BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

House Prices Guessing App 🏡 

Home sweet home

Available Domain: Homeguessed.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: House prices are crazy high right now, with even the most basic houses being sold at sky-high prices.

But the only thing people love more than complaining about house prices is guessing how much a house costs. It’s a fun game to playand we can build a business out of it. So let’s do exactly that.

Market Size: The global real estate software market size was evaluated at $10bn in 2022

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A game that challenges players to guess house prices based on photos and location data presented to them

How it Works:

• You scrape publicly available data on house prices and combine that with image and location data, all of which is pretty readily available

• Users are shown pictures of the outside and inside of houses and the location and have to guess the asking price or the price it sold for. Points are awarded based on the accuracy of the guess and bonus points are given for quick guesses or a streak of accurate guesses

• There’s also an IRL mode where users can guess the price of a house they come across in the real world. As you walk around different neighbourhoods you get shown prices in the area and you have to guess the price

Go-to-market: Start in a small market with readily available house price data and build from there

Business Model: In-app ads

Startup Costs: You’ll need a talented dev and data scientist to pull together all the data and build the app here. But it will be worth it!

Competitors: There are plenty of house price guessing games, but no-one’s nailed the in-person aspect of this. Nail that and you’ll leapfrog the competition.

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: This probably won’t be a candidate for a big exit, but could grow to a great cash flowing business

TOGETHER WITH PORTLESS

Shipping from China in 52 6 days

Picture this.

Busy season is coming up.

You think you're prepared.. that is until you visit your warehouse. You're short inventory. Like a lot of it. Panic ensues. You need a plan. This is what normally plays out.

Scenario 1: You ring your manufacturer and shipping provider in China, get on your knees and pray they will ship an order quickly. Best case, you'll get it 52 days later and by that stage you've missed out on the rush. Damn.

Scenario 2: You use Portless, and.... move on with your day. Portless fulfils e-commerce orders directly from China to your customers' front doors, saving you both money and months of time along the way.

P.S. Tell them we sent you, you'll get 20% off your first 3 months pick-and-pack fees.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Earwax Candle Kit

Candles are super expensive these days. So why not make your own?

Coming soon to a store near you.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: AI Aversion

While AI seems to be taking over the world, people are starting to pushback against the “AI-ification” of everything. Take this study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management which surveyed 1,000 adults and found that products described as using artificial intelligence were less popular than those which didn’t mention AI. People are going to make millions by going against the grain and building businesses which stay away from AI. We have a few ideas as to what they could be….

Business Ideas

• AI-free Certification: A service that verifies and certifies products or artworks as being created without AI assistance.

• AI-free Creative Collaboration Platforms: Online tools for artists, writers, and other creatives to connect and work together, explicitly without AI involvement.

• Human-verified Content Platforms: Creating social media or content sharing platforms that verify all uploads are created solely by humans.

THE MONEYSHOT

Building a +$100m Business in a Weekend

For most founders raising money is a stepping stone to building an iconic business.

But for this founder raising money almost killed his company, so he had to do something radical to save it.

This is his story.

Back in 2011, 19 year-old Sahil Lavingia was working as a designer at Pinterest, one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley at the time.

But Sahil was a hustler, constantly cooking up side hustles and thinking about business ideas.

And one day, after designing an icon, Sahil decided to sell it online. But he found the process of setting up an online store cumbersome and time-consuming. He quickly realized there was no simple way for creators to sell small digital goods online.

He saw a gap in the market, and decided to fill it.

So over a single weekend Sahil built a product that enabled creators to sell their products by sharing a link.

He created Gumroad.

He launched it on Hacker News and it took off immediately, with the launch driving 50,000 users to his site.

Building on this initial traction Sahil took the logical next step and decided to raise money. He raised $1.1m in seed funding from prominent investors, including Naval Ravikant, Chris Sacca and Max Levchin. In 2012, Gumroad secured another $7 million in a Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins.

Sahil had done everything right and the company’s growth was rapid during this period. However, Gumroad’s growth trajectory did not continue as expected. Despite the initial enthusiasm, the company struggled to scale and added too many features for too many users. It lost its focus.

By 2015, the platform had not yet reached profitability and growth had slowed further. Sahil was in a bind. He knew he couldn’t raise money based on Gumroad’s performance and they were burning cash fast.

Now normally in this situation founders would simply shut the business down and return the money to investors. But not Sahil.

Instead, Sahil decided he could run the business profitably by cutting costs. So he cut the team from 20 people down to 5 people and all the way down to 1 person. Just Sahil.

In 2016 his investors wanted to sell their shares back to him for just $1 (for tax reasons) meaning Sahil was in control of his business again.

Sahil ran the company as a lean, profitable business for years, focussing on creating the best product for creators. Then in 2021 Sahil decided to go the venture route again, raising a Series C of $1m from private investors and $5m from over 7,000 investors in a crowdfunding round at a $100m valuation.

Since then the company has kept on growing, but in a more sustainable way than before.

Sahil and Gumroad went through hell, but he came out the other side of it.

He is living proof of the old adage “if you’re going through hell…keep going.”

So if you’re running a business, or want to start one and you’re going through hell right now. Keep going.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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