Unvalidated Ideas #024

Here's a fresh idea you can take out there and validate. Already a paid member? Log in and read the uncut edition.

140280 characters more your style? 🐦 Get this newsletter tweet-by-tweet

The all-in-one Presentation Stick

Almost every industry has conferences, and at those conferences people give presentations. Right now, people build their slide decks, powerpoint presentations or regular PDFs and hand them to some organizer whose job is to make sure that they show up on screen.

Sometimes, event attendees will even bring their own laptops and struggle with conference room AV equipment to get their message on screen. It's almost barbaric.

Build a HDMI presentation stick that plugs in a display for presentations. Like a Chromecast, but tied to presentations and (completely untied to Google).

The computer-on-a-HDMI-stick world is very under explored. Hardware companies are more difficult than software companies, but there is a lot of space for good ideas in hardware. With how small Single Board Computers ("SBC") have gotten, building computers small enough to be plugged into (and powered by) TVs is *easier than ever.

The stick needs to do one thing and one thing well -- when plugged in, it needs to display content to the screen.

If you build the right kind of device, people will believe (rightfully) that it can't fail -- it's too simple to fail. This means it will be a favorite of system administrators, and presenters who just want things to work.

Can you build a more focused, Google-free Chromecast that speaks to people, companies and organizations? There's also a platform play hidden in here if you think about it enough.

Read my raw notes >

NOTE There's another intersting angle here -- could you build a stick that could go to any corporation or organization and get plugged in their HDMI/USB ports and make it extremely easy for people to present?

There's also a huge risk here -- the Chromecast could easily turn into the device for this use case. It's not that common to share to chromecasts to do presentations, but if Google gets more serious about their market penetration in this area it could be dangerous.

Liked this idea?

Thanks for reading -- if you liked this newsletter, forward it to your friend(s) who can't help but spend their time on HackerNews, ProductHunt, and IndieHackers.

You can also check out the archive -- the most recent 5 back issues of the newsletter are accessible for free.

Victor (vados@vadosware.io)