Friday, September 16, 2011

Startup Ideas I Would Fund

A couple of years ago, Y Combinator had a list of startup ideas they would like to fund. I thought it might be fun to come up with a list of interesting ideas for interesting problems I would fund! Here it is:

Problem: Teachers, especially in public school, sometimes aren't as motivated to teach and inspire their kids after they have been tenured. To me, teachers who aren't doing a really good job are having a very negative impact on the future of our society.
Idea: Some way to hold teachers accountable to doing a great job after they have been tenured or incentivize teachers to do a better job.

Problem: Kids who aren't motivated to do their best in school. A lot of times I've seen kids with a lot of ability not do well in school. For me, that's very tough.
Idea: Some way not involving money to motivate kids to do well in school. This could be as simple as a blog, tailored to kids, helping them realize their potential. Kind of like a TechCrunch for success.

Problem: A number of high schools and middle schools do not have programming or computer science courses. I think schools should be required to teach programming starting in sixth grade. One problem with this is that hiring computer science teachers or full-time web developers to teach kids how to code is expensive.
Idea: Some sort of site that school districts can pay for so their students can complete computer science exercises, become interested in coding, and learn how to make their own web apps or software applications. I think Codecademy has a chance to do this. Right now, their courses are simple. But, if they develop a set of courses that allow kids to become good at coding in javascript, and then create a set of courses that allow kids to learn Rails really well in a fun way, I know I would pay a $100 fee for the service if they had those courses.

Problem: I want to know where my twitter followers are coming from, and receive analytics about how my followers are engaging me. I know I would pay $5 to $10 a month for something like this.
Idea: Personal social media analytics, focused on twitter. A way to see how your followers found you (from a website, a post with a hashtag, a retweet, or on someone's twitter page). This would help me increase my followers and focus on areas where I could be getting more followers.

Problem: Many professionals and consultants do not have professional looking websites. I've noticed through research that a large number of consultants, and professionals such as therapists do not have websites, or the websites they do have don't look too professional.
Idea: A way for professionals who schedule appointments, speaking times, and consulting time to make professional one page websites with Google Calendar integration so people who come to these sites can schedule appointments.

If I had money to invest as an angel in startups, I would definitely invest in companies solving the problems on this list. Hopefully, in a few years I will be able to invest in tech companies that help people and businesses solve real problems. Right now, I'm working on helping businesses turn new customers and non-frequent customers into repeat customers who come often. You can follow my business @YumOrder.

You can follow me @kaufman_jack.

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