BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Poll Marketplace 🗳️ 

Poll vault

Available Domain: Pollmarket.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: With the election finally coming to an end, I bet you were hoping not to hear the word “poll” for a few years. Well…surprise! While elections polling can be dubious at best online polls can be incredibly useful. Exhibit A.

But for many companies looking to complete primary market research they don’t have big enough audiences to get meaningful data. Which is where we come in. For creators or brands with huge, engaged audiences, businesses would be willing to pay a lot to poll this audience to inform their own strategy or product decisions. So why not create a platform to make this possible?

Market Size: The global market research industry reached a record high market size of approximately $84.3bn in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A marketplace where creators/brands with large, engaged audiences can poll their followers to complete market research for other businesses

How it Works:

• Businesses seeking to do some market research sign up to the platform

• Similarly creators/brands with large audiences looking for another way to monetize their audience sign up to the platform too

• An automated matching system pairs businesses with relevant audience demographics based on the goals of the market research

• The platform then allows users to create polls which the brands/creators can share with their audiences, either through a link or using on-platform tools.

• Results are then verified and analyzed through the platform’s analytics, before sharing them with the business

Go-to-market: Find some businesses looking to complete some market research and creators willing to complete polls on an existing platform (e.g. Twitter) to test the concept

Business Model: Platform fee where you take 15% of poll revenue

Startup Costs: You could start this with just a landing page and doing polls manually to verify the idea, then you could expand once you have strong idea validation

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Get acquired by a major market research firm like Kantar or Nielsen or a large customer research software platform like Typeform

Exit Multiple: Your expected exit multiple range would be 6-10x revenue

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Tidy Tips

Ever notice that certain parts of your home are incredibly hard to clean? Brushes and scrubbers are often too big to get into those hard to reach places. Which is where the Tidy Tips come into their own.

With the Tidy Tips you can reach into every nook and cranny to make sure your house is spotless. You simply put them on your fingers and you’re ready to clean.

A real game-changer.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Short Dramas

With attention spans getting shorter and shorter, content is getting shorter and shorter too. And one area that’s exploded in recent months is the “short drama” industry. One of the largest apps gaining attention in this space is ShortMax, which features around 1,000 short films across various genres, including drama, romance, and mysteries. Data shows that 18- to 24-year-olds have installed the app over 10 million times so far in 2024. So can we build a business around this trend?

Business Ideas

• GoFundMe for Short Drama Projects: A platform for people or groups who want to make short drama projects to raise money

• Short Documentaries App: Create an app which shares short documentary films, similar to ShortMax

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THE MONEYSHOT

Turning $12k into a $25m Exit

Finding love is really hard, particularly in this day and age.

But this founder managed to turn his quest for love and $12k into a $25m exit.

This is his story.

Justin McLeod comes from a family of entrepreneurs.

So it’s no surprise that in high school he ended up starting a web and software development company. He called it “Web Wham-O”. Not the best name we’ve ever heard. But overall Justin excelled in high school and went on to attend Colgate University (not related to the toothpaste brand as far as we can tell) and studied economics and political science.

But throughout his college years, despite excelling academically, Justin struggled with drug and alcohol abuse. Which is why, when he graduated in 2006, he decided to get sober. He went to rehab and after getting his life back on track he went on to work in management consulting. Then in 2009, after a few years working in consulting, Justin decided to go to Harvard Business School.

During his time at HBS Justin wanted to find a romantic partner, so he built a platform to do it. He built a site which would list your friends on Facebook (remember Facebook?) and then you could say who you had a crush on. If two people listed each other as their crush then they would match. It worked surprisingly well. So Justin thought he should create a dating site.

After HBS Justin got an offer from McKinsey which came with a $12k signing bonus. So he took this entire signing bonus and hired an outsourced team to develop the first version of the website. He worked on the idea with his friend from business school Frances Haugen (yep, the Facebook whistleblower. Small world right?). The website was originally called Secret Agent Cupid. Clearly naming businesses wasn’t Justin’s strength. But by 2011 they were ready to launch.

After going live Justin started talking to investors about the site, but VCs weren’t interested. They felt the dating market was saturated, with companies like Match.com running the show, and that young people wouldn’t use his dating site. And for a while, they were right.

The company nearly went bankrupt by 2012 since usage was so low. So the company took a big risk. They took their last $25k and decided to build a mobile app for the site. They also organised a launch party for the app. This was their last chance.

By February 2013 they were ready to launch their app, which they also gave a fresh new name.

They had just launched Hinge.

The launch party was a huge success, with a huge number of signups joining the platform. The finally had some decent traction.

Around this time a competitor dating app named Tinder also started picking up steam. So many VCs, who previously had no interest in investing, all of a sudden wanted in. Funny how that works, right? So in 2013 Hinge raised $4.6m over two funding rounds and the following year the company raised a further $22m over two more funding rounds to support the growth of the platform.

Bu 2015 everything seemed to be going well except…it wasn’t. Justin realized that Hinge had strayed from its original mission and was the same as any other dating app at the time. So he took drastic action. He laid off half of the company's staff and they rebuilt the app from scratch. There was no going back. The new version had to work.

The new version of Hinge focused more on fostering genuine connections, requiring users to add six photos and answer personalized prompts. This period of experimentation was financially challenging but ultimately successful in improving user engagement and satisfaction.

With Hinge on an upward trajectory their improved product metrics caught the attention of Match Group, the parent company of Tinder. Match Group initially invested in Hinge in 2017, then in June 2018 acquired 51% of the company. Hinge went on to do $8m in revenue in 2018 and in 2019 Match Group, seeing the potential in the app, acquired the rest of the business in a deal valued at $25m.

And since the acquisition Hinge has skyrocketed in popularity. Revenue went from $8m pre-acquisition to almost $400m in 2023, an incredible run-up and a rare example of an acquisition delivering huge returns.

All of which goes to show that, even when a market seems saturated, there’s always room for better products in a market. All incumbents eventually get disrupted by a new entrant who comes in with a fresh perspective.

Which is why you need to keep your eyes open, since any market can be disrupted at any time.

And you could be the disruptor.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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