Startup ideas for 2022
[You can also listen to me talking about these ideas with Jakob Greenfeld in his Business Brainstorms podcast]
Happy 2022! One of my (many) strange hobbies is to keep a list of ideas that I would like to explore one day. Each year this list gets larger and my availability gets smaller. This is why I want to share these ideas, in hopes that it will inspire someone to start their own company.
BTW, here are my startup ideas for 2021.
This year the focus is on remote-first ideas.
COVID had and will have a long-lasting effect on our lives and our businesses. More and more companies are remote-first or remote-friendly. As a result, companies hire employees anywhere. Not just in a 30-mile radius, but also in other cities, states, and countries. This trend opens the door to a lot of opportunities around corporate structure, employee management, and culture tools. Here are some of my ideas to focus on:
Talent discovery
How can I find the best talent anywhere in the world? Talent search has not been changed in ages. We still have old-school listing pages and job ads. There is a need to redefine talent discovery that is not bound by location. Companies like UpWork offer a huge marketplace with ratings and reviews. That's a good start, but we can do better. There is an opportunity to let people “port” their reviews, rating, interview performance, and knowledge between companies. How can I find the best back-end engineer who knows X and is willing to work for $Y?
Global compensation data
When everyone worked in the same region, comps were easy to put together. In our new remote era, people in the same team live anywhere on the globe. Some companies choose to adjust employees comps to their cost of living. That means that for the same position, someone in India will earn less than someone in the US. The problem is that companies need to have an up-to-date cost-of-living calculator to adjust salaries across the globe. When people can work from anywhere, they often move a lot so there is a need to keep a track of where they are and adjust their pay based on their location. Comps-as-a-service can be a great solution here. How can I know how much a junior front-end engineer earns in Poland?
Global benefits and perks logistics
Healthcare in the US is not the same as in Israel (cost-wise). How can companies ensure the same level of benefits and perks to their employees across different locations? Healthcare standards can be a big problem to solve, but you can start with distributing MacBooks and swag to all your employees around the globe.
SaaS manager
SaaS companies are everywhere. There are so many products a company can use. An average employee will probably use Slack, Spotify, Airtable, Gusto, G Suite, MS Office, Figma, VS Code, GitHub, and so many others... Managing all these providers per employee is difficult. Imagine hiring 20 employees/month, that’s a lot of work. Can someone build a Zappier for services?
Async-first culture
It's common to see ads for companies who hire "only in Europe". Others (like liblab) will hire globally as long as people are willing to work in the same time zones. To allow people from Thailand to work effectively with people from Brazil, we need better tools and processes for async communication. The less we rely on meetings the more we can be inclusive to other time zones. What tools can we build to enable async work? What processes can we put in place to replace meetings?
Virtual hangout
Face-to-face meetings are important to build trust and relationships between people. Now, you can work at a company for years without meeting your peers in person. How can we enable friendships in this remote environment? How can people just "meet" to have fun? Our current virtual offsites (usually trivia night zoom calls) are not there yet. It still feels like "work" and doesn't really feel the same as hanging out in person. What will be the "zoom for beer night"? (and please, don't just zoom and drink beer)
Offsite as a service
Remote companies bring teams together once a year/quarter/month. Setting up the logistics of offsite is difficult. You need to schedule flights for everyone, book a hotel, create some team-building activities, choose instructors, etc. There's a huge opportunity to be the "bookings for off-sites". As recurring offsites expenses replace the office expenses among remote-first companies, this half-travel half-business event organizing market will just get bigger. Who will own this domain?
Just do it
Are you interested in one of these ideas? Let me know, or better, ship it!