# Living on the Supabase Edge [Functions] with Million Dollar Business Ideas *Published 2023-12-22, by Dan Ryland.* > How I used Supabase Edge Functions, Brave Search, and AI prompts to turn startup trends into million-dollar business idea experiments. - Canonical URL: https://danryland.com/blog/living-on-the-supabase-edge-functions/ - Category: Build - Tags: Supabase, Edge Functions, Startups, Ideas [![Screenshot of a tweet: "Part Human, part vector database"](https://danryland.com/images/blog-tweet-1.png)](https://twitter.com/jacksbridger/status/1735391661562167297) "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](https://twitter.com/jacksbridger), we had a great evening of tech talks, pizza and connection. [![Photo of London meetup](https://danryland.com/images/blog-tweet-2.png)](https://twitter.com/jacksbridger/status/1735385638411612497) [Lu](https://twitter.com/TodePond) from TLDraw - a ‘very good free whiteboard’ - showed us some [super clever](https://twitter.com/tldraw/status/1734625744834170973) TLDraw to GPT-Vision demos. [Sam](https://twitter.com/samwillis) 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.](https://danryland.com/blog/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](https://www.youtube.com/@MyFirstMillionPod), 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: [![Million dollar business idea](https://danryland.com/images/blog-cover-million-dollar-business-ideas.jpg)](https://milliondollarbusinessideas.com) [milliondollarbusinessideas.com](https://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’](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs) 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. ![Airtable screenshot](https://danryland.com/images/blog-screenshot.png) I then used [Brave’s Search API](https://brave.com/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. ![Brave Search API in postman](https://danryland.com/images/blog-screenshot-postman.png) 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. ![Ideas within Supabase database](https://danryland.com/images/blog-supabase-database.png) This was the perfect starting point for my app. I imported these into my Supabase database and built a simple [Quasar](https://quasar.dev/) 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. [![Screenshot of 'Random' or 'Bespoke'](https://danryland.com/images/blog-screenshot-million-dollar-business-idea.png)](https://milliondollarbusinessideas.com) 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. ![Supabase Edge Functions](https://danryland.com/images/blog-supabase-edge-function.png) 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. [![Screenshot of post-it note ideas](https://danryland.com/images/blog-post-it-note.png)](https://milliondollarbusinessideas.com) 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. [![Million dollar business idea screenshot](https://danryland.com/images/blog-screenshot-idea.png)](https://milliondollarbusinessideas.com) 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. [![Screenshot of idea search](https://danryland.com/images/blog-all-ideas.png)](https://milliondollarbusinessideas.com) Now we wait for the hackathon gods to do their thing. One thing I know for sure is it does have the [Supafactor](https://supafactor.netlify.app/) 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](https://x.com/realdanryland) And if you haven't used Supabase yet, I highly recomend you [try Supabase today](https://supabase.com/). Until next time, keep hammering those nails. --- - Home: https://danryland.com/ - About: https://danryland.com/about/ - Contact: https://danryland.com/contact/ - Privacy: https://danryland.com/privacy/ - The Forge (weekly note): https://danryland.com/forge/ - Agent overview: https://danryland.com/llms.txt - Sitemap: https://danryland.com/sitemap.xml - RSS: https://danryland.com/rss.xml - Email: dan@ryland.consulting