One of the "worthless ideas" in this thread recently received $2M in funding.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/22/swi...nder-for-jobs/

I remember reading this thread a few months ago and someone suggested Tinder for Jobs. Anyone want to pull up that post?

Here it is.

An Uber for soup.

Niche Glassdoor-type site for ESL teachers

A few years ago when I was transitioning out of poker I briefly considered teaching English abroad. I quickly discovered that a lot of the pertinent info was a pain in the ass to find, and some was impossible. The standard go-to place for info about ESL teaching is probably Dave's ESL Cafe, which has been around forever. They have some good info, but the forums are pretty dead and a lot of the info is outdated, in some cases by over 10 years. Basic stuff like whether you need a degree or not...which additional certifications, if any, are most worthwhile, or necessary...what kind of pay you can expect based on your qualifications, etc...even for some of the more popular teaching destinations, you have to dig and search through pages of posts for this stuff.

The forums are also read (and I believe moderated) by recruiting companies that post paid ads on the site, so a lot of the info that gets posted is slanted. Also, a lot of schools simply don't interview/recruit/hire candidates online period. I was thinking of creating a Glassdoor kind of site where ESL teachers can post their salaries for each country, the qualifications that correspond to those salaries, etc. There could eventually be a premium account version where people can pay a fee for more useful info, or it could just make money selling ads.

Thoughts?

Hotel booking site for poker players, giving poker room rates. Atm you still have to call the poker room at the hotel to book the poker room rate, there has to be a better way. Would perhaps be a bit niche, not sure how big that market is. On the other hand, would probably not be that hard to setup.

I attempted doing something similar last year, though it was brief and it never took off mainly due to the lack of attention and time on my part.

The idea was to provide information about various tournaments around the world (EPTs, WPTs, WSOPs and smaller tours etc with dates and locations) and provide a hotel and flight booking comparison tool. Players could then get the best rate at hotels that are near the casino.

Additional benefits would be providing information about clubs/restaurants/places to visit and the ability to book restaurant reservations and attraction tickets, city tours...

Thoughts on Tinder's prospects? It seems odd to me that Tinder only has 60 employees, as popular as the app is. I wonder if it's because there's no precedent for a dating app turning into something bigger.

There needs to be an app to connect Tinder to potential employees.

clearly you effectively recognised the trend of online fantasy sports gambling blowing up. it has grown immensely in the past four years.

what trends do you think you missed, that led to draftday's competition growing so much faster?

Probably lack of money to drive up the user base.

They're owned by the same giant company that owns Match.com, OkCupid and lots of other brands. I imagine they're pretty happy with the performance and engagement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAC_%28company%29

I think WhatsApp had even less, like 55, when Facebook made the deal for $19b.

Didn't Instagram only have like 10 or 13 when they were acquired?

This is an idea I've been playing around with for a while.

Anyone remotely serious about poker is going to be involved in "the community". You will be dealing with dozens of players on a regular basis, often engaging in a multitude of financial transactions - exchanging, borrowing/loaning, staking, side-betting, etc.
This constant flow of cash is a huge part of our routine, and for a lot of us is more than just a convenience; it's essential for our livelihood or at least maximizing our EV in our different endeavors.
Yet surprinsingly there is not much in place to organize these interactions, to facilitate them, and more importantly to make them more secure.
Our current system is based on honor, networking, speed of information, protection through forums, and it works well 95 percent of the time - but those 5 percent of times where dishonest members take advantage of its holes can cost people a lot of money.

How many threads about scammers and cheats do we have to see before we organize ourselves and try to remedy the problem in a smart way?


pokerrep.com


A website/app that makes your "rep" in the poker community tangible, concrete. An anti-scam device, but not just that.
The goal of pokerrep is to protect the community against dishonest/malignant behavior, and encourage networking, thereby creating opportunities for members who deserve them.

My idea was inspired by my years using hospitality networks (mostly hospitalityclub and couchsurfing), where travelers and hosts who had never met each other before would connect around the world, using a simple but highly effective profile+comments system to protect themselves from undesirable members.

How it works : basically a bunch of profiles with a lot of real life verified information (not all public), with a list of references/connections, and a trace (not necessarily public) of every different financial transaction between members.


