BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Masterclass for Founders 🏦 

Role models

Available Domain: Maverickmentorship.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Learning about entrepreneurship is a pain. Why? Because there’s two different types of teachers in this space. There’s the academic/lecturer type whose never run a business in their life, and then there’s the scammer looking to teach you how to dropship or trade your way to buying a lambo in 7 days.

So let’s create a platform where you can only learn from the best of the best.

Market Size: The global e-learning market was valued at $316bn in 2023, with this product serving a small subset of that market

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform where famous founders teach courses on different types of businesses and business models

How it Works:

• Users sign up to the platform and pay a monthly subscription to join

• They can then choose courses from famous founders who have expertise in building companies with different business models. For example users could learn SaaS from Jason Lemkin, e-commerce from Nik Sharma, newsletters from Sam Parr and so on

• Users can complete as many courses as they want on the site

Go-to-market: Work on a single niche first, like SaaS, create a course with an expert here and sell into aspiring or existing SaaS founders

Business Model: Subscription model with revenue share amongst the experts (similar to SkillShare’s model)

Startup Costs: If you can get away with a revenue share with the experts you can start this for basically $0

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: Given the contacts you would build up here it makes sense to hold onto this business indefinitely

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

Just the Crusts

For the sandwich eaters out there who only like the crust.

Just the crust pizza edition coming soon…

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Pokémon Sleep

Pokémon Sleep, an app which allows players to catch Pokémon based on how they sleep, was launched back in July 2023. And just 12 months later the app has more than 10 million users and has generated more than $100m in revenue, predominantly from users in Japan. This is part of a wider trend to encourage people to get more sleep, since most of us aren’t getting enough.

Business Ideas

• Competitive Sleep Platform: A competitive platform where users join teams and compete in sleep-related challenges.

• Rewards-based Sleeping App: A rewards-based app where users earn points for achieving sleep milestones, which can be redeemed for real-world rewards like discounts or merchandise.

THE MONEYSHOT

The 25 Year-Old Who Made $3bn from Pet Food

They say that a dog is a “man’s best friend.”

Well for this founder his love for his dog led to a $3bn exit.

This is his story.

Ryan Cohen always wanted to be a founder. Why? Because his Dad was one. His Dad ran a glassware company and Ryan wanted to follow in his footsteps.

So at the age of 15 Ryan took his first steps into entrepreneurship, when started his first business collecting fees off referrals to different e-commerce sites.

Fast forward to college where Ryan met his future cofounder Michael Day. Both budding entrepreneurs the pair decided to launch a jewellery store together.

But right before they were about to launch, when Ryan was buying pet food, he had an epiphany. He realized that he didn’t care about jewellery. Like at all. But he did care deeply about his dog and what he was feeding him.

So Ryan decided to combine the local pet store experience with the convenience of buying online. He wanted to start a pet food brand.

They sold all of their jewellery inventory, built a new website and found a logistics partner to work with all within 3 months.

So in June 2011, when Ryan was just 25 years old, he and Michael launched chewy.com (then called MrChewy).

The business got off to a strong start and Ryan needed capital to support their growth. He started going to investors, approaching over 100 venture capital firms to secure funding. He was rejected by all of them.

But in 2013, Ryan secured the company's first outside investment from Volition Capital for $15 million. This was the fuel the business needed to grow.

Just 1 year later in the business hit $205m in sales. By 2017 they were doing $2 billion in sales and were responsible for 51% of all online pet sales. Talk about market domination.

In April 2017, Cohen and Day decided it was time to sell and sold Chewy in an-all cash deal for $3.35 billion. This was the largest e-commerce acquisition in history at the time.

Today Ryan is the CEO of a little-known company called GameStop.

Will Ryan be able to work his magic to bring Gamestop back to its former glory?

We’ll have to wait and see…

INFLUENCER IDEAS

#HalfBakedBizIdea

Alex Lieberman (Morning Brew co-founder) coming in with a super cool idea

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