BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

AI Walking Tour Podcasts 🎧️  

Walk the talk

Available Domain: Wanderlisten.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Exploring new towns or cities on holidays is one of life’s great joys. Once you remember to watch out for any pickpockets or scammers of course…

But exploring new cities, particularly alone, means you can miss out on some of the amazing history of the place. Many people do group walking tours for this reason, but the rigid schedules, lack of personalization, and questionable "fun facts” can leave travellers wishing they could press skip in real life. So why not create walking tours that users can listen to on their own terms? That’s what we’re thinking.

Market Size: The global tour and activity market was valued at approximately $200 billion in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An app that offers personalized, location-based audio tours that enhance city exploration through curated, AI generated podcasts

How it Works:

• Users download the mobile app and select their current city or location.

• Users can choose to complete pre-set routes (based on how much time they have) or can go into free-roam mode where they freely roam a city.

• As users walk through the city, location-based audio clips are triggered, offering facts, stories, or cultural context relevant to nearby landmarks.

• The experience is interactive, allowing users to rate, skip, or explore different aspects of the city's history or culture during the tour.

• You could gamify this where users have to take a picture of a landmark or another item to get more context

Go-to-market: Start working with solo travel influencers as a great way to explore new cities

Business Model: Pay for a pass for a few days (the length of a holiday)

Startup Costs: You could create something basic here for a few thousand dollars we think

Competitors: There are some competitors in this space, but using AI to generate bespoke tours could be a game-changer

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Get acquired by a travel giant like Airbnb or TripAdvisor

Exit Multiple: A reasonable exit multiple would likely range from 3x to 6x revenue

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T&Cs Apply.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Vaseline AirPods Case Cover

• Worried about sticky-fingered thieves taking your AirPods? Tired of having to guard your precious earbuds like they're made of gold?

• Introducing VaseCase™ - the AirPods case cleverly disguised as a humble tub of Vaseline, ensuring your overpriced (let’s be honest here) earphones don’t end up on the black market.

• Of course this may lead to awkward conversations about why you’re carrying a tub of vaseline around with you, but that’s a small price to pay for peace of mind.

Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Mixy

• We think we’ve just come across the next viral social app. And it hasn’t even been released yet…

• It’s called Mixy and it’s an app which allows users to mash up and mix their favorite songs and share them with their friends.

• Earlier this week it’s creator, Joe Kennedy, launched a beta version of the app on TestFlight where it was getting 1,000 users every 15 minutes, which actually broke TestFlight (oops)

• The app will go live on May 20th and the combination of popular music, sharing mechanisms and social engagement means this will likely be a huge success.

Business Ideas

• Mixy for Movies: Create your own mini movie trailers by mashing up clips from a movie in the style of another Director e.g. if Shrek was directed by Quentin Tarantino

• Mashup-Based Music Trivia Game: A mobile game that plays AI-generated mashups, and users guess the songs involved, artist names, or release years.

Poll: Do you think that Mixy will be the next breakout social app?

• ✅ Yes, I’d bet my house on it

• ❌ Nah, the music companies will come for them

Answer to see the results

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THE MONEYSHOT

Making $500m per Year Selling Scrubs

Huge business opportunities are everywhere. Literally everywhere.

Take these founders who transformed a boring clothing category to create a multi-billion dollar business.

This is their story.

Heather Hasson (left) has always loved fashion.

And back in 2012 Heather, who was an entrepreneur in the fashion industry, had a close friend who had a big fashion problem. Her friend, a nurse practitioner, was being forced to wear boxy, uncomfortable scrubs for her 16-hour shifts. This horrified Heather. So much so that it gave her an idea…

She realized that healthcare professionals had no company focusing on creating fitted, comfortable uniforms for them. Like the Nike or Lululemon of healthcare uniforms. Her vision was clear…to do for medical uniforms what Lululemon did for workout gear.

So Heather started making custom, better-fitting scrubs for her friend to wear…which she loved. But pretty soon other medical professionals were asking for them too. She had unearthed a huge opportunity without even knowing it.

So Heather reached out to her friend Trina Spear for help. Trina, who worked on Wall Street, had the finance and operations skills to complement Heather’s fashion and marketing experience. They got to work.

Every weekend for a few months Trina flew from New York to L.A. to meet up with Heather and the co-founders started selling scrubs out of Heather’s car in hospital parking lots during 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. shift changes.

This was the beginning of FIGS.

The early days weren’t glamorous, but the scrubs were selling. So in January 2013, Trina left her finance job in New York and relocated to Los Angeles to build FIGS alongside Heather, relying on personal savings and grassroots efforts to get started.

They started selling their products online shortly after and in 2013 they raised about $2 million in seed funding from a mix of venture firms and angels. They used this to scale their operations and to launch “Threads for Threads”, a pledge to donate a set of scrubs to a healthcare provider in need for every set they sold.

The business was scaling incredibly quickly so in 2014 they raised another $3m to sustain the business until their first major venture round in 2016 where they raised $5m. But this was only the beginning…

Because in mid-2017, Thomas Tull, the founder of Legendary Entertainment, led a $65 million Series B investment into FIGS, which made his company the majority owner of the company.

With this Series B war chest, FIGS dramatically accelerated its growth plans. Revenue in 2017 was around $23m but in 2018 it 5x’d to hit $100 million. Growth slowed in 2019 but all of a sudden when COVID hit healthcare workers were in the spotlight and FIGS’ revenue skyrocketed to $263 million in 2020.

Building on this momentum FIGS made its Wall Street debut on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2021, becoming the first company led by two female co-founders to do so. The business was valued at roughly $4.8 billion after day one of trading.

Today the company is doing over $500m in revenue per year and while the valuation has come down a lot, the business is still trading well. Meaning Heather’s friend can buy all the scrubs she could ever need (with a nice discount we hope).

All because Heather brought innovation to a dull, overlooked market. Because these “boring” markets often hide massive opportunities.

It’s all about picking the right one.

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