BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Figma for Tattoo Design 🌺  

Think different

Available Domain: Inksync.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Tattoos come in all shapes and sizes. Some tell stories. Others are memorials for people no longer with us. And other tattoos are incredibly inspirational.

But here’s the thing. Tattoo design is still a pretty antiquated process. Normally it just involves someone drawing out a design on pen and paper and giving that to the tattoo artist. We think we can do better. A lot better. This is how.

Market Size: The global tattoo market was valued at $27bn in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A cloud-based collaborative design platform for tattoo fans and artists to work together to design their tattoos

How it Works:

• A user signs up to the platform where they can start using the tooling (drag and drop interface) to design their tattoo. Users can browse tattoo inspiration on the platform too

• Users can use AI to generate tattoos or they can hire an expert designer on the platform who can create designs for the user on the platform

• Users can also take pictures of their current tattoos to show where they have coverage and superimpose a design on their body to see how any new tattoo would look

• Once the design is finalized this can be shared with the tattoo artist or designer who can give feedback or suggest changes before the tattoo is applied

Go-to-market: You could create a top-of-funnel app which shows how people look with tattoos, push that to go viral on TikTok, then convert customers over to the app

Business Model: Subscription model

Startup Costs: This would be a complex build so you may need to do a small raise here to get the engineering talent needed to build out the platform

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Acquisition by a digital art platform or a private equity buyout

Exit Multiple: You could target a 8-12x revenue multiple here

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Fly Swatter App

You’ve just spotted a fly. It’s go time.

But disaster strikes. You can’t find the fly swatter. What do you do?

Well the Fly Swatter app solves this. You simply open the app and smack the **** out of that fly with your phone.

Bonus points if you don’t smash your screen (but if you do, that’s on you. DOn’t come crying to us).

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Mouth Tape

Mouth taping is an increasingly popular tool used to encourage nose breathing during sleep. Take the mouth tape brand Hostage Tape (definitely on a Government watchlist after googling that) who have made millions from selling mouth tape. And there’s still tonnes of opportunity in this space.

Business Ideas

• Optimal Sleep Kits: Create kits which contain all the products needed for an optimal night sleep including nose strips, mouth tape, eye masks, supplements etc.

• Mouth Tape Meditation App: Work with meditation apps and white label mouth tape for them to sell as part of meditation practices to encourage nose breathing

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THE MONEYSHOT

How Zuck’s Right Hand Man Built a $2bn Business

One of the best ways to be successful (in anything you do) is to surround yourself with great people.

Take Zuck’s right hand man at Facebook who went on to build a $2bn business after he left.

This is his story.

Adam D’Angelo can only be described as a child prodigy.

He began programming at the age of 10, demonstrating exceptional talent early on. During his high school years at Phillips Exeter Academy he was a competitive programmer, winning a silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics. Yep, he was one of those guys.

But despite all of his achievements at school the most important thing he did there was to befriend another programming prodigy. Mark Zuckerberg.

The pair hacked away at different ideas, the most notably creating the Synapse Media Player, a music recommendation player that was so addictive that Microsoft tried to buy it. Instead the pair famously posted it online for free. Kids eh?

In 2002 after high school Adam went to Caltech to study computer science. But his time at college was interspersed with startup work because at the time his friend Mark was starting his own company which you may have heard of…

When Facebook launched in 2004, Adam lived with its founders in Palo Alto, California for a few months. He became a full-time employee in 2005 before going back to college for the second half of the 2005 academic year. After graduating in 2006, Adam got back to working at Facebook and became their CTO in November 2006.

Adam was pivotal in those early years but still wanted to build his own business. All he needed was an idea. And in 2008 he had one.

One day in 2008 Adam and fellow Facebook employee Charlie Cheever were eating Chinese food near Facebook's offices. They were discussing the concept of "latent markets" areas of the internet that had unmet consumer demands. ONe thing they noticed was that Facebook users were obsessed with answering questions. They believed there was a significant opportunity to create a platform dedicated to answering questions in a more structured and high-quality manner than existing solutions, like Yahoo Answers.

So in 2008, much to everyone’s shock, Adam and Charlie left Facebook to start their company and by 2009 they started the business.

They founded Quora.

For the next 12 months they built the platform and carried out early beta tests with friends to test its usability. By June 2010 the platform was ready for its public launch.

Pretty quickly it took off and by January 2011, Quora had amassed around 500,000 users. Pretty soon the company needed more money to scale, so when the Series B came around in 2012, Quora raised $50m with Adam personally contributing $20m of his own money to the raise. Talk about backing yourself.

From there the company kept growing and by May 2019, Quora was valued at approximately $2 billion after a $60 million raise, even though revenue was only around $20m per year at the time. However that valuation contracted recently when in January 2024 Quora raised $75 million at a $500 million valuation.

Today the platform has around 300 million - 400 million monthly users, but monetization has always been a struggle for the business. But in the age of AI, where data is the new oil, Quora’s incredible repository of data could be its biggest revenue source going forward. Only time will tell.

All of which begs the question…should Adam have stayed at Facebook? In hindsight it’s easy to say he should have, since today his shares would be worth billions of dollars. But at least he doesn’t have to live with the regret of not giving his own idea a shot.

And if building a billion dollar business means you’re a failure, then hey, I’ll be a failure any day of the week.

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