I feel like almost every day I see great business opportunities that nobody seems to be pursuing.
Here’s a straightforward one – make a decent cell tower map website. Put a few ads on it. (Non pop-up, non-blocking ads – you don’t want to drive your users away!)
It’s easy – the (United States) data is free from the FCC. And it doesn’t already exist.
The best one out there that I’ve found sucks hard – should be easy to do better.
Build it on top of Google Maps (cheap), OpenStreetMap (free), or Bing Maps (I don’t know).
So far others who have tried to do something similar:
- Want to know “where you are” under the assumption that you’re interested in cell signal strength. But lots of people just want to know where the towers are – perhaps someplace far away. Just show the dammed map, please!
- Make you choose from a list of 300+ countries and territories. Merge the data from the countries you cover into one database and show them on one map. Easy, simple.
- Make you choose the cell carrier, often from a list that doesn’t match the public names of the carriers. But lots of people don’t care which carrier uses the towers – they just want to see where they are! Sure, show the details if the user clicks on it, and maybe (if you want to get elaborate) allow filtering based on the public names of the carriers (not the LLCs they own that nobody ever heard of).
- Want you to download their phone app, demand a bunch of intrusive permissions, and suck up your battery – just to get a map!
- Use a design and UI that sucks monkey balls.
Do better. This seems pretty easy and quick to me.
Don’t go around saying that there are no straightforward ways to start a business and make money. Just look around yourself and solve problems that haven’t been solved yet – they’re everywhere!
The world rewards those who fix it.