I'm Scott. I'm Russell. And I'm Leo. This is Spitball. Welcome to Spitball, where three
project persons and a guest empty our heads of startup and tech product ideas that we
have stuck up in there so you can all have them for free. Anything that we say is yours
to keep. And this week, Russell, you brought our guest, didn't you, brother?
- Oh yes I did.
I have the famous Marc Boersma here,
who is currently the director of product
for a company called Morey.
- Morey, yep.
-Morey, and there's a lot of cool stuff happening there,
but we know him famously from our Ring Cam days.
He is famously proposed at the Piston Stadium
and shamelessly plugged Ring Cam on a big screen there.
So yeah, it was quite incredible.
I think hundreds of thousands of people,
no, just thousands of people saw an amazing proposal
and a bunch of advertisements to every bride and groom
walking through that arena.
- My wife does not know about that, so don't tell her.
- Oh, no?
- She doesn't know, so.
- Well, if Marc's wife's listening,
she was already engaged, so.
It makes it worse.
It makes it way better, right?
Yeah, good cover up.
Nailed it.
Marc, welcome to Spitball.
Thank you.
Great to be here.
Another legendary introduction, Russell.
So when we have guests on who start off while we're warming up and talking in the pre-show
and they're like, "I have a hundred ideas.
What should I do with all these?
How do I pick just one?"
We sometimes will play a round of intramurals where we pitch some of our reject half ideas
just to clear the decks a little bit and something that we don't want to be a full pitch but
that we think has a little bit of legs.
So we're going to do a round of intramurals
to get us warmed up today.
How are we feeling?
Who wants to go first?
Who's itching?
Do we all have an app idea?
I think we might all have an app idea tonight.
Is that right?
I could do an app idea.
I can turn mine into an app idea.
Let's do it all.
Oops, all apps intramurals.
Oops, all apps.
All right, I got you.
Let's go.
Hit us.
What do you got?
This is an app.
I recently moved.
I have recently been putting lots of large things
into a old house with many corners and small staircases
realizing this will not fit from here to here.
I want an app where I could just take my phone,
like do a quick look around the room,
get a CAD model of whatever the thing is
that I'm trying to move,
that freaking mattress or dishwasher or something,
and just have it like,
"Hey, you can fit that around this corner
"only if you do it this way.
"If you hold the couch at this angle,
"you can get it through."
And it does all of that for you.
- You end up with like IKEA instructions
with like put on and slide down two feet,
Rotate 90 degrees.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
- That's the entire app.
And I would kill for that this past weekend.
- So iPhones have LiDAR scanners and stuff
for many years now,
and there's apps to do the 3D rendering.
There's a whole API suite for this.
This is very doable.
I love this.
- It doesn't exist.
I was literally looking for this
when trying to get a stupid washing machine through, but.
- Amazon even has the like,
put this object in your room to see how it would fit.
- Yeah, the augmented reality part.
- You're almost there.
You just need to show me how to get it to this spot, Amazon.
You're going to leave it on my back porch.
The CAD models.
Hey, this is a mattress.
It's a little bit flexy.
We could move it around this way.
Yeah.
Well, what if you-- and then you could--
what if you entered in your physique numbers in terms
of how much you can lift?
And then it tells you, no, you need a partner for this.
You're going to throw out your back.
Here's-- in order to get it to this position, you got to--
This box if you grew up on a farm. Yeah, you have to here's the three-week weightlifting program you have to go through first
It's a fitness map
It measures the awkwardness of the item right like just like how awkward it is to hold
You know, there's no handholds on this perfectly smooth cabinet. You want to get down there? Yeah
Well, if we want to if we want to scale it commercial, we'll just sell it to the moving companies
You can upload pictures of everything you have to move it gives the two guys in a truck
instructions for
Everything to move how to get it in there most efficiently
Because it's all about efficiency with their revenue and their profit like more efficient more profitable
So you give them step-by-step tells them they can bill you more. I
Like it. Whoa, two houses one day with your app Scott. Yeah, there you go
There's two men two houses one truck one day
Two men and app in a truck.
That is actually, Marc, I did not think you could make money with this app until you said
something like that.
Of course, Marc is away for that.
So when we moved out of our condo, my wife and I, the closest elevator was like, I don't
know, 50 years old.
And it was crazy tiny.
And so these movers that we hired to do it, they did not account for how many trips down
that little tiny elevator they would need to take because they assumed it was a big
elevator for a large condo building.
And so it was a fixed rate quote and I guarantee they lost money because they had no idea.
But if they had your app, they'd be like, "Hey, it's this many elevator loads.
This is the path to get all the way downstairs to the moving truck."
to save them a lot of money on the job.
- Man, you run a 360 camera through your house ahead of time,
like that's all it takes, right?