Typical scenario :

Bob approaches me for staking. I check his pokerrep profile, he makes the additional information I want available to me - he has no debts within the community, is not currently involved in another staking agreement, his previous staker is XxxX, and has only good things to say about him. He was flatmates with this other player I know, who vouches for his work ethic/integrity. He has connections with 10 or so people I know, and has been involved in numerous smooth 4 figure financial transactions. He gives me his name, address, contact info. I discuss some terms with Bob, we agree on a deal (that we can write out and upload to pokerrep for future reference), and boom! Bob gets his stake, I make $$$, everyone is happy.

A cool thing about pokerrep would be the possibility of detecting fishy members way before they get involved in some major scam. Say you have doubts about a player; maybe he did something semi-shady - seems to be welching on a bet, has gone missing for a few days on a staking deal, maybe it's just a weird skype convo.
Instead of posting a thread on 2+2 that would be ridiculed/closed/ignored, you can just post an invisible red flag on the players profile, and if there are red flags from a bunch of users then the info could be made public in some way.

I feel like a system like this would have prevented most of the scams I read about on 2+2.

Obviously a scammer would be immediately outed and incapacitated, but a lot of potential scammers would be deterred as well. Also, you would prevent the common scenario of someone with a good rep finding himself in trouble (pit degen, bad sports bettor, you name the leak/addiction) and getting himself into more trouble by doing things like borrowing too much money from different people, jumping from one stake to another, in an effort to "get back on his feet".

Thoughts?

^ seems there are other applications for a reputation type app/site other than just poker which could make it scalable.

It would be pretty easy to monetize as poker players are used to forking out $ to assist their career, and the service quite concretely saves people money.
Building a profile/rep and multiple connections would be an enjoyable thing in itself, as well as useful

Cool thread. I conjured up a new business idea today. Partly out of the idea that there are no poker coaches on a low level $ basis.
They're mostly highly paid because that is how the consulting world works mostly.

If you translate this over to business...what if there's a need for low level consulting work that frees up young people's time.

Here's the idea, but I bet some1 has tried it 8 times already at least.

Y2K Time: Outsourcing Millennials Business workload to help support a smarter future.
We would handle younger employees easy work that is non confidential to the company. We would target the most over worked industries.

Would have to get accredited by a better business bureau or something.

Possibly could be used as a pipeline for blue collar workers to start building their resume by doing the easy work and getting it graded in essence by bosses in the white collar world.

This could possibly lead to a much cheaper avenue for blue collar workers to enter the white collar world if the idea or busines ever grew big enough.

Doubt this is a gr8 idea but oh well.

I am going to send this into shark tank, but the main problem I have with the show is they sit up there with hundred of millions or billions to their name, and they have to be seeing alot of profits first...but what if the idea is really good?

No rebuttals in 2 days!? Zomg my idea must be genius lol ya right guys.

I agree with the OP...if you think of an idea..(lets face it..its capitalsim baby..every1 wants to be the next gr8 corporation idea new founder of a new service industry) some1 has already thought about that idea on average 5-8 times in society and 1-3 ppl have already failed at implementing the idea.

In the business world, ideas are easy, cheap, and plentiful. (There are also a lot of bad ideas.) What's hard is execution, especially profitable execution. A good idea means nothing by itself.

How about a service which checks out used cars for private party sales? The buyer and seller meet at a shop which has a lift and a few diagnostic tools to check compression, etc. After a 40 point inspection the tech goes with the parties for a short test drive.

I've been helping a friend look for cars off Craigslist this past week and it's such a crapshoot. I also think a lot of people aren't real thrilled about meeting strangers even in very public locations to show and test drive cars. Maybe a seller can arrange an "open house" at such a shop and ask all prospective buyers to meet at the same time.

No doubt that some sellers won't want their car to be inspected as few cars are in perfect condition.

I would pay a good premium for a service that comes to my house and fills my gas tank on a regular basis. I really hate going to gas stations.

Also I take a lot of supplements. Someone please make me a machine that I can fill with up to 10 different kinds of pills, then give me one of each in a batch every morning.

