BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Glassdoor for Influencer Rates 🖥️

Paid, not played

Available Domain: Reelodex.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Last week we covered the epic career of Rich Barton and how he built three +$1bn businesses around one single thesis. Meanwhile the rest of us are out here trying to get just one business off the ground.

That thesis was incredibly simple…to bring transparency to a market lacking it. He built Expedia to bring transparency to the travel market, Zillow to do the same for the real estate market and Glassdoor to shed some light on salary information. Which naturally got us thinking…what market could we apply Rich’s model to today? Well we think we have one. Hear us out.

Market Size: The creator economy was valued at approximately $250 billion in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform where creators can confidentially share details on how much they are paid for brand deals

How it Works:

• An influencer signs up to the website and can browse confidential, anonymised brand deal data shared by other creators on the platform, including how much they were paid, their audience size, industry, engagement etc.

• Users can only browse this data if they provide details on a brand deal they did themselves, similar to Glassdoor

• Brands can also sign up to the platform and browse this information. They can also search for influencers to collaborate with and offer them brand deals on the platform

Go-to-market: Build up your data repository by using publicly available data, then start working with micro-influencers to start collecting proprietary data

Business Model: Charge brands for access to the site

Startup Costs: You could start this very cheaply, probably a few thousand dollars. The hardest part will be getting data just as the business is starting out

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Exit to a company in the creator space like Social Blade

Exit Multiple: Similar platforms in the B2B SaaS space typically exit at 6-10x revenue

TOGETHER WITH AUTOMATIONLINKS

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Meeting Playset

From the makers of "Baby's First Performance Review" and "Little Manager's Downsizing Adventure” we bring you the world's first corporate meeting simulator for kids.

Introducing the Soul-Crushing Meeting™ playset. Prepare your child for the real world with this authentic corporate meeting experience, complete with a table, chairs, speakerphone, coffee cups and of course no agenda. Let your kids live the magic we all experience of the meeting could have been a simple email.

Remote work edition coming soon.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Japanese Head Spas

The West is fascinated by Japanese culture. Anime. Sushi. Matcha. The list goes on. And the latest Japanese export taking the West by storm is the “Japanese head spa.” This is a specialized therapeutic treatment that focuses on the scalp and hair and is considered both a beauty and wellness treatment in Japan as a way to combat stress and maintain scalp health. This concept could be big in the West, so why not build a business around it?

Business Ideas

• Foreign Trends Tracking Tool: Create a product which tracks popular trends and practices in other countries which can be brought to the USA

• Japanese Practices Newsletter: Create a newsletter dedicated exclusively to traditions and practices in Japan for people interested in Japanese culture

THE MONEYSHOT

How a Notebook Turned into a $55m Exit

Successful businesses can come from almost anywhere.

Take this founder who turned a simple notebook into a $55m exit.

This is his story.

Col Needham is the ultimate movie buff.

The UK-native developed a passion for films at age 5 after winning a coloring competition that awarded him a ticket to see "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in the cinema when it was re-released in the 1970s.

By the early 1980s, back when Star Wars movies were good and Sony’s Walkman was cutting edge technology, Col was a full-on movie obsessive and began writing down all the movies he watched on VHS in a notebook.

By the late 1980s Col was participating in an internet film discussion group called USENET, where he began collaborating with other movie enthusiasts to collect and share film information, particularly in a newsgroup (think discussion forum) called "rec.arts.movies," where film fans would share and maintain lists of movie credits, plot summaries, and trivia with each other.

So in 1989, using his notebook and information from these forums, Col began compiling and sharing a database of movies, actresses and actors, initially called the "rec.arts.movies movie database." Branding wasn’t exactly Col’s forte. Others saw what Col was doing though and offered to help, all of them manually compiling these lists from watching movies and reading credits. That’s right, some people actually do read the credits it turns out.

Col and his team had unofficially started IMDb.

By 1993 the database had grown substantially and Col, using his background in computing, decided to make his database available on the world wide web. So that year the renamed the database to IMDb (Internet Movie Database) and it became one of the first websites on the world wide web. Bear in mind that the world wide web had only been invented by Tim Berners-Lee a few years earlier in 1989. Col was early. Really early.

Then, in 1995, as more and more people started to use this new internet thing IMDb officially became a commercial entity with Col as the primary owner and the early contributors as shareholders.

Over time IMDb became one of the most visited websites in the world and they started monetizing the site through advertising, IMDbPro Subscriptions, partnerships and licensing deals. But the real value was in the data, and once company knew how valuable this data was for them.

In 1998 a company that just went public named Amazon saw the potential for IMDb’s database to help them to sell DVDs and VHS tapes. Col met Jeff Bezos and later that year IMDb became one of Amazon’s first acquisitions, paying $55m to acquire the business. Today Amazon still owns IMDb which is a shockingly huge business (not compared to Amazon of course) but IMDb has around 1,000 employees and is estimated to do around $100m in revenue per year.

As for Col? Well he stayed on as CEO until January 2025 when, after 30 years running the business, he stepped down and transitioned to Executive Chairman. Amazing to think a 30 year career and a $55m exit all came from a simple notebook tracking the movies he watched.

For Col a passion project became a life-changing business outcome.

Maybe your passion project could too?

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