3 Startup Ideas, Transcripts, and a New Tool
I never know how to start these - I really need to come up with a name that refers to the people who may be on this email list and or podcast listeners. Number one naming lesson for starting something new: Name your product or service something that can be turned into a descriptor. It gives a sense of belonging to those who use or consume from a particular source. Scuttlebutts, Scuttles, none of it sounds right.
Anyway.
3 Startup Ideas
I have a new episode out this morning. It’s called “3 Startup Ideas for the Military Community”. This is the very first episode that doesn’t feature an interview. Now why is that.
The real reason is that I did a piss poor job of planning. This podcast is my number one priority in my personal interests, but other categories of my life has recently taken precedence. Not to get too deep into it, but I started a masters program this fall while continuing to work full time. Needless to say, I haven’t had a second of free time. So I didn’t plan well and didn’t have an episode, but my commitment both personally and professionally is to produce something once a week. This episode is a peek inside what’s been marinading in my head for the last 3 years.
I talk about 3 ideas I’ve been sitting on I think would be interesting businesses to start:
A coffee truck on military bases
A Thiel Fellow for military members
A cohort based TAPS class.
I’m exploring some other avenues for different style episodes and have a few things in the pipeline, time being my only constraint currently. For now, I’d appreciate you listening to this episode and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE leave a review. I’m in dire need of some reviews for the pod - one just to improve, but two for discoverability.
Transcripts
Not a major development, but I claimed an official site for the show. You can now find episodes of the shows and some other content on Scuttlebuttpodcast.co. I’m beginning to work through old episodes doing transcripts for all of them.
A New Tool
Want to also unofficially officially announce something I’ve been working on, less so recently, but telling more people about it will spur me to work harder and make time for it. This is a tool for my folks on active duty still (poor suckers).
I’m tentatively calling it is Messdecks; a web application to aid the PCS process for active duty. Right now, it’s a searchable directory of the addresses of all Navy and Marine Corps UICs/Commands. If you’ve PCS’d before you know how bad it sucks - don’t know where you’re going, whose there, and especially if you’re moving across country, where do you live, what do you do there etc. This was a problem my fiancee and I found ourselves in when we *almost* moved to Connecticut a few months back. Who has even been to Connecticut?
As it stands, it’s a very rough looking minimum viable product to look up different commands and addresses, but on my product roadmap I’m looking to add housing data near every command, things to do in the area as rated by people who live there, moving assistance, weather data, you get the idea: everything you would want to know about moving to a new place. Everybody has a terrible sponsor who is supposed to help them figure this all out, but this would eliminate the need for help from your prospective command.
I’m also working on the functionality to notify other users what command you’re at. This way if you needed to get ahold of of anyone at a command, you could search the platform to see if there’s anyone who is registered as active at that command and reach out.
More to come on that. Like I said it’s very rough - kind of looks like someone did it in paint which is not far from the truth. But I’m learning something new and maybe it’ll be helpful to someone.
Appreciate you. Do hard shit this week.
Brock