If you really want to commercialize this,
you send them a 360 camera ahead of time
and it just like, or I guess you could just do this
with your iPhones, right?
They have like full rooms, oh man.
- Yep.
- That's actually dope.
- All right, someone give me a moment to intermural,
I forgot.
- Yeah, you're taking too long.
Keep it moving.
I have a, I'll piggyback off that because believe it or not, my app is kind of a moving
app.
So as we all know, the baby boomers of the generation are retiring and they are old enough
now to be moved into nursing homes.
So there is a lot of very old people moving into nursing homes and they have to sell all
their stuff, right?
I was talking to my neighbor a few months ago going through this whole thing.
parents lived in the house, had to go into a nursing home, do an estate sale.
So they have to pay hundreds of dollars for this company to come and evaluate everything
in their house.
And then they have to pay for them to move, warehouse all this stuff.
And then this company takes it upon themselves to sell as much as they can from the house.
And then they charge like a 35% commission fee on everything they sell.
And it's just because the kids who are dealing with all this, because grandparents are not
able to anymore, don't want to spend all the time to do it.
So with the beautiful rise of AI, imagine being able to walk through your parents' house,
who are now in a nursing home, be able to photograph everything, and through image recognition,
assign a price tag to everything, automatically list it on an estate sale website, and you
take care of all of that yourself just via camera and app automatically posting it assigning
a price value which honestly if they make any money off of it it's great because they
just don't want to deal with the hassle. AI virtual estate sale.
Beautiful. It could even list it on local Facebook marketplaces and eBay and all that
stuff too. Absolutely. It doesn't even have to be physical anymore.
List it at a high price and just keep knocking it down every week if no one buys it until
someone eventually grabs it.
Yeah.
There really isn't much that the estate sale companies are bringing to the table
that can't be commodified at this point.
Is there appraisal and organization of an event and price tagging and
bargain, all that stuff is like so easy to automate.
Yep.
Wow.
I don't know much about how estate sales work.
I guess I didn't, there's a whole company that will just come in and
just sell everything you own.
Pretty much.
Imagine a garage sale, but the whole house you walk through.
A lot of people do it themselves.
But like most people don't have time, you know, like think
of the kids are the ones that are doing it.
And the kids are now, you know, 40, 50 years old.
They have kids, they have jobs, they have all that stuff.
And this is a huge thing on their plate.
So they hire a company to just take care of it all.
Why can't an app with AI image recognition do it for them?
I would like to walk around my house with a thing and
just have it identify what stuff do you have that's worth a lot?
Ooh, like, do I really need this?
I don't know.
That's good.
Your app sounds great just to do, right?
Yeah, it's Russell's looking around over his shoulder.
(laughing)
Hold on, do I really need this model?
You actually got like a thousand dollars of PLA behind you.
Am I emotionally attached to this?
Yeah.
Do I need that?
Am I ever gonna learn guitar?
Yeah, exactly, right?
That's worth 300, $400.
I'm imagining Google Lens,
but it's just labeling price tags on stuff
pulled in from like recent auctions or whatever.
Even that would be sweet.
Yeah, yeah.
Dude, man, you sell that to Facebook,
they would just love that shit.
Just, oh, people are literally gonna video their whole home
and tell you every piece of information that's in there.
Like, could sell and put ads for that all day, you know?
This guy's got a guitar.
- There's gonna be a black market for thieves
for this app, unfortunately.
- See, that's where I was actually gonna go, Marc,
with this, like, what if you had an open door lockbox
with cameras throughout the house
and it turns into a vending machine style
where you buy the item online and they unlock the door
with a bunch of cameras you can take and grab and go.
- Well, have you guys done that at airports?
- That's right. - Yeah?
- Airports are just like trust honor system kiosks
with cameras, right?
- Yeah. - You don't even know
what happens.
- There's an airport, actually a really tiny one
outside of Columbia, Missouri.
And you go in, you just scan your credit card,
and you walk in.
There's absolutely no employees.
You grab whatever you want, and you walk out.
And then you get an email with what you grabbed
and the price, and it just automatically charges you.
I've seen those guys.
Yes, Denver has a couple of those, too.
Those are powered by Amazon technology.
I went into the original Amazon prototype stores for those,
the Amazon Go thing.
They're cool.
Yeah, it's awesome.
So there's a bunch of cameras all in the ceiling,
watching like, oh, he picked this up, put this down,
And they build it as like they are incredible AI whatever it's amazing that we've developed technology
We're robust know and it came to light that it's just a bunch of underpaid people in India watching cameras a guy in the back
Picked up the salad he put down the salad he picked up the salad
Yeah, I don't know if that's still the case, but if Amazon can do it
We can we can do it with the state to hire
So the company comes in with a briefcase filled with cameras
They stick it up to the ceiling and then strangers walk around the house
Scan their credit card and just pick up that clock and that priceless China and they walk out
You can haggle on the app
I'll give you 50 for everything. All right, what you got? I don't know if I have if this idea has any legs
We'll see if there's something here. So IMDB has an awesome and pretty famous database of trivia per movie
There's dozens of like, "Did you know that while filming this scene this interesting thing happened?"
