BUSINESS IDEA | CASH FLOW BUSINESS

Sleep Betting App 😴 

You snooze, you lose win

Available Domain: Sleepbettor.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Most of us are chronically sleep deprived. We know this. Which is why trying to fall asleep can feel like a high pressure situation.

We need a stronger incentive for us to try and get longer, higher quality sleep. And as we all know money is the ultimate motivator. So let’s build an app which introduces competition into the sleep space.

Market Size: The sleep monitoring apps market was valued at over $3bn in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An app where users place bets on who can get longer and/or higher quality sleep

How it Works:

• A user signs up to the app and connects their wearable tracker to the app if they use one, like a WHOOP or an oura ring

• Users can then put up a bet on how much sleep they will get over a single night or a longer period of time, like a week. They can either bet against themselves, with the proceeds going to charity, or they can bet against a friend with the loser paying the winner however much they staked

• The winner is decided based on the user’s wearables data or using the app itself which tracks their sleep. It could be based on who gets more hours of sleep or a higher sleep score, whatever they decide on

Go-to-market: Start with your own friend group, particularly those with wearables, and expand from there

Business Model: Take a % transaction fee

Startup Costs: Building the app here could be a little expensive, so be sure to find a technical co-founder

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: This is unlikely to be a venture scale business but could be a great cash-flow business for whoever builds it

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Pet VR

Remember the Apple Vision Pro? Me neither. It turns out that Apple’s next big platform play was more of a flash in the pan. But here’s the thing, they just went after the wrong market.

Clearly Pet VR is the move here. Transport your pet to wherever they want with this pet VR headset. They can explore the park, the beach or anywhere else in the world from the comfort of their home.

You know your cat or dog will love it.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: ADHD Startups

ADHD is becoming more and more prevalent every year. There are approximately 129 million children and adolescents worldwide between the ages of 5 and 19 who have ADHD. It’s no wonder then that so many startups have been founded in order to solve this problem.

Recent Raises

• Neurode wants to treat and track ADHD symptoms through a wearable headband

• Clarity Pediatrics raises $10M for treating ADHD and other chronic childhood conditions

• Shimmer Raises $2.2M for AI-Enhanced ADHD Coaching Platform

THE MONEYSHOT

From Burger King to Building a $20bn Business

Many famous entrepreneurs began their careers working in fast food, like Jeff Bezos who famously began his career working at McDonald’s.

But for these founders Burger King was their original stomping ground before they went on to create a $20bn business together.

This is their story.

Back in 2004 two University students, Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Niklas Adalberth, were working part-time in their local Burger King in Uppsala, Sweden, while studying at the Stockholm School of Economics.

After two years in their degree the pair decided to take a leave of absence from college and went hitchhiking around the world with one rule. No air travel allowed. They spent a year travelling through Asia and Australia, North and South America, eventually landing back in Stockholm a few days after the annual cut-off for course re-registration, meaning they couldn’t go back to college for another year.

So in order to survive the pair picked up jobs. Sebastian lived on welfare checks and food stamps and worked as a salesperson for an invoice factoring company (a company that provides loans to small businesses that needed cash to pay their invoices). So exciting right?

Well it was…because through this experience Sebastian discovered a wealth of mom-and-pop shops struggling with payments, particularly e-commerce payments. While working there, he noticed that merchants wanted customers to pay via debit card at checkout to guarantee payment.

Which gave him an idea. What if there was a middleman who could pay the seller at checkout and collect payment from the consumer upon delivery? This was how many mail-order transactions (also known as cash on delivery) already took place in Sweden. Could this buy now, pay later (BNPL) solution work as well in digital commerce as it did in the brick-and-mortar world?

When Sebastian brought this idea back to school with him the following term, he enlisted Niklas and another classmate, Victor Jacobsson, and they launched Kreditor in 2005.

They landed $60k in seed funding from tech investor Jane Walerud in exchange for 10% of the company in a Shark Tank-style show in Sweden. They used the cash to hire engineers to build the first iteration of the Kreditor platform, but traded away an additional 37% stake in the business to hire these engineers, who left after only a year, taking their shares with them. This was a huge blunder made by the team.

But Kreditor’s BNPL solution started catching on, growing from $146k in revenue to $26m in its early years. Uniquely for a fast-growing company the company also turned profitable soon after founding and stayed profitable for its first 16 years.

By 2009, the company decided it wanted a fresher name to present to its international customers, so they rebranded to Klarna.

Over the next few years, Klarna continued to expand its services and operations, launching in Norway and Denmark in 2012 and Germany in 2013. By 2015, Klarna was operating in six European countries and had over 35 million customers.

The business was a rocketship and after a failed foray into the payments space, including a failed bid to buy Adyen, Klarna decided to double down on BNPL and try to crack the US market.

In 2021, on the back of a $1bn raise that valued the business at $45bn, Klarna launched in the US.

The launch was a success but as the BNPL market hype faded, so too did Klarna’s valuation, which dropped 85% to $6.7bn in 2022. But the business fundamentals have remained strong and today Klarna boasts over 150 million global active users and booked $2.6bn in revenue in 2023.

The company is lining up for an IPO in 2025 at a $20bn valuation, still far below its 2021 peak, but $20bn isn’t too shabby.

You could buy a lot of Whoppers for $20bn after all.

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