You can patent this?

Services and rare new products seem to be the most successful, as well as social networking / consulting. Dwan likes the idea cause hes sitting here with a pad and pen waiting for the right idea to invest in ha. There has been a lot of unusual success in some ideas that I would have never thought to be successful. I feel the key is to put a plan together execute it to the best of your abilities and potential.. and move onto the next idea. Put all of these out there giving it your all it will increase your odds on success. I agree with its how you execute the idea.. for instance you need traffic, your product or services can be what everyone needs but if people aren't exposed to them it may not be successful even though the concept has potential for unending success. I have ideas and am putting plans together, I actually locked a site in a few days ago. I cant put ideas out there though. Not sure who would do that if theyre serious.

Yeah I'd bet that GE and others are spending a decent amount of R&D on this already. Unless youre a talented engineer and youre going to get an awesome patent that you can sell to a major manufacturer, this is prob a dead end. Even if you did develop something awesome, the manufacturer can pretty easily rip you off. This is because its really hard to get a patent that precludes others from going down a similar path.

Point being that the average joe throwing out ideas - almost all of them are going to be the result of a previously unmet need. Thus its unlikely to be original. However, ideas resulting from work in a specific field, particularly something in technology or a high innovation sector, are somewhat likely to be original.

Most of the explosive businesses that we know today were started by people that were already within the industry and not by randoms sitting at home wishing their fridge could do more. In other words, the best new buisness ideas are born out of existing businesses.

On a side note, I did kind of think of Home Depot before I knew what Home Depot was - just growing up with my dad who rarely paid contractors for anything bc he felt he could do things better and cheaper himself. Back then, at least where I grew up, there wasnt really a centralized place for all the things one would need across plumbing, electrical, carpentry, etc, and the hardware stores weren't particularly helpful to novices. Was a pretty big no brainer but obviously I wasn't the only one with the idea. Oh well.

Students are giant nits about money and will def eat at McDonalds if it's 1€ cheaper imo. That being said I still like the idea, but I don't think students will be most of your customers. In Belgium it's really annoying that you can either eat McDonalds/Quick, fries or kebab after say 10pm, but nothing that doesn't make you feel guilty for putting it in your body. I have been thinking of something similar myself for a bit.

- Would this be a day time place or a night time place? Ie closing at 10pm or at 5am? Quite a difference in customers - I tend to find most of my friends that want to go get a bite at 2am don't care about the fat/unhealthiness, and not only because they are drunk. But as a daytime place you are more of a standard 'casual' restaurant that serves burgers, doens't have a lot to do with most kebab places. Doesn't have to be a problem obv, but you'll have different customers etc. Most burger restaurants I know (there is one in Antwerp and one closeby here in London) seem to get customers that don't care that this burger costs 3€ more than one at McDo

- Building on that: wouldn't it be better to position this as say a gourmet burger restaurant, not doing delivery, but having higher quality? If you also do delivery won't people assume your food is crappy fast food like most delivery places?

There is a whole other thread on this: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...rance-1062444/

Damn this is such a sick website. I've been itching to do something like this for years. I've already deposited and am going to get my degen on.

Haha, I guess my idea is worthless.

valid point, how about marketing it as a cheap restaurant. Basicly if you feel like mcdonalds, but you want a v decent but cheap dinner, and dont want to wait that long as in a restaurant. Also if you make it that much more tasty and healthy (more tasty then healthy tho) then mcdonalds, wont you have a decent amount of students also who go there maybe once a week, or once every 2 weeks? So basicly i should focus really hard on as much quality as possible here, and make sure they dont get sloppy in the kitchen.

And lets assume that when i experiment for a while with this, i can create a pretty damn tasty menu for a decent price. How to make sure my cooks are going to make it as tasty all the time? This is what i hate in alot of restaurants, potentially awesome food made mediocre or ruined by a sloppy chef.
def daytime, and not sure if i should include night time also. Agree on the bit that people (including me) dont care about healthy food when they are drunk).
yea, but once it is running, and most people ate at least once at your place, or heard from others it is pretty good you can start doing delivery. But ofcourse this also depends on how cheap you can do that, if its almost twice as much as a pizza then it wont be popular.

I think the problem with this is that I dont know the pitfalls, and it seems like something that you have to invest quite alot of money and time in at first. So if i have other things that are way more +ev , i just have to wait untill i have more free time on my hands that i cannot fill up with something productive. Unless ofcourse I think i have a pretty high probability of making it succeed and making a decent bit of money with it.

I've seen enough Kitchen Nightmares to know that starting a restaurant is a lot work. It'll be all about the execution and how consistent the restaurant is. Plus if you just want to be an investor, you better find some chef or somebody to run the restaurant that will care about it just as much as you.

i don't know anything about the restaurent business but it has to be quite hard for you to compete with a chain like mcdo's on prize while delivering better quality, so i feel like you should focus on quality and forget trying to compete with mcdo's on price. same for kebab places, the ones that focus on price have really ****ty meat etc. everybody tastes that, but you don't care bc it's so cheap. the more 'upscale' kebab places that feel more like a restaurant than a snack bar also seem to have a more mixed clientele willing to spend more (drunk 30yo's rather than drunk students at night, 50year olds at 6pm etc), and if anything you can liken your quality burger idea to a quality kebab place as in how it relates to mcdo's/a ghetto kebab place. same thing, better quality, higher prices -> different customers

there def seems to be a lack of quality 'quick bite' (doesn't have to be only burgers obv) places in flanders though, so there should be a market as i assume it's probably the same in holland (or even worse given it's reputation)


*edit* like the poster above hinted, do you just want to invest in or run a restaurant with all the pitfalls and 'standardness' that entails, or are you trying to start a chain?

