IDEA #1 | CASH FLOW BUSINESS

Hyper Targeted Prospecting 🤑

Target acquired

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Networking is critically important in business.

It can create new career opportunities, open doors to investment and form the basis of partnerships that drive more revenue to the business, even if we do forget everyone’s name within seconds of meeting them.

Here’s the thing - most businesses are just one introduction away from a huge win, a step change in their business, once that introduction is to the right person.

But there’s a problem.

Often influential people are incredibly hard to contact or meet with.

So let’s create a business which solves this problem.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a hyper focussed prospecting service which offers to get a person or business an intro to anyone they want to meet.

Here’s how it would work.

A client would give the name of a person they want to connect with and the desired outcome, likely a call or an in person meeting. Then the client sets a budget on how much they’re willing to spend for the intro and the service goes out and does whatever it can to get in touch with this person using this budget. Hyper targeted ads, engaging with friends of theirs, paying off their gardener, whatever it takes to get the intro.

Then once the intro is made the client is then charged a success fee and if not they simply lose whatever budget was spent and are not charged for the service at all. No win, no fee.

Hell we’d be willing to pay for this service to get in touch with Sam and Shaan from My First Million, so if you know them or start this business hit us up…

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: find people in your existing network who would pay for an intro to someone else you know and build form there

Monetisation: Charge a success fee

Startup Costs: Pretty much $0.

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Once you have this process down you could outsource a lot of the work and this could be a great cash flow business. The value of owning a company with this many connections would always be valuable to you in the future.

IDEA #2 | VENTURE STARTUP

IoT Air Quality Devices🪟

Taking my breath away

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

In recent years air quality has become a major area of discussion.

Raging wildfires in California, Beijing’s constant smog problem, New York turning into something out of Blade Runner.

All of these issues and more have brought air quality to the forefront of our minds, particularly in parts of the USA where air quality is so bad that people are celebrating any even small improvements in air quality.

In recent times, with the expansion of worker’s abilities to work from home, we’re all spending much more time at home, meaning air quality at home is more important to us than ever.

For all of these reasons our guess is that air quality will be the next major health trend, so let’s build a product to capitalize on this fact.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a smart IoT device which controls the air quality in a person’s home.

The device would consist of a number of components which could be bundled or purchased separately based on a customer’s needs. It would consist of an air quality monitor, hydraulics which can be attached to windows to open or close them, an air purifier and a mobile app to control all of these devices.

The device would monitor air quality in the house and once CO2 levels get too high the device would automatically open a window until air quality returns to normal. In scenarios where air quality outdoor is worse the device would close the window and engage the air purifier all in the name of keeping air quality optimal.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: focus on areas in the USA where air quality is a big problem and start selling there, then move on to other areas and hit the mass market.

Monetisation: charge for the devices.

Startup Costs: this is going to be a capital intensive hardware startup, so you’ll need to get some decent backing before pulling the trigger here. Try and raise a small seed round to build a prototype and once that’s been perfected you’ll need to raise a decent amount from VCs to scale.

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

The goal here should be to exit to a large hardware company, think someone like Dyson. Typical valuations for hardware companies stand at 1.5x - 3.0x revenue or 7x - 15x EBITDA.

NO BRAINER IDEA

Shopping Approval App

Are you married? If you are then you know all too well how often your wife goes on rogue shopping sprees in Target or Walmart buying all manner of stuff you don’t need.

Let’s fix that with a banking app where you get to approve your wife’s frivolous purchases, which definitely won’t cause any fights. Genius.

BIG DECK ENERGY

Postmate’s $750k Seed Deck

Year: 2011

Stage: Seed

Amount: $750k

Postmates, founded in 2010 and acquired by Uber in 2020 for $2.65B, is a food delivery service headquartered in San Francisco, California. In 2011 they raised $750k in their seed round to get the company off the ground. Here’s the deck they used to do it.

JUST THE TIP

Bootstrapping to a $12bn Exit

When co-founders Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius launched MailChimp back in 2001, they weren’t trying to build a unicorn startup.

They were simply trying to help their customers.

At the time, the pair were running a web design business and when some of their customers started asking for a way to send emails, they built the first version of Mailchimp.

For years, the service remained a side project until 2007 when Chestnut and Kurzius decided to shut down their web design operation and go all-in on MailChimp.

The next step in the Silicon Valley playbook would have been for the duo to throw together a pitch deck and start knocking on VC doors.

They didn’t.

In fact, Mailchimp hasn’t raised a single dollar of outside investment since it was founded and today is doing over $800m in revenue annually.

In 2023 Intuit acquired Mailchimp for $12bn, the largest ever acquisition of a fully bootstrapped company.

So what’s the lesson here?