Concoction Startups

In the past month, I met two different people trying to build businesses based on their own concoctions. They are literally mixing ingredients to try to discover something new.

The first is trying to make naturalistic lip balm from local beeswax. I donated all the available beeswax from my hive to that effort.

The second is mixing chemicals to attempt to stop bacteria better than antibiotics, by blocking signal transduction on the bacteria. It’s a tricky business that walks the thin line of trying to do something to improve health without being regulated by the FDA. The same person is using a similar substance to improve agriculture yields.

Having back-to-back conversations with these two individuals made me think about concoction-based startups. Since the beginning of time, I’m sure people have been attempting to mix ingredients to develop new and better real-world things. It’s always fun to find concoction-based inventors and business people in the wild.

Shark Tank does a good job at bringing concoction-based startups into the show. These are often people making new, delicious foods. Someone should do a mashup video of the Sharks stuffing their mouths. Sometimes they have new substances on the show too.

Another fun concoction that recently got a lot of attention is NeverWet. See how it works below. (Note they also have a lot of criticism from people saying it doesn’t really work.)

There are several Atlanta concoction startups focusing on beverages, including beer makers, coffee makers, and energy drink makers.

There is a whole division of ATDC dedicated to wet-lab biology innovation, which involves super complicated concoctions.

I personally would not have the patience to do a concoction based startup. It seems hard: full of trial and error, subjectivity, and difficulty in breaking away from the crowd. I’ll stick to software startups.

What are your thoughts on concoction startups?

So, I was waiting for the superhydrophobic stuff to come out for ages, and bought a bunch of NeverWet when it came out.

FWIW: It works really well. I think the problem is the way it got productized. The spray-on nature of it is a little dodgy. It does what it says it will do, but it is hard to get past the fact that what you are doing is spraying on a layer of glue and then spraying on a layer of powdery stuff. It changes the texture of whatever you are spraying it onto to something that feels a little gritty. It also wears off pretty easily with any kind of abrasion.

I still think the technology is great, but it needs to be something that is product-integrated and not an after-market treatment.

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