BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Prediction Market for Business Decisions 🔮 

Strength in numbers

Available Domain: Predictist.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: We all make bad decisions in our lives. Mostly by accident, but sometimes this happens…

And just like us business leaders often make bad decisions too, which can have dire consequences for their companies. This is usually because they’re too far removed from the business day-to-day. But employees, who are much closer tot he action, have a much better ability to predict business outcomes than leadership do. So why not use prediction markets to get employee’s thoughts on different aspects of the business to drive better business decisions? Google has been doing this for over a decade. So let’s open up this opportunity to everyone else.

Market Size: The global predictive analytics market was valued at $14.1bn in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An internal prediction market which lets employees bet on probable outcomes to help make important business decisions

How it Works:

• Businesses sign up to the platform and each employee gets an individual account

• Leadership or other employees can add predictions to the platform such as “what date will X product launch” or “how many users will X product have?”. It operates like a stock market where employees bet (fake money) on probable outcomes.

• This trading system lets companies discover their employees’ uncensored opinions and is then used by leadership to make decisions

Go-to-market: Your main customers here are likely going to be scaleups who have 100 - 300 employees and need to make big decisions

Business Model: Subscription model, charge per seat

Startup Costs: The software build here will be complex so you’ll likely need to do a raise here to secure the engineering talent needed to make this work

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Exit to a large enterprise software platform who could bundle this in with their existing offering or integrate the service directly into their product, like Slack

Exit Multiple: Between 2015-2024, a median SaaS company was valued at around 5.0x revenue

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Condiment Popsicles

There’s nothing quite like an ice cream or popsicle on a hot summer day.

Well with these new condiment flavoured popsicles you can get the delicious taste of ketchup, ranch or BBQ sauce in popsicle form.

What a time to be alive.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Grounding

Grounding or earthing is another health trend sweeping social media. It’s a therapeutic technique that focuses on realigning your electrical energy by reconnecting to the earth. How you might ask? Well by walking around barefoot outside. Pretty simple. And now there are tonnes of products being sold in this niche. Take a look at the recent spike in search traffic for “grounding sheets” for example. And as we know, where there’s a health trend there’s money to be made.

Business Ideas

• Grounding Footwear: Offer shoes and sandals designed with conductive materials to allow grounding while walking.

• Urban Grounding Spots: Create small grounding parks or installations in urban areas where people can remove their shoes and connect with the Earth.

THE MONEYSHOT

Turning 3 Business Failures into $3bn

Would you be willing to bet your life savings on a business idea having failed with all of your 3 previous business ideas?

Well this founder did exactly that.

This is his story.

Tope Awotona’s story begins in Lagos, Nigeria, where he was born into a middle-class family. But at age 12 Tope’s world was turned upside down when he witnessed his father getting shot and killed in a carjacking.

At age 15 he and his family moved to Atlanta, Georgia and after graduating from the University of Georgia, he landed a job at EMC as a sales rep.

He spent the next seven years working in sales, but deep down he always wanted to become a successful entrepreneur. So he spent his evenings and weekends trying to build businesses. Lots of them.

He tried to build a dating site, an e-commerce store selling projectors and another e-commerce store selling gardening tools. Unfortunately though...all of these ideas failed.

But Tope didn’t lose hope. Instead of forcing the issue he decided to wait until an idea came to him naturally, which it did.

Tope found it increasingly frustrating to set up sales calls with his clients, which added days to his sales cycle. After months researching, where he tried out 30+ tools which claimed to solve this problem, he couldn’t find one which did.

He had found his idea. And this time Tope went all-in.

He drew down his entire $200k life savings from his pension to fund the business and in 2013 he set about creating his scheduling app. He outsourced development to a team in Ukraine but still ran out of cash. He managed to raise $350k of seed investment which kept his dream alive.

And in late 2013 his product was ready for prime-time.

Calendly was born.

The product was free initially but Tope was running low on cash again, so he decided to introduce paid plans. By September 2014, 15k people had signed up and they were making roughly $100k ARR. By the end of 2015, the business was profitable and hit $1m ARR. Tope and the team then 10x’d the business over the next two years and it just kept growing to serve millions of users around the world.

This incredible growth led the business to raise $350 million in January 2021 to maintain that growth rate. Calendly was valued at $3bn. Today the business does north of $200m revenue per year. not bad for a simple scheduling tool.

Tope’s story is one of determination and grit, never giving up in the face of adversity. He’s a living embodiment of the phrase “If you’re going through hell…keep going.“

INFLUENCER IDEAS

#HalfBakedBizIdea

Not sure if Will Nitze’s idea is a home run, but it’s at least a double!

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