3 Initial Studio Concept Ideas

One of the more popular questions about The SaaS Startup Studio is regarding what ideas we’re evaluating for our first studio companies. Great question! Before sharing the ideas, it’s important to note that most people would say wait(!), don’t share the ideas because someone could steal them. Ideas are common, execution is uncommon.

Here are three initial studio concept ideas:

1. Tax Credit Management Platform
   States issue billions of dollars of tax credits per year that are turned around and sold through brokers at a discount to their value so that a portion can be realized immediately. Take the film tax credit it Georgia. Most companies that get the tax credit don’t pay enough taxes to use it all, so they sell it to other tax payers for 90 cents on the dollar (e.g. you get a $500,000 income tax credit based on expenses but only have $50,000 of state income tax bills, so there’s $450,000 left over to sell to someone else). Imagine a SaaS platform similar to Carta/eShares that keeps track of who has what and also doubles as a marketplace to bypass the middleman so that the seller gets more money and the buyer pays a lower price.
2. Restaurant Ordering and Delivery Routing Platform
   With the rise of UberEats, Postmates, GrubHub, Caviar, DoorDash, and others, there’s tremendous competition to deliver food. Only, the delivery company owns the relationship leaving the restaurant without knowing their customer. Finally, combine that with delivery marketplaces having unique incentives (e.g. sign up a new customer and get $10), driver availability, and quality control creating an opportunity to route orders to the best delivery platform based on different attributes. Imagine a SaaS platform for online restaurant ordering where the restaurant owns the relationship with the customer (build loyalty!) and then routes the delivery of the order to the best service based on business rules (e.g. if UberEats has the shortest delivery time right now, give them the order).
3. Human Presence System
   Open workspaces have put increased pressure on conference rooms, meeting rooms, and phone rooms. Combine the increased demand with the age old problems of people scheduling rooms too long, scheduling rooms and then not using them, and not being able to find a room ad hoc. Imagine a SaaS platform that connects to off-the-shelf cameras (e.g. Nest Cam) and uses machine learning to figure out if someone is in the room. Then, it displays a visual layout of the floorplan with open and occupied rooms highlighted and it interfaces with resource management systems like Google Calendar (e.g. if room scheduled for 90+ minutes and no person present after 15 minutes, release the room for someone else to book it and record that person as a no show).

These are three ideas we’re currently considering as well as several more (we have a large Google Sheet of ideas). Remember, ideas are easy — the hard part is executing well, finding product/market fit with a must-have product, and timing the market just right.

If you know a potential Studio Entrepreneur, please let us know as we’d enjoy talking.