Like this –

1) Five businesses you would come up with if you were a hamster.
2) Retrofuturism – five businesses you would come up with if flying cars existed.
3) Five company policies to optimize employee performance
4) Five potential next steps for this project.
5) Five of the worst business ideas that you can think of.

So you have a great startup idea. We do the market research, competitive research, product viability, sales projections, for a cost that can save you a fortune down the line. Before jumping into a new startup, make an educated decision.

Vlad:

1) A gratitude list app. Every time something good happens to you, you make a little note in the app. Whenever you’re in a funk, open it, and it shows you a random happy moment.
2) A VR app that dives into the miraculous details of the creation and make-up of the littlest things around you. Kind of like ‘how it’s made’, but a deep interactive dive.
3) An app that locks out your phone in the morning until you write one thing that you’re grateful for.
4) A website that follows people who are less fortunate – paralyzed, poor, sick, and chronicles things that they are grateful for. If they can find gratitude in life, so can you.
5) Next time you have that perfect moment, where you’re sitting on a beech on a warm day, feeling a cool breeze as you hear the ocean in the background, you hit record on your portable 360° camera. You can then relive that day in VR, including sites and sounds.

1) Smart bracelet that detects movement. If you’re still loving past your bedtime, it deposits a dollar a minute to terrorist funds. Or kill shelters.
2) Muffin jar that only unlocks in the morning if you went to sleep on time.
3) Community challenge. Pool money with a group of friends. Uses wearable to track sleep
time. First person to get to 40 hours wins the betting pot.
4) A killswitch button on your nightstand. You press it, and it does all of the little pre-wedding rituals for you. Turns off the TV, the lights, lowers the blinds, sets your alarm, turns your phone onto night mode.
5) A TV with night mode built in. Like Twilight for Android, but on your TV, cutting the blue light out that keeps people awake.

Vlad:
1) Come up with one 30 day Challenge a day, for 30 days.
2) Idea: an app that you can program to notify you when you say certain words, “like,” “umm,” profanity, etc. Using that app, go for 30 days without using one of your safety words.
3) Pick a skill that you have zero interest in – such as knitting or dancing – and spend 30 days practicing it.
4) Keep a journal of the very first thought that comes into your mind every morning, as you open your eyes. For 30 days. This is the purest, consumption free moment of your day.
5) Caffeine-free challenge. Ouch.

Gary:

Jump Rope Challenge – do 25 jumps your first day no stops.  Increase by 25 every day no stopping, if you stop, restart the count.

Start a book and read 30 minutes each day.  Write for 10 minutes after about what you just read and what you understood, go into as much detail.  After 30 days or completion of the book, create a summary and pass it along to someone that is reading the same book.

Put 1 dollar away each day till end of week, on the following Monday, double that for the rest of the week.  So 1st Monday $2.00, Next Monday $4.00, $8.00 next Monday, 16$ a day the last Monday.  Put that towards a start up fund.  Repeat this every other month.

Core lift challenge – NO REST DAY – You have to lift everyday, legs don’t count. 30 days.  If you don’t do it, someone provides you with a consequence and you must do it.

Charity- Pick a support event, and one day a week you have to do at least an hour of charity work, do this till you hit 30 days.  Log every time you go and do something, what you did, who you did it with, what you learned.

1) Create an education platform that pays you to learn. Partner with a digital learning platform, and pay students in tokens when they compete a course. More tokens for speed or testing scores. The highest earner at the end of the quarter, gets real $$$

2) a toddler building block game that intuitively teaches binary to kids.

3) International study buddy. You pair up with a student, or group of students in a poorer country. You attend your fancy college, and stream live video or audio of class lectures to them. They help you with work and study, and get a free education as payment.

4) A set of picture books that teaches kids how to read in computer code. Instead of learning the alphabet, they learn binary. Instead of A is for Apple, they learn 01000001 01110000 01110000 01101100 01100101 is for Apple.

5) A children’s tablet that only unlocks when they figure out the basic puzzle. The game gets progressively harder in order for the kid to progress. Raise hypergeniuses by the age of 3.

It’s like those big ones used by blacksmiths to stoke flames, but small to sit on your desktop and blow air between keys.

In a large company, there is a lot of power in cultivating an informal employee organization. But how do you cultivate that as a company leader? Any steps you take will de facto formalize it.

Here’s the idea: create an arbitrary digital currency that employees can use to trade in for company perks – free lunches, days off, better parking spots. They earn it by as a good performance bonus. On the one hand, you create a cool fringe benefit. On the other hand, you will create an informal market for employees to trade, hack and grow their CorpCoin empire. Without forcing it, you have created a powerful informal network.

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Another benefit of a digital CorpCoin is that you can track employee behavior. Not to punish, but to see who the real innovators in the company are.