thesis
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Okay, let's go for something completely different. So the first one is Long Live Research Inc. And this is, so I had a company, a newsletter before that was called Patent Drop. And what Patent Drop would do is it would summarize three new patents from big tech companies every week. And it was really just about scraping the patent database, bringing it to people with a short, brief summary.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And it was really focused on, hey, if you're interested in the future, you need to be reading this newsletter. And what that experience taught me was, firstly, there is a lot of value from really fragmented information or information that's just hard to find. and bringing that to people where they are in a way that's easy to digest.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And I think the second thing is again, going back to that algorithm breaking moment, that kind of distributional advantage. So with patent drop, I would really just look for patents that had interesting visuals that I knew would break the algorithm. It was like, okay, meta working on this brain computing helmet thing would definitely get people talking.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And the distributional thing is validated from, oh yeah, like all of these journalistic publications always write about like, ah, look at what Apple working on. Look at this patent from Apple. So it's like, okay, cool. Like let's just centralize it. Let's own that format. That format right now is not owned by someone. Let's own that format.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So similarly with, um, long live research, it'd be doing the same play, but it would be doing it for academic research that is looking at the extension of life and quality of life. and it just be kind of running it back in theory. But basically, let's say I'm near, I'm South Asian. So problems that I need to avoid are like type two diabetes, maybe some cardiac issues. My father had cancer.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
I've always kind of felt like this is a really stupid thing to do. Anyway, it happens. But the idea of it is quite interesting because you're crowdsourcing these people to contribute to your future as a married couple. So I was thinking, well, what about if you take that principle and apply it to money going towards a newborn baby and their future?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So let me just like, I'm interested in cancer. I input all of those um, things. And then, okay. Long live research is just sending me as soon as there is research focused on how to, um, extend life or, you know, reduce the risk of one of those things. It's just sending me the summary. And, um, I think this kind of tacks into the longevity meta trend.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
I think unlike Patent Drop, like Patent Drop was very much run by advertising. I think long live research is actually something that people would want to spend money on if it's done in a really high quality way. I think there's a lot of money being spent on people trying to extend their life. So having, you know, just...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
instant research kind of brought to you very quickly is something I think people would pay for. Um, so yeah, it's really just kind of applying that, that thesis of, you know, get fragmented information, bring it to people in a way that's relevant to them, um, and make money from that is, is, is the, the, the play I'd be making.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah, I think also, you know, I was kind of testing it with Claude and just, you know, feeding it academic papers and just getting results. And it's like, yeah, this is so much easier now with, you know, starting these ideas using Claude or ChatGPT to kind of code an MVP is just so much easier to do today than it was like a few years ago. So I think these kinds of plays are pretty easy to do.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Okay, one last idea. Let's rock. What kind of idea do we want?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
That's a great question. I think the... Okay, so I think besides the long-lived research, which I think could be that million dollars within a year. Okay. So the idea I would go for is... Have you heard of Shilajit?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So, I mean, it's so funny because the name is algorithm breaking in itself. Yeah, totally. I think I was listening to Sam Parr and Sean talk about this. And Basically, it's just this black tar ayurvedic medicine that has been going really viral on TikTok. And it's basically just leveraging TikTok shop like crazy. It's an algorithm breaking visual. It's like black gooey stuff.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah, the idea is really crowdsourcing money from parents and friends of parents to invest in that baby's future. And the money can only be used for investing in index tracker funds. It can't be taken out before then. It will go in the name of the child. And yeah, I think it's pretty interesting because I do what you say as well around like crawling into the subreddits.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
