BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Skills Assessment for Overseas Talent 🌏

Talent Sans Frontierès

Available Domain: Skillskape.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: As we’ve mentioned a few times in this newsletter, hiring overseas talent is the new hack businesses are employing to get ahead (pun not intended). And it’s no wonder why when many tech worker’s schedules look like this:

Hiring overseas talent from companies like Nick Huber’s Somewhere.com or Austin Rief’s Oceans can help businesses to find highly skilled labor at a fraction of the cost of a local employee. But these overseas employees need their skills to be assessed and a pathway to get to the skill level required to work in the US market. So let’s build a business to do exactly this.

Market Size: The global digital talent acquisition market was estimated at $30bn in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform which assesses the skills of overseas talent and provides them with opportunities to upskill in their chosen domain

How it Works:

• An overseas worker can sign up to the platform or candidates applying for jobs through overseas talent agencies can be referred to the platform

• The worker is then given assessments to test their proficiency in a particular domain, like UX design, programming, AI etc.

• These results are shared with the platform who can then match the candidates to roles they need to fill

• Based on the assessment results, the platform also creates tailored upskilling programs for each user to help them become as proficient as possible, which could be paid for by the user or the talent agency

Go-to-market: Start with focusing on testing in a single niche and sell the services into overseas talent agencies

Business Model: Charge companies for access to the talent pool and custom assessment tools.

Startup Costs: You could start this relatively cheaply by focusing on an assessment in a single domain and acting more like an agency in the early days before building a platform around this idea

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Sell to a large platform with huge pools of overseas talent, like Fiverr or UpWork who can assess their skills

Exit Multiple: Successful companies in this space have seen exit multiples ranging from 5x to 15x annual revenue.

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

EchoChamber

When using social media these days it’s pretty clear how divided we all are. You post something on Twitter and immediately about 50 people jump in and disagree with you.

Well not anymore. With the new EchoChamber app only people who agree with you can comment on your posts, leaving you in an echo chamber where your beliefs are never questioned or challenged.

This is exactly what society needs right now.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Tepache

It feels like every few weeks a new interesting drink or functional beverage is trending. And the latest is called “tepache.” Tepache is a traditional Mexican fermented beverage made from the peel and the rind of pineapples, and is sweetened either with piloncillo or brown sugar. While the beverage market is getting more crowded the market is still ripe for disruption.

Business Ideas

• Tepache Home Brewing Kits: Create and sell kits for people to make tepache at home.

• Novel Beverage Subscription Box: Create a subscription box where customers receive an interesting mix of beverages, like functional beverages, every month to try.

• Tepache Energy Drink: Create a natural, low-sugar energy beverage using tepache as a base.

THE MONEYSHOT

How a Website Built in 45 Minutes Became a $61bn Business

Googling a search term. Xeroxing a file. Venmoing someone money. You know your business has made it when your company name becomes a noun or verb used in everyday life.

And these founders managed to achieve exactly that by building their $61bn business.

This is their story.

Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang and Evan Moore were not your typical friend group.

They all met back in college in (you guessed it) Stanford and bonded over their love of business and technology. And one fall afternoon in 2012 they had their a-ha moment.

The foursome were hanging out in a small macaron store in downtown Palo Alto (as you do) and speaking to the store manager, Chloe. They had built an app for small business owners and were getting feedback on it and pretty quickly they learned that their app didn’t solve any of her problems. But just as they were about to leave Chloe stopped them and dropped a thick booklet on the table. It was pages and pages of delivery orders.

“This drives me crazy. I have no drivers to fulfil them and I’m the one doing all of it.” That was their lightbulb moment.

However the team wanted to make sure this wasn’t an isolated incident. So they decided to talk to a few other small business owners to see how widespread this problem was. In fact, over the next few weeks they spoke to over 200 small business owners all over the Bay Area. And they kept hearing the same thing over and over again…deliveries are painful. It was music to their ears.

Once they decided they wanted to solve this problem they moved quickly. They created a website where they would perform deliveries for small local food businesses in the evenings after college. They built a website in 45 minutes, with PDF files for menus and a phone number people could call for delivery. That was it.

They launched their website in 2013 under the name PaloAltoDelivery.com but in the summer of 2013, after getting into Y Combinator and receiving a $120k check from the accelerator, they decided to think outside of the Valley and rebranded.

They became DoorDash.

The early days of the business were scrappy. Incredibly scrappy. They used to track their orders on Google Docs (hardly the most sophisticated CRM out there) and tracked their drivers using Apple’s “Find My Friends”.

Despite the scrappiness though the team had some good early traction and in 2014 they raised 17 million at a valuation of c.$100 million, with Evan leaving the business that same year.

Pretty soon though many competitors started to come into the market, recognising the scale of the opportunity. Unlike competitors who focused on large urban centers though, DoorDash capitalized on underserved suburban markets which proved to be a killer strategy.

In 2015, they began signing contracts with well-known restaurant chains like Wendy's and Taco Bell to expand their offerings and market presence. This helped them to raise $40m that year at a $600m valuation, allowing the company to keep growing and keep their competitors at bay.

The company kept growing and by 2020 they were ready to go public. DoorDash went public on December 9, 2020 at a price of $102 per share, valuing the company at an eye-watering $72 billion on its first trading day.

As of December 31, 2023, DoorDash had around 37 million monthly active users on its platforms and generated approximately $8.6 billion in revenues that year. The business is valued around $62bn today (October 2024).

The DoorDash story is one of the great Silicon Valley success stories and there’s one major takeaway from their story. Talk to people. They spoke to 200 small business owners before they wrote a single line of code to make sure they were solving the right problem.

So get out into the world and start talking to people. You could be one conversation away from your lightbulb moment too.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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