BUSINESS IDEA | CASH FLOW BUSINESS

Mobile Photo Scanning Service 📷

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1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Going through old family photos is a sort beautiful, but harrowing experience. The terrible haircuts. The questionable outfits. It’s intense.

But these previous photos are in constant danger of a spilt cup of tea or a rogue pet eating them, so they should be digitized. While services exist to do this, most require you to ship out your family photos to, which a lot of people don’t feel comfortable doing. So let’s bring the service directly to the people.

Market Size: The Digital Photo Scanning Services Market was valued at $4.5 Billion in 2023 (how specific)

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A mobile service which travels to people’s homes and scans their old pictures to ensure they are kept forever

How it Works:

• A user goes on to the website and selects a time for their appointment

• A worker turns up to the house with a professional grade scanner and scans as many photos as the person would like, with the customer paying a fee per picture scanned

• Once the customer pays the fee they can access all of their photos on a drive in the cloud, can download them and then store them wherever they want to, preserving them forever

Go-to-market: Work with photographers in the first instance who will require this service regularly

Business Model: Charge a fee per picture scanned

Startup Costs: You’ll need to invest in a high quality portable, scanner but that’s about it

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: This certainly won’t be a huge company where you get a big exit, but you could build a great business out of this

WE WANT YOU…TO APPLY

Your Next Venture

If you're ready for your next entrepreneurial adventure, this will give you goosebumps.

A friend of Half Baked is sitting on a goldmine.

He has a dormant list of over one million subscribers, and wants to turn it into a 7-figure newsletter business.

But he has a problem.

He already runs a multi-million dollar business and doesn't have time to execute.

So...he's recruiting. If you want to put yourself forward, fill out this form and we'll send your details straight to his inbox. 

Applications get sent as they come in so speed matters!

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

The Every Sauce

Everybody’s got a favorite sauce. Ketchup. Ranch. Tartar if you’re weird.

So why not combine them all into the ultimate, every sauce.

Watch out for it in your local supermarket.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Tech Neck

So it turns out hunching over a laptop for 50 hours a week is terrible for your back. Who knew? This has led to many of us suffer with an affliction known as “tech neck“. Tech neck is basically neck or shoulder pain, soreness or stiffness caused by poor posture while using technology. And there’s been an explosion in searches for this problem in recent times, meaning there’s businesses to be built here.

Business Ideas

• Posture Monitoring Devices: Develop wearable devices that provide real-time feedback on posture and remind users to adjust their position.

• Posture Tracking Software: Develop software that uses your computer’s camera to detect whether or not your posture is good.

• Virtual Posture Coaches: Offer subscription-based virtual coaching services that provide personalized posture correction advice and exercises.

THE MONEYSHOT

Selling a Business For $465m…and Making $0

If you sold your business for $465m, you’d expect to ride off into the sunset to never work again.

But when these founders sold their business for exactly that amount…they walked away with nothing.

This is their story.

Back in 2009 husband and wife duo, Nigel and Lesley Eccles, along with 3 of their friends (Tom Griffiths, Rob Jones and Chris Stafford) were working on their startup in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was called Hubdub, a prediction market for future events, kinda like Polymarket.

But there was a problem. Hubdub wasn’t working. The team had raised £1.2m but the business wasn’t going anywhere. They needed to pivot. Fast.

The team noticed that sports was one of the most active categories on Hubdub and decided to pivot and launch a product in that space.

so they launched FanDuel, a sports betting and daily fantasy sports platform.

And the idea took-off.

Between 2009 and 2014, FanDuel raised $88m across different funding rounds. And then, in 2015, they closed a $275m Series E round from KKR, Shamrock Ventures (Disney’s family investment firm), Google and other investors.

The company hit a valuation of $1.2bn, but that would be its last equity raise.

By 2017, FanDuel was burning cash like it was going out of fashion. It had annual revenues of $124m, while spending $400m on marketing at the time. Yikes.

The company was spiralling out of control and by November 2017, Nigel Eccles was out. Leslie Eccles left too and co-founder Tom Griffiths left shortly after too.

This is when Flutter, the parent company of Irish gambling giant Paddy Power, saw its opportunity.

In 2018 Flutter swooped in with an offer to acquire FanDuel for $465m, which sounds great right?

But there was a problem.

When the FanDuel founders raised their Series E, KKR and Shamrock received a liquidation preference that entitled them to the first $559m in any acquisition, meaning founders and employees would be paid only if the acquisition exceeded $559m.

Management fought against the deal, but there was nothing they could do. These two lead investors had “drag along rights”, meaning other shareholders were forced to accept the decisions made by these two investors.

So in July 2018 the deal was pushed through.

Over the last few years the founders and former employees have brought a number of lawsuits against FanDuel’s board, but to no avail. To this day they still haven’t got their payday.

Which all goes to show in the cut throat world of business…make sure you have a really good lawyer.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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