BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Online Community Ads Marketplace 👥 

The reaches are in the niches

Available Domain: Communads.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: There are online communities for everything these days. Like the ice chewers bulletin board. Or the Facebook group for people who hate coriander. You name it and a community exists for it.

And these communities live on platforms like Discord and Facebook. There are 19 million active servers on Discord weekly and over 10 million groups on Facebook. This is a huge untapped market. So let’s build a platform to capture this.

Market Size: The global online advertising market was valued at $236bn in 2022. This is a nascent market so would be much smaller, however the ad budgets are there which brands are willing to spend online

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An independent platform that connects advertisers with online community managers across various social media platforms and forums.

How it Works:

• Community owners and admins sign up to the platform and enter in details of their audience size, demographics and so on

• Advertisers similarly sign up and give details on what audiences or communities they want to target

• Community owners and advertisers are then matched and ads are run in the groups based on the advertisers’ budgets and campaign goals

• Advertisers can monitor performance across all communities with real-time analytics and reporting

Go-to-market: You’ll want to focus on communities which will be more susceptible to ads first

Business Model: Charge a transaction fee on each ad run

Startup Costs: You could start this incredibly cheaply by acting as an agency to test this concept out and then productize it if you have good success with it

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: You could remain as an agency and this could be a cash flow business

Exit Strategy: If you go the software platform route you could sell to a large digital ad business

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Baby Gambling Set

There are few better feelings than winning big in a game of poker. But that exhilarating feeling is reserved for those over the age of 18. Or at least it was…

With this gambling set for babies your kids can learn the joy of winning (and the pain of losing) from an early age.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Green Hydrogen

As the world seeks cleaner alternatives to traditional fossil fuels, green hydrogen has emerged as a frontrunner in the quest for decarbonization. Green hydrogen is hydrogen fuel that is created using renewable energy sources, making its production process environmentally friendly with minimal carbon emissions and some experts predict that it will be the fuel of the future. And venture funding is pouring into the space to companies like Drift Energy, Stargate Hydrogen and Hysata.

Recent Raises

• Drift Energy sets sail with £4.65m backing for hydrogen-producing yacht vision

• Stargate Hydrogen raises 42 million Euros for scaling up

• Green Hydrogen Startup Hysata Raises $111 Million

THE MONEYSHOT

Building a +$1bn Business…then Becoming a Teacher

Most successful founders stay in the entrepreneurship game for as long as they can.

But after founding multiple million dollar businesses, and even a billion business, this founder decided to leave it all behind and become a teacher.

This is his story.

Agris Tamanis was born and raised in Latvia which, in the early 2000s, had a burgeoning tech scene.

And in 2004 Agris teamed up with his friend Lauris Liberts and together they founded Draugiem.lv, which was Latvia’s answer to Facebook.

The social network took off and after just 3 years had 1 million users. This was over half the population of Latvia.

Having tasted success Agris wanted more, so he founded Draugiem Group, a diversified holding company that would eventually encompass more than a dozen different businesses.

Agris and his team started to experiment with new business ideas including GPS tracking (launching Mapon) and SMS marketing (launching Text2Reach). They also built products like Desktime and Startup Vitamins, both of which were hits. Pretty soon customers were looking for inspiring quotes to be printed on posters and t-shirts.

They quickly realised that there was no business that could offer all of the products they wanted, so they decided to build their own business to do this.

It was 2013 and Agris and his team had just founded Printful.

The idea behind Printful was to make it simple for anyone to order print on demand merchandise.

Agris built the first version of the printing software himself, helped build the core team, and, in his free time, packed orders at the warehouse.

Over time they developed a unique, scalable technology, and there was growing global demand in the nascent e-commerce industry. Agris and his team had captured lightning in a bottle and through integrations with the big e-commerce players the company grew and grew.

By 2018 the business was doing $77.4 million and by 2020 was doing more than $200m in revenue. But this is where things started to change for Agris.

He moved back to his rural hometown during covid and at the time a school had been searching for a computer-programming teacher for nearly two years. He spontaneously agreed to do it.

He stepped back from Printful and became their full-time teacher until the school found a suitable replacement.

This turned into 2 and a half years of full-time teaching.

While Agris was away, in 2021, Printful became Latvia’s first unicorn startup after a $130 million raise, doing $289 million of revenue that same year.

So why did Agris step back from what so many of us dream of to teach? It’s simple. Because he loved it.

He said himself that “teaching is exhausting, but it brings me more joy than entrepreneurship ever did.”

After 2 and a half years of teaching though, Agris decided to become a part-time teacher, finding a replacement for him. He still works as a substitute teacher when needed and hasn’t returned to Printful to make sure he’s free to teach when he can.

It’s an amazing story and just goes to show that building a billion dollar business may not be what you really want out of life. You have to chase fulfilment, in whatever form that may take, because that’s the most important thing any of us can do.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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