Procrastinatr

Nov 3, 2023

Embrace the weird

↓
And love it too.

Hey Reader,

This newsletter was supposed to go out before Halloween, then on Halloween, then on November 1st, and then I sort of lost all hope I’d get down to actually write it.

It’s no short of paranormal that I am sitting down now, November 3rd, to wrap it up and push “Send.” Hopefully, it’s a bit like a Happy Birthday that comes one week late — it’s obviously, well, late, but sort of still well-received in a sort of nostalgic way.

The plan for this issue was vaguely simple: weird business ideas and something something with AI. Like, for example:

• Selling beef jerky flowers
• Rage rooms
• Dog poop cleaning
• Renting out pets
• …And more

These are all weird, for sure — but it’s easy to see why they might have viability. Beef jerky flowers are a funmantic gift. Rage rooms are incredibly useful for those times in your life you have a boss who’s ****really**** getting on your nerves. Dog poop cleaning seems legit. And I know for sure there are people out there willing to pay $$ to play with a pet for a couple of hours.

(It’s me, I’m people.)

But what if you thought of something ****really**** weird? What is the weirdest you can get and still make it a viable business idea? The Ghostbusters were a brilliant one and witches in Romania are tax-paying citizens (fact.) But it still doesn’t feel ****really**** weird.

So I tried to do what everyone else is doing: turn to AI to help me uncover the weirdest possible ideas. In a fit of pre-Halloween excitement, ChatGPT came up with a (not great, not terrible) list that included (among others):

• Haunted doll adoption agency
• Zombie apocalypse trainer
• Ghostwriting for spirits
• Cryptid expeditions (like searching for Nessie and all that stuff)
• Vampire teeth whitening
• Coffin customization
• Paranormal-themed bed and breakfast

They all sound reasonably weird, but they were somewhat… unsurprising. Again, I can see goths wanting to give haunted dolls a home, doomsday preppers training for zombie apocalypses, writers selling services for spirits (or, better said, their still-living loved ones), people going off to search for Yetti, vampires wanting to whiten their teeth (we like nice teeth, OK?), or people wanting to go to the Great Beyond in style.

Then, I checked: most of the ideas ChatGPT gave me exist, in one interpretation or another.

“I need weirder,” I told Chatty.

And I got 30 more weird business ideas, all of them somewhat real.

Not exactly what I needed. Somewhere in the back of my head, there were ideas far weirder than these — not yet materialized, kind of like batter to a cake, a mix of all sorts of ingredients coming together in a goo you can’t digest.

“OK, I’m not getting new stuff from a system fed with old stuff,” I said, so, since done is better than perfect, let’s take one of these ideas and run it through ValidatorAI (an AI that helps you validate business ideas.)

I picked the “zombie apocalypse training” one, thinking there are enough conspiracy… aficionados (🙂) out there for this to be a pretty solid idea in the right context.

And then… ValidatorAI started asking me about the seasonality of this business idea, how to promote it before Halloween, and all that stuff.

Clearly, we were on different pages. I was not thinking of some fun Halloween activity there. I was thinking of people who actually want to train for a zombie apocalypse. “Are there really no people who believe zombies are a possibility, after Covid and the whole vaccine discussions,” I asked myself.

So I went digging.

And it turns out — no, it’s not that common a doomsday scenario.

Disappointed, I returned to ValidatorAI, not before checking the LinkedIn comments I got on my post announcing the newsletter I’m writing now. “AI apocalypse training,” said someone in the comments, “should replace the zombie one.”

Eureka!

I went back to Validator and asked him to switch. And the ideas I got were…

​

​

I mean, that’s relatively solid, right? It’s largely skill training and cybersecurity wrapped as AI apocalypse training. It caters to many, but not everyone, it’s a pretty real pain point, and there are solutions for it. Most importantly, people would pay for this.

Voila!

Here’s the best part: After a few largely wasted hours wandering around, looking for a weird-but-totally-feasible-business-ideas, I ended up looking at not just a business idea, but the beginning of an entire positioning strategy. It wasn’t prompted by an AI, though. Nor was it 100% prompted by a human. It was prompted by:

• A discussion with an AI (which, frankly, could have been a Google search or, at most, a PerplexityAI one — see below)
• A discussion with humans based on the discussion with the AI
• Another discussion with an AI

You can disagree with the viability of the business idea, for sure.

What you cannot disagree is that the human spark made it happen.

Creativity happens when you connect two (or more) ideas in a new way. The AI can help to some extent, but the main reason it cannot be creative per se is because it calculates probability. Which, in itself, is all about the status-quo, the things that already exist. Not about the breakthroughs, the next big thing, or the surprising.

That’s good news. We now have a tool that can somewhat tell us what the most expected answers would be. Zapping away from those can lead to creative thinking — even if, just like in the case of this story, it’s all for the fun of it.

Question is: will we use it like this, or will we rely on the perpetual self-propagation of probable ideas it generates?

---

Random Fuel

1. This song.

2. Mushrooms talk.

3. Why are TikTok Lives so weird? (I might have to write an issue about this.)

---

Let's Play

Write down the first 10 on your mind right now.

Can you think of a weird business idea related to them?

Hit "Reply" and let me know if you think of anything, I'll share the best ideas in the next issue.

---

​

Like this? I'm humbled, really. There are four ways you can say "thanks." Good news is they're all free: Follow me on LinkedIn​ Subscribe to The Blue Vase Email me your questions/ feedback ...Or share this newsletter with a friend

Yours spookily,

Octavia

113 Cherry St #92768, Dumbravita, Timis 307160
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​