BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Animated Book Summary Platform 📖 

Visualize to memorize

Available Domain: Vizreads.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: We all lie. “I’m almost there.” “I was just thinking that too.” “I’ll only have one drink.” And one of the biggest areas we all lie about is reading. In fact studies have found that more than 60 percent of people lie about the books they’ve read. And I’m no exception.

In a world where we’re all short on time and have even shorter attention spans, book summaries come in clutch. But existing book summary platforms are super dry, just giving ChatGPT-style summaries of books. In the broader learning market companies like Sketchy and Brilliant are using visuals to help people to learn more effectively. So let’s do this for book summaries.

Market Size: The global books market was valued at $137bn in 2022

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform which contains summaries of popular non-fiction books told through creative visual stories to make them more memorable

How it Works:

• Users sign up to the platform and can download the app for free, giving them access to a small number of summaries each month which they can watch as part of the free plan

• By upgrading to premium users can access all summaries on the platform

• The platform also includes elements like % completion, learning streaks and influencer recommendations all to encourage users to use the platform as often as possible

Go-to-market: Work with some animators and release some book summaries in different formats on YouTube. Whatever performs best you can use as your format

Business Model: Freemium for access to certain books then monthly subscription for full access

Startup Costs: You’ll need to work with some great animators here so you’ll need a bit of capital to get this off the ground

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Sell to a big player in the online learning space, like Blinkist did. In 2023 Go1 acquired Blinkist for an undisclosed amount.

Exit Multiple: Your multiple here should be in the 4x - 8x revenue range, but can vary wildly based on your apps metrics around growth rate, subscriber conversion rate, churn etc.

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Toddler Tamers

For any parents out there with a toddler you know how hard it is to keep up with them. They have boundless energy and find themselves in near-death situations at least twice per day.

Sometimes all you want is for them to slow down a bit, and with Toddler Tamers you can do exactly that. These ankle weights will prevent your child from running everywhere and is a great workout for their little legs too.

Win-win.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Sleep Supplements

We are a society deprived of sleep. Back in 1942, 8 hours of sleep was the norm. Today, people get an average of 6.8 hours and 50 to 70 million Americans suffer from chronic sleep disorders. This is why sleep supplementation has been exploding in popularity in recent years.

Business Ideas

• Sleep Supplement Store: Launch an e-commerce platform dedicated to sleep supplements, offering a wide range of products and detailed information to help customers make informed choices.

• Sleep Stack Site: A site which breaks down the habits used by athletes and wellness influencers to get the best night sleep possible.

• Shift Worker Sleep Stacks: Create supplements or recommend supplement stacks designed to help shift workers specifically to manage sleep cycles and improve rest quality.

THE MONEYSHOT

The 15 Year-Old Who Accidentally Built a +$1bn Business

During high school we all tried everything we could to get good grades.

But this founder, by building a simple tool to help him study for a test, accidentally created a billion dollar business.

This is his story.

Back in 2005 Andrew Sutherland was a pretty typical 15 year-old high schooler. And in his sophomore (second) year of high school he enrolled in a french class, no doubt to impress the ladies. One day though his teacher laid down a challenge. The teacher made Andrew’s whole class memorize the words for 110 animals in french for a vocabulary test the next day.

So Andrew decided to build a tool to help him pass this test. He built a simple website which would make each word show up one at a time and used this to study.

The result? He aced the test. Nerd.

He found the tool incredibly useful and started sharing it with his friends, who all found it just as useful. Without realising it Andrew had stumbled upon a a billion dollar idea.

The site bounced around his friends until 2007 when he decided to launch the site publicly before heading to MIT to study computer science.

He called it Quizlet.

And while at college Quizlet became incredibly popular. It became so big and was growing so fast that, like all good entrepreneurs, Andrew dropped out of college.

The site continued to grow and by 2009 hit 1 million unique visitors per month and had the world's largest database of flashcards.

From there the business kept growing, raising $12m in 2015 and $30m in 2020 to support its expansion. The 2020 raise valued the business at $1bn.

Today the business is doing an estimated $80m in revenue per year with more than 60m monthly active users worldwide. And it all started from a single french test.

Andrew’s story shows us that even the simplest ideas can transform into huge businesses. They evolve over time. He could have never envisioned that such a simple tool was the genesis of a billion dollar business.

So that small business idea in the back of your head could be just as big. You’ll only find out by building it.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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