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Business Ideas I: Juggler, Never Let A Message Drop

Over the years I have kept a running spreadsheet of Business ideas – my current business, HiddenLevers, was once a denizen of the same spreadsheet. But ideas have expiration dates [1], and my Idea list has grown while my available time has shrunk. Over the next few months I will be sharing my ideas – I’d love to hear feedback and to inspire others to take the next step or gain inspiration. To provide structure, for each idea I’ll share my thoughts on what I thought the MVP might be, and a scoring of the idea using my own 10 point scale. Here goes!

Idea: Juggler – Never Let a Message Drop

Juggler would watch your firm’s emails, LinkedIn, and other messaging platforms to ensure that every inbound request is tracked and gets a response. The challenge today is that inbound business communication arrives across channels, and often comes in to many different personnel at your firm. Using AI, Juggler would determine which messages actually require response, and monitor these across all firm users, alerting managing when prospects and clients are awaiting response.

There are a ton of AI-based email solutions and also support email solutions from firms like Zendesk – but none of these seem to focus on this specific use case – firm-wide monitoring and taking a global look at all communications to a particular client.

MVP:

The MVP is simple – do the machine learning work to simply determine whether a particular email requires response. Emails asking questions clearly come to mind – but taking a true machine-learning approach, can we approach 99% accuracy here? This can then be married to a simple UI showing individuals (not messages) requiring attention – this sort of dashboard data could ideally then be integrated into Salesforce or other CRM platforms.

Scoring (0-10 scale): 6 points

1. Is it Transformative? 1 point

This is a fairly standard use of machine learning in 2018 – but the accuracy level required to make this viable is not. Also, many businesses still don’t take real advantage of CRM systems, and this idea automates some of the key value concepts from CRM for a small business (ie don’t let any leads slip through the cracks – I’m looking at you, contractors).

2. Revenue Market Size or Eyeballs: 1 point

This is a broad market – virtually every business could use this capability, so volume pricing of even a few dollars a month in a SaaS solution could scale quickly. Presuming that this capability is worth $5/user/month – the US market alone is greater than a billion per year.

3. In a Growing Market? 1 point

While email utilization is stable, multi-channel communication is growing – think chat, social media, VOIP (phone) – in theory the same approach could be applied to all of these.

4. Difficulty, Barriers to Entry, and Competition: 1 point

It may prove difficult to achieve the level of accuracy with machine-learning to inspire user confidence. If businesses suspect that even a few important messages might be slipping through, they will lose confidence and not use the product. Ideally the system ought to learn based on each user and firm’s data – posing a bit more complexity.

5. Riding Hype or a Trend? 2 points

AI and machine-learning are arguably THE trend of the moment, and while arguable overhyped – the Juggler idea definitely is riding this trend.

[1] James Watt’s steam engine was an excellent invention, and applying it to pumping water out of mines an excellent business idea – for the 1770s. The concept of hailing a car via smartphone was likewise a great idea – in 2009. It’s also possible to be too early – Yahoo Briefcase shutdown the same year DropBox was founded (although the latter was also a vastly superior implementation).

P.S. Investors out there, feel free to reach out if any ideas in this series are of interest – while my core business continues to grow rapidly, I’m open to discussions on how to seed fund and launch against many of these ideas.

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Business Ideas I: Juggler, Never Let A Message Drop

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