BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Automated Engineer Performance Reviews 👨‍💻 

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Available Domain: Devscore.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Being a software engineer is an interesting job. Sometimes you feel like a genius, other times you feel like an idiot. But most of the time you’re just trying to figure out what’s going on.

But analysing the performance of software engineers, particularly for people who are non-technical, can be very challenging. But given recent advances in AI are focussing on replacing software engineers, why not use AI to understand the performance of your existing engineer base instead? Let’s do it.

Market Size: The US is home to more than 4.4 million software developers as of 2022

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An AI platform which automatically measures a software engineer’s performance by integrating with Git repositories

How it Works:

• The system works by integrating with Git repositories

• AI analyzes the code for quality and out comes a stack ranked score of engineers who’ve contributed to the project based not on just their number of contributions or lines of code, but on code quality, difficulty, consistency etc.

• A senior software engineer also reviews the code to add more feedback which is used to train the AI, making it more performant over time

• The AI generates a performance report for each engineer, including areas of improvement they should work on in the future

Go-to-market: Target mid-sized tech companies (50-200 engineers) to get early customers on board

Business Model: Subscription model, charge per completed review

Startup Costs: You could get prototype of this working leveraging large LLMs like ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude and as you prove out the market develop your own tech

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Acquisition by a major DevOps platform like GitHub or GitLab

Exit Multiple: DevOps tools typically exit at 15-20x ARR, so being conservative here you should be able to exit at 10-15x ARR

TOGETHER WITH OMNISEND

Gone viral yet? Us neither…

Going viral sounds nice and exciting, but even if you succeed the fame is more like 15 seconds than 15 minutes.

So why not to talk directly to the people who already like you and your brand (and we aren’t talking about your mom).

Email & SMS marketing is the GOAT when it comes to this.  As boring as it sounds, Omnisend can help you build an audience of people who like you and convert them into recurring sales.

1. Collect contact details of people who already like your brand.

2. Segment them.

3. Send them personalized offers.

4. Watch sales happen in front of your eyes.

Use code HALFBAKED10 & get 10% off your first 3 months.

For new paid plans only, expires Dec. 31, 2024

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Steering Wheel Desk

Do you find yourself wasting precious hours you could be working on commuting to work?

Well with this steering wheel desk now you can work on your way to work, maximizing your productivity. Is it a little dangerous? Sure. Is it legal? No comment.

But one thing we know for sure is you’ll get more work done on your commute than you ever thought possible.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Local Newsletters

Local newsletters are booming right now. These are newsletters that typically cover the news and current events in a city, town, or specific geographic area. Since everybody’s starting a newsletter these days it stands to reason that every town will have a local newsletter associated with it too. So why not start one yourself?

Business Ideas

• College Newsletter Business: Create a business which creates local newsletters for different colleges focussing on news and events on college campuses.

• Newcomers' Newsletters: Create a newsletter specifically for new residents moving to an area, featuring essential local information and tips for getting settled.

THE MONEYSHOT

The Brothers who Turned $2m into a $4bn Exit

Sometimes you don’t have to come up with a great business idea, you can just buy one.

Take these two brothers (who you have probably never heard of) who bought a business for $2m and transformed into a $4bn empire (that you have definitely heard of).

This is their story.

From an early age Frank (right) and Lorenzo (left) Fertitta were big risk-takers.

They were born and raised in the risk capital of the world, Las Vegas, where their father founded a casino business in 1976.

In 1993 the brothers took over as the leaders of their father’s business, Station Casinos, which they expanded into a broader gaming and hospitality business generating revenues of around $1.5 billion per year.

But the big turning point for them came in 2001 when the pair found an underperforming business they wanted to buy.

The business in question had been running since 1993 after Art Davie, an advertising executive, partnered with Rorion Gracie, a prominent jiu-jitsu instructor in California to create a tournament to determine which martial art was most effective in real combat. They called it "War of the Worlds”, putting fighters from different disciplines (karate, boxing, wrestling, jiu-jitsu, etc.) against each other with minimal rules.

But the business wasn’t performing particularly well and after a long battle to secure sanctioning for the sport, the company stood on the brink of bankruptcy.

The brothers were interested in buying the business, but weren’t sure if it was the right decision, until they got their confirmation after attending a wedding.

At a friend’s wedding and ran into an old high school friend of theirs…a man named Dana White and told him about the potential acquisition. Dana thought it was a great idea and wanted in too.

So in January 2001 the brothers decided to swoop in and buy the fledgling business for $2m and made Dana White the President of the company.

They purchased the UFC.

Many thought the brothers were crazy for the purchase. Even Lorenzo’s lawyers thought it was a crazy decision. But what Lorenzi and Frank understood was the value of the brand name…the UFC.

Along with the trademark, they acquired a wooden octagon and around a dozen fighter's contracts. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

After the change in ownership the UFC slowly rose in popularity.T his was mainly due to better advertising, bigger corporate sponsorships and a return to cable pay-per-view. Previously the fights were aired on DirecTV PPV which had a much smaller viewership than cable pay-per-view, limiting the sport’s reach.

Interestingly an early fan of the sport was Donald Trump, who opened up his venues like the Trump Taj Mahal, to UFC events and in June 2002 the first mixed martial arts match on American cable television was aired on Fox Sports Net.

But the big turning point for the sport was UFC40. Each event was hugely loss making for the UFC, leaving the business in trouble. However this all changed with UFC40. The event was a near sellout with an attendance of 13,022 at the MGM Grand Arena and sold 150,000 pay-per-view buys, a rate roughly double that of previous events. This was enough to show that the sport could be popular enough to support itself and made the events economically feasible.

From there the UFC never looked back and got more and more popular each year. By 2015 the UFC was earning $600m in revenue per year and a year later UFC's the Fertitta brothers and Dana sold the business, with Dana White staying on to run the business. Not a bad return on a $2m investment.

In 2023 the UFC underwent another change in ownership when it merged merge with the wrestling promotion WWE to form TKO Group Holdings. That year the UFC did $1.3bn in revenue and the brand was valued around $11.3bn at the time, one of the most valuable sports brands in the world.

All of which goes to show that sometimes great business ideas can already exist, they just need a different operator to reach their potential.

So if you find a great but struggling business, and have the cash to buy it, it could be your route to success.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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