Business Ideas That Solve Real World Problems

Based On Human Interactions

I collect data everywhere I go. Data is the raw material of information which after integrations turns out to be the bricks of knowledge. Not only do I collect public data using mechanized methods online, but every time I get into a detailed conversation with a business owner or client, I ask them what their biggest headache is and record a note to myself on my device.

Over 4 out of 5 business startups fail because they address a problem that the problem owners do not need a solution or their solution. I like to address the field of solving business problems because they have the motivation to make a bigger profit by generating more revenue, save money, and eliminate wasteful costly steps in their processes. Businesses are motivated to pay for solutions that save them money. So this is why in almost every business conversation, I ask them what their biggest headache is.

With the hollowing out of the middle class, I see business startups as not only a means of self-employment but also as a means of creating employment for others. And in terms of founders, we are at an interesting stage of technological development. In the early days Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, et al. went into a workshop garret and with bits of tin, wire, screws, metal and wood, invent stuff like the telephone, the phonograph, the telegraph and various sundry wonders of technology. Once these groundbreakers came to market, to make further advances, you had to know electricity principles, materials engineering and the requisite STEM subject behind it. These required intense first-principles knowledge. Then another improvement comes along from the experts doing research, and the technology is democratized again. A good example is the inventor of the transistor. It required the immense resources of Bell Labs and innovative researchers. But once the transistor was in the public domain, hobbyists around the world were soldering them into their own inventions.

We are in the stage of citizen technologist again, and the cycles between intense first-principle knowledge and the citizen inventor are dramatically shortened. The ordinary Joe Programmer could not have brought ChatGPT to market, but I know of at least a dozen people making money from it, and it is less than 4 months old in the public domain. So creating a successful business is within the grasp of folks who have the motivation but not the tools to execute. Technology today and their practitioners is a commodity.

So here are some business problems or required inventions that need solving according to my information gathering efforts.

A New Payments Paradigm

This comes from a manager of a chain drugstore franchise. The losses from shoplifting were getting out of hand, even with loss prevention initiatives like embedding anti-theft widgets into the packaging and CCTV cameras in the aisles. There were particularly egregious losses in shaver cartridge refills, where just 3-4 blades are retailed for close to $15. It got to the point where they were put in displays under lock and key, and you had to summon a sales associate to get your product, and then it was taken to a cashier where you had to claim it when you finished shopping. Of course, this doesn’t work when you have self-checkouts. So the solution that the manager wants to see is a new payments paradigm coupled to vending technology. Essentially all high priced items subject to shoplifting have a tap payment processor that dispenses the item. However, the payment doesn’t have to be processed right away. It can be aggregated by the payments system so that the merchant is not charged per transaction. The way that it would work, is that if the payment was approved, it would not be submitted as a transaction but checked to see if the card is declined. Then it is stored waiting for other purchases with the same payment card. After a period of time, if there are no other purchases the system submits either the aggregated or single transaction. Eventually this paradigm could even eliminate the checkout counter and stations.

Inventorying Problems

This is an aggregate of the same problem outlined by two different types of business. They both wanted the inventorying problems addressed. The first was from the owner of a trucking company that had a bonded warehouse. The trucks were unloaded into the warehouse and the contents were to be held in bond. The contents had to be inventoried by hand. They were not usually barcoded in an efficient readable manner for the transport warehouse, but the business itself didn’t have the IT systems to manage the barcodes for constantly shifting inventory. He wanted an inventory robot with an AI camera that could count things.

This intrigued me, because one of my first exercises in programming AI was to build an imaging system that could count things, and this was many years ago in the early stages of AI. I didn’t build it for a business need, but rather for truth in politics. I was living in place where there was corruption in government and during election rallies, the most corrupt political party was claiming thousands of attendees. I built a people-in-the-crowd counter to debunk their claims of rally attendance. So the technology to build a thing-counting inventory robot is certainly well developed and relatively mature technology.

The other request came from a non-chain convenience store owner, or rather one of his employees. An employee wanted to buy the business from the owner. The owner was adding $60,000-$80,000 for the inventory into the price. The employee didn’t believe the amount and didn’t have access to the sales system so that he could undertake an evaluation of the inventory. Also he didn’t want to pay for inventory specialists (there are business that go around and do inventories for small stores) in case he needed to back out of the deal. The owner certainly wasn’t going to pay for it. The type of inventory robot that was envisioned by the employee, was a camera gun attached to a computing device that was operated by walking up and down the aisles and pointing the camera at each unique range of items and have a count automagically done.

Illicit Dumping

The owner of a Middle Eastern fast food place (there are many different ways to describe his food — either a gyro, kebab or shawarma), outlined his dumpster problem. He lived in a location where the government garbage Nazis were quite strict. You had to buy stickers to put on the bins, cans or bags and you were limited to two items. And they wouldn’t take things like DIY construction materials (lumber bits) or things like aerosol cans. So the folks would pull up to his dumpster in the off hours and fill it up with junk, included broken chairs and big things that the garbage Nazis wouldn’t take. Putting a CCTV camera on the dumpster didn’t help.

