BUSINESS IDEA | CASH FLOW BUSINESS

Cheap Products Recommendations Platform 💲 

Cents and sensibility

Available Domain: 50dollarfinds.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Stripe is in the news this week with their $1bn acquisition of Bridge, a stablecoin platform. But it turns out Stripe’s CEO Patrick Collison isn’t just interested in buying products for $1bn. No, Patrick is just as interested in buying cheap products which can greatly improve one’s life. He said so himself…

Similarly, if you’re a long time listener to the Tim Ferriss podcast, you’ll also know that he asks all his guests the following question: “What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months?” Clearly people love cheap products which provide substantial benefits, particularly when they’re recommended by famous influencers or entrepreneurs. So let’s build a platform which captures these lists.

Market Size: How long is a piece of string? Ultimately you’re not going for a venture return here so TAM is less important

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A community-driven platform where users share and discover affordable products under $50 that provide exceptional value

How it Works:

• Users can sign up to the site and list cheap products under a specific threshold (we picked $50 here)

• They can then create simple lists of their favorite products they use, with a limit on the number they can add to keep their lists well curated

• Users can browse other people’s lists and buy products they want through affiliate links

Go-to-market: Your MVP should be finding out what products a subset of influencers use, creating their lists for them and going from there

Business Model: Affiliate revenue share where users and the platform share affiliate revenue

Startup Costs: You could start this with a few hundred bucks

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: This won’t turn into a huge, world-beating, startup but could be a great little cash flow business

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Full Body Umbrella

Umbrellas kinda suck, right? They break, you lose them and they don’t even keep you very dry.

Well the full body umbrella solves all of these issues. It keeps you bone dry, is so big you’ll never forget it and is far more robust than a traditional umbrella.

Genius right?

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Livestream Shopping

Livestream shopping has taken off in recent months. The trend first gained significant traction in China around 2016 with platforms like Taobao Live, Douyin (TikTok's Chinese version) and Kuaishou becoming major players in the space. Recently though the trend has finally started taking off in the US, led by Whatnot, which was last valued at $3.7bn in July 2022. This is a huge, growing market which presents opportunities to build businesses.

Business Ideas

• Virtual Personal Shopping Service: Offer one-on-one or small group livestream sessions where a personal shopper helps clients find and purchase items tailored to their needs.

• Whatnot for Cars: Build a site where users can live bid on cars to buy them.

• Live Commerce Platform for Local Businesses: Create a platform connecting local shops to online audiences where users can bid on these local items which are delivered or could be picked up by the winner.

THE MONEYSHOT

How 70 Failed Pitches Led to a $13bn Business

There’s a business out there that over 100m Americans have used, but very few have ever heard of.

And it was founded by these two guys who were rejected by 70 different investors, but still went on to build a $13bn business.

This is their story.

You might say that Zach Perret (right) and William Hockey (left) are kindred spirits.

Despite very different undergrads (Zach studied Chemistry at Duke and William studied computer science at Emory) they both ended up at the same company after college, the consulting firm Bain.

And it was in Bain’s Atlanta office that these two became fast friends, despite Zach dropping William 15 feet on one of their early climbing expeditions together. Yikes.

As well as sharing a love of rock climbing Zach and William shared a love for coding and began working on projects in their spare time. They focussed mainly on building apps in the finance space. They tried to build a financial planning app…which failed. Then they built an accounting app…which also failed.

In both cases they found they hit a roadblock. Developing custom integrations for each financial institution they wanted to work with was extremely challenging.

Which got them thinking…could you build an API to simplify the process of linking users’ bank accounts to fintech apps? That was their lightbulb moment.

They tried to raise some money for the platform, pitching more than 70 investors, who all said no. Ouch.

So in order to prove the idea’s viability the pair entered the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon in April 2013 in Manhattan. The pair built an app called Rambler in 2 days that mapped out consumers’ banking activity. They ended up winning the hackathon, proving that there was indeed some interest in the product and in the process they built the core tech that would power their platform.

They had founded Plaid.

In July 2013, Spark Capital led a $2.9 million seed round in the company and that fall the co-founders moved to San Francisco to give them the best chance of success.

Shortly after they got their first big win. At the time Venmo was looking to change how they settled payments and they needed a product like Plaid to make this work, becoming their first major customer. This was their first killer use case and the company never looked back from there.

In November 2014 they raised a $12.5m series A, followed by a $44m series B in 2016 which valued the company at $250 million.

By 2020 Plaid was generating around $170 million in annualized revenue and in January of that year, Visa agreed to acquire Plaid for $5.3 billion. However, antitrust regulators intervened and shut the deal down, which had to suck for everyone involved.

The company instead went on to raise $425m in funding at a $13.4 billion valuation in 2021. Not the worst outcome I guess.

Plaid’s story is pretty remarkable and I think there’s one big takeaway from it…don’t get too attached to an idea. Too many founders get bogged down in a single idea snd miss the bigger opportunity staring them in the face. Had Zach and William stuck with their financial planning app we wouldn’t be talking about them today.

So don’t be afraid to chart a different course if opportunity arises.

It may well lead you to where you want to go.

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