BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Competitor Comment Tracking 🗨️

Their pain, your gain

Available Domain: Rantradar.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Online reviews are incredibly helpful. There’s comfort in knowing other people have taken the plunge and bought the product before you or watched the movie you want to see, even if it didn’t quite live up to their expectations…

But for businesses online reviews and comments on social media are an opportunity to acquire customers. By swooping in when a competitor’s customer is unhappy businesses can secure themselves new users essentially for free. So let’s build a platform to support this.

Market Size: The social media monitoring market is valued around $4.2bn presently

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform which tracks negative comments made about competitor products so brands can swoop in and acquire them as customers

How it Works:

• A brand signs up for the platform and shares details of their primary competitors

• The platform uses AI and natural language processing to monitor social media, review sites, and forums for negative comments about competitor products

• Once these complaints are identified the platform generates targeted acquisition messages which can be sent to these customers or replied to

• Customer journeys from complaint to conversion are tracked

• You could also expand the software to monitor complaints about the company itself

Go-to-market: Start by working with B2B SaaS companies (easier to track complaints, higher customer lifetime value) and expand to other verticals from there

Business Model: Subscription fee based on the number of competitors tracked

Startup Costs: The build here shouldn’t be too technical. This would be a prime candidate to hire some overseas talent from a business like Somewhere.com to get v1 built

Competitors: Some businesses like Mention offer this kind of intelligence, but they’ve not taken the next step to turn it into an acquisition channel

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: The goal here is to get acquired by a similar software provider in this space, like Sprout Social

Exit Multiple: Your expected exit multiple range here is 8-12x ARR

TOGETHER WITH RYSE

The Smart Home Company to Watch

Best Buy has a knack for picking the up-and-coming tech products that go on to dominate the market. Their early bets on household items like Ring (acquired by Amazon for $1.2B) and Nest (acquired by Google for $3.2B) have a proven record of paying off. 

Now Best Buy is lifting the curtain on their latest find, launching RYSE’s SmartShades in over 120 retail stores. RYSE has already hit $9M+ in lifetime revenue with over 60,000 units sold, and the numbers are rising (along with the window shades). 

RYSE shareholders have seen their value increase 40% year-over-year, with strong upside remaining as they scale into retail and high-volume B2B channels. 

Invest in RYSE at just $1.75/share before it becomes a household name.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Ping Pong Door

Ping pong is a ton of fun to play. But tables are pretty expensive and take up a lot of room in your house. Or at least…they did.

This ping pong door converter means any door in your house can be instantly converted into a ping pong table. Hell if you have a big house you could convert all the doors in your house to ping pong tables and start hosting tournaments.

Less ding dong, more ping pong.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Dash Cams

We all have guilty pleasures. Watching reality TV shows. Late night snacking. Spending any time at all on TikTok. But one my guilty pleasures is watching interesting dash cam videos, like this recent video where a dash cam saves a driver from attempted insurance fraud. It’s no wonder that sales of dash cams have skyrocketed in recent weeks.

Business Ideas

• Dash Cam Data Business: Sell your own dash cams (or work with dashcam companies) to help them to monetize the metadata they’re collecting, like data on road quality, traffic, weather etc.

• Phone-Dash Cam Conversion Kit: Create a mount and app combination which turns your phone into a dash cam.

THE MONEYSHOT

How 5 Years of Failure Led to a $10bn Business

Not all businesses are overnight successes.

Take these founders who spent 5 years working tirelessly only to shut it down, but relaunched it into a $10bn business.

This is their story.

Ivan Zhao (right) is no quitter.

He was born in Chengdu, China and immigrated to Canada with his family at the age of seven. As a kid, he dabbled in video game design which ignited a lifelong passion for coding. For college he studied cognitive science and fine arts (quite the combination) at the University of British Columbia and worked at Inkling after he graduated.

But Ivan had a dream, a vision for a product he wanted to build. He envisioned a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. But in order to make this dream a reality he knew he needed to find a co-founder. And luckily…he did.

One day Ivan went to meet his friend Toby Schachman to catch up, and Toby brought someone else to their meeting. Simon Last. 

Simon had just turned 20 at the time and after finishing the second year of his computer science at the University of Maryland, Simon was in San Francisco for a summer internship. Within a few hours though Ivan had sold Simon on his dream and he immediately quit his internship and started working with Ivan.

They got to work and started building. It was 2013 and they had just started their company.

They founded Notion.

The pair raised $2 million from a mix of friends, family and friends of friends that year and they set to work. For the next 2 years they built the platform tirelessly. But as they started getting their product to customers they had a problem…the product was very hard to use. Moreover their users didn't want to build their own apps. Ivan had committed a cardinal sin in entrepreneurship - he built something he wanted, not what his customers wanted. It took him 2 years to figure this out.

By 2015 the business was in trouble. So they decided to pivot to creating a platform that people could use in their everyday life, an all-in-one workspace, like a word processor on steroids. But as they rolled this new product out to their friends and family they noticed it was very buggy. They built the platform using a Google web framework called Web Component, which crashed constantly.

On top of this they were quickly running out of money so the pair decided to start from scratch. In order to preserve their depleting cash reserves Ivan and Simon moved from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, which was less than half as expensive. They decided to give it one last shot.

The pair spent 18 hours a day at their laptops, not bothering to dress, clean or cook. All they did was code. After months and months of working tirelessly they finally had a new product built. They relaunched in 2018 with a renewed focus on simplicity and user-centered design. Around this time Akshay Kothari, an early investor in Notion, joined as a co-founder, seeing the promise in the new direction the business had taken.

They had created an all-in-one workspace for note-taking, task management, and project management, the Notion many of us use today.

From there the platform started to take off. In 2019 they raised $18.2 million in a series A round and just a year later they raised $50 million at a $2 billion valuation. The business had completely turned around.

The most recent funding round took place in 2021, where Notion raised $275 million in a Series C round, propelling the company to a $10 billion valuation.

Earlier this year notion passed 100m users and they’re constantly launching new features with the goal of making Notion the ultimate productivity platform.

All of which goes to show that when you’re building a business you need to listen to the market and to your customers. You can’t build what you want, you have to build what your customers want and need.

That’s the only way to make it.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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