What he wanted was a smart dumpster. All of his employees would carry RFID tags and as they approached the dumpster, it would open and close. The truck emptying the dumpster also would have to be able to open it. If smart dumpsters were ubiquitous, it would cut down on a lot of those missing body murders, but it would kill the sport of dumpster diving.

Home And Restaurant Saponifier

This problem came from the poop pumper and septic tank installer. Every 2 years, the local government comes and pumps out septic tanks in the region (tax dollars pay for it). When the truck showed up to do my house, I of course naturally went out to talk to him. First of all, I wanted to see if he was a true connoisseur and could determine how many Taco Bell meals that I had from the contents of my septic tank. But then I got around to asking him about septic tanks. He was a real aficionado in that field. He pointed out that there were two enemies of septic systems — fatbergs and crusts. Fatbergs came from pouring fats and cooking oils down into the septic system and they clogged the works. The crusts in question are bacterial crusts that form around the holes in the pipes of the leaching beds that slow down and eventually clog up and causing the septic system to malfunction. He had a solution for the crust (a bacterial shock therapy that uses good bacteria to dissolve the crust). And he also had an idea on how to solve the fatberg problem, but needed some technical help.

The invention that he wanted was a saponifier. It would not only be a valuable adjunct to septic systems, but the market was huge for cities and sewer systems as well. Fatbergs were the common enemy of of sewers and septic tanks. Not only would it be installed in home septic systems, but there would be bylaws for every restaurant to have one installed. They pour major amounts of grease and fats into sewer systems.

What’s a saponifier, your ask? It’s a thingie that does saponification. The definition of saponification is : a “hydration reaction where free hydroxide breaks the ester bonds between the fatty acids and glycerol of a triglyceride, resulting in free fatty acids and glycerol,” which are each soluble in aqueous solutions. Bottom line, it turns fats into harmless water soluble things that do not gum up the system. The first person that brings a commercial saponifier to market would be an instant millionaire.

Precision in Construction

This one comes from the contractor who installed my new doors. He wants a smart utility measuring device. It would have a camera that can measure both x and y axis (so that he points the device at a door frame and it gives all four box dimensions). He sees this incorporated into a spirit level with a laser (there are already laser levels on the market, but he wants one that replaces a messy chalk line which has to be removed. What you do is lay down a coated masking tape and with the level and a laser line, it marks a level line across a surface like a wall. And the thing would have a precision yardstick etched in metal.

Defeating The Porch Pirates

I was on a wilderness canoe trip and when we arrived at the terminus in a nature reserve, we emptied our garbage into a bear-proof garbage can. It has a system of intuitive levers that lock the lid. It’s easy for humans to see the mechanical logic to open it, but bears can’t figure it out. And once the garbage has gone down into the receptacle, even if you did get the lid open you couldn’t reach the garbage. The reason is that when the lid is opened a shelf lifts up to block access to the garbage in the lower extremity of the bin. When you close the lid, the shelf collapses and the stuff drops down below. It is accesses through a locked back door.

Buddy puts a banana peel into the receptacle and says: “This is a great invention to thwart porch pirates.” And it is.

Checking The Buns In The Oven

One of the most underrated tourist towns in Provence in the south of France is Aigues-Mortes in the area known as the Camargue in the Occitania region. If you are a history buff and love medieval castles, architecture, the Knights Templars and such like that, it is the town for you. The whole town is a 13th century walled castle. In the shops area, I met a food worker in an apron, leaning against a building smoking a cigarette. The building was a sucrerie, or a sweet shop. Those shops sell everything sugar, from candies to cookies to bakery items to chocolates and everything in between with sugar in it, including nectars and drinks. The ultimate product of these shops throughout France, is Type 2 diabetes. We got to chatting. He was the pâtissier or pastry maker of the sucrerie. I told him that I just totally enjoyed one of the multi-coloured, multi-flavoured meringues that they sold.

He told me that most of his baking failures were in the making of the meringues. The success of the making of these whipped eggwhite delights is never a sure thing, due to such factors as the heat, humidity, barometric pressure and slight differences in the ingredients. The meringues need hours in a low heat oven. Sometimes they collapse like a soufflé or the inside doesn’t cook. When you open the oven to check on their progress, not only do you let the heat out, but the jarring of the door may collapse them. He wants a built-in oven camera. He can’t see properly through the glass door of the oven. He also mention that if the camera had an infrared mode, it would be a thermal camera to measure the temperature of the food.

Many more

I am going to quit this post here, but I have a collection many more business problems that need to be solved, perhaps in a later …. or paid post.

If you are looking for a product solution to a business problem, or you want to generated new products or new revenue streams with existing products, I have AI NLP machines and knowledge graphs that are amazing at generating useable ideas. Ping me: ken.bodnar@block.ky .