BUSINESS IDEA | VENTURE STARTUP

Neobank for Christians ✝️

Turning the tithe

Available Domain: Banktism.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: There aren’t particularly strong links between Silicon Valley and the Christian faith, despite the obvious link between Christianity and technology in the bible.

But the more than 2 billion Christians around the world are looking to find and support businesses that align with their faith. And many companies have been successful building businesses for this community, like Hallow and Glorify, who both raised $40m in 2021 for their prayer apps. So let’s do this in the banking space.

Market Size: Estimates from 2021 suggest that there are around 210m Christians in the USA alone and more than 2 billion worldwide

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A neobank designed exclusively for Christians with specific features appealing to this demographic

How it Works:

• You partner with a banking-as-a-service platform/traditional bank to get access to their banking infrastructure for clearing payments, issuing card etc.

• You create the front-end which includes the usual banking app features like paying bills, transferring funds etc.

• The app also has additional features, like the ability to make tax-advantaged donations to non-profits or local churches, invest in ethical stocks and users can get cash back or rewards on their religious donations using a dedicated credit card too

Go-to-market: Build a landing page outlining the offering and share it in Christian Facebook groups and run ads to it, gauge interest and if you get strong interest start speaking to investors

Business Model: Earn money on deposits sitting in the bank and interchange fees from card usage

Startup Costs: This will be expensive to get going. You can massively reduce your cost to get to market by working with a banking-as-a-service platform or a partner bank, but dev and launch will still be costly

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: The goal here is to exit to a larger neobank, like Chime or Revolut (recently valued at $45bn, 17x last 12 month’s revenue) who can acquire a cohort of new users

Exit Multiple: Consumer neobanks are valued between 4.5x and 7.5x revenue depending on their size in the private markets currently

TOGETHER WITH OMNISEND

We negotiated a discount for you…

E-commerce is a game of money-in vs money-out. You spend $1 and make $2. The higher that ratio is, the more successful you’ll be. So check this out…in 2023, for every $1 spent on Omnisend’s email & SMS marketing, merchants made $72!

We (Half Baked) want to work with brands that deliver for our readers (you). That’s why we asked Omnisend to work with us. They agreed.

Omnisend offers affordable, scalable pricing that grows with your business. From popups to newsletters & abandoned carts, 100,000 e-commerce brands are selling more stuff while paying less.

P.S use code HALFBAKED10 for 10% off (you won't get a discount for Omnisend anywhere else)

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Baby Shields

If you have a kid, or have even been around a kid, this one’s pretty self explanatory….

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Pickle Juice

While 51% of people throw pickles out of their burgers (what a waste), it turns out that pickle juice has emerged as a new health trend. Why? Because pickle juice has been found to stop cramping 40% faster than drinking water. So expect a flurry of pickle juice products to hit the market in the coming months.

Business Ideas

• Pickle Juice Shots: small, 5 hour energy style, shots of pickle juice for athletes to consume during or after sport to prevent cramping

• Pickle Juice Kits: Provide customers with kits that include pickle brine mix and spices to create their own pickle juice at home

THE MONEYSHOT

How Two Brothers Founded a $1bn+ Women's Health App

Some brothers are best friends. Others can’t stand each other.

But these two badass Belarusian brothers managed to start an app in a sector they knew absolutely nothing about. Think of them as Klitschko brothers of the business world.

This is their story.

Yuri and Dmitry Gurski had a tough upbringing. They were raised by a single mother who worked as a librarian, meaning by age 16 they were both working.

Yuri went to college to study journalism and Dmitry studied pharmaceutical chemistry, both of which didn’t help much in their careers.

They both spent a few years working in the Piter Publishing House until they co-founded IDEAnomix in 2009, a publishing house with over 1,500 titles published which sold more than 10 million copies.

Around the same time Yuri co-founded Viaden Mobile, a company which created fitness and gaming apps, including All-in Pedometer, Yoga.com, and All-in Fitness.

Dmitry taught himself to code and helped to develop the apps. In fact he has written 5 computer science books in his spare time.

The apps were pretty successful and in 2012, Viaden Mobile was acquired by Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi. They had their first taste of the kind of money that could be made in mobile apps.

A few years after the acquisition the brothers decided to go all in on building building apps and they started researching different markets…until they found a big, underserved market with minimal competition.

Women’s health.

So in 2015 the pair decided to build and launch a period and ovulation tracking application.

They launched Flo.

The pair raised $1m in 2016 and were projecting 2 million MAU and a few million in revenue over the next 2 -3 years.

But they were wrong…by a lot. Fast forward to 2019 and they had exceeded those projections tenfold.

Now you may be thinking…how could 2 guys launch an app about something they can’t experience themselves? Well in their view this lack of personal experience or bias means they have to listen intently to users and look at the data objectively.

Since its launch Flo has transformed from an ovulation tracking app to a super-app for women’s health and last month Flo raised $200m at a $1bn+ valuation, with the business doing well over $100m in revenue per year.

It took them many attempts, but in the end they had a breakout hit that has changed their lives forever.

In Dmitry’s own words “success is the sum of your attempts.”

So if you’re not attempting something right now…start.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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Gabriel Lumagui letting slip that he and has partner have been fighting lately 👀

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