Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

18 May 2014, 8:50 a.m.

Bad Startup Ideas

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2014 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

  • Fleeing As A Service: hook up a FitBit to Uber so that, if the user becomes stressed enough that her physiology reflects it, a cab shows up to "nope" her out of there
  • Match.com/Idealist/Duotrope's Digest/RightSignature/SlideShare mashup to help do-gooders write grant proposals
  • A device that performs a Shazam-like service on the muffled vibrations coming through neighbors' walls and hooks it up with the user's Last.fm-type account to figure out whether said neighbors are listening to music the user likes and thus whether she should try to make friends with them (e.g., Rockapella is an automatic yes)