BUSINESS IDEA | VENTURE STARTUP

Shopify for Boring Businesses 🧑‍🔧 

Mow money, less problems

Available Domain: Boringstack.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Here at Half Baked we share a lot of tech business ideas. But we equally love boring businesses. And no we’re not talking about Elon Musk’s Boring Company.

When we talk about boring businesses we’re talking about lawn mowing/landscaping, pressure washing, mobile car details and so on. They may be considered boring but they’re cash flow generating, AI proof and more in demand than ever before. But here’s the problem. Setting up one of these businesses is hard, between forming a business, creating a website, accepting payments. Shopify solved this problem for e-commerce. It’s time to solve this problem for service businesses.

Market Size: Around 4.4 million new businesses started annually in the US and of these roughly 65% (2.86 million) are traditional "boring" businesses. On average they spend $3,570 on company formation and billions on business operations software, giving a TAM of well over $10bn.

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A Shopify-style platform that provides everything needed to launch and run a “boring” service business

How it Works:

• The user signs up to the platform and selects what type of business they are starting

• Users can use the platform’s logo designer to create their brand and choose from different website templates which they can modify using the platform’s website builder

• They can also go through a company registration flow to help them to register their business

• Once their website has gone live users can share this with their customers and accept payments easily through the website

• Over time, just like Shopify, an app ecosystem will be built up with apps which users can utilize, such as taking bookings, invoicing, tax compliance etc.

Go-to-market: Your go-to-market cheat code here is to team up with a big influencer in this space, like Nick Huber or Codie Sanchez, to leverage their audiences who are starting these businesses everyday

Business Model: Subscription fee based on revenue levels (e.g. Basic: $39/month, Professional: $99/month, Enterprise: $299/month). You’ll also earn on payments through the platform (2.9% + 30¢ per transaction)

Startup Costs: Building the platform will be costly, meaning you’ll need to raise some money here to get this off the ground

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: You could exit to a bigger player in this market like Housecallpro or Jobber or even Shopify if they wanted to diversify into this market

Exit Multiple: This is a SaaS play so you’re talking about a 5x - 10x revenue multiple on an exit here

TOGETHER WITH SOMEWHERE

Find Top Overseas Talent for your Business

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

The Toilet-Sink Combo

Looking to unlock some extra space in your bathroom. Well look no further.

Introducing…the toilet-sink combo. With this amazing product you can save space in your bathroom and by eliminating that long walk to the sink, time too.

Oh and pro tip - go for the stainless steel finish if you’re going for the “prison chic” look.

Easily a +$1bn business idea.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: NotebookLM

Google and AI go together about as well as socks and sandals do. But while Gemini is struggling there is a brightspot in their portfolio of AI products, and it’s called NotebookLM. NotebookLM is an AI-first notebook that uses the documents you upload to train a specialized AI. The AI in that notebook then becomes an expert on your documents, which is pretty cool. And many people are already building businesses by leveraging this tool.

Business Ideas

• AI Training Agency: Create an agency which works with companies to train their employees in bleeding edge AI tools, like NotebookLM.

• NotebookLM Templates Business: Build reusable templates and guides for common business analytics tasks for NotebookLM.

THE MONEYSHOT

How 100 Rejections Led to a $3.7bn Business

Rejection sucks. That’s probably why most people can’t handle it.

But these founders managed to endure 100 investor rejections before going on to build a $3.7bn business.

This is their story.

Grant Lafontaine’s (right) first love was not tech…it was collectibles.

At the age of 7 he was buying and selling collectibles like pokémon cards online, back when Yahoo auctions was the leading platform and before payment processors even existed.

So when Grant met Logan Head, someone who was just as passionate about collectibles as he was, he knew he had found an ally.

Grant studied economics at Cornell and went on to work for Google and Facebook as well as co-founding Kit. Logan meanwhile studied management information systems at the University of Montana and became a Director of Engineering at Flight Club before they were acquired by GOAT in 2018, combining Logan’s passion for collecting with his career.

But after working for big companies for a few years neither Grant or Logan felt they had fully scratched their entrepreneurial itch so they decided to start something together. What? They weren’t sure. But since they both had experiences in marketplaces they decided to start there.

Their first idea was to build a full-service version of Craigslist, but after two weeks of playing around with this idea they concluded that they couldn't make any money with it.

So they decided to return to their first love, collectibles, and built a marketplace to buy and resell collectibles. They started selling lots of different products on their site before focusing on buying and reselling just one collectible…Funko Pops.

It was 2019 and they had just founded WhatNot.

While the platform was doing ok the watershed moment came in 2020. That summer they added a livestreaming function to the platform where users could livestream themselves talking about the Funko Pops they were selling. Think Twitch meets eBay. During the first livestream on the app, Whatnot sold $5K worth of FunkoPops in just a few hours. This was a revelation. Livestream shopping was the killer feature in the app, so they decided to go all-in on that feature.

They started approaching investors but they weren’t interested. In fact the pair spoke to 100 investors, getting rejected by almost all of them, before they were able to secure some funding. After getting into Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 this opened the floodgates and in December 2020 they raised $4m in seed funding.

From there the business didn’t look back and in September 2021 they raised $150 million, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.

By June 2022, the WhatNot app had 2 million installations between the App Store and the Google Play play store, enabling the business to raise $260 million at a $3.7bn valuation at the time. . That year they reported revenue had grown 20x year-over-year compared to the prior year, but had to layoff employees that year too, such is the state of venture startups these days.

Since then growth has slowed a little but you still have to marvel at what these guys have been able to do. They set out without knowing what they wanted to build, got through 100 investor rejections and built a multi-billion dollar business.

All of proves that sometimes entrepreneurship isn’t about having the perfect idea or plan. Sometimes it’s about taking a leap of faith.

So the question to you…reader…is are you willing to take a leap of faith?

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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