I've always wanted to bring the concept of the customizable poker HUD to other areas. If you're watching a baseball game on tv, you can overlay the stats that you want to keep track on top of the tv.

I'm sure there are other fields where it's beneficial to have customizable stats available to you in real time.

I want to compete only with mcdonalds in that i actually want to food to look like in the pictures. And not have you feeling like you just ate toxic waste. Ofcourse i cannnot make it as cheap. And then I sell it as a restaurant. So no counter where you can get a quick 1 euro burger. But also with quick waiting times. So basicly you order and you get your food quickly, since it should be faster to make then most food. And since there dont seem to be such places in holland I thought it should have a higher chance of succes then just starting some random restaurant.

Not sure if you know Johnny rocket's in dublin, but kind of like that place. Except I didnt like theyr menu that much.

But yea I think you probably need a motivated chef for that. And i dont know any. And i dont like cooking nearly enough to stand in the kitchen myself for long hours.

Something like this?

http://www.hacheburgers.com/index.php

I def think there is a market for it, but it's just pretty much another restaurant. Not that that's bad obv

This is in Antwerp (site is in Dutch): http://www.burgerij.be/

There are a lot of bars nearby, but they close at 10.30. I feel they should make good money being open later, esp in that neighbourhood (it's pretty upscale). Every friday night I come there place is packed btw

For the refrigerator idea, it makes more sense to go after restaurants. You could integrate the system with cash register to get a better idea of what has been used. RFID tags on the bins of food in the coolers will allow the food to be tracked. This would be attractive to restaurants because it will reduce the labor involved in tracking food and help prevent and located sources of spoilage. Alerts could be set up to go off when food is out of place or nearing spoilage.

The refrigerator tracking for restaurants seems great. Need to see if it's already patented.

Didn't liked it to house, it costs to deliver a few eggs (making the price go up) and the guy can have just left home, if he needs to be turning on and off would be better to have a interface where he can just click the item he wants to hire a deliver - this would take the cost of needing someone answering the phone and fidelity would increase as we are too lazy...

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INews: Each day a very short journal (a page imo) is delivered to the subscriber IPad with top news. When he wakes up and is taking his breakfast he then reads it. Free subscription with ad space. Could be tuned to preferences if viable.

http://www.lgnewsroom.com/newsroom/contents/61546
Clever Refrigerator, Revolutionized Food Management

Imagine the above, but adding a multitouch trackpad and also adding a universal A/V remote control for TVs, satellite boxes, DVD players, etc. It will have a way to hold an ipad, or any smartphone.

So you keep it on your coffee table or at your bedside, and now you can easily reply to emails on your smartphone while you watch television. It would also be the killer unifying device for people who have home theater PCs. Maybe it also has a large battery inside and can charge items plugged into it like ipad, smartphone, etc.

I actually was building a site for a while called CrossFeed which was like Crossfit for meal plans for athletes. You just joined up, it gave you shopping lists 2x weekly, it micromanaged the meals so that they used up all the food by the end of the shopping list cycle (eg if you bought celery as a snack, it would probably be that you would stirfry it or something in another dish that week), recipes would be on the site to cook things.

The idea was you would basically just blindly follow it and end up with no wasted food, easy to cook recipes with all the calories etc broken down for you, etc.

I started thinking about stuff like celebrity meal plans after this. That lead me to the thought of a site called "EatWhatIEat", a kind of 'feed' where you could log on and find peoples meal plans. It would be great for example if you could see the sort of plans that, day to day, Hugh Jackman was eating as he prepared to be wolverine, or what others were eating.

It could also be managed as a kind of site for amateur but serious athletes, like i mentioned, a food based Crossfit style site.

I've since moved past caring about these ideas but i feel like there was something there...

I would buy this.

I have a restricted medical diet and this would be huge. I already do this for myself and another person, but sometimes stores run out of certain things and you have to modify on the fly. You would need to account for that somehow.

http://www.reconinstruments.com/

thanks for posting the link to draftday, cts. i am one of the founders of the site and we definitely aren't the first to market. meaning, our idea is not original. it's all about execution.

cardrunners was not the first poker training site. hold'em manager was not the first poker software. it's all about executing the ideas.

looking forward to reading this thread and doing my best to execute on draftday!

Can you explain a bit more what you did exactly to differentiate yourself from the competition that preceded you?

for now -- better UX, focus on community, platform built and endorsed by tastemakers / trusted people in gaming space.

long term -- product offerings, social experience, among other things.

i feel excited to get into a market that is very small and has a real (imo) chance to explode. part of why i think we have a huge chance for success is just identifying a high-growth market early and acting super fast to try to capture a piece of it.