BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Amazon Prime for Neighborhoods 🏘️

Prime location

Available Domain: Opencommunity.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: While big cities like New York, London and San Francisco get all the headlines, small neighborhoods are the backbone of our society. Although some neighborhoods are a bit rougher than others.

Today neighborhoods tend to interact in Facebook groups. And a good rule is that wherever there are FB groups there’s a business to be built. So let’s build that business.

Market Size: The global community engagement software market size was valued at around $2bn in 2022

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A hyper-localized membership platform offering benefits for residents in neighborhoods

How it Works:

• Users can sign up for membership for a small monthly fee and join their neighborhood

• By joining the platform users get access to local events, discounts to local stores and restaurants, recommendations on vetted local plumbers, mechanics, babysitters and for other services

• There could also be a social element to this, with feeds and posts. You’ll just need to be strong on moderation here which is where Nextdoor falls down (who aren’t doing too well btw)

• You could also explore including a neighborhood wide smart delivery box service as part of the subscription to combat porch piracy

Go-to-market: Find Facebook groups for small communities and get them to use the platform. Build from there.

Business Model: Subscription model

Startup Costs: Initial launch here should be pretty cheap

Competitors: Nextdoor is the biggest competitor here, but 5 mins of Googling will tell you they’re ripe for disruption

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: Mark Zuckerberg famously said it’ll be a few years before Facebook can buy Google. If you do this right, you could end up buying Nextdoor.

TOGETHER WITH PORTLESS

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Single Color Rubix Cube

Rubix cubes are really hard to solve. And today nobody has the time to figure out how to solve one. It eats too much into our TikTok time.

Which is why we’re introducing the single color rubix cube.

The rubix cube for anyone can solve.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Natural Sunscreen is Hot Right Now

Summer is here baby. Which means sales of sunscreen are about to explode. But recently studies have shown that ingredients in many sunscreen. brands can act as endocrine disruptors. This has driven huge increases in searches for more basic sunscreens, like zinc or tallow sunscreen.

Business Ideas

• Sunscreen Review Site

• Ancestral Cosmetics Brand

THE MONEYSHOT

The $20bn App that brought Wall Street to Main Street

Back in 2021, during the original Gamestop stock frenzy, Robinhood were at the heart of the action.

This is how they got there.

Robinhood was founded in April 2013 by Baiju Bhatt and Vladimir Tenev, experts in all things finance and clearly haircare.

Baiju and Vlad were roommates and classmates at Stanford. After graduating, they packed their bags for New York City and built two finance companies, selling their own trading software to hedge funds.

Seeing the disparity between how little Wall Street firms were paying for trading compared to retail traders, they decided to build a financial product that would give everyone equal access to financial markets. Hence the name…Robinhood.

They aimed to design a mobile app that was free, easy to use, and addictive. And that’s exactly what they did.

But how did they make it free?

Well they did it the same way all tech companies do. By selling data. Robinhood specifically sells order data to high frequency trading firms like Citadel, in a practice called “payment for order flow”, netting them hundreds of millions in revenue.

They also use gamification to make the app as addictive as possible, with elements like digital confetti and scratch off tickets to get free stocks found in the UI. Despite causing legal problems for the company, these growth tactics supercharge Robinhood’s growth.

The number of users grew from 500k in 2014 up to 17.3m in 2021 at the height of the “stonks bubble”. Until Robinhood had to halt trading on stocks like Gamestop, which badly hurt the platform’s reputation.

“You either go bankrupt as a hero, or live long enough to screw over your customers.”

Today however the business is still thriving. The app has 13.7 million monthly active users and is valued at $20bn.

With riches like that it might be time for them to change their name…

HALF BAKED PICK

Newsletter Pick: Cyber Patterns by Jason Levin

Cyber Patterns is a weekly advice column by Jason Levin on organic social media growth tactics for startups/VCs.

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