BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Bloomberg for Failed Startups 📉 

Turning flops into a fortune

Available Domain: Failfolio.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Everyone loves a success story. The gold medal winner. The championship winning team. The man who wins an argument against his wife (still waiting on someone to achieve that). But in the startup world failure is much more commonplace than success. The numbers don’t lie.

Today data intelligence businesses like Crunchbase focus solely on capturing data on the 10% of startups that succeed. But this means that there’s a huge dataset of failed startups and within that data lies vital learnings for founders and investors. So let’s create a platform to unearth this data.

Market Size: Revenue in the business intelligence software market is projected to reach $28bn in 2024

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform that collects, analyzes, and shares data about failed startups for founders and investors to analyze and learn from

How it Works:

• The platform collects data on the founders, funding history, business models and the reasons for failure of failed startups with an accompanying detailed post-mortem analysis

• The platform then aggregates all of this data and provides data-driven analysis of startup failure patterns and pulls out industry-specific risk factors and common pitfalls

• This business could also expand into many other areas, including legal and financial advice for closing a business, facilitating asset and IP sales from closed businesses and so on

Go-to-market: You should sell this tool to venture capital firms who can share learnings with their founders and use them themselves in critiquing ideas

Business Model: Subscription fee for full access to the data

Startup Costs: This will be a big undertaking so you’ll need a few thousand dollars to get this started at least

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Sell to crunchbase or a similar data intelligence business

Exit Multiple: As a SaaS business you could likely sell this for 4x - 8x revenue in a few years

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Dog Poop Cover

A dog is a man’s best friend, but having to clean up after them is no fun at all.

But now, you don’t have to, with this incredible “hide-a-poo” product. Simply place it over your dog’s business and continue on with your walk.

No mess, no fuss.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Startup Shutdowns

The era of sky high valuations and easy fundraising for startups is well and truly over. Recent data from Carta shows that startup failures are up 58% over the last year and the rate of bankruptcies are 7x higher than in 2019. Take Tally, a credit card debt management platform valued at $855m, which shutdown earlier this month. There has been a wave of high profile closing down which presents opportunities for business ideas.

Business Ideas

• Talent Reallocation Platform: Develop a job board or recruitment service focused on placing employees from shuttered startups

• Intellectual Property Brokerage: Connect failed startups with potential buyers for their patents, trademarks, or other IP

• Failed Startup Community: Create a community for founders of shuttered startups

THE MONEYSHOT

From $0 to +$150m/year Selling Water Bottles

Most of us have one thing in common. We don’t drink enough water.

And that one fact led this group of founders to create a +$150m/year revenue business.

This is their story.

Back in 2016 Lena Jüngst was studying product design at the University of Schwäbisch Gmünd in Germany.

During her studies, she developed a deep interest in how sensory perception works, particularly how taste is influenced by smell. She was particularly intrigued by the idea that around 80% of what we perceive as taste is actually determined by our sense of smell.

Which is when she had her big idea.

What if she could design a water bottle that could trick the brain into perceiving flavor just by smelling something aromatic while drinking plain water?

Lena met Tim Tim Jäger, another student at the university, who was fascinated by the idea and joined her in the project. Together, they worked on refining the prototype and brought on board additional co-founders - Fabian Schlang, Simon Nüesch, and Jannis Koppitz - each bringing different expertise to the team, from product development to business strategy.

For the next 2 years the team refined their prototype, funded through a combination of grants and early-stage investment and in 2018 they officially founded their company.

Air Up was born.

It took another year of development but finally in 2019 Air Up launched their first product. They launched in the German market and sold out of their 80k starter sets in just 6 weeks. And the momentum kept building from there.

The company made $2 million in its first six months, then $20 million in 2020, and $90 million in 2021, picking up around $70m in funding along the way to support this growth.

Put it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for the team. They say that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” and for Air Up this has been a huge problem.

In early 2023, TikTok videos advertising counterfeit Air Up bottles surfaced under the hashtag #AirUpDupe. In fact the company found more than 10,000 counterfeit products listed across the web selling knock-off versions of their patented product, costing the business an estimated €10m in sales.

This is still an ongoing problem but the business has done their best to get these listings removed and protect their IP.

Today the business is doing more than $150m in revenue each year. Not bad for selling a few water bottles.

Ultimately Air Up is a great invention with a great mission…to help the world to drink more water.

Air up proves that you can build an incredible business out of reinventing a simple product we all use in our everyday lives.

So what are you going to reinvent?

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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