Or, "They actually had to break up this into four different blah blah blah."
Right? It's fascinating and I feel like it isn't being used for anything interesting or fun.
So I would like to make some sort of either Duolingo style, like,
learn some interesting facts about the things that you already have in your recently watched list or something,
Or maybe even it's like a head-to-head trivia game that you're playing with people.
Somehow gamifying this corpus of data into something that brings it to light in a better way than having to go and find it myself.
I don't know what kind of... what the structure is here, which is why it's an intramural.
I love those movie facts too. Like, they always bring me joy.
So that's but you have to remember to go in like I don't know not only be intentional about that movie that you're interested in
But I don't just remembering to do it at all
Yeah, honestly, like my gut reaction is if I'm watching a movie and you know
I think it's like Amazon Prime does it when I pause it shows me?
Hey, he's all the characters on the screen like I could just pause at a random point
It'll tell me either a tidbit about the movie or about that scene or something. Did you know that Amazon owns IMDb?
Yeah
We're so freaking close the feature you're called you're talking about is called Amazon x-ray. They should just put the facts in there. Yes
That's what I would be most interested in those facts when I'm actively watching it
You pause like 10 minutes into the movie, you know when Russell Crowe died at the end of this then he blah blah blah
spoiler
That's a real concern yeah
This could be just like an add-on to subtitles or like an app and like, you know, if you get some title thing, yes
- Put it during the movie. - What's the trivia going?
- Yeah. - It listens to the audio on the movie
and then like a thing pops up.
Maybe you could do this on your phone, right?
It just listens to the audio or time syncs up
and now you just have that going at the same time.
- Zoomers are reading and watching TikTok and stuff
while having their movie on anyway.
So put it on the screen that they're actually looking at.
I love it.
- I love that, yeah.
'Cause if I'm watching, let's say I'm watching a movie
for like the third time 'cause I'm with a group
and they've never seen it.
I would love to pull out my phone and learn all these facts,
but they probably don't want to be distracted by all these facts
while they're watching a movie for the first time.
And so I can pull it out and still enjoy by learning a bunch more stuff
that I didn't know.
Are you going to be able to hold your tongue though?
Hey guys, did you know Vigo actually broke his toe?
Yeah.
We'll call the app Pompous Critic.
You guys wouldn't believe this.
Hey, hey, hey, guess what?
Guess what?
Shut up.
All right, Russell, what do you got?
- That's awesome.
Okay, mine is extremely like illegal and borderline
not helpful to society, but we'll see how this goes, okay?
This is why it's an intramural, all right?
So I knew a guy, I know some folks that are trying to get,
stay in the United States with their H-1B
and try to get an H-1B visa.
Now it turns out all you need to qualify for that
is a good enough job title to get through the bureaucracy
of the government.
So why not just create an app slash company, kind of like--
you guys remember that one movie about the college that
wasn't real and you got degrees?
Yeah.
That's what I'm trying to do with a company.
What kind of business would exist
that would just hand out pompous titles to interns?
Ringcam.com.
So I think this would be funded by parents of people whose kids go to school and want
them to stay in the United States to get opportunities.
So you create fake kind of jobs that are paid for by the rich parents of those kids and
you take a commission and all you're doing is making fake job titles until they find
their real job.
So now they're like an engineer, a mechanical engineer
for Box Tech Guru.
LLC.
OK, that's the company.
See, completely white label, and that's it.
I feel like you're just describing
a new level of Ivy League college admissions.
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
This business, this app could have just
like a portfolio of shell companies
that it's assigning people to and stuff.
Constantly shifting.
Although, Ring Cam-- or Ring Cam, oh my god.
LinkedIn recruiters are going to hate you.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, we're looking for a VP of engineering over here.
This guy looks great.
He was-- his parents paid for the VP of engineering position
in my company, so--
Vice president and a freshman in college.
Amazing.
Dude, yes.
Internships, you know, it's basically
fraud paid for by my app.
So simply put, you know, it makes me think,
you know, when Twitter shut down, right?
How many people could totally say they worked at Twitter
and got laid off by-- - You couldn't verify it.
- That's right, who's gonna verify that?
- No one's gonna call Twitter, yeah.
- For three years, actually, guys.
- Did you really, wow. - I was their
head of product, yeah, I know.
- Head of product. (laughs)
- I saw that with a lot of Toys R Us managers, too.
