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- Business Ideas #37: Fantasy Sports for VC, Helping Distressed Companies...
Business Ideas #37: Fantasy Sports for VC, Helping Distressed Companies...
Plus Behind the Curtains of a $1bn per year Empire
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Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas more secret than the secret ingredient in coca-cola.
Here’s what we’re serving up today:
Idea #1: Bringing the world of fantasy sports to VC
Idea #2: A marketplace opportunity for distressed businesses
No Brainer Bonus Idea
Big Deck Energy: A creator platform’s $15m series A deck
The Moneyshot: Behind the curtains of a $1bn per year adult empire
Psst…btw if you want to read any previous editions of Half Baked you can on our website.
Let’s get into it.
IDEA #1 | VENTURE STARTUP
Fantasy VC
PC VC gaming
💡 TLDR: A game which helps aspiring investors to learn about venture capital, similar to a fantasy sports game
1. Problem/Opportunity❓
Fantasy sports is big business.
The fantasy sports market is currently worth $27.2 bn but is projected to be worth $76.5 bn by 2030.
The gamification and competition of fantasy make it the perfect complement to watching sport. Where else can out of shape dudes who don’t know much about sport complain that world class athletes aren’t performing well enough and their superstar coaches don’t know what they’re doing.
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In the business world the closest equivalent to fantasy football is paper trading, games where stock trading companies like Robinhood or eToro give users fake money to play with and trade stocks in the hope they get addicted and yolo their actual life savings on a meme stock in the hope of buying a lambo.
Sure there are paper trading games for playing the stock market, but what about for people interested in learning about venture capital?
There’s a huge gap in the market for someone to build a fantasy game for those interested in VC investing.
Let’s build it.
2. Solution ✅
Here’s the idea. Create a game, similar to fantasy football, which helps aspiring investors to learn about venture capital.
Here’s how it works. When you start the game you get allocated a budget, say $25m. You can then explore opportunities to invest in different companies. The companies are AI generated and some will be based on real life businesses, others won’t be.
You can choose what companies you want to invest in and how much you want to invest in them. Some will be seed stage companies with limited information, others will be late stage with full financial information available. At every stage, from investments to valuations to exits, key terminology will be explained to the user so they can learn about the intricacies on VC investing.
Each day you will receive an update on new opportunities and updates on your investments, which could be anything from landing a huge new contract to the founder being caught up in a scandal and you have to decide what your move will be.
The game takes place at an accelerated pace where a week of real world time equals 6 months of time in the game. This means a game takes around 10 - 12 weeks to complete. You can play by yourself, in a league with friends or even in a league with strangers to see who generates the best returns for their LPs.
This is a huge opportunity for the right team to pursue.
3. Business Model 🏦
Go-to-market: Sell to colleges in the first instance to use with their students then go mass market
Monetisation: ads in the game
Startup Costs: Game development is notoriously expensive, meaning you’ll likely need to raise some money here to get this off the ground and get a dev team to build it out
4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰
Sell to an indie game dev company
IDEA #2 | STARTUP
Liquidation Digital Assets Marketplace 🔻
When startups become shutdowns
💡 TLDR: A marketplace for companies going through a liquidation process to list and sell their digital assets as part of bankruptcy proceedings
1. Problem/Opportunity❓
The economy is in a tough spot right now.
Interest rates have been steadily rising, inflation is still a thing and credit card debt is sitting at all time highs.
At least that’s our justification for being so broke right now.
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Against this macroeconomic backdrop we’re seeing more and more companies go under. US bankruptcies surged 18% in 2023 and seen rising again in 2024.
Since the dawn of man companies have been going out of business and similarly businesses have been created to help liquidate their assets. We’ve all seen auctions in movies where physical assets get sold off to the highest bidder.
But in the digital age what about digital assets? Domain names? Customer lists? Trademarks?
What’s the path of least resistance for these assets to be disposed of in a liquidation?
It doesn’t exist right now.
So let’s create it.
2. Solution ✅
Here’s the idea. Create a digital marketplace for companies going through a liquidation process to list and sell their digital assets.
Here’s how it works. When a company is going into liquidation they join the platform and list any digital assets they want to sell on the platform. The platform, using data from other and previous listings, can recommend prices to help the company get as much money as possible for their assets.
Meanwhile, companies interested in acquiring digital assets sign up for the platform and pay a subscription fee to browse the listings and can interact with the sellers to buy any products they’re interested in.
A big selling point here would be the fact that companies selling their assets could list and sell their assets for free, with the acquiring companies paying a subscription fee to keep the platform running.
3. Business Model 🏦
Go-to-market: start by working directly with insolvency practitioners to help them sell digital assets for their clients, and productize the service from here
Monetisation: charge buyers on the platform a subscription fee for access to the platform
Startup Costs: this would be a straight forward build since the platform would be simple to build, so not much capital needed here
4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰
Sell to a liquidation marketplace or a business like carta
NO BRAINER IDEA
Stacked Work Desks
In these trying economic times businesses are looking to cut costs wherever they can. A lot of businesses are cutting back on rental costs, particularly with more and more people “working“ from home.
But what happens if the company gets bigger or everyone’s required to be in work on a particular day? Well we have the solution.
Stacked work desks! Save space and feel closer to your colleagues than ever before with our innovative design.
Patent pending.
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BIG DECK ENERGY
Kyra’s $15m Series A Deck
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Year: 2022
Stage: Series A
Amount: $15m
Kyra offers creators a self-serve platform to find new deals where they will be paid on a performance basis. The platform also offers Kyra Originals, a network of TikTok channels producing original content; Kyra Profile, a Gen Z creator incubator program; and Kyra Studios, a production studio that creates social content on behalf of brands. This pitch deck helped Kyra secure a $15 million Series A.
THE MONEYSHOT
OnlyFans: the Money Making Machine
Have you ever wondered how much money OnlyFans makes? Maybe not, but we did.
You always hear stories online about the crazy amounts of money creators make on OnlyFans, but what about the platform itself?
Well luckily OnlyFans is actually a UK registered company. Why is this lucky? Because all private UK companies must publish their financials, meaning we can take a peak behind the curtains of this business.
OnlyFans’ company name is Fenix International Limited, and this is their income statement from 2022:
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/42007317-85e4-412c-908b-3b240edd366c/Screenshot_2024-02-25_at_12.04.52.png?t=1708876082)
The company generated over $1bn in revenue from charging transaction fees on the $5.5bn of transaction volume going through the platform. They earned $404m in net profit in 2022 alone, absolutely ridiculous numbers.
You can also see from their balance sheet that $338m of this profit was paid out to shareholders and the company is sitting on cash reserves of $563m.
You can check out their full financials here if you’re interested.
Turns out there’s a lot of money to be made in porn. Who knew?
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Have you taken one of the business ideas we’ve shared previously and are you building it, or are you planning to built it?
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Just email us a [email protected] or reply to this email and we’ll do whatever we can to help you succeed.
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