You wake up to the steady drumming of rain on your window.

Not again, you think, envisioning mud puddles, bike wipe-outs and wet seats. It is, after all, the third or fourth straight week of rainy weather. But then you remember: At Stanford, entrepreneurship solves everything.

As a true entrepreneur, however, you scope out the market first. Here are some potential products that will appeal to your market of Stanford students. Make it rain … cash, that is.

1. PARCHment (for wet paper)

No, I’m not referring to that transcript-sending service from high school. Stanford students need a solution for the soggy combination that is rainy weather and printed homework. Hours of slaving away at p-sets deserve far more than blurred letters and water-damaged edges, and a startup that breathes life back into wet pages would be quite a life saver.

Note, too, that this product would be effective even when the recent bout of rain ceases. Imagine the days when your water bottle becomes mysteriously unscrewed during your bike ride, turning your folders and textbooks into expensive, heartbreaking sponges. If you invent a paper-drying device, all of our lives could be immediately put at ease.

2. Non-rusting bike locks

Most of us have found that it now takes increasingly longer to unlock our bikes for the morning dorm-to-class commute. Some locks have refused to operate altogether. All this leads to time wasted, unnecessary walks in the rain and extraordinarily long lines of students at the Stanford Bike Shop, all with rusted locks in hand (I know, because I’ve been there twice myself).

The obvious solution is to create non-rusting bike locks. It’s unclear whether these already exist, but it is abundantly evident that they have not yet entered the Stanford market. Which means that you should invent them and sell them here.

3. Helmets for big hair, long hair, ponytails and buns


Remember the free helmets that Stanford gave out at the beginning of the school year? The helmets, though emblazoned with “I love my brain,” were unfortunately not particularly friendly to the brains of individuals with thick hair, long hairstyles or the like. After failing several times to fit my ponytail into a helmet, I eventually ceased to wear my helmet regularly.

If Stanford is so keen to encourage helmet wearing, it should recognize that a video advertising “style and safety” is not sufficient to change the physical barriers that bar students from wearing helmets. When your helmet slips off your head, it’s not particularly effective at protecting your brain. It’s time for the d.School to find a helmet solution for all hair types and styles, not just the sort that can squeeze into a plastic case.

4. Hydrophobic bike seats

The case for this product is simple. Wet butts are terrible for style. Terrible for productivity. Terrible for walking down the sidewalk with dignity. Hydrophobic bike seats solve the problem that seat covers (which continue to drip and often allow water in anyway) cannot.

5. Umbrella hats


To be fair, umbrella hats already exist, and there are likely social pressures (i.e. looking extremely ridiculous) that prevent this product from entering the market. All this aside, however, perhaps some will consider wearing an umbrella hat because the benefits of staying dry outweigh the minor social costs.

6. Heated bike seats (and heated handlebars)

Biking in the cold often feels as if one is sitting on an ice cube while a biting wind cuts at your exposed, numb fingers. Given that many cars offer heated seats for the wintertime, why not create heated seats for bikers? Quite frankly, we spend more time on our bikes than we would in our cars, so nice seats seem like an apt investment.

7. Bike bubbles


In what might be described as a raincoat on steroids, we ought to create a product that simply covers everything. Head to toe in a plastic bubble, away from the rain, the cold and the icy wind.

8. Bike umbrella holders


There are two possible iterations of this product – first, a holder that secures your umbrella while you bike, allowing you to shield yourself from the elements without the ridiculousness of an umbrella hat; second, a lock that secures your umbrella to the bike, so you don’t have to drag a poorly-folded wet mess into your class.

While you’re at it, throw in some bike cupholders!

9. Windshield wipers for glasses

I, like many, wear glasses. And I, like many, become effectively blind when biking through driving rain and more than slightly annoyed when a small drizzle leaves splatters of water across my lenses.

And if glasses are to humans as windshields are to cars (a rather tenuous analogy, I admit), then human glasses require windshield wipers.

10. Anti-fogging glasses

As anyone with glasses knows, the second most annoying glasses phenomenon (behind rain) is the tendency to fog at almost any change in temperature or environment. Given that the ability to see the road is a likely prerequisite to safe biking practices, I feel that some form of an anti-fogging product would improve bike safety significantly.

 

Contact Xinlan Emily Hu with more startup ideas at xehu ‘at’ stanford.edu.