- Yeah. - There we go, right?
That's it. - That's fantastic, Russell.
I love that.
Yep.
A close cousin to tax fraud as a service,
pitched many, many episodes ago.
I love that.
That one was legal.
Visas as a service is pretty bad.
Visify.
Do it.
You got first this week, Scott.
All right.
I do not have children.
All three of you have children.
This is an idea for people with children.
I want to know if this is a good idea or a bad idea.
I spent last Thanksgiving with nieces and nephews.
They are at ages where indoor voices are a thing that has to be reminded to them quite a bit
It got to a point where I'm wondering could we just put like a decibel meter on the wall or just like a bar
You just say hey if this bar crosses this threshold three you get three strikes and if it hits it too many times then
Something happens. You lost your gold star for the day. Yeah, I don't I don't know something along those lines
That is as far as I got with that idea
Would this work? Because it's not a shot collar.
It's not a shot collar.
Yeah, well, the hard, you could make this in an afternoon and then make a website and just start selling these out if you get a little TikTok movement going.
Would this sell? Would it work?
You know, Scott, that is, I think that's a phenomenal idea because we do something very similar with our oldest, Lena, getting out of bed.
She's got a nightlight that we can control from our phones, and she knows that if the light is not green,
she is not allowed out of her room. It turns green when it's her wake-up time, you know, and
it works. Not all the time, but it works. So...
All hail the light.
That's a great idea.
You know where this would be useful for? You should sell this to schools. Put it in their cafeteria,
keep the volume below this certain level, put it in the classroom. Hey, don't forget, we're in yellow mode right now, kids,
So quiet voices put it on the hallway as you're walking by all that stuff
Yeah, yellow mode it like moves the max threshold down or something like hey, it's yeah
Remember, we're in a zone two and there's four zones. You can't go above that or whatever
They literally have that at my son's elementary school. They'll be like, hey, we're walking through the hall
So we're at level two for our quiet voices right now or whatever and no hard way to know right?
Yeah, yeah, it's just it means nothing right to quantify it for them
Yeah, I mean you got you got you got schools you got daycares you got I mean everything
every classroom
Your case will be thrown out old man
Honestly, this could be it this could be a solution for the for the detriment of open office concepts that have plagued our working
Society even oh
Yeah, just stop talking
Yeah, right cuz libraries secretary of state
Gamified decibel meters. This is fun. Yeah, I think kids forget or they just don't even know that their voices are so loud
Exactly what was happening all the time all this past adults - I
Have several people in my life that escalate each other to the point where they're screaming at each other
Yes
So, how do you make it not into a game that the kids are trying to you know
If you see like us one of those signs that tells you how fast you're going
How does the kid just not want to hit that?
Scott this is what you do you put a bowl of Skittles and as they scream
Skittles just pour into a blender and dissolve in front of them
And the law it just like hundreds of Skittles and then let's start screaming no
But then they stop immediately because they don't want more Skittles to honestly, you know
Blender makes so much noise that it keeps the blender going
Skittle drops in to the bull right or something
So if you stay below the meter only one you get a skittle you get a ski or like some version of that, right?
But then as soon as they scream hundreds of skittles just burn into a fire dog treat
That's the loud light platinum version, you know, you get that you get the blender and the skittles
-The loud light. -The loud light.
-Or you do fake coins for a pizza party.
You want to get boring with this, right?
You get the fake money dollars. -I'm going to pour some Skittle blenders.
-Pour the money out when the coin-- People are too loud.
That would be-- -Yes, hang up their favorite stuffed animal
above the blender.
-It just lowers a little bit each time.
-No.
He's--
-Woofie, no.
- We're trying not to scar another generation.
- Well then don't yell.
- Don't yell.
(laughing)
- You remember what happened to your doll's little toesies.
- It's your trauma.
Guys, I literally was joking with Gary,
my daughter's 14 months,
and she only knows how to scream
at the top of her lungs for anything.
And I'm like, do they have bark collars for their daughters?
They just, like a little vibration to know,
oh, that's a little loud, right?
Not like a shock collar, but like--
That's what shock collars can do.
This is much better, Scott.
I think it's--
I want it on record.
I did not recommend shock collars for children
in this idea at any point.
No, no, no, we're changing the episode title.
Shock Collars for Kids by Scott.
[LAUGHTER]
The louder they get, the shockier it gets.
All right, Leo, what do you got for us this week?
It's so funny.
My main idea that I was going to bring before you even said
anything about this is also a LED-based information
visual for kids.
Oops, all LEDs.
Oops, all LEDs for kids.
So I want to solve the age-old generational problem of the,
are we there yet in the car?
I think we could make an LED bar, a strip of some kind that
goes behind the passenger and driver's seats on the ceiling
that represents the map data progress toward our destination.
