BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Restricted Products Ad Platform 🚫

Getting the word out there

Available Domain: Adunlocks.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: We’re all constantly getting bombarded ads. You simply can’t avoid them in modern life, particularly when YouTube decides to make them unskippable.

But here’s the thing…for as much as we hate them, ads work. How else could you explain the existence of a $615 billion dollar industry? Billions of dollars only get spent because they’re generating a return. And today, through a clear data advantage and sophisticated targeting, Google and Facebook are the top dogs in the ad market. But interestingly there are lots of products that can’t be advertised on these platforms, such as swords, gambling products, nicotine products or certain CBD products to name a few. So where do these businesses go to acquire customers and advertise their businesses? Let’s build that exact destination.

Market Size: The global advertising market was $615bn last year, the TAM here is is a subset of that

2. Solution✅

The Idea: A platform to match brands who can’t advertise on major platforms with channels where they can

How it Works:

• Brands can sign up to the platform, giving details on what their business, ad budgets and their advertising goals (brand awareness, finding leads etc.)

• They can then select from a range of advertisers who will advertise their products and are optimized for their particular industry (relevant creators, newsletters, websites, blogs and so on)

• They can then engage with these advertising partners on the platform and set up campaigns, which could be cost per impression, cost per click etc. Where possible through API connections the performance could be monitored on the platform and payouts are made accordingly

Go-to-market: Start by creating an agency to help these brands to advertise, then productize that over time

Business Model: Take a % of ad fees paid through the platform

Startup Costs: You should be able to start this for $0 if you go the agency route first. Engage with customers, get paid upfront to optimize cash flow, reinvest profits into building the software

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold & Exit: The strategy here should be to hold your agency as a cash flow business as long as it is profitable and exit the software side of the business for your big payout

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Pre-cracked Eggs

“You can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs.“

Well with these pre-cracked eggs you certainly can.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Lab Grown Meat

Lab grown meat costs have been plummeting in recent years, behaving similarly to computing costs. However while costs to produce it are plummeting, politicians are starting to get involved in the market, banning lab grown meat earlier this year.

Business Ideas (we’re still a few years away from these, the costs need to come down closer to today’s “normal” meat costs)

• Lab-Grown Meat Pet Food: Develop a line of pet food made from lab-grown meat, providing a sustainable and ethical alternative for pet owners.

• Lab-Grown Meat Delivery Service: Launch a delivery service that delivers lab-grown meat dishes to customers, promoting ease of access and convenience.

THE MONEYSHOT

The Founders Who Built a $3bn Salad Empire

Homer Simpson once famously remarked “you don’t win friends with salad.”

But it turns out you can make billions of dollars with salad, like these founders did.

This is their story.

In 2006 three friends at Georgetown University were discussing how disappointed they were with the food options on campus. The most delicious food on campus was the unhealthiest, so they decided to do something about.

Armed with their simple idea they needed some money to get their concept off the ground. So they went to friends and family and raised $375k to start their business in what’s known as a FFF round (friends, families and fools).

So three months after graduating, armed with some cash, the trio opened their first location in a 560-square-foot shack near the Georgetown University campus.

They had started Sweetgreen.

Sweetgreen is a fast casual salad chain serving fresh meals with transparently-sourced ingredients. It’s kinda like the Starbucks of Salads, trendy, surprisingly expensive and instagram friendly (which is why Gen-Z love it so much).

When they first started they had no idea what they were doing. But they had core principles in the business that they never wavered from, including using fresh, local ingredients.

And the concept was a hit.

Customers kept coming back and within a year and a half, Sweetgreen opened two more locations.

It kept growing and by 2013, when Sweetgreen made it to New York with store number 20, the company had raised over $35 million in funding.

The company continued to scale, but didn’t do so through franchising, the traditional way to scale fast food ventures. Why? Because of quality and control. The company’s obsession with quality means they’ve scaled to hundreds of locations without franchising to ensure their standards are met.

After opening more locations and raising hundreds of millions of dollars along the way Sweetgreen went public in 2021 at a valuation of $5.5bn

And today the business is still thriving, pulling in $584m in revenue among their 220+ locations in 2023.

What Sweetgreen proves is that, in a world where venture is dominated by software, you can still build billion dollar businesses in other verticals and this is a great example of that.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

#HalfBakedBizIdea

A little tongue-in-cheek from Jon Hutchinson here, but there’s the germ of a great idea

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