BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Honey for SaaS 🍯 

Sweetening the deal

Available Domain: Saasthrift.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Who doesn’t love a great deal? Nothing beats that moment when you find something you really want at a heavy discount. I just wish they had deals on the stuff we really need.

Similarly business owners love to find a great deal. For years online shoppers have used Honey to find deals on, so why not create a similar product for founders buying SaaS tools?

Market Size: The global software as a service market was valued at $261bn in 2022

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A one-click chrome extension that pops up with discounts to help business owners to save on software purchases

How it Works:

• Users sign up to the platform and download the extension

• When they’re at the checkout of a website about to buy a software tool the extension pulls up any discount codes or coupons they can use to save on their purchases

• If a discount code is used the platform gets a commission from the software vendor

• The tool could also analyze a user’s existing tech stack, see how much they are paying and see if they could get a lower rate by threatening to quit etc.

Go-to-market: Focus on working with startups and solopreneurs first and expand your market from there

Business Model: Every time someone buys using a coupon the company earns a commission

Startup Costs: This would be incredibly cheap to start, once you can find someone who knows how to build chrome extensions

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: PayPal acquired Honey for $4bn in 2019. You could go a similar route and try to get acquired by a big player in this space

Exit Multiple: Honey was acquired for 40x revenue, but don’t expect a multiple like that. Something in the 5x - 10x region is more likely

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Avocado on a Stick

We all know millennials and gen-z are obsessed with avocado. In fact most of us can’t afford to buy houses since we spend so much of our money on avocado toast, if boomers are to be believed.

But cutting and prepping avocados can take time and effort, but with this new avocado on a stick that’s a thing on the past.

Now you can even break out avocado in an emergency situation when needed. What an innovation.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Productized Services

Productized services involve taking a service and packaging it with a set price and scope, making it easier to sell and deliver For example a design agency traditionally charges by the hour, but Brett Williams productized his UX design service, turning it into a subscription service and making millions of dollars doing so. He’s so successful at it he even made a course on how to do it called Productize Yourself (not sponsored).

Business Ideas

• Productized Financial Modelling: Work with businesses who want to outsource their financial modelling. They pay a monthly subscription fee for unlimited updates and changes.

• E-commerce Management: Manage online stores, including product listings, inventory management and order processing for a fixed price per month

• Productized Video Editing: Deliver fixed-price video editing packages for YouTube channels, promotional videos, or social media.

THE MONEYSHOT

The Founder with Two Viral Apps Right Now

Most of our founder stories focus on what what founders have achieved in the past.

But this founder has two apps in the top 10 of the app store right this second.

This is his story.

In a previous edition of Half Baked we covered the exploits of Nikita Bier. Nikita is a founder and growth hacker who built an app called TBH, an anonymous social media app which was acquired by Facebook for between $30m and $100m (the exact selling price is not known). Then a few years later he built the exact same app again, called it Gas, and it was acquired by Discord for millions of dollars.

And now Nikita is back at it and two companies he has invested in and is advising are in the top 10 of the app store.

One of them is Airbuds, a widget where you can see what your friends are listening to on your home screens. The other is Locket Camera, a widget that shows live photos from your best friends, right to your home screen. Notice any similarity between them?

Airbuds is #10 in music in the app store and Locket Camera is #12 in social right now in the app store. So how has Nikita managed this? Is it luck?

No. He has a playbook. And it’s all driven by TikTok.

Nikita and his team have hired dozens of students and regular people to post multiple times a day on new TikTok accounts. There are 50+ accounts posting for Airbuds, like Nathan or Claire for example.

They make simple videos and then post these videos multiple times per day. They usually post 2 to 4 videos a day on average, with some posting up to 10 videos a day. Some of the videos get little to no views, some get decent views and others go insanely viral which leads to millions of views and drives hundreds of thousands of people to download the apps.

They have managed to engineer virality through mass content production on TikTok. And it’s clearly working for both apps.

You gotta respect what Nikita’s doing here.

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