So you program in on your phone or whatever,
we are headed from here to here,
it's gonna be a 23 minute drive,
and you just got like the dots traveling from left to right
that they can see, oh, we're about halfway,
or oh, we got a long way to go still,
or look at that, we're almost here.
It could do five minute warning,
like gentle breathing blinkings.
It could do your turn signal, we're about to turn,
so it lights up on one side for a minute.
You could just to communicate, where are we on our journey
to the backseat passively so that you
stop having that we're almost there conversation or the dad,
how long left?
Dots on the road.
I immediately think this is like Pac-Man.
Like Pac-Man is eating all these treats going.
So let's bring Russell's Skittle idea.
Every time you hit one of those dots on the map,
a Skittle comes out.
As long as you've been quiet.
Shoots at their face, one mile intervals or something.
I need a decibel meter from your company, Scott, in my car.
Hey, that's a good spot for it.
So so this might get way too complicated to expand on the idea.
Yeah, please.
But like, so my kids, we have a DVD player right in our in our minivan that we, you know, have a bunch of DVDs for for the kids on long road trips.
And what if what if the speed of the movie synced up to the time it takes to get to the destination?
So the movie ended right when you got there.
You stick in all the bonus scenes and you loop a couple times here and there.
Or it's just like picking from your media library from the hundreds of movies.
Recommend any of these movies will fit.
If we grab this, this, and this episode, it'll be exactly 38 minutes or whatever.
That's cool.
Dude, I want that for like airplanes and stuff.
That's a great idea.
Well, little kids, if it's a little faster, if the movie, you know, vocals go a little
faster or a little slower, they're not going to notice.
I mean, they're watching like Shrek and stuff, and it's like, you know, they don't care.
And so I would also absolutely try to break that system to be like, I'm going like down the street, play Shrek.
Let's go.
Hey, donkey!
[mimics donkey]
[laughter]
Somebody once told me the world's gonna roll me.
[laughter]
End credits.
[laughter]
I love that.
No, the LED progress bar, Leo, is so smart.
Yeah.
I think I've pitched before like LED countdown timers for kids to visualize that just around the house
So this is kind of a natural extension
Maybe it's even something you could take in the house and turn into the 10-minute timer for just everyday life - I don't know
Yeah, I mean use it for timeouts
Right now your timeouts gonna be five minutes this time ten minutes a modernized
controllable sand timer that's synced up to
Your you know Google Maps that you've pulled up for your driver destination thing
That's yeah, that's genius because then it doesn't have to be a car. It can be anywhere
You can sync it up no matter the setting. That's great. Yeah, you make a smart sand timer adjusting the aperture
I guess between the two I don't know how to do that now like somehow measuring the weight or something
I don't even know how that would work. I have seen people do like the falling sand visualizations on
LED matrix matrices, so you could probably have like a digital display that's, you know, simulating sand or something, but that's not as cool.
We love physical representations of digital data on this show.
It'd be a great app to add, like, as a, I feel like there's little menus you can add to your iPad while they're watching a
show at the same time as, like, your LED time.
So instead of doing physical, you could just be watching your show and there's an overlay of your, of your drive on top of it
That's like oh two minutes left so that show is gonna be done
My kid loves to wait until the show's over before he gets out of the car
There was a fit. You know what I mean? It's like it's just it's not it's not sass. It's TAS time as a service
But if you have a 45 minute drive
Then you're right Marc turning that 48 minute show into a 45 minute show is easy stretch it by 1.01
speed or whatever and you're good to go right? Yep. That's fun. That was some
quick math I just did. I don't know. That works out perfectly.
Russell what do you got for us this week? So I'm driving around a lot and I see a
lot of empty lots and every time I see these commercial empty lots I'm like man
I'd love to put a coffee shop there or a taco truck or something like that
that right but the thing is it's such a high risk to put something in that
location so I would love to do pop-up trial trucks as a service right so if
you want to launch a coffee company in this spot you pop up a food truck
that's there 24/7 or whatever or like a you know you bring in the Amazon house
place your bagel shop there and run it for three months now whoever is
co-interested in that experience, shares in that risk and that investment.
So you're just the service that provides the business, literally business in a box for
those given locations and you share in the profits and earnings.
And that's, that's, it's, yeah, it's kind of like...
Russell, that's amazing.
Oh, and it's house shopping.
I'm looking at like modular homes, like, they're like, you can get very high end, crazy nice
houses now that they're just like pick in place put together on there just do
that with stores just like I'm gonna turn this empty lot over here into a
Starbucks or some equivalent coffee shop three different pieces come together all
out of shipping containers set it up for temporary all you need is a concrete
platform Tom Scott's lateral podcast is a like a puzzle lateral thinking thing
and they had a question on there what is it that White Castle did to insulate
themselves from rent hikes and failing store locations and stuff.
