Here are the startups Curalate could have become

Before Curalate was Curalate, it was Storably — the Airbnb for storage.

When that failed, its investors, including First Round Capital, gave the team one month to come up with a better idea. They brainstormed more than 70 startup ideas.

Here are some of their ideas (and why they ultimately didn’t work out), according to a recap of a Philly Startup Leaders Bootcamp talk that Curalate CTO Nick Shiftan and marketing director Brendan Lowry gave last week. It was recapped by Simplpost:

• DrinkedIn: Matching up small groups of people for business networking over drinks. They got 130 signups in one day and got news coverage from a local Fox TV station. But scaling this one up didn’t seem like a good fit for the team and investors.
• Fanfare: A trivia service for sports fans. They got 25,000 impressions and 88 participants based on eight questions tweeted during a Sixers game. It only cost them $7.50 to find out that this idea was doable, but would not become a billion dollar company. And that cost included buying a drink at a sports bar.
• Ethnically: Providing a range of different ethnic foods to people. This one seemed like a good idea, but none of them had any experience in the food industry.
• Cloudticks: A service to synchronize services between servers in the cloud. This tackled a difficult problem, but didn’t have the potential they required.
• Get Me Out of Here: A site for impulse travelers. The service would connect people to destinations based on the data they inputted. Both the market size and the profit margins ended up being too small.
• Pinsights: Analytics for social media. Pinterest was just taking off, and Apu [Gupta, CEO] realized there was a real lack of context for all the products in photos. He wanted to buy a bag he spotted, but couldn’t track down where it could be purchased.

In their talk, Shiftan and Lowry discuss how they knew to give up on Storably, why they used Twitter to get their first customers and why they initially focused on user experience instead of product features.