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Business Ideas #121: Fake Profile Platform, DMCA Takedowns...

Plus Using $5k to Build an $8bn Uber Competitor

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up business ideas as often as Epic Games gets into scraps with Apple.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

  1. Business Idea💡: Solving the fake profile problem

  2. Drunk Business Idea 🍻: Bringing a key aspect of work to family life

  3. Just The Tip 📈: Crazy growth in DMCA takedowns

  4. The Moneyshot 🤑: Using $5k to build an $8bn uber competitor

P.S…if you want to read any previous editions of Half Baked you can on our website.

P.P.S…if you were forwarded this email and want to subscribe, you can here.

Let’s get into it.

BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Fake Profile Platform 👤 

Fake IDs

Available Domain: Scanfake.com

💡 TLDR: A platform to identify, manage and remove fake profiles for famous people and businesses

1. Problem/Opportunity

The Problem/Opportunity: Having a large following on social media is kinda the ultimate life hack. You get sent free stuff, can sell products to your audience, it’s pretty sweet. But if you do have a big following you often have to deal with people impersonating you, copying your profile and trying to scam people using your identity. It’s no joke.

Like how many times have you seen someone with a large audience post something like this?

So let’s build a business to stop the scammers.

Market Size: Honestly…we have no clue how big this market could be

2. Solution 

The Idea: A platform to identify, manage and remove fake profiles for famous people and businesses

How it Works:

  • Influencers sign up to the platform and link their verified social media accounts across different platforms so the platform knows exactly which accounts are real

  • The platform used AI to proactively monitors for fake profiles impersonating them and contacts support to get the profiles taken down

  • It also reaches out to anyone who follows the fake profile to let them know that it’s a fake profile and that they could be scammed by them

  • You could also incentivize followers to report fake accounts through giveaways or other means to speed up the process of getting these taken down

Go-to-market: Once you’ve built the tech, reach out to anyone who posts about fake profiles and offer to manage the situation for them

Business Model: Monthly subscription fee

Startup Costs: You should be able to get this off the ground for a few thousand dollars

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: The goal here should be to exit to one of the large players in the cybersecurity space, like CrowdStrike

Exit Multiple: SaaS businesses in the cybersecurity space go for 6x - 8x revenue or 13x - 16x EBITDA

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Family Performance Review App

Companies like to talk about how we’re all one big family. So why not make family life more like our work lives?

Well now you can with our new family performance review app. Give feedback to your loved ones to make sure they’re always at the top of their game.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: DMCA Takedown Requests

DMCA requests (when content is removed from a website or internet platform at the request of the owner of the content) have skyrocketed in recent years. Check out this chart of the number of DMCA requests Google have received in recent years.

This trend allowed Ceartas to rasie €4.5m earlier this year.

Business Ideas

  • Content Verification Services: Help businesses verify the ownership of digital content before it is published to avoid potential DMCA issues.

  • Verticalized Content ID: Develop systems similar to YouTube’s Content ID, allowing creators to automatically detect and manage infringing content in specific verticals

THE MONEYSHOT

Using $5k to Build an $8bn Uber Competitor

Few have managed to enter the ride hailing market, take ont he might Uber, and lived to tell the tale.

Markus Villig is one of the few who has.

This is his story.

Back in the spring 2013 Markus had just finished high school and was looking for a business idea. He was inspired by the story of Skype, the first big tech success story to come out of his home nation of Estonia, and wanted to start his own tech company.

Which is when his older brother mentioned a web-based taxi ordering service which Markus loved the idea of.

So with a €5,000 loan from his family, he created the first prototype of the app while personally recruiting drivers on the streets of Tallinn.

Bolt (not to be confused with Bolt) was born.

It began as a digital dispatcher for taxi drivers, but having to sell directly to taxi companies was…difficult. Take a pitch he made to a taxi company owner in Serbia who had a revolver on his desk and a safe in the corner. Not exactly the kind of person you want to do business with (unless you enjoy waking up next to horses heads).

So Markus pivoted to make Bolt more similar to Uber, but on a shoestring budget, raising only $2m compared to the hundreds of millions Uber had at their disposal.

But through a combination of keeping costs low and targeting geographies that Uber hadn’t reached yet, Bolt was able to make its mark on the market.

In just 4 years Bolt’s revenue grew from $700k to $140m. Earlier this year the company raised €220m in debt financing as it gears up for an IPO which should value the company around $8bn.

All of which goes to show that, even if you’re not first to market, there’s always room to be successful with the right execution.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

#HalfBakedBizIdea

Hung Lee with a frankly genius idea.

DM us or use #halfbakedbizidea on X/Twitter to get your idea featured in our newsletter.

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