IDEA #1 | VENTURE STARTUP

AI for Outbound Sales 📞

Always be closing…with a little AI magic

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Outbound sales is incredibly hard.

You’re cold calling or cold emailing strangers trying to sell to them and doing whatever it takes to hit your sales target.

It’s no surprise then that the second a prospect shows even the tiniest bit of interest that the salesperson comes in hot.

This is particularly true for enterprise sales reps who are trying to close huge deals with the big wigs in large corporations.

In this world research, preparation and personalisation all go a long way to getting deals closed, but these are time intensive activities. But what if we could use AI to do the heavy lifting on these activities to increase sales reps efficiency?

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create an AI tool which helps reps to take a more personalised approach to outbounding, sales calls and ultimately close more deals.

The AI would assist with outbounding leads, where the AI analyses the company’s product docs and helps the rep to identify their ideal customer profile and craft a personalized outreach plan for each prospect, helping reps to focus on the right leads and deliver them the right messaging.

The platform would also help reps to prepare for sales calls, using AI to browse the web, articles, 10Ks and any other publicly available information to learn as much as possible about the prospect and their business. The salesperson would receive a summary doc of all of this information prior to the call which they could then study and save them the time of doing the research themselves.

All of this would go a very long way to help sales reps to get more deals done.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Begin by working with smaller sales teams to determine the efficacy of the AI assistant, and once you have some statistics on how close rates have improved and reps time has been free up then go to larger organisations with big sales teams

Monetisation: Charge a monthly subscription fee per user

Startup Costs: find yourself an AI engineer and you’ll be good to go!

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

This is an exit play. SaaS multiples are around c.5x revenue at the moment, depending on what data you look at. A business like this would be a prime target for any large sales software platform, like Gong or Hubspot.

IDEA #2 | STARTUP

The Knot for Funerals ⚰️

Breathing life into this market

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Planning the funeral of a loved one is emotionally and logistically challenging, with an average of 13 months of decisions and tasks to navigate after the death of a loved one.

Multiply that by the fact that 61m people died globally last year (3.5m in the USA) and you get a big problem.

Once upon a time (not in a galaxy far, far away) weddings had a similar problem, a problem which was solved by The Knot.

The Knot has been the go to destination for wedding planning, making it as easy as possible to spend all your money on that one special day.

The Knot was taken private in 2018 after selling to a private equity firm in a deal reportedly worth $933m.

If The Knot could do it for weddings, someone else must do it for funerals.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create an all in one platform which streamlines the funeral planning process.

Users could sign up to the platform and arrange everything they need for a funeral. They could find a suitable funeral home and funeral Director through the site and find the best time for it, while also arranging transport to and from the funeral home.

They could also buy a casket or an urn on the website, buy flowers for the occasion, find suitable readings or music to mark the occasion and so on. Fundamentally everything could be done through the platform.

In cases where people want to be involved in the planning of their own funeral the platform could accommodate this too, with them giving input on any aspect of the planning.

The platform could also expand beyond these core features to include estate planning, inheritance management and more.

Currently there’s no leading platform in this space, meaning there’s a huge opportunity here for the right founder.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: offer to help in the planning of a funeral for free to understand all of the pain points in the process, build the software then work with websites who post death notices and see if they would be comfortable recommending the platform to those who are in the funeral planning stage

Monetisation: charge a fee to use the platform and take a commission on sales of products made through the platform

Startup Costs: this would be relatively inexpensive to get going, you would likely only need a few thousand dollars to get your MVP built and get going

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

This could be an incredible cash flow business that could grow very, very big. It’s hard to see a path to an exit here but you never know a company like The Knot (who also own The Bump) may want to expand into this vertical.

JUST THE TIP

Turning 11 ingredients into $20m

Christmas is over for another year. Presents have been exchanged, family members have fought and in Japan millions celebrated Christmas with a traditional bucket of KFC.

That’s right, every year in Japan millions of families eat KFC on Christmas Day, which the colonel presumably delivers in his sleigh pulled by his reindeer.

But KFC came from much more humble beginnings when in 1930, at the age of 40, Harland Sanders opened a service station in Kentucky and started serving fried chicken to bring in more customers.

He became famous for his recipe and in 1952, Kentucky Fried Chicken started when then-62-year-old Sanders franchised his recipe to a friend in Salt Lake City, Utah.

A decade later, the company had grown to hundreds of franchises, and Sanders sold his ownership in 1964 for $2 million ($20m in today’s money).

Today, the KFC brand is valued at $12.6 billion, according to Forbes.

So what’s the lesson here?