Friend of a Friend, Garage Carwash, and USB Buttons

(upbeat music)

- I'm Scott.

- I'm Russell.

- And I'm Leo.

This is Spitball.

(upbeat music)

Welcome to Spitball, the Pitchin' Kitchen,

where three lovable scamps, yours truly,

empty their heads of startup and tech product ideas

that we have stuck up in there

and you can all have them for free.

Anything we say is yours to keep.

Russell, you're up, go for it.

- All right, guys.

I've been sitting on this fresh idea for a long time.

It is a, so what's great about this idea

is it should be stolen because the three of us

are married men.

This is a dating app idea.

Scott, you are the winner of the dating app world.

So your feedback's highly anticipated.

- Okay.

- And married men cannot create dating apps.

We all know this.

- Nope.

- I guess not.

(laughing)

Definitely not, right?

So, okay.

Here's the problem.

And this is why I think about a lot of dating apps

because all of Carrie's friends, my wife's friends,

all are trying to get married, not married.

They're all trying to find people.

And every time, I feel like the women's side

of the dating app world really sucks.

I know for guys it does too, but like the unsolicited

- Extra sucks.

pigs, the un like there's just so much harassment or whatever on there.

I, I can't even begin to understand, but all I have to say is as a wingman in

training or a wingman extraordinaire, I am constantly seeking suitors for my

wife's friends.

Okay.

Sure.

So the reason, and so you're going to hear a lot as, as you subscribe to our

podcast, you're going to hear a couple of these dating app ideas because I got I

have a lot of them right.

This one is this one's a good one for your wife.

This one's a good one.

Russell's love corner.

So new second, OK, the dating app is called Friend of a Friend.

All right.

OK, so the idea is that you as the person that wants to find a suitor for your

friend, right?

Because basically if your best friend is trying to find a

boyfriend or whatever, they're going to become a part of your

friend group.

So why not pick and choose Spice Girl style?

If you want to be my friend's lover, you got to get with me.

Right?

So you're literally betting platonically, right?

Your wife's friends, perhaps potential significant others.

Yes.

Okay.

This is my dilemma that I'm solving with a dating app.

Couple rules, right?

It's basically you're posting pictures of you

with your friend, right?

And friends of friends are matching each other

to each other, right?

So for example, we got a friend,

his name is, we'll call him Phil, okay?

Guy named Phil.

I just want to say if I take photos with him, I am now able to post pictures of this person,

right?

So it kind of removes an element of scaminess, elements of, you know, bad behavior because

you're taking pictures with that friend, right?

So friend of a friend, someone is vouching for you.

Exactly.

Phil.

For Phil in this scenario, right?

And that's the goal.

So are you setting up all of your friends on the blind dates?

Are you picking the suitors for them and they are just sort of getting fed people that you've sent their way?

Best part here, because it's double dates. They're all double dates, right?

Oh.

Everything's a double date at that point because you meet somebody who's got a friend. I have a

friend. Now we're on a double date, right? Or a triple date.

You are productizing the actual experience that you're having over and over again here in real

life, going on all these double dates and trying to match people up in real life.

The end user isn't the people looking for significant others. It's you who has a

a friend who's looking for someone.

You are a broker.

Yes, you are the broker, the friend broker.

It's kind of like the realtor relationships, right?

You have a buyer, seller, you meet them in the middle and we match them, right?

And it's kind of like that.

So here's what's crazy.

I tried this out actually.

I started a Facebook group called Friend of a Friend with some of Cary's friends and immediately

when they heard about my idea, they started taking pictures of themselves in groups.

Like, so they like, oh, take a picture with me, take a picture with me. And I'm like,

well, it's like circle the person you're talking about in the group pictures.

