BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Startup Equity Modelling Tool 💰️  

Vest assured

Available Domain: Vestquest.co

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Working in tech comes with a lot of perks. Good money. Free snacks. Lots of exercise because of all of those “stand-ups”. But by far the biggest benefit of working in a tech startup is the stock options, which could be your ticket to riches…

But as amazing as share options are, they remain something of a mystery to most us. Between strike prices, vesting schedules, cliffs, liquidation preferences and plenty of other buzz words, many tech employees don’t understand how their options actually work, never mind the tax implications of exercising them. But what if someone built a tool that could help employees to better understand how they work and model out different scenarios for their options in the future? You read our minds.

Market Size: There are around 12 million startup workers in tech globally

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An interactive app that helps employees to model how their equity options could play out across different scenarios to make better decisions about when to exercise, sell, or hold.

How it Works:

• The user manually inputs details about their equity (grant size, type, vesting schedule, strike price, cliff, etc.) into the platform or this data is imported from their Carta accounts

• Different outcomes are then simulated outcomes based on future funding rounds, company exit values, dilution scenarios, exit timelines etc.

• The user can use the tool at specific points to make decisions about what to do, such as when they are leaving a company, when their options expire, during secondary sales etc..

• The platform also offers tax insights, giving details on the tax implications of exercising options

Go-to-market: Make powerful content here showing how little people know about how their options work, use that hook and get people to use a free, limited version of the tool

Business Model: Free version with limited functionality. Premium version where you ideally sell licenses directly to startups who cover the costs on behalf of their employees.

Startup Costs: The software build here will be pretty complex, so you’ll either need a great technical co-founder or funding to pay a great engineering team to build this

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Get acquired by Carta, Pulley, or another cap table solution looking to expand into financial planning tools

Exit Multiple: Consumer SaaS with financial utility typically see exits around 5–10x ARR

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Alarm Clock Pillow

• Struggle to get out of bed in the morning? Find yourself sleeping through your alarm some mornings?

• Introducing the Rise & Cry™, the world’s first alarm clock pillow. This revolutionary pillow shakes violently and blasts loud music directly into your skull to ensure you, or your partner, can’t miss your alarm.

• Success doesn’t sleep. And now, neither will you

Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Unretirement

• Throughout our working lives we all dream of the day we finally get to retire. Interestingly though many people who have hit this milestone are choosing to go back, to “unretire”.

• "Unretirement" (as you can probably guess) refers to the situation where a retiree returns to the workforce after a short period of living retired life.

• People are unretiring for many reasons. Some people sadly have to for financial reasons. Others though are embracing an “encore career” where they work for social and emotional benefits, like working on a cause near and dear to their hearts.

Business Ideas

• Retiree Consulting Platform: A platform where businesses can hire retired professionals as consultants (From edition #26)

• Late-Life Upskilling Platform: An education platform built for 50+ learners with simplified UX, AI tutors, and programs geared toward encore careers, side gigs, or volunteering.

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THE MONEYSHOT

How a Single Feature Built a $5bn Business

Facebook’s feed. Snapchat stories. Duolingo streaks. Certain platforms can attribute much of their success to a single, killer feature.

Take these guys who turned one killer feature into a $5bn business.

This is their story.

Yoni Assia (left) and Ronen Assia go way back. Mainly because…they’re brothers.

And it turns out this pair of Israeli brothers made the perfect co-founding team. Ronen, the older of the two, was a product designer while Yoni had a passion for computer science and finance. Which is where their big idea came from…

While Yoni was working on his Master’s thesis in computer science and finance, he realised there was an opportunity to build a platform which simplified online forex trading.

He brought his older brother in on the idea to help with the design work. All they needed now was an engineer. So they brought David Ring, a seasoned software engineer, on board.

With the team in place they started building and by 2007 they were ready to launch their platform which they called RetailFX.

The platform started to gain some early traction and the team raised $6.3 million in March 2009 to expand beyond just forex trading. And with this expansion came a change in name.

They became eToro.

With a new name and some capital to play with, eToro set out to make their mark in the investing space. Which is why they decided to lean into the idea of “social investing”.

This culminated with the launch of eToro OpenBook in 2010. This was the world’s first social trading platform which allowed users to see what real traders were doing in real time and follow top-performing investors. But the killer feature they stumbled upon with this launch was CopyTrader.

This feature allowed users to replicate the trading strategies of top-performing investors automatically, like hedge fund managers or US politicians of course.

Growth exploded after this was launched and between 2010 and 2015, the company raised $65 million across five funding rounds to fuel growth. But that pales in comparison to their last two funding rounds where the business raised $100m and $250m in 2018 and 2023 respectively. More fuel for the rocket ship.

Today eToro is a giant in the trading space with around 38 million registered users and is pulling in almost $1bn in revenue per year. In early 2025, the company filed for an IPO, aiming to list on the Nasdaq. The Financial Times reports the IPO could potentially value the company at $5 billion.

All of which goes to prove that sometimes, a single idea, a single insight, a single feature, can propel a business to new heights. The only thing is, until you launch it, you have no idea what feature that could be.

The only way to find out is to build…and build…and build.

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