BUSINESS IDEA | VENTURE STARTUP

Discontinued App Development Studio 🪦 

Cache me outside

Available Domain: Apprevival.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: There’s an app for everything these days. Which might be why so many of them look so similar.

But given there are so many apps built, inevitably apps that customers love get shut down. Reddit in particular is flooded with comments where users mourn the loss of their favorite apps, like here for example. These are apps that are ready to explode once they’re relaunched. So let’s relaunch them.

Market Size: The global mobile application market was valued at $253bn in 2023. With approximately 2% of previously successful apps becoming discontinued annually, this is a gigantic market.

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An app development studio that rebuilds old apps which have been discontinued that customers want revived

How it Works:

• The business scrapes data from subreddits and other online forums where people discuss apps they want to be brought back

• The rights are acquired to these apps or agreements can be reached with the original developers to give them a small piece of ownership in the app

• You rebuild the apps using modern technology stacks and launch them to the public

• Over time you build up a portfolio of successful apps which you can separate into separate companies and sell

Go-to-market: Identify an app that’s been discontinued, had a strong user-base and is relatively easy to build. That’s your starting point.

Business Model: Each app will have a different strategy, from running ads to freemium models and so on

Startup Costs: You’ll need to find a great developer to work with you early on to keep costs down. That’s the key to making this idea work.

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: You hold the business, keep developing apps and any app that takes off you turn into a separate business which you can sell

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Horn Alarm Clock

Are you a deep sleeper? Have you become so used to the piercing sound of your iPhone alarm that you find yourself sleeping through it?

Well good luck sleeping through this. The horn alarm is so loud it will wake you up, your entire family and half the neighborhood all in one go.

What an innovation.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Mushroom Coffee

Caffeine, delivered through coffee, is the most used drug on the planet. And more recently people have started “cutting” (to use the drug lingo) their coffee with medicinal and functional mushrooms to give it an extra kick. Brands and consumers have started mixing coffee with mushrooms like lion’s mane, chaga, or cordyceps to create different mushroom coffee products, a fast-growing category in the beverage market.

Business Ideas

• Functional Beverage Testing Box: Create a free subscription box where users receive a box of different functional beverages (like mushroom coffee) every week for free that they then review for the brands

• DIY Mushroom Coffee Kits: Create kits which allow users to grow their own functional mushrooms which they can then combine with coffee to create their own mushroom coffee blend

THE MONEYSHOT

Building a +$250m Business at 26 Years-old

If it feels like this election cycle will never end, don’t worry, we’re almost there.

But one founder has managed to leverage this election cycle to build a +$250m business.

This is his story.

New York is a city Shayne Coplan knows well.

He was raised on the Upper West Side by his mother and attended public school near the theater district. As a teenager, he learned to code and, according to crypto legend, became the youngest participant in the initial sale of Ethereum back in 2014 when you could buy the token for 30 cents. Shayne went on to pursue a computer science degree at New York University, but then left before graduating in order to combine his passion for crypto with another area…predictions.

It was 2020 and Shayne wanted to gauge the likelihood of various events related to the pandemic and its impact. He specifically wanted to know the probability of New York City reopening, the timeline for vaccine availability and whether restaurants would open again. But he had a problem. Cutting through the noise to find out what was really going on was incredibly difficult.

Shayne however was interested in the idea of prediction markets and how he could combine the “wisdom of the crowds” with crypto to create a prediction market to get his answers.

He set to work building the marketplace and within a few months was ready to send it live.

He built Polymarket.

Here’s how the site works. Markets are created around specific yes/no questions (e.g., "Will X win the election?"). Users can then buy either "YES" or "NO" tokens for any market which are priced between $0 and $1. The current price essentially represents the market's prediction of the probability. For example, currently Tump’s probability of winning is 64.4%, meaning a token on this outcome costs 64.4c.

When the platform launched the very first bet on Polymarket was about when New York City would reopen, just as Shayne intended. People were so impressed by his platform that in October 2020 Shayne raised $4 million in a seed round to fund the business.

The business kept growing in popularity and in 2022 Polymarket raised $25 million in a Series A funding round. But Polymarket’s big break has actually come much more recently…the 2024 US Presidential election.

As people have increasingly questioned the accuracy of polling data, journalists and pundits have increasingly turned to Polymarket to determine who is most likely to win. Since people are putting real money on the line when making predictions, this means that prediction markets can prove to be very accurate.

On the back of this interest in the platform Polymarket raised $45 million in May of 2024 in a round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. While an exact valuation is not known, the business is easily worth over $250m and could be worth as much as $500m. Monthly volume on Polymarket hit an all-time high of $472 million in August of this year, showing just how popular the platform has become.

Now you might think that Shanye got lucky because of the publicity Polymarket got due to the election. But here’s the thing about luck. Luck is like a train. There’s always one coming, the question is have you paid the fare to get on.

Shayne did. And reader, you need to make sure you do too. A train is coming and you need to put in the work so you can get on.

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