Adapted from a recent response to an Indiehackers topic Mission vs Money: What do you prioritize?
I think you need both. I try to find the balance this way:
- There’s a lot of potential business ideas.
- A subset of them will have some output/side-effect that is on-mission for you.
- Try out all those ideas. A subset of them will work.
For example my mission is climate. Very easy to not be able to live off your climate efforts though: nonprofits, thanksless work, civic engagement, etc.
So now
- of all business ideas I think of
- I only consider doing the subset that could have a climate impact.
- I try most of those in the subset. A subset of them hopefully will work :)
Below, I’m starting to keep a running list of business problems, a subset of them with impact.
- Solar
- Sales decks take time. B2B Sales PDF Maker SaaS for solar installers - Tesla style solar sales presentation tool for everyone else - $59/mo
- Solar platforms are a race to the bottom.
- Solar installers have issues tracking applicants across financing, before site survey.
- Reach out to solar installers & offer them a sales brochure.
- Reach out to solar installers & ask them if need apartment solar leads
- Reach out to solar installers & ask them if need second-hand solar equipment
- Sustainability
- Low energy apartment washing machine
- Drones
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HitJ8r9HwBg
- EVTOL
- Homes
- Prefab and printing houses
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-4S7cdo3tY
- EVs
- https://cars.electrade.app: Tired of High Gas Prices? Best EV lease list: 10x less calling, 20% more affordable (text dealer // get updates on this lease)
- Contract manufacturing, design, software, cheap chinese EVs: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/04/14/all-change
- News
- Incentivized to be negative, and balanced news is hard to find and monetize. Positive News Newsletter SaaS - (obviously broken, big market). train a newsbot on good seed, find non-negative headlines with sentiment analysis? - $10/mo
- People only consume debates as clips on social media and miss bigger context.
- Potential competitors, b2b: Media monitoring, sentiment analysis, b2b for agencies
- Mastodon instances are run by unpaid volunteers and lack a business model. Buy a cool short domain and host a paid, reliable mastodon instance. $1/mo
- Linux
- Linux mobile doesn’t have a notepad that syncs (freemium, flathub) - SaaS $2/mo for syncing (based off video watch count for below, market is only around 2-5k people)
- Linux e-book reader/store (Update: Foliate)
- Linux-ready phone with smd845 not ready
- Flathub app: build & deploy blog from linux mobile
- websites
- Wordpress is still used for most blogs. CDN content platform SaaS for content websites - NotablePress, DecapCMS, Hugo, Cloudways, Nuxtpress - $6/mo
- Shopify plug-in uninstaller speedup
- Clone Hey world as b2b SaaS for $30/mo. Founders write great emails, marketers write bad blog posts. Let the founders send emails to the blog.
- Climate Fintech
- It’s hard to decarbbonize your investments. - Inyova.ch
- https://www.joinatmos.com
- Hospital prices are hard to compare
- Impact quizzes / web apps SaaS? EV charging configurator, solar configurator, gas configurator, what climate type are you.
- AI
- https://keras.io/examples/vision/3D_image_classification/) (example: Keras model trained to create art from inputs) (update: this now exists :))
- https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither
- National quarter shortage: quarter delivery service. Hard to deliver though.
- Heat pumps
- blockchain
- artificial meat
- energy
- farming
- water
- transportation
- biodiversity
- studio for climate saving software
- Time tested classic: clone another badly-run business better (maybe with existing demand) - solarbalkon
- Odd Solar