BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

AR Murder Mystery Game

MurdAR Mystery

Available Domain: Crimeseen.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: 2016 was a historic year. Trump won the election, Brexit somehow happened and Usain Blot dominated the 2016 Rio Olympics. But something far bigger and more important happened that year. Pokémon Go was launched. All of a sudden, almost overnight, more than 200m people around the world were running around hoping to catch a Charizard or a Pikachu, much to the dismay of some people out there…

The idea of leveraging AR tech to create a pokémon game was genius. So why don’t we take this idea and apply it to another domain…murder mysteries. Here’s what we have in mind.

Market Size: The global augmented reality market was valued at $78bn in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A location-based AR game that allows players to solve famous historical or fictional murder cases

How it Works:

• Users download the app on their smartphones and select the game mode they want to play. Game modes can involve solving real world or made up crimes, can be shorter and held over smaller locations or can be longer games that can last a few days and span many different locations

• When players visit specific real-world locations the game overlays virtual crime scene elements, clues, and interactive characters which can all be interacted with. They can also receive hints if required to move to the next clue

• Once they solve a crime they get a score based on how well they did which can be compared against other users, creating competition amongst users

Go-to-market: The MVP here could be to create mysteries using QR codes to prove out the concept, then develop the AR side of the business

Business Model: In app ads

Startup Costs: You could start this quite cheaply using nocode tools and QR codes as a starting point, but you’ll have to start spending money once you need to develop and app here

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: You could hold this as a cashflow business or potentially sell to a true crime content business, like the True Crime Network

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Waistline Belt

With Christmas fast approaching we’re all looking forward to spending the holiday season catching up with loved ones, drinking copious amounts of egg nog and invariably putting on a few pounds.

But this holiday season, with this incredible, stylish, Waistline Belt, you can hold up your trousers and monitor your waist size at the same time.

How convenient!

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Trust in the Media

Americans are losing faith in the media. Over the last 50 years the media has gone from a universally trusted institution to today where 33% of US citizens have no trust or confidence in the media to accurately and fairly report the news. But as less people feel they can trust the mainstream media, this presents business idea opportunities for those outside it…like us.

Business Ideas

• News Source Diversification Tool: Build a browser extension or app that suggests alternative sources for news stories to help users break out of their information bubbles.

• News Consumption Habit Analyzer: Develop an app that tracks users' news reading habits and suggests ways to diversify their information sources.

• "Slow news" Subscription Service: Create a platform delivering in-depth, thoroughly researched stories on a less frequent basis, prioritizing accuracy over speed.

THE MONEYSHOT

From $0 to $1bn in 10 Months

Fun fact: there’s a 0.00006% chance of building a company that will grow to be worth more than a billion dollars.

And these founders not only managed to build a billion dollar business, but did so in just 10 months.

This is their story.

Rohan Seth (right) and Paul Davison (left) were destined to do great things together.

They met in 2011, introduced by a mutual friend, but it’s a wonder how they didn’t meet earlier. Because while their paths never crossed, they were eerily similar.

They both graduated from Stanford, albeit four years apart, and even started working at Google the very same month.

After college Paul went to work for a database company called Metaweb and at Benchmark as an entrepreneur-in-residence, until he teamed up with Ben Garrett to launch Highlight (a location-based social networking app). Despite some early traction the app faded into obscurity, leaving Paul and Ben looking for new ideas. They launched Roll (an app for sharing your camera roll with your friends) and Shorts (an app which showed your photos to random users who were nearby). But alas, these flopped too, and in 2016 Pinterest bought the cofounders out, hiring most of their employees but sunsetting their apps.

Rohan meanwhile spent more than 5 years working at Google after college. He left Google in 2012 and joined forces with the former Microsoft employee Rohan Dang to create Memry Labs, a launchpad for all kinds of social apps. The founders churned out six products in three years, including an app for sharing a selfie a day with friends and another for telling your friends when you're free to chat over the phone. But similar to Paul’s experience, nothing that Memry Labs made took off. In 2017 the company was acquired by Opendoor for an undisclosed amount.

But where their paths finally converged began with the birth of Rohan’s daughter, Lydia. Lydia was born with a rare genetic condition after poring over hundreds of research papers and meeting with scientists Rohan wanted to set up a nonprofit to find a cure for the disease.

So in the fall of 2019 Rohan reached out to Paul to get his advice on how to raise money for the nonprofit.

That work led the two entrepreneurs to talk more regularly where they discovered their shared love of building social apps. So they decided to give building a social app one last chance.

They first launched an app called Talkshow for scheduling and streaming live radiolike programs. The founders peeled away some features and focused on something that Talkshow's beta testers loved…the ability to have listeners pop into the show as a guest speaker.

This was their killer insight, so much so that in March 2020 they built an app around this one feature.

Clubhouse was born.

From there Clubhouse had an insane run up. The app went live in April 2020 and quickly grew to 1,500 users. This was enough traction for the business to raise $12 million in seed funding at a $100m valuation in May of 2020.

From there the founders used a genius strategy to create hype around the app.

Initially, Clubhouse utilized an invite-only model, which created exclusivity and curiosity among potential users. This strategy propelled them to 600,000 users by December 2020.

This laid the groundwork for a $110m raise in January 2021, just 10 months after launching, where the business was valued at $1bn. Clubhouse had 2m users at the time.

Clubhouse's Series C came around quickly. Extremely quickly. In April 2021 Clubhouse raised $50 million at a $4 billion, 4xing their valuation in just a few months. By August 2021 the platform reached 10m users.

But unfortunately for Clubhouse their success was short-lived. As the pandemic subsided people lost interest in the app and their user numbers started to dwindle. They also struggled to monetize the app which contributed to their problems. In fact their user numbers fell so much that in 2023 the company pivoted away from its original idea to become a platform for asynchronous voice messages.

Will this pivot pay off? Only time will well.

But one thing we can all take form this is that, while success can come incredibly quickly, it can also be short lived.

So never take it for granted, not for a second.

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