BUSINESS IDEA | VENTURE STARTUP

Mercury for FIRE 🔥

Playing with FIRE

Available Domain: Firenheit.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: The FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement has grown from a fringe subreddit obsession into a full-blown financial lifestyle. Despite the fact that in this economy most of us are further than ever before from retiring…

But while the FIRE community has evolved, their tools haven’t. Right now, the typical FIRE follower’s stack consists of a spreadsheet, a savings account and maybe a budgeting tool. In other words, FIRE folks are cobbling together their financial lives with duct tape. This is why we think there’s an opportunity is to create the go-to financial hub for the FIRE movement, like Mercury did for startups. Here’s how.

Market Size: There are 3–5 million FIRE enthusiasts in the US alone

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A digital bank and financial management platform tailored for the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement

How it Works:

• Users have a dedicated FIRE Dashboard for real-time tracking of their savings rate, FI number, retirement date, and burn rate.

• Their income can be routed into FIRE-aligned buckets for savings (investments, Roth conversions, HSA, etc.) and the platform plugs into Vanguard, Fidelity, Robinhood, etc., optimizing for tax efficiency.

• Users can also run scenarios in the app such as “What if I moved to Portugal?” or “What if I cut rent by $500?” to see how that affects their finances

• Users can join FIRE squads on the app for motivation, ideas, and tracking challenges.

Go-to-market: Influencer-led acquisition where you partner with top FIRE content creators (Mr. Money Mustache or Reddit r/FIRE mods).

Business Model: Interchange fees, interest on deposits and a premium subscription version of the app with full features

Startup Costs: You’ll need to do a raise here to get this off the ground given the technical and regulatory complexities of becoming a fintech/bank

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Acquisition by a larger fintech like Wealthfront, Robinhood, or SoFi to expand their customer base to the FIRE community.

Exit Multiple: Fintech companies typically exit at 4–8x revenue.

TOGETHER WITH BLUEHOST

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Death Clock Watch

• Looking to get more out of your life? Do you think a daily reminder of your own mortality would help you seize the day?

• Introducing the Tikker Watch™, the timepiece that doesn’t just tell time...it tells you that your time is running out.

• With Tikker you simply input your estimated death date, then it counts down every second until your time is up. How fun.

• Have your friends saying “carpe damnnn” when they look at your wrist.

Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: De-extinction

• Jurassic Park, one of the best the sci-fi films of all time, is becoming more sci and less fi by the day as the field of “de-extinction” is gaining momentum.

• Using genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and tools like CRISPR, stem cells, and selective breeding, scientists are working to bring extinct species back from the abyss.

• Leading the charge is Colossal Biosciences, which recently made headlines for reviving the dire wolf, and has its sights set on the woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, and even the dodo.

• Guess it’s time to retire the phrase “dead as a dodo.”

Business Ideas

• Synthetic Ecosystem Simulator: A SaaS simulation tool that models the impact of reintroducing extinct species into modern ecosystems.

• Extinct Animal App: Pokémon Go–style AR experience where users “find” extinct animals revived by science, complete with educational overlays.

TOGETHER WITH LYNQ

Turn email from a time-sink into a background process

Early-stage founders already split attention across product, hiring, and fundraising; inbox triage shouldn’t be another job.

Lynq.ai connects to Gmail or Outlook, surfaces the handful of messages that matter, drafts on-brand replies, and books meetings automatically—freeing roughly six hours each week for actual company-building.

There are no per-seat minimums, and pricing grows only when headcount does. Most importantly, the product ships updates weekly; user feedback on Monday often becomes a feature by Friday.

Founders use Lynq.ai to get back to shipping code, closing deals, and thinking big—without a wall of unread messages haunting the tab bar.

Try Lynq.ai free and see whether inbox stress disappears by the end of the week.

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THE MONEYSHOT

Turning Learning into a $525m Exit

We’ve all heard the phrase “knowledge is power”. However, sometimes a lack of knowledge can be just as powerful.

Take this founder whose lack of knowledge in a field led him and his co-founder to create a $525m business.

This is their story.

Zach Sims (left) is a founder at heart.

He started his first business at 13, a review site and e-commerce store for iPod cases, that made him a few thousand dollars. Not bad for his first business. And this started his lifelong love of entrepreneurship.

Despite his love of entrepreneurship though Zach went to Columbia to study Political Science. Which is where he met Ryan Bubinski, a Computer Science student who had a knack for teaching and had previously created educational programs for programming.

During his time at college Zach spent time interning at startups and quickly realized how important technical literacy was in the tech world. However, he didn’t know how to code. Which is when he approached his friend Ryan.

They quickly realised that learning to code was extremely difficult for a beginner, so they decided to build their own platform to help people to learn how to code.

They built the first prototype during the summer of 2011 as part of Y Combinator's Summer 2011 batch. The MVP focused on JavaScript and let users complete simple coding challenges in the browser with instant feedback. No setup, no downloads.

By August 2011, they were ready to launch.

They founded Codecademy.

The launch was an incredible success. They shared the site on Hacker News and the site went super viral, garnering 200,000 users in the first 72 hours, far exceeding their expectations. The response was so explosive that their servers crashed due to the traffic.

Shortly after their viral debut, they secured a $2.5 million seed round from investors including Union Square Ventures, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, and O’Reilly AlphaTech. The momentum was undeniable.

Since going viral helped the company so much, they decided to try and repeat the process, launching a campaign in 2012 called Code Year, a New Year's resolution initiative that encouraged users to learn to code over the course of a year.

The campaign went viral too with over 450,000 people signing up in the first month, including then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

By 2013, Codecademy had become one of the most recognized names in online coding education and that year they raised a $10 million Series B round led by Index Ventures.

For the next few years the company grew and grew, with the launch of Codecademy Pro and Codecademy for Business products driving huge revenues for the business.

Eventually in January 2022, Codecademy was acquired by Skillsoft (a corporate learning company) for $525 million in a cash-and-stock deal. At the time, Codecademy had over 40 million learners worldwide and offered courses in multiple programming languages, data science, and web development.

And in the end all of this didn’t come from some compelling insight, it came from something Zach didn’t know, but that he wanted to learn.

Which raises the question…what don’t you know right now? Because whatever that is it could make you millions.

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