Ideas for Business

 Or: A Treatise on Why I Shouldn't Do That

Production Consultancy

Lots of businesses would love to throw events from punching up the annual company retreat to a massive product reveal. These companies often do not have any experience in putting on an event and have no idea where to start or what is in scope for them. I could bring my extensive experience in the world of event production to get companies like the best event for the lowest cost so they don't have to spend exorbitant sums on the major players in the industry.

Or they could just hire TPN and be done with it.

Polling Software

Have you ever just wanted to do some simple little survey to find out something for work or just with your friends? Have you then found that the "simple" thing you want is locked behind a paywall, or just functionally impossible in the software you have? You bounce around looking for another one and another one and eventually you resign yourself to just sending that group text instead. What if there was a software that was full featured, robust, and could be customized to do what you want? What if that software let you do it all, for free! All those simple little things are there and they work the way you want. You don't pay unless you need a truly prodigious number of responses or want the service to keep your data long term.

This may or may not be particularly profitable and I think will be suited for an open source/private support model like NGINX. Something I'd like to do in the long term but I don't think suited to a first swing.

Theatrical Software Suite

Theatre is a niche industry and so a lot of the software for it has been developed by the people already working in it. These people are not software developers by trade so a common experience in the industry is "I'm using the best possible software for this job. It sucks". There's a wide range of opportunities to corner different slices of the market here with different software. A cue sheeting software, a lighting rig management and tracking system/paperwork generator, a production planner, a full event management system. Maybe even a time clock with adjustable conditions for union rules! By developing all of that under one house we can use modular shared components to minimize development time while expanding on new features across several platforms and target large sectors of the theatrical market. It would be incredibly difficult to just target straight to the regional players and Broadway but there's been a side effect of all this software being one off odd projects for people in the industry: It's all pretty expensive. We could offer a lower cost, subscription based offering that would be more enticing to the college student demographic. There's a lot of students in theatre program across the country being put off by high price tags to underwhelming software; if we can offer a robust but simple to use experience for a lower price point then some well placed marketing and word of mouth may just be enough to break into the market. As students graduate they'll move on to professional jobs in regional and community theatres across the country, where in most or at least many cases they'll have the freedom to continue using the software they've grown comfortable with, and maybe even with an enterprise or professional markup from their student pricing!

I think this is a really solid plan that could actually lead to sizeable income and an ability to expand the software development company beyond the theatrical market in the future, so barring great barriers this may be right where I start.