BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Family Communication Platform

Fostering kin-nections

Available Domain: Kinnects.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: If we learned anything from the Fast and Furious movies (apart from how big Corona’s marketing budget is) it’s importance of family in our lives. Because ultimately family is the most important thing in life, even if they do fight sometimes…

Today we have countless ways of communicating with others. We can communicate with friends through social media platforms like Instagram or communication apps like Discord. We have tools like Slack and Teams to communicate with our work colleagues. Yet the only medium of communication most of us have with our families is the family group-chat (at most). Surely we can do better than that right? We think so. This is how.

Market Size: The global social media market was valued at $219bn in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A communication platform designed specifically for immediate and/or extended family to interact with each other

How it Works:

• A member of the family signs up to the app and sends invites to other members of the family to join and download the app

• The app centres around a feed where family members can post updates, photos or videos for all members of the family to see, similar to social media feeds

• Users can also create different private chats within the app with only certain members added for planning events or other reasons (like moaning about that one relative no-one likes)

• Family events can easily be planned with built-in calendar integrations. There are also reminders for important events or family milestones like birthdays, graduations etc.

Go-to-market: You could use your own family as a test group for the product (assuming you all get along)

Business Model: Advertising

Startup Costs: The build here shouldn’t be too complex, just find yourself a talented engineer and you’re good-to-go

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Acquisition by an adjacent social media platform, like Nextdoor

Exit Multiple: These platforms typically command 6-15x revenue multiples

TOGETHER WITH OMNISEND

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Pen Cap Cutlery

Are you a workaholic? Find yourself eating lunch at your desk most days? Then boy do we have the product for you.

Introducing pen cutlery. This makes it easy to eat in between taking notes, signing contracts and all the other stuff that you should be doing digitally these days.

Available for bic pens but coming to all pen brands soon. No cap.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Biological Age

People like to say that “age is just a number”. But these days it’s a little more complicated. We all have our chronological age (the number of years since we were born) but we also all have a “biological age”. A person's biological age refers to how old their body appears to be at a cellular and physiological level and this can differ substantially from your chronological age. And with the current focus on longevity, more people than ever before are interested in discovering and reducing their biological age.

Business Ideas

• Biological Age Products Review Site: Create a website which tests different biological age testing kits and supplements to discover which ones work the best

• Mobile Biological Age Testing Labs: Convert vans into mobile testing units for at-home testing

THE MONEYSHOT

The 17 Year-Old Running a $12m Revenue Business

When it comes to starting a business age is irrelevant.

Take this 17 year-old whose building a $12m ARR business while attending high school.

This is his story.

Zach Yadegari has been building companies since he was 10 years old.

He learned to code as a kid and began his entrepreneurial journey teaching coding to other kids for $30 an hour. He managed to coach a few people but after watching The Social Network he realised it wasn't scalable to trade his time for money. Instead he wanted to build tech products. He wanted to be the next Zuck.

Zach had his first taste of entrepreneurial success during the pandemic. He saw that schools were distributing Chromebooks to students, and knew that these students would want to play games on their newly acquired devices. So he created an unblocked gaming site that consolidated popular games in one location. The venture attracted 5 million users and later sold for a six-figure sum. Zach had his first taste of entrepreneurial success, but he was far from finished.

Following this success, Zach partnered with Henry Langmack, who he met at a coding camp. They teamed up and started exploring the consumer app space. Their first venture Grind Clock was a motivational alarm clock app that featured David Goggins-style wake-up calls. It garnered 20,000 downloads in its first two weeks, but struggled to grow thereafter.

Zach realised he needed help with scaling his ideas, so he reached out to Blake Anderson, who had built two apps which received millions of downloads in the previous six months. Blake agreed to provide capital and guidance and joined as a cofounder alongside Zach and Henry. Now they just needed a big idea. Which is when inspiration struck.

One day Zach decided to start tracking his calories so he downloaded MyFitnessPal from the app store. But after 3 days of painstakingly tracking each meal, he gave up. He felt the process was far too manual. He wondered if you could use AI to make a better product in this space, which is exactly what he and his co-founders did.

They spent a few weeks building and by May 2024 they were ready to launch.

They created Cal AI.

Cal AI is a calorie tracker with one additional killer feature. Users can simply take pictures of their food and the platform uses AI to estimate the nutritional content in the meal, allegedly more accurately than other calorie counting apps.

With a differentiated product Zach and the team now needed to get users, which is where they developed their own growth strategy. This is how it works.

They start by finding underrated creators who are doing millions of views on TikTok, but don’t get many brand deals since their content isn’t a great fit for brands. They then work together to create content, testing different videos in the hopes that one will go viral. When one does they then use clips from these viral videos in paid ads across different platforms, since they know content has viral potential.

This strategy has been hugely successful and within six months of launch, Cal AI has achieved some pretty remarkable metrics. The app has been downloaded over 1 million times with users logging an average of four meals per day. The app is currently doing $12m in ARR and they have a team of 17 working for them, which can be difficult to manage since Zach is still spending half his days in high school. Badass.

All of which goes to show that, when it comes to entrepreneurship, age is not a barrier to success. Nor is anything else like where you’re from, your background, none of it matters. In 2024 if you have an internet connection and a laptop you can build a great business.

So the question is…what’s holding you back?

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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