Welcome to Ghost Business - where mediocre business ideas go to launch or die

This week's agenda:

• The Stalking Shopping Cart

• What Dall-E Thinks We Meant

• Viability Score

Stalking Shopping Cart

I'm in Safeway one day and I see something I've never ever ever seen before. It was a woman walking and a robot shopping cart on 2 wheels was following her. She would stop, press a button, the "top" would open and she would insert her groceries into the robot.

Naturally I had to stop her "WHATS UP WITH THAT BOT DOE?", was not what I said but kindly asked what the hell is that thing. She said it was a MyGita robot.

She liked to shop but didn't have a car and didn't want to carry the groceries a couple of miles to her house. A quick search pulled up that these robots cost $2,500 to $3,500 so they weren't the cheapest either. Thoughts in my head were:

• Why not use a scooter?

• Why not get a cheap car?

• Why not use instacart or other grocery delivery?

But we wouldn't be where we are now if she had made one of the above choices. SO THE WHEELS STARTED TO TURN 🛞 🔥

This can be a business. Easily.

Folks rent out their premium items all the time; cars, houses, boats, computers, even chickens 🐓 . Why not spin something up for these premium shopping carts?

What would this look like?

I would buy a couple of these (maybe start with one). And hit a few premium stores (think whole foods, sprouts, etc) in the area. Generate some buzz, talk to the managers, tell them you have more of these and you want to create a "premium shopping experience".

I would set up a table outside of the store (a la girl scouts) and rent these bots out $5 to $10 per shopping customer. Some would rent it for the novelty, some for the gram, some for actual accessibility needs. Either way you could EASILY generate 10-20 customers per day ($100-$200 / per day in rev). Some of these stores get over 1k visitors per day so were looking at less than a percent.

All you would need is a robot, a charger, and a card reader (and maybe some sani wipes)

Scalability:

• The obvious way to get more customers is to get more bots. Set up a bot charging station outside of stores and hire people to man them.

• Additional revenue could come from ads (always ads) in getting these things vinyl wrapped. Sell ad space on the bot with a 7 or 30 day minimum. You could be making triple what your working bots are bringing in.

Viability:

1 [building spaceships hard] to 5 [easy peasy]

This business is a 4 ghost viability. This honestly does not seem too difficult on paper. The hardest part may be coming up with the $3500 for your first purchase, but you could also finance it for $150/mo (which you could make in your first day!)

Selling ad space may be a challenge but once you get up and running in a few locations with several bots, you could be making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.