Well, yeah, it's kind of like, all right, if you're gonna take pictures of me and post them,

I want you to find a person, we both need to look good, right? So now they're taking pictures of

both of them together. And they kind of like it, because it's fun to take pictures of themselves.

and it just, it builds on top of each other really well. But simply put, that's the app,

friend of a friend. Does the actual person who's getting

matched, the friend, are they using the app at all? Or is this entirely for-

Entirely- Friends only.

Friend, the friend is the only people on the app. Now, there's no rules behind what happens

outside the app, right? So if you're- Well, sure.

your friends in the room.

I found this, you know, but that person can't join.

So, I mean, they can, but they have to be soliciting a friend, I guess.

So they have to bring their own friends.

That's right. Exactly. Right.

Because when you first started pitching this, I was nervous

that this was just going to be an easily copyable feature

for the tenders and hinges of the world to just take and add into their own apps.

But you're fostering an entirely different community.

Brilliant. Brilliant.

And it's because people don't want to do dating apps,

but their friends want them to do dating apps.

And so there's this like niche of friends that want their friends to do dating apps.

But sure.

And especially like somebody like my wife and I love to do the dating apps

for their friends.

There's just it's fun to get a big group to help make a profile.

Yeah. And you know, let's lean into that.

Right. Let's create an app for that.

So great.

I mean, that's I. Yeah.

What do you, yeah, Scott, dating app extraordinaire.

What do you think?

Having multiple eyes on the profile is always good.

I I'm just picturing like that first date scenario, though,

because like right now it's Russell, it's you and Carrie

are trying to set up your friend, Phil.

So it's the three of you guys on one team

and you have randomly met with these other three people on another team,

we'll call it, and you all go out to get drinks together.

And it's going to be you and Carrie and the other married couple just staring at

your two friends the entire time.

Like, is there chemistry?

Do you like him yet?

How's he doing?

And then one of them goes to the bathroom and everyone else is just like, okay, okay.

Let's, let's break down what's happening.

Play by play.

How is that worse than a regular double date situation though?

Right?

I mean, that's still, does that still happen in 2023?

No, no, it's great.

I don't know if that still happens or not, but this at least creates a scenario where

can happen. That's a good point. That's a good point. I wonder how the actual dates would end up

going. Right? You might just go on one date, try the try the app, and you actually end up on a

date. And then you're just like, Oh, that was weird. Just like, all around. All right, I'm

ready to punch up your idea. So please, have you heard of the Hollywood Stock Exchange?

Hollywood. No, Hollywood Stock Exchange is a role playing like

fake stock trading app. But instead of trading stocks, you

are investing in celebrities when they're up and coming

trying to bet on who's going to be the big deal before they

actually become a thing. I imagine that if you are in

friend of a friend, and you fire up your your app, you're not

looking at just one friend's profile that you're trying to

set up right? You've got several. So can this be gamified

for the person who is creating profiles, this profile gets a

lot of interest because I've really worked hard on it. My

friend over here is looking great. My other one over here is

kind of a dud right now. How do we incentivize these profiles

and get punched up? I'll give you 21. It's like it's Pokemon

trading cards, but they're your friends, right? This is a super

ultra rare holographic Charizard because she's my hot friend.

Whoa.

So how do we how do we use this to our advantage to make each

profile on there better? Because the secret sauce of all dating

apps is having a good profile candidates, right?

Man, it's incredible.

Can we use this as a way to punch up each other's profiles

and turn it into a competition? And in addition to trying to

find the match, you know, you not only do you want to win

Pokemon battles by doing your match, but you want to make the best collection you can.

I will build the best friend group possible.

Oh my gosh, it's like wingman trading cards, right?

It's like, oh.

It's Queer Eye for all of your different friends, right?

You're going in and you're like finding the best photos you can of all of them.

You're creating your perfect deck.

It's a little bit dehumanizing, but.

So is Tinder, it's fine.

So is the dating apps, right?

So are all dating.

Just capitalizing on that more.

So it's it's a feed.

So it's like the feedback system there, right?

So in a way, how I guess you could use that now.

