“Part human, part vector database” Dan Ryland returns for another instalment of Supabase hackathon entries.

But before I jump into that, let me tell you about the Launch Week X Community Meetup that happened in London last week.

Hosted by Jack Bridger, we had a great evening of tech talks, pizza and connection.

Lu from TLDraw - a ‘very good free whiteboard’ - showed us some super clever TLDraw to GPT-Vision demos.

Sam from ElectricSQL then followed by demoing some slick local-first, database syncing.

The third speaker?

Me.

I shared the journey of vectorising myself.

You can read more about that in my previous post, Dan Ryland. Is. Supabase Vector Database.

It truly was a great evening and I’m looking forward to the next one.

If there’s a Supabase Community Meetup in your city, you should turn up - You might even get a free t-shirt!

Now back to our regular program: Living on the Supabase Edge [Functions].

I’m a big fan of My First Million, a podcast that’s all about business ideas, market trends and opportunities.

I also love ideas, inspiration and good SEO.

So, presenting my latest hackathon entry:

milliondollarbusinessideas.com

“Build in a weekend. Make millions.”

(Yes, I was super surprised this domain name wasn’t already taken)

As you may know, Supabase got into Y Combinator back in Summer 2020.

They applied 7 times before being accepted.

There’s a lesson in perseverance if you need one!

Y Combinator has a great ‘Request for Startups’ list of general ideas and themes they’re looking for.

So I took this list of themes and asked Chat-GPT to give me 5-10 suggested search queries to match each theme.

Here’s some examples:

“Brick and Mortar 2.0” returned “latest innovations in brick and mortar retail”, “creative uses of retail space in 2023” and “micro-lease retail space”.

“Education” returned “personalised learning experiences in school”, “new school models for mass education”, “impact of educational technology on social mobility” and so forth.

I then used Brave’s Search API to get the latest news around each of those search queries.

This would give me the current/realtime context snippets I wanted to use within my final prompt.

The final prompt included the YC theme copy for a single theme, Brave Search API response matched to one example search query and the request to provide 5-10 million dollar business ideas.

I wanted each idea to be super actionable so I decided to ask for the idea, a suggested first prototype/MVP, how you’d get your first 10 users and finally how you’d make your first million.

The returned ideas were beautiful.

They were unique, intricate and most importantly, inspiring.

I now needed to automate some of the process I was doing manually be introducing Zapier.

Zapier took each theme, performed the API calls to Brave and Chat GPT to then store it in an Airtable database for ease.

I generated a total of 611 ideas.

This was the perfect starting point for my app.

I imported these into my Supabase database and built a simple Quasar application where you’d have two choices: ‘Random’ and ‘Bespoke’.

‘Random’ sourced 20 existing ideas from the database and ‘Bespoke’ is where the magic happened.

I knew I couldn’t have this mammoth Zap getting triggered every time someone wanted a bespoke idea so I turned to Supabase’s Edge Functions.

Using the provided user interest, I would trigger Brave’s Search API to return related news results.

I then asked Chat GPT to form ideas using these results as inspiration.

Again, the responses were great.

I wrapped each idea in a post-it note UI and built out each business idea into a pitch-deck like page with sections for prototype/MVP, getting users and that juicy first million.

I sat back and marvelled at what I had created.

An endless pot of inspiration.

But it was missing something.

I thought about dynamically creating Google Slide decks from the copy using Zapier, but that felt too credit-expensive.

What about visual inspiration?

How about DALL-E?

So, I added a DALL-E image generator for each of the sections which would give you a context specific image and something that could be used in a pitch deck.

Adding this image function was the cherry on top.

Now any user could generate ideas, pick the best suggestion and build a pitch deck from the content and generated images.

Puuuurfect.

But what about wanting to see all the ideas all at once?

If you add your email, it navigates you to a searchable table of all the 826 (and counting) million dollar ideas.

Now we wait for the hackathon gods to do their thing.

One thing I know for sure is it does have the Supafactor and regardless of outcome, I’ve really enjoyed building an inspiration tool.

A future improvement I have considered is to create vector embeddings for all the idea descriptions for better search capability and ‘related ideas’ suggestions.

If you’re interested in following any my progress follow me on X

And if you haven’t used Supabase yet, I highly recomend you try Supabase today.

Until next time, keep hammering those nails.