BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Investor Intros Platform 🖥️

VC-ing is believing

Available Domain: VC Intros

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Getting meetings with investors is hard. Trust us, we’ve tried. Getting money from an investor is like getting blood from a stone or staying sober on a night out.

You can try cold emailing investors, but response rates are incredibly low. By far the best way to meet an investor is through a warm intro, but outside of your network how do you secure warm intros to founders? This is how.

Market Size: Venture capital in the USA reached $149 billion in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform for founders to secure warm intros to VCs to help them raise money

How it Works:

• Founders sign up to the platform and give details about themselves, their business and what type of investors they’re looking to meet

• Users also sign up to the platform who can offer to give warm intros to certain investors like VCs or angels and decide how much they would charge for an intro

• Users on the platform can view founders’ profiles and even meet with founders if they want to vet them further

• The warm intro is set up and if successful (i.e the intro happens) the founder pays the user a fee for the intro

Go-to-market: Start by arranging warm intros manually for founders and then productize it

Business Model: Transaction fees on successful intros

Startup Costs: If you start this very cheaply by doing the work manually first, then building a platform from there, you can start this for $0

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: You would hold this business for as long as possible given the power of the network and users you would develop

TOGETHER WITH BONNER PRIVATE WINES

Are you a trend setter? Here’s one to uncork

High Altitude Wines. Yes, you read that correctly.

Just like groundbreaking startups, these wines are born in extreme conditions.

Sourced from remote Andean vineyards, they’re as rare as a unicorn business idea.

Not many people know about Bonner Private Wines yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

These wines defy the ordinary.

Curious? Well.. this will make you even more curious.

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Compost Bar Press

We all know that food waste is a huge problem, with 2.5 billion tons of food being wasted globally every year. Well…we have the solution.

Introducing the scrap n’snack. It turns your food waste into delicious snack bars in any flavour you can imagine, like a lemon/cucumber/garlic/spaghetti bar. Delicious!

Just some food for thought.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Microschools

Microschools, while still quite niche, are starting to gain traction. These are schools with a single class of 6-15 students and one teacher. They’re private, largely unregulated and typically cost $5k-10k a year, which is more affordable than a typical private school. They’re still quite niche but offer a great compromise between traditional schooling and homeschooling which has exploded in popularity in recent years.

Business Ideas

• Microschool Management Software: Develop a specialized platform for microschool administration, including features for scheduling, attendance tracking, progress reporting, and parent communication

• Teacher Training for Microschools: Offer specialized training programs for educators transitioning to microschool environments, focusing on multi-age classrooms and personalized learning strategies.

• Microschool Network: Establish a network of microschools to share resources, best practices, and potentially offer student exchange programs.

THE MONEYSHOT

How Two Pivots Made this Founder +$15bn

There have been many famous pivots in Silicon Valley history. Burbn’s transformation into Instagram. Odeo’s pivot to Twitter.

But this founder pivoted twice on two separate companies to build a $15bn business.

This is his story.

Growing up Jason Citron was an avid gamer. And like many young gamers Jason taught himself how to program. In fact by age 16 Jason was writing code for companies as a freelancer.

For college Jason decided to go all in on gaming, studying video game design at Full Sail University, a few years after which he joined a startup incubator called YouWeb.

His first business idea was to build a video dating site…which crashed and burned. He shut it down the day it launched since no-one wanted to use it. He then began working on a start up idea in the social networking space, but he dropped it when Apple announced their app store.

He and his co-founder Danielle Cassley spent months working tirelessly to develop an iPhone game which launched in July 2008 when the app store went live.

They founded Aurora Feint, a mobile puzzle game which was pretty successful, but couldn’t gain mass adoption because of its high price point.

Jason and his small team were haemorrhaging cash and found themselves only 3 weeks away from bankruptcy. So they decided to pivot.

The game was underperforming, but the company had built some really solid social features, like the ability to invite friends to play your game. They had the idea to package these into an SDK for other developers to use, but needed to validate this...quickly.

So Jason set up a landing page, pitched the idea to TechCrunch who wrote about it and they got 400 developers to sign up overnight, which completely validated the concept.

They rebranded to OpenFeint and it was a smash hit. By 2011 OpenFeint had more than 100 million users, and over 7,000 games were integrated into their platform. That same year OpenFeint was acquired by a GREE, a Japanese gaming company, for $104m. Jason was 26 at the time.

After OpenFeint was sold, in 2012 Jason started Hammer & Chisel, a games development company focussed on building games for tablets.

In 2014 they launched their first game, Fates Forever, but history repeated itself and the game flopped.

But while building the game Jason and an employee at the company, Stanislav Vishnevskiy, noticed that players on the game couldn’t easily communicate with each other during games.

So for a second time Jason decided to pivot and in 2015 they launched an app to help players to communicate during games.

They launched Discord.

The app took off and in January 2016, Discord raised $20 million to support its growth.

The app gained massive traction among gamers and starting in June 2020, Discord announced it was shifting focus away from video gaming specifically to a more all-purpose communication and chat client for all functions.

Discord was smashing it, so much so that in 2021 Microsoft offered to buy the company for $10bn, an offer which was rejected. Instead they company raised $500m later that year at a $15bn valuation.

Today Discord has over 150 million active users per month and is known all over the world. All of which goes to show, if your idea isn’t working, you may need to pivot like Jason did…twice.

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