BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Udemy for YouTube 📹

YouDemy

Available Domain: Edyoucater.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: YouTube is a goldmine for learning. You can literally learn any skill you want to completely for free. It’s like the opposite of school, where you pay to learn absolutely nothing.

But working through YouTube videos in a structured manner is super hard, particularly when you go on the platform to learn to code and end up watching conspiracy videos about Area 51 for hours. So let’s build a platform to turn YouTube into the ultimate learning experience.

Market Size: The global e-learning market was valued at $316bn in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform which turns YouTube videos into online courses to learn about any topic

How it Works:

• A user who wants to learn a new skill signs up to the platform

• On the platform, depending on what skill they want to learn, the user can follow “learning paths” which are series of videos teaching them a particular skill

• As they watch and complete the videos the platform automatically creates notes and interactive quizzes which are presented to students as they learn, as well as showing them the % of the course they have completed

• Once finished they receive a certificate to prove they have completed the course

Go-to-market: Do some analysis on the most viewed educational content on YouTube and build courses around that first

Business Model: One-time fee for access to the platform, disrupts the traditional pay per course model in the e-learning space

Startup Costs: These should be pretty minimal, you could get this going for a few thousand bucks

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Sell to one of the big players in the e-leaning space, like Coursera or Skillshare

Exit Multiple: You’re probably exiting this business for 4x - 8x annual revenue in a few years

GIVEAWAY

You Think You Know The Internet. You Don’t.

Did you know there’s a tool to see how subreddits are connected?

What about this tool where you can view any website at any point of time?

Or this tool that converts any website into an editable Figma file?

Not so long ago, this information was impossible to discover. No amount of money could tell you that millions of people are interested in butterfly pea tea!

But thankfully, a magical place called the Internet ushered in a new era.

Unfortunately, a small percentage of people know how to leverage it effectively.

Internet Pipes exists to give you that leverage.

To celebrate hitting 15,000 subscribers, we're giving away a free subscription of Internet Pipes (worth $400) to one lucky Half Baked subscriber.

P.S. once you sign-up, you can increase your chances of winning by sharing your special link. Winner announced August 5th.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Temporary Olympic Tattoos

How can you tell an Olympian from the rest of us mere mortals? Their physique? Their confidence?

No. The best way to know if you’ve met an Olympian is if they have the Olympic rings tattoo. They all have it.

So with the Olympics top of mind why not get yourself a temporary Olympics tattoo?

Put it on and convince your coworkers or that boy or girl you meet in a bar that you’re an ex-Olympian, ideally in a super obscure sport. Bag that promotion or that hottie, all with a simple temporary tattoo.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: AI Drive-thrus

Love them or hate them we’ve all used those self-checkouts at supermarkets. And the next frontier of robotic customer service is AI drive-thrus, with Taco Bell rolling out hundreds of AI drive-thru ordering systems to their customers. This is in stark contrast to what they normally offer their customers…stomach problems.

Business Ideas

• AI Customer Feedback Analysis: Use AI to analyze customer feedback from drive-thrus in real-time, providing insights to improve service.

• Facial Recognition Rewards: Implement facial recognition technology at drive-thrus to identify loyalty program members and offer personalized rewards.

THE MONEYSHOT

How the Nintendo Wii Led to a $2.1bn Exit

Back in the mid 2000s the Nintendo Wii took the world by storm.

And this console inspired a pair of founders to invent an industry…and make over $2bn in the process.

This is their story.

Both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg famously dropped out of Harvard to start their companies. This is the exact same path that James Park took.

Back in 1998 James dropped out to start a B2B infrastructure software firm called Epesi Technologies, which is now defunct. James considers Epesi Technologies his "greatest failure" and described the experience as "particularly painful.”

But despite this experience James was not deterred…he just needed a new idea. And in 2006 he found it.

At the time James was fascinated by a new video game console that had just launched…the Nintendo Wii.

He and his friend (and eventual co-founder) Eric Friedman saw millions of people using the product to get healthier and have fun at the same time. So they asked themselves one simple question that would change their lives: “How do we capture this magic and put it into a portable form?”

So they set to work on making this idea a reality.

The dynamic duo raised $400,000 from family and friends to build a prototype but soon realised they needed more. They pitched investors for more money with little more than a circuit board in a wooden box. But still, they kept moving forward.

Then in September 2008, at the TechCrunch 50 conference, James and Eric officially launched their product.

They launched Fitbit.

At the conference they hoped to get 50 pre-orders, but were expecting to get 5. Instead they got hit with 2,000 pre-orders.

Investors could tell they were on to something and the pair raised $2 million that year. They were early to a nascent market…and investors knew it.

But it turns out this was the easy part. Neither had any experience in manufacturing so they spent months going through hell trying to build the first version of the Fitbit. They eventually figured it out, and the rest is history.

In total the company went on to raise over $66 million in funding over four rounds, culminating in their IPO in 2015 where the company peaked at a valuation of $6bn.

From there the market got more and more competitive and in 2019 they received h an offer they couldn’t refuse.

That year Google acquired Fitbit for $2.1bn, although the deal only closed 2 years later in January 2021 after an antitrust probe into the deal. Standard.

James and Eric beat the odds to build a whole new industry and their story goes to show that inspiration can come from anywhere. You just have to keep your eyes open to it.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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