BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

History Newspaper Service 📰 

Making history

Available Domain: Timecapsuletimes.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: People love a lot of things about X (Formerly Twitter). The debate. The brevity. The memes. But one thing everyone hates about the platform is the name, which they can’t really go back on now.

But for us, we love twitter because it’s a great source of business ideas. Like this tweet from Patrick Collison (Co-founder of Stripe).

Great idea Patrick. Let’s make it.

Market Size: Revenue in the newspapers & magazines market worldwide is forecasted to hit $151bn in 2024

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A service which sends customers a newspaper each week which covers the main stories in a full year of history

How it Works:

• Users sign up to the platform and each week they receive a 20 - 30 page newspaper with headlines and stories of the major world events that happened that year, including pictures.

• The newspapers start at the year 1900 and run all the way up to 2023 (more than 2 years of content runway with this approach)

• Users can either receive a digital version of the newspaper or a print version which is more expensive

• The newspaper also contains ads from the time which modern brands can pay for

Go-to-market: Your early customers will likely be history buffs. You could expand to selling to schools in the future too.

Business Model: Charge a subscription fee for receiving each paper you can charge businesses to advertise in the papers using time appropriate ads

Startup Costs: The major costs here will be researching and printing of the papers, but you could sell early users on a life-long subscription to generate up-front cash flow

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: This is unlikely to be a venture scale business but could easily do millions of dollars in revenue per year

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Zuck’s Pro Surfer Game

If you grew up in the late 90s or early 2000s, and happened to be a gamer, there’s a good chance you played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, a truly iconic game.

But it’s time to create a new game for this era of board sport aficionados. And we’ve figured it out.

Check out “Mark Zuckerberg’s Pro Surfer”, the next mega gaming franchise. Look out for it in your local Gamestop…

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Pop-up Apps

We’re all familiar with the concept of pop-up stores. But now, pop-up apps are a thing. Take Score, a dating app for people with good to excellent credit, which sounds like one of our drunk business ideas. It was quietly shut down this week but was only designed as a pop-up app to be available for 90 days. And we think many more businesses will do this in the future.

Business Ideas

• Pop-up App Marketing Agency: An agency which builds pop-up apps for large brands as marketing initiatives

• Digital Pop-up Store Business: Work with fashion brands to create digital pop-up stores for their customers to shop

THE MONEYSHOT

The $13bn AI Company Started in 2009

AI is the buzziest word in tech right now ever since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022.

But back in 2009 these three Ukrainian founders built an AI company which became a $13bn powerhouse.

This is their story.

In the early 2000s Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko, two Ukrainian founders, were riding an entrepreneurial wave.

In 2002 they founded their company MyDropbox (no relation to the other Dropbox), a plagiarism-checking software for college students and by 2007, it had expanded to 800 universities and had 2 million students as users.

But there was a problem. The product had a narrow, academic use-case, which limited growth potential. So the co-founders decided to sell the business for a tiny amount, so little that they won’t even say how much they sold it for to this day.

But this experience with MyDropBox got these founders to think…why do people plagiarize in the first place? They realised it was because people just aren’t great at writing, so they feel the need to plagiarize. They had found a deeper problem that they could solve.

So in 2009 they recruited Dmytro Lider, who worked at MyDropbox, and the three of them set about starting a new business.

The founded Grammarly.

Initially, Grammarly focused on the education sector, since the team knew this market well. They offered a subscription-based web editor that used AI to check for spelling mistakes, grammar issues, and plagiarism. It was like having a stern English teacher in your computer, minus the tweed jacket and elbow patches.

In 2012, Grammarly began to expand its focus beyond academic institutions to serve a broader audience of writers. Growth was still relatively slow though. So the Grammarly team took a big risk.

In 2015, they completely changed their business model, introducing a freemium model which allowed users to access basic writing suggestions for free. This turned out to be a genius move and suddenly their user base took off. In fact the business started growing so rapidly that the team needed to raise money to support the growth.

So in 2017 Grammarly took on its first outside capital, raising $110 million. Pretty incredible for a first raise. The business had 6.9 million daily active users at the time.

The company’s rocketship growth continued and 4 years later in 2021 Grammarly raised $200 million in funding at a $13 billion valuation, boasting 30 million daily active users at the time.

Today though, Grammarly faces tough competition from AI tools like ChatGPT and similar products built directly into operating systems. Many new tools have been billed as “Grammarly killers” and many have said that Grammarly is sure to fail.

Only time will tell what the next chapter in Grammarly’s story will be.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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