Also I think it would be really cool if someone would take a full virtual reality setup into the worst slums and places in the world. Capture life there - so people in cushy places like where most of us live would get a visceral sense of what it's really like to walk around in say a refugee camp in Lebanon full of Syrians who have fled ISIS. Or a Liberian slum.

Or this place. The photos and this story really had a deep impact on me. Imagine a fully immersive virtual reality experience.

Hi all,

This is such a great thread as I can ask for help on my worthless idea and not feel too guilty.

I have not found gold. But I have found an incredibly cheap fruit/vegetable that could serve as the base of sauces/lotions in a very remote part of the world (my girlfriend's home village). No one is doing it here or in the country to my knowledge.

I have no intention of being a grocery mogul. But I think I can pay someone to make a number of products at extremely low prices in this part of the world. And there MAY be a small gap in the market.

My only question is regarding shipping and other costs (the idea is irrelevant anyway if the products don't taste/feel good).

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Mae-Ploy-S...-of-6/31197425

Here is Mae Ploy sauce, one of the most popular sauces shipped in from Thailand. It costs $5 per bottle if buying six. But we know it costs a fraction of the cost in Thailand (say $0.40). Is the bottle on the shelf at Walmart (after the supplier's mark up) at $1? $2? $3?

Essentially, I want to make a line of products from somewhere in remote SE Asia. Say 3000 bottles a day:

http://worldfreightrates.com/freight

I checked this website out and it seems 250kg of 'produce' is approximately $3000 USD. So shipping in 1000 bottles is useless. If 10000, now it makes sense!

A few things for naysayers:

This is probably the cheapest place in the world to find such products. Cheapest and tastiest I've ever had. And they are durable.
I know the terrain well and speak the language a little.
I am aware fruits and vegetables are incredibly cheap around the world and the cost is all in the shipping (a market I could never hope to break due to my puny volumes).
The unit cost of one of the fruits/vegetables (which I intend to make products out of) is approximately 8% of the price in a supermarket in UK/US.
I have no experience of factories but if it is viable I intend to learn.
I have to start the idea somewhere...

Any words of encouragement or am I living in dreamworld?

I don't think I need to say the actual product. Tens of fruits/vegetables in SE Asia are incredibly cheap but expensive in Europe/US due to shipping costs/markup & demand etc.

I would really appreciate any useful answers. I was going to post on ELI5 on reddit but I thought better answers would come here.

I have very little knowledge of the regulations that go in to shipping/selling fresh produce across borders but I would imagine they are intense. The only semi-similar thing I ever did was shipping processed foods like mayo/olive oil/peanut butter to Puerto Rico, and we had all kinds of things we had to do around transferring to specific types of pallets, wrapping in certain ways, etc and then paid a lot of extra fees to ship.

That would be something I'd do research into pretty quickly.

Do you know what the market volume is for some of these products? Are they super expensive in US/UK because they're grown locally and hard to grow there? Is it because of shipping costs? Or is there just not a lot of demand so they charge a premium for the few who actually want it?

this on all three

Thanks for reply. i didn't detect even a hint of derision for my head-in-the-clouds approach.

You cannot grow the base fruit/vege locally. Supermarkets import from Peru/South Africa i'm told. I'm guessing mine would be cheaper originally and better quality. But it's possible the remoteness increases the cost/reliability. But just maybe, this place is largely undiscovered and my fruit/veg, due to its unpopularity in its home country, has been ignored by importers. Or at least no one has been crazy enough to go to the middle of nowhere and make sauces, lotions and drinks!
I do not know if the crazy difference in prices is because of demand or shipping costs.

Ok let's take the example of the Durian (the enormous stinky fruit Asians are crazy for). £4 a fruit in my gf's home town, £35 in singapore. Now, same thinking, if one could make a cooking sauce and an energy drink and a soap from Durians (highly unlikely!), is it possible that the products could be a winner.

My fruit/vege is very versatile, the actual base fruit/vege is hugely popular in US and people do make products from it. But I'm hoping my unit cost for a sauce/lotion/drink could be incredibly cheap and a range of products means one could be a hit. The products surely can be shipped not flown as they have a long shelf life.

I'll continue to research (particularly the landed cost) and plan to fly again to my gf's village and get a few samples made for not much. That'll be in September and I will research before. But if the products are poor, then I just give up!