IDEA #1 | CASH FLOW BUSINESS

Side Hustles as a Service 🤑

Where hustle culture meets the C-suite

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

There are around 4,000,000 C-suite executives in the USA…CEOs, COOs CMOs…that’s Chief Meme Officer to be clear, at least according to Bud.

...and almost all of them have the same things in common:

1. Gigantic bank balances

2. No spare time, which their spouse constantly complains about to them

3. They have a business that they’ve wanted to start for years, but haven’t had the bandwidth to do it

They have an entrepreneurial itch that they need someone to scratch…so why not build a business that provides this service for them?

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create an agency which offers a turnkey solution for C-suite execs to create their own businesses or side hustles.

Maybe they want to start an eCommerce brand, or a SaaS business? Doesn’t matter. You hire a team of devs, marketers etc. and your agency does all the heavy lifting to set up the business, allowing the exec to be as involved as they want to be.

This is complete whitespace, nobody’s doing it yet (at least according to our 2 mins of research).

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: LinkedIn will be your best friend for finding customers for your agency. Warning: you may have to filter through a lot of LinkedIn cringe on your quest to find leads, but trust us, your customers are out there.

Monetisation: C suite execs have plenty of cash to play around with, which means we’re going to charge them a small fortune for this service (since they can afford it). Here’s the model:

1. Charge a monthly subscription fee for building and managing the business, think $5k+ per month

2. Take equity in their business too, something in the 20% - 30% region. We want some of that upside if the business “pops off” as the kids would say

   

Startup Costs: Startup costs here should be minimal. If you have the means to receive and read this email, you have the means to start this business. Get your first client to pay in advance for the service and use this capital to hire freelancers and create their business for them. Negative cash conversion cycle. Easy.

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

There are 2 ways you could approach this to get rich:

• Hold: This should be a very strong cash flow business with minimal overhead, so this could be an incredible lifestyle business throwing off cash for many, many years

• Exit: There could also be an exit opportunity here. Agencies tend to be valued at a multiple of revenue (1x - 3x) or earnings (4x - 8x) so if you built this to $1m revenue per year, you could net a few hundred thousand dollars per year or sell it for $2m - $3m. Focus on profitability.

IDEA #2 | STARTUP

LinkedIn Bio 👔

One link to rule them all

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

“Link in bio” has always been an elegant solution for creators looking to direct their followers to their product or service, particularly when the destination may involve content that’s NSFW.

And this “link in bio” real estate is incredibly valuable.

Linktree, the biggest player in this space, raised an eye watering $110 million in March 2022 at a $1.3bn valuation. Not bad for a product which is essentially just a list of hyperlinks on a page.

Peak bull market exuberance or a fair valuation? Well a 52x revenue multiple is looking a little steep in 2023.

The focus by linktree and many other players in the market on creating a product optimised for links in Instagram and Tik Tok bios has left one social media platform largely ignored….LinkedIn.

Which is where we believe there’s an opportunity.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a link in bio tool designed for professionals on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is great for building a network, creeping on old classmates and for pure entertainment value courtesy of good some old fashioned LinkedIn cringe.

But the actual profiles on LinkedIn are pretty stale. If you’re looking to give a more detailed, nuanced account of who you are then LinkedIn won’t cut it. We need to create a product which offers exactly this.

This platform would allow users to create customised pages for themselves, using the details from their LinkedIn profile as a starting point with a bit of AI magic. On their personalised site users could:

• Showcase their creativity, such as design portfolios, previous writings etc.

• Suggest what they’re open to, such as working on side projects, consulting or freelancing

• Give more detailed backgrounds beyond just a list of previous jobs, such as previous travel experiences

• Give recommendations on favourites books, podcasts and more

Polywork is the only real player in this market. Interestingly they’ve only recently pivoted into this area. Previously they were trying to compete with LinkedIn directly.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Companies have deep pockets, so the ideal go-to-market strategy here is to find workers who find this tool very valuable, then approach companies with these workers and get them to pay for the service. Failing that, just go directly to your users.

Monetisation: Charge end users, or preferably companies, a monthly subscription fee. Somewhere between $5 and $15 a month per user/seat seems about right.

Startup Costs: you could spin up an MVP pretty cheaply here, you’d need just a few thousand dollars to get this going.

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit: The goal here should clearly be to exit. The link in bio market has a lot of players in it all looking to increase market share, so selling to one of them makes the most sense once you’ve built a solid user base. Hopefully once you’re ready for an exit multiples will be back at 2021 levels.

IDEA #3 | VENTURE STARTUP

Podcases 🎧

Making case studies great again

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

During two years of study, a typical Harvard MBA student will (apparently) analyse and discuss around 500 different case studies.

Unfortunately however, since our parents forgot to get super rich and buy us admission into Harvard, we can’t confirm this first hand.

Here’s the interesting thing…the way case studies are delivered to students hasn’t changed in 100 years. Take this case study from Harvard Business School from 1921 for example:

It’s pretty similar to what you’d get if you were in HBS in 2023, pages and pages of content which you inevitably skim read before giving up and finding a summary online or a good podcast to listen to about the case.

So what’s the opportunity here?

We think podcasts are the answer.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create engaging, high quality podcast versions of case studies. Take inspiration from some of the best podcasts in the space (Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale comes to mind).

You could use AI voices to bring different characters to life and make the content incredibly engaging.

While we’re focussing on business case studies this could work equally well for law students, basically any degree that involves case studies.

Stanford’s Graduate Business School has started developing podcast version of their case studies, which means other universities will be looking to introduce something similar in the coming years. Now is a great time to build this business.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: As we see it there’s 2 paths to market with this product:

1. Create podcases of popular case studies and then license them to different business schools so they can use them as part of their teaching curriculums

2. Work with specific schools to create podcast versions of their own case studies, which they then put through their own distribution. Harvard sells more than 15m cases per year, netting them $250m+ per year. You could try to get in on some of that action.

Monetisation: Charge universities to allow them to use your content as part of their teaching curriculums.

Startup Costs: You’d likely need to take on a little early investment here to get this off the ground, a small seed round would give the runway to create the best content.

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

If you focus on working with a small number of universities, this could be an incredible cash flow business. If you want to go big on this you’ll need some VC backing. Just make sure you focus on how you’re a tech company, not a media business, to make sure you get that sweet, sweet tech valuation multiple.

THEIR PAST, YOUR FUTURE

Do you know this guy? You should.

We’re 99% sure you don’t know who this guy is…but you’ve used his product before.

So who is he?

No, it’s not your father who went out for cigarettes 15 years ago (you gotta let it go).

This is Michael Arrington and back in 2005 he founded techcrunch.

It started out as a hobby, but his high quality content, diligent publishing schedule and a lack of competitors meant his website was soon getting millions of views every month.

He bootstrapped the business to millions of dollars of revenue per year and in 2010 AOL acquired the blog for an estimated $25m, just 5 years after he started the company.

Michael owned 85% of the company when it was acquired, so got himself a pretty nice payout over a very short time span.

If he did it, you can do it too (cringe… BUT TRUE)