BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Expense Negotiation Platform 🤝 

Take it or leave it

Available Domain: Negoatiate.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Negotiating is one of those important life skills we were never taught in school, like how to do our taxes, manage stress or hardest of all…how to fold bed sheets. And this inability to negotiate can cause us problems.

But for corporations their inability (and lack of time) to negotiate with or look for discounts from their vendors is costing them thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars per month. So let’s build a platform to unlock these savings for them.

Market Size: The global software as a service market size was $314 billion in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform which negotiates discounts on subscriptions and other expenses on behalf of a company

How it Works:

• A business signs up to the platform and connects up their bank accounts through an open banking platform

• The platform analyzes their transaction data and picks out their subscriptions and other expenses, noting now much they cost each month. The business can also provide more context on their expenses, such as the number of seats they have, license details etc.

• Based on the expenses they have the platform uses different techniques to help to reduce their costs, such as going through the unsub flow (where you are enticed back with a discount), using AI to negotiate with companies or using a person to negotiate discounts

Go-to-market: Start by manually working with companies to help them to reduce their software costs, no platform needed. You can find companies who are looking to cut costs by monitoring ones who have recently conducted layoffs.

Business Model: You take a % of the money saved by a company. This creates great incentive alignment between parties

Startup Costs: You could start this as an agency for $0 and once you have some funds and customers build out a more sophisticated software platform (productization baby)

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: This could be a great cash flow business if you stick with the agency play and build basic software to help streamline your operations

Exit Strategy: If you go all-in and build a power software platform here you could exit to an expense management platform like Ramp or Brex

TOGETHER WITH OMNISEND

How Vayose cut shipping time from 60 to 5 days

Vayose is a game-changing No Shampoo Hairbrush.

They can't stop selling. But they have one big problem.

Shipping.

It took 2 months for their stock to arrive.

But Vayose are smart people...so they contacted Portless.

Portless slashed their ship time from 60 days to 5-10 days. Not only that, but they also saved big time on import duties and fees.

The result? Happy Vayose, happy customers.

What are you waiting for? Contact Portless today, tell them we sent you and you'll get 20% off your first 3 months pick-and-pack fees.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Squirrel Hot Tubs

There’s a company (Bird Buddy) that makes millions of dollars every year selling bird feeders with cameras on them.

So why not do something similar for squirrels? They’re busy all day collecting nuts so why not give them a chance to relax and unwind.

They deserve it.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Anxiety Calming Devices

Back in 2017 fidget spinners were all the rage. But since then a new class of products have emerged and replaced fidget spinners, known as “anxiety calming“ products. Take Calm Strips, which are sensory stickers to help people to alleviate anxiety. They went from $0 to $2.5m in revenue in under 2 years. It’s a huge market and there’s lots of opportunity in it.

Business Ideas

• Anxiety Calming E-commerce Store: A store which sells anxiety calming products. Could include a subscription box too which sends out different products each mont

• Anxiety Wristband: A wristband which contains an NFC chip which you can scan when you feel anxious and it opens an app to help you to breathe or meditate

• Aromatherapy Fidget Cubes: Fidget toys infused with calming scents. Lavender for focus, peppermint for energy, etc.

THE MONEYSHOT

How 2 Founders Made $400m from GIFs

The internet has profoundly changed the way we all communicate. Emojis. Memes. GIFs. None of these existed before the internet.

And these founders managed to make more than $400m from the humble GIF.

This is their story.

Alex Chung had an unlikely path to entrepreneurship. He attended Johns Hopkins University, where he studied neuroscience, but later shifted his focus to engineering and computer science. After graduating he had several roles, working as an engineer, product designer and a creative director. But he was always interested in starting a business, so he was actively involved in the tech and startup scene in New York. Which is where he met Jace Cooke.

Jace majored in film studies but was also heavily involved in New York’s startup scene, wanting to build a startup in the media space.

One morning this duo were having breakfast and discussing the growing popularity of GIFs as a form of expression on the internet. They noticed that while GIFs were widely used, there wasn’t an efficient way to search for or share them.

With Alex’s engineering prowess and Jace’s media background, like in any good buddy cop movie, the pair complemented each other perfectly and they decided to build this company.

So in February 2013 they started their business. They launched Giphy.

Giphy was launched as a search engine for GIFs and within a week of its launch, the site received significant attention, attracting thousands of users.

Over time it evolved and became a platform for hosting and sharing GIFs, integrating with social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Slack.

By 2016, Giphy had raised over $150 million in funding, valuing the company at around $600 million and in 2017 hit 200 million daily active users.

The company continued to grow and at one stage Giphy was the second biggest search engine in the world behind only Google, a fact that has to hurt if you’re Bing.

But most of Giphy’s traffic was coming from searches on social platforms, with Facebook alone accounting for nearly half their traffic.

Facebook noticed its popularity and like a kid in a candy store Mark wanted to buy the platform. And what Mark wants, Mark gets.

So in May 2020, Facebook acquired Giphy for approximately $400 million. But it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, since the deal was plagued by antitrust issues. In the end Facebook was forced to sell Giphy 3 years later and Shutterstock acquired the platform for just $53m. I don’t think Facebook has lost much sleep over the deal though.

Ultimately Alex and Jace’s story proves that a very simple idea can morph into something incredible.

You just have to get out there and build.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

#HalfBakedBizIdea

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