BUSINESS IDEA | CASH FLOW BUSINESS

Tech Sales Bootcamp 🤝 

Pitch, please

Available Domain: Quotacamp.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: There are lots of reasons people want to work in tech. Remote working. Great benefits. Making the world a better place The money. And when people think about pursuing a career in tech they often only think about software engineers, who we all know have a very tough time at work.

But in many tech companies the big earners are really the salespeople. If you can close a large, multi-million dollar sales deal for your business you can get paid a fat commission for this. Many people do coding bootcamps to break into software engineering, so why not do the same thing for salespeople? If coding bootcamps can turn people into software developers in 12 weeks, you can definitely create some killer salespeople in the same amount of time. Here’s how.

Market Size: The US tech sales workforce consists of around ~500,000 professionals presently

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An 8 - 12 week bootcamp that transforms career-switchers and entry-level candidates into job-ready tech sales professionals

How it Works:

• A user signs up for the program and gives their previous experience and goals for the bootcamp

• They spend 8 - 12 weeks completing an intensive bootcamp where they learn all about tech sales. You could also offer a longer, part-time bootcamp for people who can’t complete a full-time camp

• During the camps students are taught how to use CRMs, build a sales pipeline, cold calling best practices and sales psychology training. They also do real world cold calling and try to close deals for real, all contributing to the best training experience possible

• Once they complete the program students are offered job placement assistance to help them to secure a job

Go-to-market: Start by building a landing page for the course and running some ads to it to gauge appetite. If you get enough interest then go ahead with the course.

Business Model: Income Share Agreements - take 10% of the first-year salary of a graduate once they land a sales job

Startup Costs: You could start this with just a few hundred bucks

Competitors: Sales training bootcamps already exist but by focussing on tech sales and making the training as high quality as possible you can build a great business here

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: This could be an amazing cash flow business if you were to build it

TOGETHER WITH NAME.COM

Quick Fire Ideas

330,000 Entrepreneurs use Name.com as their one-stop-shop for buying domains.

So let’s get your creative juices flowing with these quick fire business ideas and domains so you can get started straight away:

💡 Idea 1: A digital marketplace where salespeople can buy, sell, and trade sales scripts

Kickass Domain: Scriptswap.io

💡 Idea 2: A platform for influencers to make large, public wagers which others can bet on too

Perfect Domain: Socialstakes.io

💡Idea 3: A platform where sales teams across different companies can compete against each other to see who performs best

Ideal Domain: Salesduel.io

Get started with 15% off your first domain today and to sweeten the deal even more get free advanced security with any domain using the code #halfbaked at checkout.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Fake Fight Club

Looking to impress your partner? Want to show them how tough you are and that in a fight you’ll step up to defend them?

Well with the Fake Fight Club app you can do exactly that. Simply go on the app and hire someone you can beat up in a staged fight in front of your partner to prove how brave you are.

Fake fights. Real results. You can thank us later.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Social Sauna

As more and more people are swearing off alcohol, “social saunas” have emerged as a way for people to socialize without the need for booze, popping up in places like New York and San Francisco. And if you hate the idea of sitting around half naked with your work colleagues then…join the club. But they’re getting more and more popular, and where there’s a trend there’s money to be made.

Business Ideas

• Yelp for Saunas: Create a map and review system for saunas and cold plunge facilities around the USA

• Topgolf for Saunas: Create a nighttime friendly sauna/cold plunge facility which serves healthy food and drinks for socializing

THE MONEYSHOT

From Reselling Scooters to Building an $8bn Business

The life of a founder is really the life of an explorer, where you go out into the world searching for ideas and opportunities.

Take this founder, who went from re-selling scooters in China to building an $8bn business.

This is his story.

Ryan Petersen has always prioritized adventure in his life.

For college he attended the University of California, Berkeley and during his degree he spent time studying abroad in both Chile and Brazil.

After graduating from college in 2006, still in search of adventure, Ryan, his brother David and their friend Michael Kanko decided to start importing and reselling scooters and motorcycles from China. Ryan actually moved to China to source the products for a while, and that’s where he first dealt with the difficulty and disorganization of logistics.

To address this problem, the trio created ImportGenius in 2007. ImportGenius digitized shipping information to help companies to understand competitors’ supply chains and search for suppliers. ImportGenius remains a multi-million dollar business to this day. Oh and for good measure at the same time as starting ImportGenius Ryan went to Columbia Business School to get his MBA. Talk about an overachiever.

After spending so many years in the freight space Ryan slowly but surely came into his big idea. He wanted to build a “TurboTax for customers paperwork” which he started working on in 2010 which would simplify all the paperwork for customers shipping goods around the world.

But to start moving goods across the U.S. border he needed to clear rigorous background checks (mainly to prove he wasn’t a smuggler). But finally approved in March 2013, Ryan pitched his startup idea onstage at a 2,000-person Y Combinator event and his startup was accepted into YC’s 2014 batch.

He had founded Flexport.

Flexport quickly raised $4 million from a number of A-list investors, including Reddit’s cofounder Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan.

But as Ryan went even deeper into this space he realised that customers wanted an online destination that handled customs and their bigger concern: freight forwarding. Incumbents still relied heavily on sending faxes or PDFs back and forth, or “freight email forwarding.” Within a few months, Flexport had stitched together a working cloud-based version of its freight forwarding software. And from there the company exploded.

By 2015, the company was on pace to generate $60 million in sales and Founders Fund led a $20 million Series A investment into Flexport.

Over the next few years as Flexport’s revenue soared past $200 million, then $400 million and by 2019 Masayoshi Son’s Vision Fund was interested in investing. Ryan and Masayoshi sat down and after 45 minutes of chatting Ryan walked away with a $1 billion commitment. Time is money as they say.

Flexport has raised over $2.6bn since it was founded to fund its growth with its valuation peaking at $8bn. The company has had to survive some tough times too, like Covid and various shipping crises over the years.

But Flexport is still a giant of the tech world and today helps businesses to ship billions of dollars of goods around the world everyday.

All of which goes to show that entrepreneurship, like life, is an adventure.

So when you take the plunge and start your own business, be willing to go wherever the wind takes you.

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