3 Things: Humaaans for Generative AI, Fun Shaped Food, Group Buying for Office Meals/Snacks
Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently and associated business opportunities. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Humaaans for Generative AI
Fun Shaped Food
Group Buying for Office Meals/Snacks
1. Humaaans for Generative AI
You will likely be hearing a lot of ideas around generative AI from me over the next few months 😂. There has been hype around this area for a while but prior to recently, there wasn’t tech that was actually good enough and generally available. It feels like each week there are now new models released and APIs opened up for public use like DALL.E-2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney. It’s fun to watch what super smart and creative people are doing with them! The first wave was all about text generation with companies like Jasper.ai, Copy.ai, Writesonic, etc, mostly built on top of GPT-3, and now the next wave of applications is all around images.
If you’ve spent time on any SaaS websites over the last 6ish years, you probably have noticed that they all have had a very similar look to them. They often contain flat illustrated humans in various poses and permutations. The company behind this style is Humaaans and has been replicated by many other knock-offs that are used pervasively across websites, blogs, other forms of content, product demos, and more. A company can create a new version of this using one of the generative image models focused on marketing and content use cases where you’d historically use a Humaaans image. You can ingest a company’s own color scheme/brand guidelines and have prompts optimized for illustration that can easily be sized and placed wherever you want them. Similarly, you could do the same for the Noun Project and build an API and Chrome Extension that lets you create custom icons and embed them within webpages, presentations, docs, etc.
2. Fun Shaped Food
Over 30,000 years ago, humans began grinding ferns into a flour, mixing with water, and cooking what were likely very hard and tasteless flat cakes over hot rocks. These were the earliest form of we now think of as a pancake. Over time, nearly every culture has ground grains into flour and made their own version of a pancake, developing purpose-built pans or griddles used to cook them. All the way back in the time of the Ancient Greeks, they used to cook flat cakes called obelios made of flour, water, milk and often eggs between metal plates. The practice spread across europe and the food became known as wafers, which would eventually turn into waffles. In the Middle Ages, communion wafer irons emerged depicting imagery of Jesus and other biblical scenes which was the first iteration of the modern waffle iron.
Specialized food cookers like waffle irons, pancake makers, tortilla presses, omelette cookers, and more have popped up on the market, and now you can even buy a round multi-purpose griddle that can make cookies, burgers, eggs, pancakes, and more in the same contraption. Some waffle irons are sold in fun shapes like cars and trucks, but that is the only shape you can make with that product. Given the fact that these griddles are essentially just 2 metal plates with a certain design attached to plastic discs with hinges that plug into a socket and get hot, you should be able to design a multi-purpose product that allows you to swap out the metal plates to produce all kinds of shapes. They could be stackable and easily storable and allow you to make eggs in the form of an avocado, pancakes that look like unicorns, waffles that resemble legos, and burgers in the shape of smiley faces. You could do seasonal plates for every fun holiday like Halloween, St. Patty’s Day, or even all of the weird made-up holidays like Submarine Day or Frog Jumping Day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This could be a fun DTC brand targeted at parents as well as sold through big-box stores and other family-friendly outlets.
3. Group Buying for Office Meals/Snacks
In Silicon Valley, people often talk about pre- and post-Google companies. What they are typically referring to are the perks that come as part of employment like free meals/snacks, massages, and other on-site benefits that Google pioneered. Today, to woo perspective talent most tech companies offer complementary lunches and snacks at a minimum for those who come into the offices. Most companies aren’t large enough to warrant their own cafeterias and chefs so revert to either catering from a corporate vendor or using one of the myriad lunch ordering services that allow employees to select what they want each day from (usually) a single restaurant or selection of a few menus.
While there will definitely be more people working from home now than before the pandemic, people are coming back to offices and many employers are trying to figure out how to get people to show up in-person. Since space may be underutilized and companies (especially smaller or mid-sized startups) may be hitting a rough patch due to market conditions, the concept of pooling together with other companies in your building, block, or office park for food ordering could be a win-win for everyone. Instead of catering food individually everyday or using a service like Forkable, EATClub (recently acquired by Compass Group), or FreshlyWell which customizes each meal for each employee, you could aggregate companies by location to provide significantly cheaper options that still offer personalization and variety. This could also be bundled with snack delivery so you can remove the need for multiple vendors and areas of spend while still offering food benefits that employees have come to both expect and appreciate. You could go through the REITs or building managers to get access to the tenants and onboard each company in a building or local area.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine
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