BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Reddit Reviews Platform ⭐

Thread of truth

Available Domain: Reviewtrue.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Online reviews are a shady business. You’ve got companies out there paying for reviews, fake reviews being generated on websites, it’s all smoke and mirrors to get you to part with your cash. But there’s one place on the internet where people are incredibly honest about products…Reddit. In fact a lot of Redditors can be a little too honest…

But reddit is an absolute goldmine for unbiased reviews on different products. So why not surface that data and make it available to everyone?

Market Size: The market size of the consumer ratings and reviews platform industry is sitting around $10bn currently

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A product review platform which surfaces unbiased reviews about products from Reddit posts

How it Works:

• You scrape reviews of different products and businesses from different subreddits

• Use sentiment analysis to come up with an overall score for the product, pulling out key common complaints or issues which they company needs to address

• Sell this data back to the businesses themselves

• You could expand this to pulling reviews from other platforms like Twitter too (not X, Twitter. Come at us Elon)

Go-to-market: Pay someone on Fiverr to scrape this data for 10 - 15 e-commerce or CPG companies, see if you can sell it back to them and how much they’re willing to pay for this data

Business Model: Monthly Subscription

Startup Costs: You could get this off the ground and validate the idea for less than $1k. Building out a platform from there could be costly but you should be able to do a small raise if you nail the validation.

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Sell to a large review platform like Trustpilot, which they could add on as an additional service to provide to their customers

Exit Multiple: Typical SaaS valuation multiples, you’re talking about exiting for 4x - 8x revenue most likely here

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Alarm Clock Roulette

Variety is the spice of life as they say. So why not introduce a little variety into your morning routine?

Well with the Alarm Clock Roulette app you can do exactly that.

This alarm app will wake you up at a random time between 4am and 10am. Will you be up before the sun rises? Maybe. Could you be woken up so late you miss work and get fired? Absolutely.

It’s all part of the excitement!

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Galaxy Gas

It feels like every other week there’s a new life-threatening trend doing the rounds on social media. Like that time everyone started eating tide pods online, wtf was that? Well the latest dangerous trend going around is the “Galaxy Gas” trend. Galaxy Gas is a company that sells whipped cream dispensers and chargers which contain nitrous oxide (aka whippets if you know the lingo), which some young people are deciding to inhale for a quick high. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Business Ideas

• Dangerous TikTok Trend Tracker: A platform which tracks dangerous social media trends for parents and schools to keep them informed of potential risks to children and young people

• VR Drug Simulations: Develop a virtual reality (VR) experience that simulates the health and social consequences of drug misuse, including nitrous oxide, showing the fallout and consequences from substance abuse

THE MONEYSHOT

Making $50m/yr Selling Olive Oil

Crude oil has created more wealth in the world than just about any other material.

But somehow this founder managed to build a $50m/yr business in 3 years selling a very different kind of oil (and no, it wasn’t selling baby oil to P Diddy).

This is his story.

Andrew Benin is a business ideas guy.

After graduating from Binghamton University in 2013 Andrew worked for a variety of DTC companies, including Warby Parker, Casper and Magic Spoon. But being an employee never quite suited Andrew. Over the course of many years he had 100s of business ideas, 300 by his own count, but none of them really stood out to him. He didn’t have an idea he was willing to pursue, until suddenly…he did.

One summer Andrew went on a trip to visit his wife’s parents in Spain. During his time in Spain Andrew indluged all the usual local delicacies…paella, patatas bravas, but Andrew had his a-ha moment when he tried Spanish olive oil for the first time.

It was love at first try. He loved the bolder, full flavor than Spanish olive oil had compared its US counterpart. Andrew then decided to go on an olive oil tour of Spain and brought back different oils in bottles to New York. I’m sure TSA saw no issue with a guy transporting plastic bottles full of a yellow liquid through security…

Andrew brought the different oils to his old boss Michael Anthony, who was a chef in a Michelin star restaurant where Andrew previously worked. Michael agreed the oil was amazing, and now it was Andrew’s mission to ensure as many people had access to this incredible product.

He partnered up with his friend Allen Dushi who became his co-founder and the pair set out to raise some money. Andrew spoke to a lot of investors, but just like I did in my online dating days, he got a lot of “no” and “ew don’t talk to me“.

The pair managed to raise $230k in funding before launching which they put towards their first inventory order. They tried to generate hype before the launch by sending samples to influencers who used the product in their videos, a tactic they still use to this day.

Finally in January 2022 the pair were ready to launch their company.

Graza was born.

They named the company after Grazalema, the first stop on Andrew’s olive oil tour in Spain and when the product went live it was an instant hit. On launch day they did $100k in revenue and on day 2 Whole Foods reached out wanting to get the product on their shelves.

The product was an instant hit, not only because of the delicious taste of the oil, but because of its innovative packaging. Rather than coming in a glass bottle Graza comes in a squeezy plastic bottle, an idea Andrew had one day in the shower when he looked at his squeezey shampoo bottle and thought to himself “that’s the form factor.”

Graza sells 2 products, Drizzle (a finishing oil for salads etc.) and Sizzle (a frying oil), as well as refill cans shaped like beer cans. And this simplicity across their product range has been another major driver of their success.

In 2022, the year the brand launched, Graza did $4.4m in revenue. This rocketed to $19.7m in 2023 and the brand is on track to hit $50m in revenue in 2024.

The company has raised $10m in funding to support this growth and will likely raise more in the future to remain on its current trajectory.

All of which goes to show that, if you’re a business ideas guy like Andrew (which you are since you’re a Half Baked subscriber) you gotta keep searching for that one idea that ignites your entrepreneurial fire like no other.

And that idea could be just around the corner.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

#HalfBakedBizIdea

If this is Wordgrammer’s (great spelling)second best startup idea, I wonder what the first is 👀

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