Like how do you create like a feedback loop that isn't that's more fun?

I guess more.

Sure like but Scott would never share his dating profile with like with our friend.

I would share my profile all the time.

You'd be like, guys, give me feedback on here.

Like, do I look stupid in this picture?

Like, what should I do for what should I,

is this a clever like description of myself or something?

Never show the messages though.

- You know, there's a world,

there's like a bunch of like rate me subreddits, right?

Like.

- That's how Facebook started, right?

- Right, hot or not. - Hot or not or whatever.

- Maybe there's an element of that too.

We bring like a, there's something there.

How do we gamify your hot friends? Your hot single friends?

I feel like we're on the cusp of something here,

but I don't quite know what it is. I know, right?

Or the person, the listener who's hearing this now,

we'll take that idea and finally put the cherry on top and become a trillionaire.

All right, Leo, what do you got?

All right, we're thinking big for this one.

Big hardware project.

- Oh boy.

- So, I want you to really think about your dishwasher.

Think about all the interior of it.

You've got, so you take out the racks.

We're not actually washing racks with this device,

but you've got an extremely efficient way

of using water to make a bunch of stuff that's dirty clean.

You've got a sprayer that recirculates.

You've got a heating and drying element.

Now we're gonna blow it up

and we're gonna put it in your garage.

This is gonna be an apparatus that we're installing

in our own home.

We might have to have some like tarp walls or something.

I haven't quite figured out boxing it in entirely.

But we live here in Michigan

where there's salt on the roads, right?

And you can't go to the car wash

unless it's above 30 degree day

and it happens to be sunny and happens to be nice.

What if every time you parked your car,

we had a small amount of water that's recirculated,

we are spraying it all over the car,

We are getting the undercarriage, we're getting all over,

and we are drying it with heating elements

every single time.

In a world where we are plugging in our cars to charge,

it's gonna be amazing when we start every day

with a clean, full tank,

ready to go off the lot looking car, right?

There's gonna be some mold to deal with,

but that's my pitch.

- We'll figure that part out.

- That part's the easy part, right?

The rest of the, everything else around it.

- Positioning of the sprayers and stuff,

it doesn't have to be exactly the same, right?

You gotta have a couple in the corner

and you got a couple on top and bottom,

but you don't need a ton of water to get something clean.

- Yeah, just like a two, maybe three axis arm

that comes down and just like very like

targeted sprays your car in certain areas of going through.

- A lot of garages have drains in them, that can be solved.

Most have like hose nearby.

- Actually, could you, I'm almost thinking,

Could you make this out of with less hardware, I guess, where less a full.

I'm, you know, immediately I'm picturing like a G code running, like 3d printer

thing, that's going over your car.

Uh, sure.

Could we just make it a single.

Standalone unit like that, uh, that robot and, uh, Iron Man, the little arm robot

that would always, it was the butt of all the jokes, could we just put a hose or

something on something like that?

And it'll just go around your car and actively clean it.

You know, like a room that takes a long time, but it doesn't matter because it's at night

while you're sleeping.

Yes.

Seems like a lot of moving parts.

And that makes so much sense.

I was thinking the opposite where we have one giant molded piece of plastic like those

sheds you buy at a hardware store, and you put that inside the garage as another layer

of a building within a building.

I wanted to overcomplicate it compared to your idea.

So Leo, you were saying one giant piece, right?

And there's like the 3D printer model.

Like all right, just a little spot where you just go up and down.

I guess like they have these, so for trucks, if you have like a truck camper, they have

the thing on top.

So like they actually have like lifts where you can like pulley system your, you know,

like the trucks have like covers.

Do you guys know what I'm talking about?

No, a cover.

Okay.

So, so trucks, like, you know, Ford F-150, they have the truck bed, but you can actually

buy like a roof.

Oh yeah.

Right.

Totally.

I thought you meant semi's.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah, no, just the truck.