You've got videos of hundreds and thousands of influencers just eating this black tar. And it's just then followed up with, it boosts your testosterone. It does all of these magical things. And it's doing really well. I've forgotten the numbers exactly, but I think tens of millions of dollars in revenue in a very, very short period of time for the company that is selling Shoe Legit.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Um, so I think what I would do is, um, there is this other company in India called Patanjali and Patanjali is an Ayurvedic company and it's huge, like must be billions of dollars in revenue. It's just absolutely massive. And, um, it's really tailored to the Indian market. It's tailored to the Indian, like middle market. The designs look terrible. They look medicinal, but it's all the same stuff.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Like they sell like, you know, the equivalent of Shilajit. They sell these other random juices and these other like Ayurvedic things. And basically what I try to do is if I just be running back the Shilajit thing with basically being a Patanjali rapper, I would take very ugly, disgusting looking products
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
in India, in the Ayurvedic industry, I would spruce it up with a cool brand or a brand that is still tied to like the mysticism of India, but Western enough for people to kind of snap it up. And I would hire a bunch of influencers using TikTok shop to go crazy. And I would make sure that the packaging is viral enough
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
you know, is a algorithm breaking thing as well as the consumption of the product itself, whether it's the colors, just something about it needs to be extremely, you know, scroll stopping. Um, and, and then, you know, all of the health benefits are, you know, kind of well chronicled. Um, and I think there's like this meta trend too of, um,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
There's the Brian Johnsons of the world who are really leaning into medical innovation and experimentation. And then there are other people who are really turning away from modern day medicine and looking towards traditional medicine as a means of being pure and clean and healthy. So Ayurvedic medicine, which is like an ancient Indian medicine, kind of hits that specific demographic pretty well.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So yeah, if I was trying to make a million dollars in a year, it's a little bit of capital. And to be honest, if I was to be really cheeky about it, I would just buy the potentially products. I wouldn't even try to get it made. I'd just buy the products, I'd design packaging, and I would literally just put the product in this new packaging.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
hire a bunch of influencers, start making videos, have my own website, and just start selling those things. And then if you validate it, okay, cool, let's actually make this stuff properly with our own factory and have people do this more above board. I have no idea about the legality of actually doing that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
But that would be one play that I could make if I were to aggressively try to seek a million dollars within 12 months.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
great products and then reach out to them and be like hey i want to white label your product and try to try to close those deals yeah i think that is definitely a better way of probably doing it um i think if you wanted to do it in a permissionless way um the the the products are um you know it's just especially like indian bureaucracy it's just there's a lot of layers of fat to get through.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
But yeah, that would be a much better play. And I'm sure there are... Yeah, I haven't looked into the details of that specific company, but if you can white label it, and especially if you're going after a market that they're not capitalizing on, you know, like they're very much heavily focused on like... Indians and the Indian diaspora, possibly. They're not really focused on the Western market.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So if you were to partner with them and be like, hey, look, just give me the stuff that you're making and I'll take care of the rest in terms of actually making it palatable to the rest of this massive consumer market, I'm sure there's a win-win for you and the distributor if you can build the trust and go through that process.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And when you kind of crawl into the subreddits of like, you know, parenting and parents, just cost of that is a big worry. And also just, can I guarantee or can I provide for my child? Like, will I be able to ensure my child has access
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
But yeah, that's generally the thesis.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah, this is definitely something that is outside of my zone of expertise. But I think for someone who has done this kind of play with physical goods, I think they could probably kill it. And especially I really like the idea of partnering with a TikTok influencer who's already got that distribution baked in.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Like if you can find, you know, who's like not the next Huberman, but you know, like a notch below or a few notches below, And kind of talking about similar things, you know, that just de-risks a lot of it. And also, you know, if you're like an operator or you're an entrepreneur and you're basically saying, hey, look, let's go 50-50 on this. I'll take care of everything.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
You just do the marketing and the distribution and just kind of pump this out. I'm seeing a lot more startups and businesses going down that route. And I think it's a really solid route because... going back to what we've been discussing today as well, just distribution is so important and being able to break through is so important. It's really hard to get people's attention.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So anything you can do to minimize the risk involved with not getting attention is always helpful.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
