Trouble is ... my ideas suck. Either I have a really good idea that requires inventing new technology, or I have a niche idea that I can't fathom how to monetize or market. I'll take your points about being boring to heart and hope something finally springs to mind under those constraints. But as of a month or two ago I already realized that I needed to tone my ideas down, and after all that time with it in the back of my mind ... I still have nothing. Frustrating.
A phone app that makes scanning documents stupid easy by using machine learning to identify when a document is on screen and automatically take a picture, and then use more machine learning to convert the picture into a cleaned up image. The concept to train the machine models is pretty easy; just print out a known document, take a bunch of pictures, and train the model to convert from the pictures to the original document. But it would likely require massive kernels to get enough context to do the necessary 3D transformations. Could probably reduce the strain on the algorithm by using traditional picture->document algorithms and then use the model to clean it up further. Either way, it's new tech that would require a lot of work.
Vocal isolator for extracting vocals from music, using a machine learning model. These tools kind of already exist, but they don't use machine learning, usually require user interaction to tweak knobs, and don't work particularly well. My bet is that a 1D conv network can do great, and generating examples for training is super easy. But, again, new tech, and as easy as machine learning sounds it usually devolves into long nights of debugging, tweaking, and banging your head trying to figure out why changing one hyper-parameter ever so slightly completely changes your results.
A hardware password manager. Like KeePass/LastPass/etc but as an actual hardware device, possibly a wearable/watch. The idea is that a hardware password manager provides more security than a software password manager, by virtue of not being susceptible to malware (though yes passwords can still be stolen 1 by 1 if used on an infected machine), and most importantly works with phones/tablets over bluetooth. Requires developing hardware, productization, etc. Not a big market; nobody cares about security.
I have a quiz website that I built for my wife, who's a teacher. It allows here to give online fill-in-the-blank type quizzes to her classes, with a set amount of time to take the quiz, and a set amount of time that the quiz is available. She's happy with it; I made it because she had something similar with Edmodo but the school dropped Edmodo. I can't imagine such a simple website is worth much though, and it's currently only designed for her and a bit rough around the edges. It'd take quite a lot of UI updates and a bit of backend tweaking to make it usable by the general public.
A couple game ideas, mostly geared towards programmers. Pretty niche, and games take immense effort versus profit.
A service to provide email to Bitcoin addresses. You authenticate yourself using your Bitcoin wallet's signature mechanism, and then can receive email like at e.g. [email protected]. I got this mostly working, but rendering emails is super hard, who wants to use yet another mail client, how do I monetize, how do I fight spam, etc, etc. Lots of security and anonymity angles to this, but security is hard, so again lots of work.
NSFW: Machine learning based porn assistant. You thumb up/down images, it learns what you like, and finds more of it. Keeps learning as you thumb up/down its results. Classic machine learning model. Requires new tech, and it probably requires training a model per user (super expensive), or some kind of transfer learning.
Lots more beyond that, all very pie-in-the-sky, new tech related, or super niche.
The point being: most practical machine learning I've seen has involved a lot of effort chasing 75-90% precision, which means that a lot of commonly considered problems can only be aided by machine learning for human-assisted or human-curated tasks, or cases where precision can be sacrificed and benefit still derived.
If you haven't picked one idea and run it all the way through to a working solution, you have the choice of actually picking one and doing it, or not attributing more value to machine learning than it actually deserves.
It seems to me that innovative uses of machine learning are more around finding a user interface or user experience that compensates for inaccuracy than it is the sophistication of the algorithm itself.
I think that for a lot of people who might try small businesses, the "use of surplus energy" is intermingled. Maybe you want to make some cool piece of software (because you just want to); and you want to use it to do something creative (because fulfillment); and you want it to also be a business (because you want more money).
In that case it's much harder to focus on the "boring" part. (I am assuming of course that there exist things that are "boring" in the business sense but still allow for some satisfying creativity and/or fun hacking. For instance CoderPad gives you plenty of room to do cool programming things, if doing those will make you happy. You just might have to book them on the lifestyle/happiness ledger. The bingo-cards thing, maybe not so much.)
Edit: damn, I love your presenting style. Keep it up man!
For instance, the way you recommend a hyper-specific style of elevator pitching I think has basically no impact on success. Success with pitching is (according to my dumbass) way more about identifying who your actual audience is and why they care than about getting this perfect "pitch" correct. The discovery process around that is much harder and ambiguous than defining a pitch on paper.
Also, you have really specific stuff in there like "blast your contact list". I mean, okay, I think that might work for some people in some industries, but I don't think it's great advice for the median new founder. Neither is doing a CAC/LTV for a business when you haven't even figured out potential distribution much use, either.
Anyway, my longwinded point is that this is kind of culty. What makes cults what they are? I think it boils down to their unshakable conviction that their specific rituals are correct and their motivation to convince others of that. I don't think that "follow these specific actions and you will have a business" is advice that you can give in good conscience.
Generally, most people do NO (or very little) research, testing or thinking about their business idea before investing significant resources into it. My aim was to get them thinking, even if my way isn't the best. If I can help them avoid analysis paralysis and just DO something that moves their dream of starting a business forward, without risking too much money and time, then I'm happy. :-)
With over 10k words I didn't have the time (or frankly, energy) to dive too deep into any one topic. For example elevator pitching, which could be a 10,000 word blog post in itself. Happy to provide links for further reading though if you have any specific resources you find useful?
I actually think the culty thing is kind of a compliment; some of the most successful companies are kind of cultish and many great marketers talk about building 'Tribes' (e.g. Seth Godin). Maybe I just absorbed a bit too much of Noah Kagan's charisma when I worked at AppSumo, I dunno. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is a bigger topic again, but in my experience rather than 'optimizing' (investing a lot of time choosing the best possible path) it's much more efficient to 'satisfice' (invest less time and choose a good enough path). Does it really make that much difference which elevator pitch format you use? Or is it more important that you actually do write one? Providing multiple options would only scare most people away because it's too hard to pick.
Hope that's useful background / partial justification for cultiness. ;-)