Problem: Every location has a history, however it extremely difficult to learn about that history if you don’t know the right people.
Solution: The goal of this business would be to free the history of locations from temporal bounds: why is it that you need to network to talk to the past tenant who used to live in your apartment to know more about it? When traveling how do you learn about the most local, secret spots? Where would you go to discover the life-changing stories that happened at your local coffee shop?
This business would bring ghosts to life by allowing people to “drop” messages for future individuals to read or by allowing individuals to communicate around a common location-based phenomenon or object in real time.
There are a multitude of profitable applications for such a technology: apartment tenants could pay to chat with past apartment tenants, romantic partners could pay to talk to past romantic partners, restaurateurs can pay to chat with past owners, and more. It could also expand to be an app for the service industry broadly (HVAC, Garage Door, plumbers) for workers to rate customers and vice versa. “Much needed and I know a bunch of people who would subscribe,” remarks Danny W.
It would be Glassdoor for everything.
Some existing competitors in this space include PocketList (Find your next rental months before it’s listed), OpenIgloo (an app allows NYC renters to rate their apartment buildings), or Good Neighbour (“Learn about your future home from the neighbours. Share your experiences anonymously”). Of course, there is also the low-tech competitor of just knocking on doors and ask the current residents. Where this business has an opportunity to thrive, however, is by focusing on a market outside of just apartments and housing.
In chatting with Elizabeth Petrov, we expanding this idea one-degree further. In order to make technologies like AR useful, there will eventually need to be a technology platform that allows users to “drop” and “pick-up” digital notes from other people in the world. Perhaps this business could focus on building out a next-generation “Ghost Advice Platform” which would be a way for strangers to share the beautiful moments they’ve experienced with each other. It would be Pokémon Go but with notes of real-world experiences rather than with Pokemon.
Monetization: Pay-per-view of dropped advice or a subscription to be connected directly to the person who dropped the note / piece of advice.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)