BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Public Wager Platform 🎰 

Put your money where your mouth is

Available Domain: Socialstakes.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Despite the odds never being in your favour, gambling is more widespread than ever before.

Gambling is now so widespread that creators and other influencers openly make public bets with each other on tv, Twitter, on podcasts and so on. Last week on a podcast I listened to two creators bet $20k on when we would all have robots in our homes. Which got me thinking…will they actually follow through with this? Will someone payout? And secondly, why can’t I place a bet here and have some skin in the game? So let’s build a platform to do exactly this.

Market Size: The global gambling market reached a value of nearly $540bn in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform for influencers to make large, public wagers which others can bet on too

How it Works:

• Influencers sign up to the platform and lay out the conditions of their bet and what the over/under is

• They then put up the money for the bet which is held in escrow by the platform.

• Users can then place their bets on who they believe is correct

• Once the conditions of the bet have been met and a winner is decided payouts are made

• The product could either operate using fiat currency or could be decentralized and use crypto, similar to Polymarket

Go-to-market: Start by approaching influencers who have already made public bets to put them on the platform

Business Model: Charge a transaction fee and earn interest income on staked bets

Startup Costs: You’ll need some cash to get this off the ground since there will be technology and compliance costs to t get this biz going

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Any number of businesses in the betting space would snap this up, like Polymarket who just raised $45m.

Exit Multiple: DraftKings is currently valued around 5x revenue, that’s a pretty decent comp here

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Airbnb for Squatters

The life of a squatter is tricky. Trying to find the best place to squat in and at the right time is almost impossible,

Well not anymore.

With SquatBnB you can find out when people’s homes are vacant so you can squat in peace. No pesky owners telling you to leave.

Easily a billion dollar idea.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Synthetic Data is the Future

In the age of AI, data is the new oil. But despite the petabytes of data out there, it’s still not enough for the big AI companies out there trying to create the most AI models out there. So they’re starting to turn to synthetic data (information that's artificially manufactured rather than generated by real-world events) to solve this problem.

Business Ideas

• Scale.ai for Synthetic Data: deliver high quality synthetic training data for AI applications

• Synthetic Data Marketplace: an online marketplace where businesses can buy and sell synthetic datasets tailored to specific industries and use cases

• Data Privacy Solutions: Offer synthetic data as a privacy-preserving alternative to real data

THE MONEYSHOT

The Story of the $730m Race

Coming from someone who gets out of breath walking up stairs, swimming 2.4 miles, cycling 112 miles and then running a marathon straight after sounds impossible.

Yet every year thousands of athletes finish Ironman triathlons.

And it turns out Ironman isn’t just an incredible race, it’s an incredible business too.

This is its story.

In the 1970s naval officer John Collins and his wife, Judy, were living in Hawaii and thought to combine 3 of the toughest endurance events into one race. So on February 18th, 1978, the first “Hawaiian Iron Man Triathlon” was held. There were just 15 participants, who paid $5 to “sponsor” the race.

By 1979, Collins needed someone to run the 3rd Ironman event, so he unofficially handed the reins to Hank Grundman and Valerie Silk — no lawyers, no signatures.

This caused problems, since some of the initial participants believed that they partially owned the event per the terms of the first event. Decades of court proceedings have found that they’re entitled to nothing.

Over the nest decade the brand grew and grew, changing owners multiple times.

Dr. James P. Gills and Lew Friedland acquired the business for $3 million from Valerie Silk in 1990. Then in 2008 Providence Equity Partners acquired Ironman for $85m. A Chinese conglomerate, Wanda Sports Group, were the next owners, acquiring the brand in 2015 for $650m until they decided to sell it for $730m to Advance Publications Inc., who own the brand today.

Today the brand is doing over $200m in revenue per year and is a staple brand in the endurance sport world.

And today, as Hyrox, Tough Mudder and sports brands have proved, there’s more appetite than ever from people wanting to push themselves physically.

HALF BAKED PICK

Newsletter Pick: Bot Eat Brain

AI is eating the world and your brain is on the menu.

20,000+ readers are staying one step ahead of the bots with Bot Eat Brain’s daily newsletter.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, check them out!

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