BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Tinder for Gamers 🎮

Turning players into playas

Available Domain: Datergamer.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Gamers don’t always have the best luck in the dating department.

Many gamers out there can lack the confidence to go out and talk to girls AFK (that’s away from keyboard for the non-gamers out there), but they ooze confidence when playing their favorite games. So why not create the perfect environment for gamers to meet?

Market Size: The online dating services market size was $7.2 billion in 2022

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A site which allows users to go on dates while they play their favorite games and chat in real-time

How it Works:

• Users sign up to the platform and create their profiles including their location, hobbies and their favorite games

• Players are then matched based on their compatibility and can go on dates where they play the same game and use in game chat to get to know each other

• If they hit it off they can share contact details and go on more dates if they would like

Go-to-market: Focus on a single game with the highest proportion of female players, since the market dynamics need to work here

Business Model: Freemium model - free for a certain number of matches, premium for unlimited

Startup Costs: You may need to do a small raise here given some of the technical challenges

Competitors: Date Like Goblins is the only player in this market and they’ve only just gone live. It’s still all to play for here.

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Sell to a large dating site, like Match Group, to help them to grow their TAM

Exit Multiple: Publicly traded dating app companies are trading around 2.0x - 8.0x revenue currently

TOGETHER WITH OMNISEND

Shipping from China in 52 6 days

Picture this.

Busy season is coming up.

You think you're prepared.. that is until you visit your warehouse. You're short inventory. Like a lot of it. Panic ensues. You need a plan. This is what normally plays out.

Scenario 1: You ring your manufacturer and shipping provider in China, get on your knees and pray they will ship an order quickly. Best case, you'll get it 52 days later and by that stage you've missed out on the rush. Damn.

Scenario 2: You use Portless, and.... move on with your day. Portless fulfils e-commerce orders directly from China to your customers' front doors, saving you both money and months of time along the way.

P.S. Tell them we sent you, you'll get 20% off your first 3 months pick-and-pack fees.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Shaq’s Pregnancy Test

Ring. Papa John’s. Pepsi. Oreos. What do these products all have in common?

Shaq.

Shaq has endorsed all of these products and now he’s back with his line of pregnancy tests. They’re the most accurate in the game! Look out for them at your local drugstore.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Sunscreen Powder

With summer in full swing people across the world are getting burnt to a crisp. Why? Because putting on sunscreen is a sticky, messy process. But there’s been a recent boom in sales of an alternative…sunscreen powder, as evidenced by the spike in search traffic.

Business Ideas

• Travel-Friendly Sunscreen Powder: Develop compact, travel-sized sunscreen powders that are convenient for on-the-go protection. Not a liquid so it can get through TSA.

• Customized Sunscreen Powder: Offer personalized sunscreen powder formulations based on individual skin types, tones, and preferences.

THE MONEYSHOT

The Founder Who Made Millions…then Worked at McDonald’s

If you sold your business for millions of dollars, what would you do? Retire? Travel the world?

Well this founder decided to go and work at McDonald’s. And he did something similar after selling another business for hundreds of millions of dolalrs

This is his story.

Like so many founders Scott Heiferman’s entrepreneurial endeavours began in college. Scott sold coupon books for shops in a nearby town and earned enough to pay for his first year of college doing this, which given the cost of college this was a small fortune.

After graduating and working for Sony for a year Scott decided to move to New York City and in 1995 he started his online ad-agency called i-traffic.

I-traffic grew to about 100 employees before it was purchased by Agency.com in 1999 for $15m. He sold the business just before the dot-com bubble burst (great timing) and remained at Agency.com until 2000.

Having exited his company and with millions of dollars in the bank, Scott was planning his next move. And he ended up doing something no-one could have predicted. He decided to spend a few weeks working in McDonald’s.

Why? Because he felt like he was spending too much time with bankers and other rich people. Definitely a first world problem.

But then in September 2001 things changed again for Scott. The attacks of 9/11 caused Scott and his neighbors to meet each other for the first time on the roof of his building, an experience which made him more interested in building a business around communities.

So in 2002 Scott and five co-founders started Meetup. Around the same time, Scott also started a photo-sharing service called Fotolog, which was basically instagram before instagram even existed. He sold that business five years later for $90 million. It was basically a side quest for him.

Meetup quickly gained traction and by 2004 it reached 1 million users. In 2005 though Scott nearly killed the business by moving from an advertising model to charging users to run groups, which made activity on the site plummet 95%. The business rebounded however and by 2009 it was a thriving, profitable business.

By 2017 Meetup had 32 million members in 182 countries and later that year Meetup was acquired by WeWork for what they probably called a “community-adjusted“ acquisition price of $200m.

So after selling Meetup did Scott go back to work at McDonald’s? No. Instead he decided to work in an Amazon warehouse for 9 months to make his LinkedIn profile even more confusing.

So I guess his next venture will be a billion dollar business if the trend continues. What a guy.

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