F-150, right?

- Pickup truck.

- And you can buy something in your car,

in your garage, like lift it up, right?

So I guess you could just install,

let's say you put a hose, or a heater,

like a water heater at the top of your garage,

and then like one X-axis, one line, right?

And so as you're like backing into your garage,

or out of your, well I guess you could do forward and back,

but like you could do something where you're just,

as you're backing out, it's like turn on,

and it just rinses the car as you back out.

And then you're on the road.

- An archway with sprayers.

- Yes, an archway with sprayers, exactly.

- All right, new pitch.

You have an archway of sprayers

that you put on the garage door on the outside.

You hook up to your hose and it soaps it in, rinses.

- You can buy this. - It's just water.

There's no soap. - They have.

- Pulling it in and out a couple dozen times.

- They have this for like, what is it, weed and feed.

Like when you're doing the lawn,

you just attach like a soap module and there you go.

You got your monetization strategy, okay?

You only have to, you have the special hose hookup

that works with the archway and now it's like--

- Car wash pods.

- Yes.

- Your detergent pods.

How do we podify it?

- Honestly, there are enough people

that buy unlimited car washes that would just be like,

this is how I do my life.

- I'm a little worried about the exterior,

spraying down my driveway with water

every day in the winter move.

Yeah. - Salt?

- It sprays with salt water.

Perfect, corrodes your car away in like 18 months.

That's perfect.

Rusts out the frame right under you.

- That has some traction, Leo.

I'm surprised it doesn't exist.

It's just like, I mean, like it's one of those like.

- It feels like the kind of thing that you'd see on cribs

where some guy has a car wash in his garage and yeah.

- This seems like somebody in the South is like,

all right, I live on a farm, my truck gets dirty every day.

I need an invention that cleans my truck

every time I pull in, boom.

So like the reusable water element is an add on

because some people are just like,

I don't care, I leave my garage door open.

- The archway is a cool idea because it could go anywhere.

Like at the end of the driveway on my way out to the farm or whatever.

When I'm going in and out of this construction site, it goes up and it has

like all the dump trucks and shit that go through it.

Ooh.

Yeah.

Then they're, they're on the road.

There might be a commercial application.

That's, yeah, exactly.

Think about that B2B baby.

Right.

All right, Scott, what do you got?

Hit us up.

Okay.

So I'm also thinking product idea, but much smaller.

So I was scooting around Alibaba the other day.

I just love looking at that for random, like cheap products

that you can get from China and see how you can remarket it and whatnot.

And me too.

I came across this.

It it looks like like a that was easy button.

Really small.

And it's just a big button that you just want to press by looking at this thing.

But at the same time, I had a USB cable coming out of it.

And I'm like, what the heck is this thing?

And I realized, uh, it described it as a like marketing material that you have at

trade shows or something, and you put your logo on top on the button.

And what happens is that you take, you give these out to people and then they

plug it into their computer and when they hit the button, it'll open up their

web browser and go to your website.

I'm like, oh, that's cool.

Um, but then I saw one that had a button and an led inside of it.

So like when you press the button, the whole thing lights up.

And this is cool.

This is a lot of hardware for very cheap.

It is a button slash switch.

It's LEDs on here.

It's got a little microcontroller already built in that you can, that can automatically

download drivers and do whatever and connect to your computer.

Just like a, like a keyboard.

Like I can plug in a mouse and a mouse will just work through HID.

And so I'm thinking like there's got to be a lot of applications for something like this,

besides going to an open or besides opening up a URL for you.

And so I love playing RTSs, random video games, strategy stuff.

And when you're playing these, you're always looking at a million different things at once.

And I was thinking, is it possible we could write a Python script or something that is

looking at the screen and if I'm forgetting to do something in the game,

it'll just light up and alert me to be like,

"Hey, you didn't do this one thing."

It's an external alert light in order for you

to remember that you're supposed to be doing something in a game.