And they've done this where the entirety of a White Castle store,
more or less all their locations can be put on a truck and moved.
So if they're like, if they have a landlord that hikes up the rent of the lot
too much or their location isn't doing well, they can just like move down the
street or across town or whatever with the same building.
That's yeah.
You want to like White Castle-ify the, the idea of trying a business for the first time.
Yeah.
That's so fun.
And there's so many like empty lots now, I feel like, or spots where like,
"Oh, I want to launch a coffee shop, but I want to make sure it's going to be cool,
valid," you know, like foot traffic.
You're making all these assumptions.
You just de-risk.
You only need like three or four different types of stores too.
Like your classic restaurant, your classic like commerce store.
Coffee one would be its own.
Oh man.
Like bubble tea locations, like all these like unique little things that are like,
Oh, that'd be cool.
Or like crumble cook.
I mean, I don't know why crumble cookie is just killing it everywhere
because I guess cookies, but like.
It's because weed's legal.
There's definitely a correlation there.
Boom, a weed truck.
You could just roll up in a weed truck, right?
Test the location, you know?
Yeah.
But how unique do these different designs need to, I mean, if you want to try out
a Froyo shop versus a bubble tea place, that can be the same building, right?
Like you don't, it doesn't need to have a ton of specialized exterior layout or whatever.
Right.
Exactly.
I'd say you just keep the exact same building.
It's supposed to kind of be janky.
If you are not providing a good enough product to get past the jankiness,
that's telling you a lot already.
Right.
Sure.
The brand isn't perfect and like the quality isn't great maybe, but if you
you still get foot traffic and people coming to the store,
it means there's something there, right?
- You're doing something right with your product.
- You're filling a gap.
- Yeah, 'cause the type of companies that you're describing
are, it's really, really difficult to prove
that you have a good solution and a valuable offering
before investing a bunch of money in an actual location.
So that's great.
- Like Subway, like even Subway franchise locations, right?
Like I think franchises should be our huge customer of ours
to help de-risk their costs as well.
'Cause they're, I think, sharing in some of the investment
or the brand equity, right?
So if you're just launching Subways everywhere
and half of them shut down,
well, it looks bad for the brand.
So make a, you know, we create like a Subway truck
that goes to random locations and sees if people
or modular home sees that people are gonna roll up to that.
You post up for three months and move on, right?
- I think it needs to be longer than that
because our small town here had a Popeyes move in
about two years ago and I've never seen it in my life
where a drive-thru line goes out to the road,
in, wraps around the building once,
wraps around again to the window,
a double-layered drive-thru wrap,
And now, two years later, empty, totally gone.
Raising Cane's up in Grand Rapids,
open last week or a couple weeks ago,
same story, just line out the door.
I think it's not gonna be lined down the street
in three months, right?
So you need to get over that initial hump
of it's got novelty to it, everyone wants to try it
'cause it just moved in,
and see what the actual traffic will be like
like six months or a year down the line, you know?
- That's true, that's so true.
You can just pick up and move.
Oh, and you still make the money.
You're like, you're still ran a successful business
for a year, but you quit while you were ahead.
- Or you even test, you wanna be Subway,
why don't you put in like Bob's Generic Sandwiches
in that spot for a year, see if people like it,
and if they don't, then you know that's not a good spot
for your Subway or vice versa.
Wow, there was a lot of sandwich demand
on this side of whatever.
- I was even thinking like, what if you partnered
with companies who are closed during the times
where you want to be open.
And so if I have a dinner type restaurant idea
and a local coffee shop is never open after 4 PM,
can I strike a deal with them to set up my pop-up shop
or even just use their location, quick rebrand in the evenings?
They get to split in my revenue.
I'm not interfering with their business because they're closed during that time
anyway. How many restaurants in Holland are closed on Sundays or Mondays? Like
that's like a staple thing. Like all the restaurants in Holland closed on
Mondays, right? So just replace those with a temporary pop-up. That's great. I just
pull a lever and all the signs like flip from like Mr. Hughes to something else.
Yeah. That makes me wonder like how many other synergies are there between you. Yeah, it's a good, yeah exactly.
It is. There are, you've got your coffee versus, you know, that they always close at 2 p.m. or whatever.
I wonder what other yin and yang businesses could go together like that. That's interesting.
Breakfast places and dinner places, right? Naturally.
Yeah, we've got a couple greasy spoon diner type places that I think close after lunch. You could have your fine dining
in the same run down whatever for dinner.
Yeah.
I wonder if you do that seasonally too.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
So, I mean, there's like Grand Haven, Holland.
Those are tourist towns in the summer.
And, you know, engagement customers plummet in the winter.
