BUSINESS IDEA | CASH FLOW BUSINESS

Technical Due Diligence for Investors 🕵️

We git it right

Available Domain: Codeprobe.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Sometimes the internet shows no mercy. Like this week when this guy posted on Twitter about quitting his job and getting into Y Combinator, until Community Notes ripped him to shreds.

That’s right, it appears these guys basically cloned some existing software and used it to get into YC, and YC is under fire for backing them. There are lots of examples of founders pretending their tech is proprietary, like the Rabbit R1 which claimed to use its own LLM but was actually using ChatGPT to power its device. All of this shows it’s getting harder and harder to figure out what’s actually great technology and what isn’t. So let’s create a business to help investors to figure this out.

Market Size: As of 2022, 305 million startups are created each year worldwide

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A service which performs technical due diligence on startups to ensure their technology is proprietary

How it Works:

• When deciding on an investment an investor, like a VC or a startup accelerator, points to startup to the business

• Startups then submit their codebase for analysis where algorithms compare the code against open-source repositories and learning models identify potential matches or derivatives

• Human experts review flagged sections and provide context in order to generate a report which highlights any potential issues

• Startups can also come to the company proactively to receive an accreditation in order to help them secure funding

• You could combine this with a previous idea of ours too to create a unified startup auditing business

Go-to-market: Reach out to startup accelerators pitching them the idea and see if they’ll bite

Business Model: Charge per review

Startup Costs: The key here will be having the technical skills to effectively audit the code, meaning you’ll need some cracked engineering talent to make this work and some money to pay them

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: This could remain as more of an agency play throwing off amazing cash flow, or could be productized and scaled into a startup

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Perfect Domain: Stakeschool.io

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Ideal Domain: Negotiace.io

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Loved-one Location Alerts

We’ve all been there. Your significant other is out of the house and they ask you to do a few jobs while they’re gone, like taking out the trash or doing the dishes. But there’s a problem. TV, TikTok or almost anything else is preferable to doing these jobs, meaning they often don’t get done, leading to a spirited discussion.

Well our location alerts app solves exactly this. It gives updates on your partner’s whereabouts so you can maximize your down time and get those jobs done 5 minutes before they arrive back.

The perfect crime.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Continuous Glucose Monitors

Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) are super popular right now. These are wearable devices that track your glucose (sugar) levels in real time. Traditionally they’ve been used by diabetics to track their blood sugar levels in real time, however today CGMs are being marketed to non-diabetics as a tool that allows them to observe the impact of foods on their glucose levels.

Business Ideas

• Strava for CGMs: An app where users can share their blood sugar levels and compete on leaderboards to see who can be the healthiest

• CGM Data Marketplace: Create a platform where anonymized CGM data can be sold to researchers and pharmaceutical companies for studies and drug development

THE MONEYSHOT

Turning $6,500 into a $250m/year Business

What could you do with $6,500 these days? Go on a really nice holiday? Buy a really crappy car?

Well these guys took $6,500 and turned it into a $250m/year revenue business

This is their story.

Pete Maldonado (R) has always been interested in food.

Growing up on New York’s Long Island, he spent countless afternoons biking up the street to the local 7-Eleven and buying a bundle of Slim Jims (beef jerky sticks), as many as he could fit in his basket.

But after becoming a personal trainer in college, he started cutting Slim Jims and other unhealthy snacks out of his diet. He noticed many of his clients were trying and failing to follow his meal plans so in 2006 he started a meal prep company called Frozen Fitness, but after 3 years the business went under. He had taken his first shot at entrepreneurship and struck out.

But Pete didn’t stop there. He knew he wanted to start a successful business. And a chance encounter 2 years later was the beginning if his journey.

One evening in 2011 Pete attended a friend’s poker game in Chicago where he met Rashid Ali (L). After a few rounds of betting, their conversation turned to guilty pleasures. Pete immediately thought of his favorite childhood snack.

He told Rashid that he wanted to create a “healthier” meat stick that was high in protein, low in calories and tasted just as good as the snack that defined his childhood. Rashid, who was working as a business operations consultant at the time, thought it was a smart pitch. They met up the next day and decided to work on the idea together.

They pulled together $6,500 from their savings to fund their first tiny production run, to build a website and to run some FB ads.

It was 2012 and they were ready to launch.

They founded Chomps.

Chomps was a “better-for-you”jerky stick made with 100% grass-fed beef that still tasted great. Interestingly though neither founder expected this to be a huge business, initially they sold the product online as a side hustle.

2013 was their first full year in business and Chomps made around $50k in revenue. In 2014 they did $100k and for the next year the business grew bit-by-bit.

But 2016 marked a turning point for the business when they secured their first retail listing, Trader Joe’s. This is when the business morphed from a side hustle into a fast-growing business, with Chomps 10xing their revenue in 2016, from $450k in 2015 to $4.3m in 2016. This is when Pete decided to go full-time in the business. For Rashid it took him another 2 years to go full time, but they were off to the races.

They opened offices, hired staff and decided to go for broke (as opposed to going broke, an important distinction).

In 2021 after bootstrapping the business for a decade they decided to bring in outside capital, securing an $80m minority investment from Stride Consumer Partners, a private equity firm. And this injection has fuelled the brand’s recent revenue explosion, growing to almost $250m in revenue in 2023. All from selling meat sticks. Incredible.

It’s a beautifully simple business that once again stemmed from a founder creating something that they wanted to see in the world. Which begs the question.

What do you want to see in the world, and why aren’t you creating it?

INFLUENCER IDEAS

#HalfBakedBizIdea

Evan Stewart (like all of us) is waking up to the amount of toxic chemicals in our foods

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