>> You want to give yourself a competitive advantage with hardware.

>> Yeah, exactly.

A hardware advantage on here.

>> Interesting.

>> If I'm just scraping the screen,

looking for certain things and maybe... Do those games know to look for

screen scraping, anti-cheat software triggering stuff? That is a great

question. Seems dangerous like you're gonna get banned. If you're just looking

externally to your screen on the pixels and it's not actually referencing

anything in the game, like I'm not going into the game's code to be like, "hey when

this certain trigger happens, light up that light." It's more of just, "this is on

on the screen and you didn't notice it.

So I'm going to flash an alert at you.

- This is okay.

This is so cool.

This is like, I could see this being used

for like any notification.

- Yeah, it doesn't have to be used for games or whatnot.

You just literally have a button slash light on your desk

that connects instantly to whatever you want.

- So like I have Slack notifications,

message notifications,

and I could have different light notifiers

based on whatever it is, right?

So orange lights, Slack, green lights, messages.

I could do something like add lights,

customize those lights.

It's, I mean, basically, so whether it's gaming, right?

So applying a gaming aspect to those lights,

it's just, yeah, notifications are annoying, right?

So I'm guessing your game--

- Let's add more.

- Well, it's just separate the notification out

to be more universal, effective, and minimalistic, right?

It's like, you don't need the whole slide bar,

the Slack branding and all the information about it.

I just wanna know, check my Slack in like a minute,

my messages, my Facebook, whatever.

And then you can flip, you can flip it to,

all right, I got, what does Apple have?

They have a focus mode.

You have work focus, you have play focus,

you can have sleep focus, right?

And you can apply and flip those profiles,

game mode, work mode.

Now you have Slack colors and you change those LEDs,

LEDs are what multi-colored out, right?

You just change those colors.

- Crazy part about this.

This is like RGB LEDs and button and plastic housing

and USB cable all for like $2.

- Wow.

- You could easily, it's so much hardware

for so cheap on this.

And they're using it to open URLs.

There's so many potentials on this.

Your Slack notification one, like it'll light up

and be like, you have a Slack message or something.

And then you could press the button and it opens it up.

- Slap it.

It's a stream deck distilled down to like the most core,

minimal interface that you can, right?

- One input, one output.

- Yeah.

- Well, I guess it's RGB.

You get as many outputs as you want.

- Press this one, grandma, when it's flashing

and that's how you get to your email.

- Oh, that's good.

Grandma, when this is flashing,

if when you press the button,

it'll open up a Facebook call with me or something.

- So like, okay, is this like, so what if, okay,

somebody rings my doorbell and I hear it

and you know what, I know who's coming over.

I can slap this button, boom, unlocks my door.

Like this is applied to anything, right?

Like Color Elite, I'm just thinking like easy,

you know, the easy button,

but make anything I think of easier, right?

- The hardware is done, it's just code at this point.

Random code changes

and you can make any application out of it.

- Open it up into an app store.

You got third party application people just like,

all right, Yale Smart Lock button,

add it to your button, done.

Plug unplug, right?

You just plug it into your dock,

assign the app, throw it on the wall.

- And then you have a recurring revenue thing

because you're, you know, selling a subscription

for a dollar a month or whatever.

Yeah, totally.

- Whoa.

- Dude, okay.

I bought these dumb ass, sorry.

I bought these buttons for my dog to talk, right?

- Oh yeah, I've seen those.

They look just like it.

- If you can apply,

Like those buttons are like 20 bucks.

I don't know.

They're insanely expensive.

Five bucks a pop, a pop, right?

And they're small and they just press the button and it's like, here's the word.

You could, it's just like, all right, now I'm like thinking in button world right

now, everything's a button and I'm seeing it with your ideas, like making

me think of everything as a button.

Why isn't, why isn't my light switch a button, right?

Why can't I press a button next to my nightstand to turn off the lights in my

house or activate a Google Home script or Alexa script to do all of these

things.