So if you had, you know, seasonal yin and yang business ideas.
Cross country ski shop over the winter and...
Yeah.
Find and see food place in the summer.
This is kind of like the spirit Halloween model
Yes
So warehouse for 11 months of the year one month they take over an abandoned warehouse and sell it all
Marc close us out. What do you got? What's your billion-dollar idea? Oh boy. No pressure
Okay, so
This is an homage to Ringcam because I was trying to narrow down what I wanted to talk
about and I had an idea that's wedding related.
So there was a season of my life a few years after I graduated where every single person
I knew was getting married.
So I had a couple summers straight where nearly every weekend I was at a wedding or actually
standing part of the you know party whatever.
And I noticed a huge trend where no wedding ever goes according to plan.
There's always delays, there's always miscommunications, no one knows what's going on.
And so I'm sitting in a parking lot with the whole bridal party of a wedding and we're
standing outside and we're supposed to go into the reception area and we're being told
to wait and we've taken no pictures yet.
We have no idea what's going on.
And we sat there for 45 minutes and everyone was like, I wish we had a way to know what
was going on.
So enter in the, I don't have a creative name for it yet, but a wedding, a wedding day planning
app.
Okay.
So here's how it goes.
Start to finish.
You're invited to a wedding and you get invited and you get access to, to this app, this website,
And you are classified by your role in the wedding just an attendee on the bride or the groom side
A part of the wedding party, you know groomsmen bridesmaid
best man, whatever
and
You're put into those groups and not just the wedding planner that they hired
But the bride and groom and everyone can all communicate with the specific parties that need to know information
Whenever something happens so through that app you get the full itinerary
You get messages from the planner like, "Hey, we're delayed 20 minutes.
Something happened.
Hey, now everyone, notification.
You got to go over here.
It's going to take 10 minutes.
Just a reminder, we're meeting over there."
And so it is a way for the wedding planner to communicate with each group if schedules
change, which they always do.
Everyone can get notified, especially in messages that apply to particularly your role in the
wedding.
And then on the opposite side as an attendee or as the actual person getting married, it
becomes a way for everyone to share all of the pictures, all of the footage, all the
videos that everyone who attended the wedding took and captured.
And so when Anne and I, my wife, got done with our wedding, we had all the photographer's
pictures that we hired and we got a few sent to us from friends and stuff.
But there are hundreds of pictures, special moments that got captured that we will never
see, never know about.
And if everyone used this app as a, not just a planning coordinating app, but as a data
dump for wedding footage pictures, we would be able to look through all of that stuff.
We'd be able to see it, save the ones we liked.
And so it's not just for the wedding planner, but also for all the attendees to share, comment,
whatever.
It's a full-blown wedding day planning app.
And we're gonna scale it, we're gonna get the user base,
we're gonna ride it for about two to three years,
and then we're gonna sell it to the not.
- Yeah, yeah, or Zola or whatever.
- They would love this.
- This could translate one for one
with complicated family vacations
that you're bringing in additional people to,
or family reunions, or any situation
where you're trying to coordinate more than six people
who are not immediate family onto a schedule of some kind,
right?
Just have a giant sign at the entrance of whatever
the event is with a big QR code and be like,
scan this immediately, log in here,
and then all your info in one spot.
Could be web-based.
Yeah, web-based, honestly.
Man, I love this idea because I think during the wedding,
my wedding, everybody was texting me or my wife about,
hey, just we're friends, right?
So obviously, you can tell me where to park.
"What table am I at?" or whatever.
- Yeah, just those little things
that doesn't seem like a big deal
when you're texting your buddy,
but you realize, oh, they're getting texts
from hundreds of people that day probably, right?
And they're all more important than your stupid little
where do I go text, right?
This would be, I think the group,
the tagging of what party you're in is so helpful,
because if my parents were in that group chat
or saw those posts coming in,
they would be able to respond,
Or somebody, like kind of that group thinking,
would be like, right, where is everybody?
Some actual escalation inside there.
Keep a ticket system.
You've been escalated to tier two tech support.
It's grandma.
She's on it.
Uh-oh, tier three.
You're over to the sister-in-law.
Patching in wife.
Honestly, though, if it had the itinerary,
you could be blocking off, like, at this time,
the big headline on the front page of my wedding app
is this is where parking is.
And when this block happens, that's
You're like guiding the person through the day, right?
All the attendees, that's awesome.
- Yep.
- I think making that agenda is so hard though.
I think looking back though,
I would have loved to like think through,
like you have to kind of pretend to be the person
that's at your wedding.
Did they get the hotel?
Did they get their gift bag?
Are they, like you have to literally go through three days
of this person's life in order to figure out every step.
And it's always the minor inconvenience
that can throw everybody off, right?
