I’ve seen startups which got millions in funding to do basic appointment scheduling. If I had actual funds seeing something like that for $20k might not be a bad idea and totally possible for decent coder to generate in a month.

So you'd be buying an unimplemented, unpatentable idea for $20k that a dev could build in a month (for presumably much less than $20k)?

Patents don't seem to carry as much weight in this industry.

There's a million and one ways of doing things, the way patents work is a specific implementation.

Gaining a patent amounts to throwing stones at each other.

20k is a lot less than hiring a HR department and finding a developer. Haven't looked at the site, but was assuming some of the ideas have an MVP of some sorts.