BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Podcast Ad Platform 🎙️

Ad libs

Available Domain: Podvox.ai

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: We all love a good podcast. They’re engaging, informative and the best ones can transport you to another world. Until an ad kicks in that is.

But here’s the thing, podcasters have to make money too which means they have to resort to something scarier than the most terrifying true crime podcasts out there…ads. And a lot of podcast ads aren’t read by podcasters themselves since they don’t have the time to do ad reads which can hurts conversion badly. Also there’s no ability to test different ads to find out what performs the best for brands. So let’s build something to solve this problem.

Market Size: In 2023, the global podcast advertising market was valued at $12.7bn.

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform which generates ad reads for podcasts using AI clones of the host’s voice

How it Works:

• A podcast owner/creator signs up for the platform which uses their existing podcast episodes to create a clone of their voice

• Advertisers or podcast producers input ad scripts into the system and the AI generates the ad read using the host's voice clone

• Users can adjust parameters like tone and pacing to perfect the output and the generated ad read is seamlessly inserted into the podcast episode.

• Ads can also be generated en masse and A/B tested on platforms which support programmatic podcast ads

Go-to-market: Create some different ad reads for podcasters using Eleven Labs or other software to validate the solution

Business Model: Monthly subscription fee

Startup Costs: You could start this pretty cheaply, using existing AI solutions to create your MVP

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Sell to a large podcast hosting platform like Podbean who could integrate this tech into their platform

Exit Multiple: You’re looking at a classic 4x - 8x revenue multiple here

TOGETHER WITH OMNISEND

Gone viral yet? Us neither…

Going viral sounds nice and exciting, but even if you succeed the fame is more like 15 seconds than 15 minutes.

So why not to talk directly to the people who already like you and your brand (and we aren’t talking about your mom).

Email & SMS marketing is the GOAT when it comes to this.  As boring as it sounds, Omnisend can help you build an audience of people who like you and convert them into recurring sales.

1. Collect contact details of people who already like your brand.

2. Segment them.

3. Send them personalized offers.

4. Watch sales happen in front of your eyes.

Use code HALFBAKED10 & get 10% off your first 3 months.

For new paid plans only, expires Dec. 31, 2024

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Date DiCaprio

Lenonardo DiCaprio is a lot of things. A great actor, incredibly rich and as we all know…a serial dater. In fact Leo dates so much you could literally build a dating app just for him. So why don’t we?

Anyone he matches with would of course need to match his strict (mainly age) criteria…

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: AI Videos

It seems like there’s a new breakthrough in AI every single week. Advancements in AI are moving faster than celebs are deleting any Diddy related tweets from their timelines. And one are that’s seen huge advancement in recent months is AI video generation, beginning with that incredibly creepy AI generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti to Sora and other advanced models we have today. This is a trend that’s not going away anytime soon, presenting boundless opportunities for founders to start building.

Business Ideas

• YouTube for AI Videos: A platform where all videos uploaded to it are generated by AI, leaning into the trend

• AI Video Restoration: Use AI to restore and enhance old or damaged video footage.

• Virtual Influencer Agency: Create and manage AI-generated virtual influencers who create videos for brand partnerships and social media campaigns

THE MONEYSHOT

How a Checklist Became a $2.5bn Business

The origins of billion dollar businesses can, in truth, be incredibly simple.

Take this founder, who managed to turn a pretty simple checklist into a $2.5bn business.

This is her story.

Christina Cacioppo was born to be a founder.

From a young age Christina loved exploring new ideas and concepts, a trait she inherited from her parents. She was particularly interested in business which is how, at age 11, Christina started a business selling Beanie Babies on eBay.

Many years later Christina’s entrepreneurial curiosity led her to…you’ll never guess…Stanford, where she graduated with a Master’s degree in 2009. She also learned to code while at Stanford, something which would stand to her in her future endeavours.

After graduating Christina worked for a VC firm for 2 years but after meeting hundreds of inspiring founders Christina decided to go on the founder path herself, leaving to start her own business with fellow Stanford alum Matt Spitz.

They experimented building different apps for months, building a competitor to GoodReads and also creating Hoot, a Snapchat competitor (themed with owls of course). They managed to sell Hoot to a teenage entrepreneur in Tennessee for $20,000 and Matt went to work for Dropbox.

Christina gave entrepreneurship another go and built a coding education platform to help young people learn more quickly and easily than she had at Stanford, but eventually she decided to go to work for Dropbox too.

In 2014, she joined as a product manager building Dropbox Paper, a collaborative document-editing product. And it was during her time at Dropbox that she had her big idea.

During her time at Dropbox she noticed how difficult cybersecurity compliance was. Companies were consistently having compliance issues and major data breaches were in the news every other week. This was a huge, important problem.

So in 2016 she left Dropbox with Erik Goldman to try and solve this problem. She interviewed different startups, asking them about their best practices and how they handled security audits. She became an expert in the field and started her new company.

She founded Vanta.

Initially, the founding team of Vanta just became SOC2 consultants, creating company-specific gap assessment sheets which were basically security compliance checklists for companies to use. These sheets were invaluable and helped companies to get SOC2 compliant quickly. The team kept building out expertise for countless different security requirements and slowly productized these to create a product that their customers loved.

The team was pretty slow to raise money in the early days, instead focussing on building the best product possible. Eventually in 2018 though Vanta was accepted into YC and received $500k in funding. Shortly after this Vanta raised $3 million in seed funding.

From there the company grew like a weed. The company surpassed $10 million in annual recurring revenue before raising $50 million in May 2021.

Vanta went on to raise $110m in 2022 and $150m in 2023, with the valuation of the business ballooning to $2.45bn, a pretty incredible run-up in such a short period of time.

All of which shows that billion dollar businesses can emerge from incredibly humble beginnings. The most important thing is to just get started.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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