a reasonable standard of living in 18 years and when i can't do that for myself like when i worry about my own standard of living in 18 years um you know the the probability that i could do it for my child is a lot lower so the principle is that um yeah yeah so when would
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah, just follow me on This Is Near on X. And yeah, that's where I normally shitpost a lot of random ideas.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
I was thinking the baby shower was a really good time to do it. Or is that when they're, that's when they're announcing like the gender of the child and all of that kind of stuff. I think, yeah. Okay. I think, I think the baby shower is a great time. I can definitely imagine.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
um a link for the upcoming baby a qr code which can just be printed out and you know donate to our kids future or help you know help invest in our baby's future and everyone can just kind of donate 10 pounds 20 pounds um however much they want to donate and yeah here's how i think it should okay so i think the way it should work is it's kind of like partiful
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And I think that, um, you know, I, I spent a lot of time in the, in the fire, like subreddits and the, there is something really interesting about that larger potential number, um, of investing into an index tracker fund that I don't think is really utilized that much.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And that's actually an idea, that principle inspired another idea of mine, which was anti-spend, which is the next idea on the list.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
Okay, so anti-spend is an app that basically tracks the money you don't spend by being more thoughtful about your day-to-day spending. behavior. And the idea of it is again, um, this is something that I do. I'm generally a pretty cheap guy. Um, and there's always this mental maths that I, there's like mental maths game that I play with myself. You know, if I'm, Hey, if I make coffee today,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
before I go out into town, instead of buying coffee from that cafe, I've saved myself like four pounds. And it's almost like girl math, but for a cheap guy. And I think what's really interesting is then, hey, if I invested that four pounds into the S&P 500 in 30 years time, that four pounds could be worth X pounds.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And I was just generally thinking, you know, there's a lot of, you know, there's, when we're making transactions, when we're making purchases, there's a lot of like thoughtless purchases, right? And a lot of these like instant dopamine hits. So one thing for me is when I get stressed, I... once a month, I'll just buy a pizza like from Uber Eats and it'll be terrible for me.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And it's like super expensive for what it is. It's like a shit pizza. And that dopamine hit from just pressing purchase is like, yeah, okay, that will do something for me. But really, it's just like a lot of money wasted for nothing. And usually those kinds of purchases are things that are not actually really good for me in the long run anyway.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So I think there's this like confluence of thoughtless purchases, usually resulting in something bad for me anyway, and that money could have been spent better. So what I really wanted to do is... can you create a dopamine hit from not spending money? So, you know, if I was on Uber Eats about to make that, you know, 20 pound pizza purchase, could I create an alternative
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
dopamine hit from being like, no, I'm not going to spend that 20 pounds. Instead, I'm going to save that 20 pounds by not spending it. And then what I'd really want to do from there is build up this balance of money that you haven't spent. And that is money that could, in theory, then be invested in an index tracker fund. And what is also interesting about this
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
is the cost of the pizza is not 20 pounds, right? The cost of the pizza is that 20 pounds invested in the S&P 500 over 30 years. So I think there is, again, this like, I think there's two things. One thing is a viral moment from just having how much money have you decided to not spend and how much is that money worth?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And secondly, from a monetization perspective, I'd really think about how do you create that link from the money you've saved to then money being actually invested in a Vanguard fund? Are there affiliate revenues that could be generated from being like lead gen for Vanguard or whoever else there is.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
And I think just on top of that, I think there's a number of different movements that where anti-spend would actually be kind of interesting. So I think there's the fire movement, first of all. Secondly, I think there's like an environmental movement of people trying to actively consume less, spend less. So if you go on TikTok, there are people who do a lot of these no spend challenges.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
So like, I'm not going to spend money on new clothes this week, or I'm not going to spend money on anything this week. So I think there is... this combination of people either trying to save money or trying to veer away from like excessive consumerism or just trying to protect the planet where actually something like this and tracking that behavior would maybe be kind of interesting.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these $1M+/year startup ideas
But yeah, curious to get your thoughts.