It's okay.

I think it starts getting really complex when you like, okay, well, next thing

we're going to make it wireless.

And, but if you make it wireless and you come into all these other hurdles of how

do I set up my button or

is this like NFC tags though?

How close are we to NFC tags?

This being, well, I guess no, it's not going to notify.

I think that's the special element.

It's like NFC tags plus that Google project. What was that called? Hold on. Little signals. Do you

guys remember Google's little signals, the experiment from last year? They talked about

an experiment that they did where there were these six different devices that would sit around your

house and they have very calm, like blend in with the environment, understated designs,

fabric and like matte plastic and stuff. And they were supposed to just sort of sit in the

background, but then very subtly changed.

Like this one gently blows air on the plants to remind you that you need to

water them.

Or this one has a really small like thing that raises up like the flag on a,

a mailbox to just remind you that you have to take out the trash this Tuesday

or whatever it was supposed to just sort of the little,

little subtle in the background notification, the type stuff you want to do that,

but also have it be like,

I walk up to it and I hit the button and I respond to this. I dismiss it.

I'm down in action on the thing you're trying to tell me.

I love that.

Oh man, it was.

I feel like there's a something with physical notifications.

Yeah, and I think if I think it's got to maybe be beyond

the plastic button and light.

I kind of like that.

Like maybe there's something else like action, action buttons

or something.

And I know Amazon did this.

I know, but there's there's something to it.

And I think people are.

Yeah, I think I think now is more.

I just more like this one because the hardware is so cheap.

And as long as you keep the hardware cheap and you don't expand into other things,

you have a huge margin, very simple to get into product idea.

And it sounds like you have a niche in mind, a need that you've already

identified in your own life.

I've got one niche on here that would be good for probably just me in the world.

But there's there's so many other little applications now that everyone,

more and more people are starting to work from home.

Like you could have something on your desk

that you actually have access to every day.

- Dude, I kid you not, like the buttons for like Slack

or Zoom or whatever, like just the quick, quick change.

Like that would be fire.

I would buy that up.

- Yeah, I think that's why Streamdecks

kind of took off in the pandemic.

People have their, you know, join, call, end call,

mute buttons all as a separate standalone

dedicated piece of hardware.

So it's a write-off is what you're saying.

Yes, exactly.

We got to sell this directly to Fortune 500 companies.

Every new employee at Best Buy gets a button for their,

every time they make a sale and it starts flashing at them when they

haven't done their janitorial rounds this hour.

All right, Russell, give me a thing that you often need quick.

Ziploc bags.

Oh boy, this is a narrow niche. Scott, tell me about your pitch for Uber for Ziploc bags.

Why should I invest in your new startup?

Oh God.

Uber for Ziploc.

Oh, frick.

Got it. Okay, this is – okay, you have a truck, like the ice cream truck. Okay,

It has everything that you would see at a gas station,

or a grocery store that you need.

Cup of sugar, cup of flour, stick of butter,

Ziploc bags, tin foil, propane, all that shit.

Just in the cup.

It's a--

- Ice cream truck for adults.

- Yes, 'cause adults need it the most.

- The adulting truck.

I'm so tired.

- Oh my God, is that the ice cream truck for adults?

- You can buy anything from diapers to weed

and it just comes right to your house.

(laughing)

- The weed truck. - What music play?

- What music would-- - We're just doing a weed truck.

That's all this is gonna end up being.

- What's the adult truck play?

Why isn't there just a truck,

like an Amazon truck filled with necessities?

- You're taking your trash out and there it is,

the truck, you didn't even ask for it.

It's driving by and it has that thing that you know,

I didn't go and get AA batteries.

I don't wanna do just one trip for door to door

for double A batteries.

There he is right there, like an angel sent from above.

- The things you need, truck.

- Thank you for listening.

We hope you enjoyed yourself.

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