Idea: Matching staff at F&B establishments with short virtual jobs they can use to fill restaurant down time.
Problem: The F&B owner is required to hire their wait staff for 8 hours, but every restaurant faces a 4-hour gap after lunch where there will be no customers until dinner. So you're paying your staff for nothing.
Insight: Restaurants don't realise how unproductive their employees actually are, and labour laws protect them from being sent home during non-busy periods.
Validation method: You're selling directly to small business owners. So look for family owned businesses that have a clear cyclicality throughout the day. Advertise to them through Facebook: "Waiters sitting on their butt? Make them work for you". Then you would find some jobs that can be done virtually for $20/hour. Matching them with a task on TaskRabbit would probably not be a bad first step.
Notes: The two most challenging parts of this startup are: overcoming business owner mindset, and appropriate work matching. Business owners are so used to having their stuff during the downtime hours that it may be uncomfortable to them to outsource their staff in case there's a sudden influx of customers. Consequently, you would need to match the labour with tasks that are low-stake, quick, and accessible by anyone with a smartphone.
Why am I doing this? I’m an innovation consultant who helps businesses build new products, and ventures. And I want people to see how easy it is to build, and validate an initial business idea. Hopefully inspiring them to start their own business.
Am I worried that people will take the ideas? I hope they do. These ideas will hopefully make the world a better place. Just remember, “Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything”. What’s most likely is that within a month of testing the idea, the idea would have completely pivoted, but this is a starting point.
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