600+ Early-Stage Projects

The Big Twitter Spreadsheet

As everyone else has been worrying about Twitter’s demise, I hit a bit of a personal milestone (10,000 followers) and took it as an opportunity to do one of the things I like best — making a Big Damn Spreadsheet.

You can look through it here.

Purpose and Inclusion Criteria

The goal of the Big Twitter Spreadsheet is to evaluate who in my network is working on something cool I can help with, and to connect people in my network with others who can help them.

The prototypical “something cool” is a recently-started project, producing something I want to see exist in the world, where a small amount of donation, investment, or introductions to the right people could be critical to whether it succeeds or fails.

The “mass affluent” — people with $100,000-$1M in liquid assets — people who can afford to buy a house, or start a small business out of savings — can generally also afford to be small-scale patrons of “cool projects” in their social networks.

I think more people would want to be “mini-Medicis” than actually do it, partly because it’s not the norm, and partly because finding “cool projects” takes a bit of legwork.

Building a Big Spreadsheet is my attempt to do some of that legwork myself.

I went through all of my Twitter followers to identify everyone who’s working on an “early-stage project.”

What’s an early-stage project?

First of all, it’s a project.

It must produce a concrete piece of work, observable to the general public — such as, a music album, a software tool, or a hardware device.

I mostly excluded “writing” projects, because I didn’t want the spreadsheet to be dominated by everybody who has a blog, but I included edge cases like datasets, informational resources, or formalized protocols, which are sort of like the most “technical” or “systematized” forms of writing.

I also excluded “ongoing” practices (like a consulting, coaching, or freelancing practice) on the grounds that the general public can’t inspect their output.

Second of all, an early-stage project must be small and independent.

I didn’t include startups or nonprofits with over $5M in funding, or research at academic institutions, in the interests of focusing on projects where <$1M of investment or donation could be mission-critical.¹

What’s left is everything else I could find, from links visible on Twitter profiles and recent tweets, and from people who saw the (editable) link and added themselves to the spreadsheet.

(If you’re reading this and have a project that belongs on the spreadsheet, please add yourself! Make the resource better!)

This is not a curated list; most of these projects are from people I don’t know personally and haven’t vetted. Caveat emptor.

Observations Highlights

I divided the spreadsheet into 15 basic categories:

• Live events and classes

• Retail and real estate, including:

  • Bars and restaurants

  • Community spaces and co-living

  • Consumer products

• Visual art and design

• Writing

• Theoretical math

• Surveys, data analysis, and data resources

• Markets and governance mechanisms, including

  • web3 and crypto

  • marketplaces and auctions

  • forecasting

• Performance and interactive arts, including

  • games

  • film

  • music

• Software, including

  • AI

  • data tools

  • design & art tools

  • ecommerce

  • enterprise software

  • programming tools

  • hardware engineering tools

  • health and wellness apps

  • finance and insurance apps

  • networking

  • online classes

  • security

  • social networks

  • tools for thought/learning/knowledge-management

  • web3 and crypto development tools

  • web development tools

• Physical sciences and hardware engineering

• Chemistry and materials

• Biology and biotech

• Direct charities

Software, unsurprisingly, was the biggest category, with AI the biggest subcategory.

Another popular category was what I’d termed the “tools for thought/learning/knowledge-management” cluster — things like notetaking apps, productivity apps, educational apps, “digital gardens”, etc. Personal tools to help organize or improve one’s mind and digital life.

There are also a lot of people building new social networks — if you’re interested in exploring alternatives to the old ones, this spreadsheet is a decent resource for options.

I was mildly surprised (but perhaps shouldn’t be) at how many people out there are making electronic music and video games as side projects.

The wildest projects, though, are in the world of atoms. My top picks for “amazing if they can pull it off”:

• warming the surface of Mars by 50K using artificial aerosols

• nanopore biomolecular sensing…as a gaming device?!

• an ultra-high-energy-density power source based on burning fuel to make light tuned to the exact absorption spectrum of photovoltaics

• molecular additive manufacturing (i.e. build your own ribosome)

• turning atmospheric CO2 into fuel (at scale)

• open source insulin production

• a method for pure (unsintered!) metal 3D printing

• 3D printer “farms” for industrial-scale mass fabrication

• low-cost at-home sperm testing device

• generating offshore hydropower

• automated vivarium for running mouse experiments remotely

and there’s a lot more in that vein.

Check it out, see if there’s anything that interests you, and add yourself if you’re working on something cool!

1. Yes, there are a lot of underfunded academics out there; working at a university or established research institute is no guarantee of adequate funding! But I can’t easily discern academic researchers’ funding situation from public info, so I just excluded them from the list this time around.