Like, how do I get back to the hotel room
after the wedding, right?
You had this whole thing planned out with the caterer,
but you just didn't communicate it through the agenda
because you just forgot that line.
And then now the hive mind has to communicate out,
like, everybody just tell everybody
there's a shuttle coming every 20 minutes
or something, right?
Like, that's hard.
And I think, I guess what I'm saying is like,
the agenda making, the parking stuff,
these are for all the, it's like Reddit
for this wedding, right?
People randomly post stuff and randomly comment,
and it can be anonymous.
I don't know if it has to be anonymous or not.
The chattering board or whatever, yeah.
I don't know if I want my family commenting
or ability for them to comment.
(laughing)
Russell, you bring up a great dynamic.
So we've talked about communication with different parties,
but what about the day of Corb Daters communication
with vendors?
like the catering, the DJ, the minister,
everyone's added in that, the photographer,
and they can communicate with each of those people
for coordinating things.
'Cause I mean, day of wedding coordinators are huge.
Like that is, everyone's getting them now.
And so that's having that person be able to communicate
with all the vendors and set the entire invite list up
to communicate with one another.
this is the centralized place to like have all their phone numbers and know
when things are arriving. It's getting calendared. It's getting, yeah,
you're getting task lists like, okay, flowers have arrived,
but where is this thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And I like out of the building or something.
One in one thing that I don't like about the way things like this are currently
handled is I don't want to group chat that is time bound. Yeah.
They are so annoying and you know, they're just blasting in messages while they're active.
And this is a, this is a short duration type thing.
And to have that all within an app that also contains all the information about the wedding
so that I'm not dealing with like Facebook messenger or like a group chat on my phone.
Everyone's communicating via this interface.
That's great.
I think that's your model.
through the vendors, like you're talking as a couple
to all these vendors, the vendors would pay maybe
into this service for whatever reason, right?
Whether it's to talk to other vendors,
but then you as the bride and groom get this benefit
of agenda, day of wedding coordinator, group chats,
all that jazz, right, for free and included
because you're working with that vendor.
The vendors upselling that as a free service to what,
Like, if you cater with me, you get this awesome app as well.
Yes.
That's good.
And then now the caterer also has control
over the photographer, like a little bit
of that communication.
So it all comes together.
I only pick people on Prime.
I only pick people with this service, my vendors.
Yeah.
I was going to pitch a much worse version, which is you
are the couple, you're looking at it,
and oh, this florist has paid to be like--
have you thought about this kind of whatever?
This is like the catalog of services for you to pick from,
and they're advertising for places in there, you know?
But I feel like you having like recommended partners and stuff that are curated is way
better than just another place to show ads.
Yeah.
I think, yeah, I think the person this gets sold to is the wedding planner slash day of
coordinator.
Yeah.
And then they offer it to their clientele as an add on service, uh, or they just use
it behind the scenes just for vendor communication stuff.
And yeah, that's, uh, it's like a,
Like an Asana or monday.com or whatever, but hyper specific to like agendaing.
It's a project management tool, but specifically for event coordination and
planning, I wonder if something like that exists already.
That's cool.
Yeah.
And if you, as like a, like, let's say I'm the one getting married.
If all the wedding planner told me was, Hey, if you use this app, you'll be able
to collect everyone's photos and videos and everything like that from everywhere.
I would, I would instantly be like, Oh yeah, of course.
Like I'm gonna do that and you can white label to like you go to
Bob and Diane calm and it's actually powered by this
It's a you know website generator and there's a view for vendor of you for coordinator view for a party of you for guests
Regular guests totally. Yep. That's great. I think your exit strategy should be buying the not not getting bought by them
CEO
Just walk away.
Done.
Well, to your listener, if you are listening to this while looking through your scrapbook
of wedding planning ideas, thank you very much for joining us, and we hope you enjoyed
yourself.
And thank you so much, Marc, for joining us.
This was really fun.
Thank you for having me.
That's a banger idea.
We'll have to have you back for one of those other 50 ideas from your book.
Our website is Spitball.show.
There you can find our YouTube channels, other social media.
Hey, if you have an idea, record a pitch and send it as a voice memo or however it is that you record stuff over to podcast@Spitball.show and we might discuss it on the show.
That's also how you can follow us on the Fediverse such as Mastodon. We are podcast@spitball.show or on Bluesky @Spitball.Show.
Our subreddit is r/SpitballShow.
Our intro/outro music is "Swingers" by Bonkers Beat Club.
Please, if you wouldn't mind, that one friend who is in the throes of wedding planning and
really needs some levity in the stress that comes with getting that organized, send them
a link to this episode.
We think we would love to have them as a listener and they might enjoy this one.
Also leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever it is that you get your
podcasts.
New episodes coming out in two weeks.
We will see you then.