BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Competitive Sales Platform 🥇 

Close calls

Available Domain: Salesduel.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Sales cultures are incredibly competitive environments. Salespeople love competing with each other, even though it isn’t always possible.

But this competitive spirit comes at a cost. Sales cultures can grow toxic over time with salespeople competing with each other to out-do one another. Sales teams need a common enemy to come against. So let’s create one for them.

Market Size: The global sales software market was valued at approximately $20.5bn in 2022

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform where sales teams across different companies can compete against each other to see who performs best

How it Works:

• A company agrees to sign up their sales team to the platform and connects up their CRM to the platform

• The platform then pulls out the overall performance of sales teams and their members for each company on the platform

• Each company and user then goes into an overall leaderboard, where they are ranked based on how well they are performing, specifically how close they are to their target. Their actual numbers and performance are hidden so no sensitive information is shared across different companies relating to performance

Go-to-market: Find some small sales teams in competitor companies and build from there

Business Model: Monthly subscription fee

Startup Costs: You’ll likely need to do a small raise here to get this off the ground

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Sell to a large sales platform, like Hubspot, who can incorporate into their own CRM

Exit Multiple: Classic SaaS valuations apply here, so 5x - 10x revenue or EBITDA multiples of 10x - 15x are good rules of thumb here

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Taxi Route App

Ever been sitting in a taxi and thought to yourself “was this really the quickest way the driver could have gone?”

Well wonder no more with this Taxi Route App. The app analyzes the route the driver drove compared to the quickest possible route to see if your taxi driver is overcharging you, and by how much.

It also helpfully gives you the option to call the driver to give them a piece of your mind…

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: TikTok SEO

Many people view TikTok as a platform where annoying dance trends emerge. But that’s not true. TikTok has actually become a search engine in its own right. Studies have found that, among Gen Z, 40% of young people now prefer to use TikTok and Instagram for search rather than Google. That means that TikTok SEO is emerging as an area for people to make money.

Business Ideas

• Ahrefs for TikTok: Develop software to identify trending hashtags and keywords on TikTok

• TikTok SEO Consulting: Offer services to help businesses optimize their TikTok content for better discoverability.

• TikTok Content Repurposing Service: Help businesses adapt their existing content for TikTok in an SEO-friendly manner.

THE MONEYSHOT

Building a $1bn Business in 2 Years

It took Shopify 9 years to reach a $1bn valuation. What about Spotify? It took them 5 years. Dropbox? 4 years.

But this founder managed to take his business from $0 to a $1bn valuation in just 2 years.

This is his story.

Entrepreneurship is in Andrew Dudum’s DNA.

His grandfather and grandparents on both sides were immigrants who came from the West Bank and Syria in the mid 1900s, moving to America and starting their own companies so they could give themselves and their kids a better life.

But for Andrew he spent the first 17 years of his life doing something far different, he was a cellist. He travelled the world playing weddings, concerts and even toured Europe.

But at age 18 Andrew decided business was for him, so he went to Wharton where he studied math & economics. He lasted for about 2 years there but decided to take a leave of absence when he realized he was barely studying or going to class. Instead he was spending his time trying to convince engineers to build things for him.

Now on his leave of absence Andrew decided to move to San Francisco where he joined a 6-person, Sequoia-backed video-chat startup called TokBox. They raised around $30 - $40 million and Andrew ran product for the company for 4 years until TokBox sold to Telefonica in 2012. Andrew had his first taste of success.

After TokBox, and a stint in Telefonica (who doesn’t love a good earn-out), Andrew decided that his next move wouldn’t be building a traditional company. Instead he wanted to build a company that builds companies.

So Andrew co-founded Atomic. Atomic brought together investors, entrepreneurs and operators to create new companies. Since it began Atomic has built over a dozen companies and raised hundreds of millions of dollars to support these companies, including Butter and Playbook.

But all of Andrew’s success came at a cost…his health. And one evening Andrew went to dinner with his younger sister who had no problem telling him how terrible he looked. She went out and bought Andrew $200 worth of creams and other healthcare products to help Andrew take back control of his health. And it worked.

He started feeling and looking better. This experience made Andrew realize that many men neglect their health to their detriment. So within Atomic Andrew, Jack Abraham and Hilary Coles started exploring the area of men’s health. They wanted to create a telemedicine solution to give men access to healthcare.

So that’s exactly what they did and in 2017 they were ready to launch.

They launched Hims.

Hims initially sold erectile dysfunction treatment sildenafil and hair loss treatments such as minoxidil, biotin vitamins and DHT-blocking shampoo. And the brand took off. With funding from Atomic and an incredible team in place the brand cleared $27 million in year 1.

In fact Hims was so successful that in 2018 they launched Hers, a telemedicine brand targeted to women.

In January 2019, Hims&Hers raised $100 million in a Series C funding round with a pre-money valuation of $1 billion. They had reached the sacred $1bn valuation in just 2 years.

By 2021, just four years after launching, the brand was bringing in $140m in revenue per year and the company debuted on the New York Stock Exchange. In fact you can see the deck the exact deck used to go public here.

And since then the business has kept growing. Last year Hims&Hers did $872m in revenue and have over 1.5 million subscribers on their platform.

For 2024 they’re forecasting to do over $1bn in revenue.

This is an astonishing story of growth, which shows that once you bank those early entrepreneurship wins the sky’s the limit as to what you can achieve.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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