BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Unbiased Buying Advice 🛍️ 

Unbuyased

Available Domain: Buyerbrief.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

There are a small number of huge purchase decisions we all make in our lives. Buying a house or a car, maybe making a major home improvement. Or at least we would be making these purchases if we all weren’t clearly blowing our money on avocado toast…

But here’s the thing. Your personal finances are majorly affected by a small number of large purchases you make, not your $3 coffees or your avocado toast. Your house. And for these purchases whoever you’re speaking to is incentivised to charge you as much money as they possibly can. So let’s build a product to level the playing field.

Market Size: The global market for this product is in the billions if you aggregate just the real estate, home improvement and car markets and assume only a tiny % would go through this process

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform where users making a large purchase can consult independent, unbiased, experts to better inform their purchase decision

How it Works:

• A user signs up to the platform and give details on the expense they’re considering e.g. they’ve been given a quote to add an extension to their house

• These details are then circulated to the most relevant experts on the platform who are vetted by the platform before joining. A condition of joining is that they may not advertise or mention brands in their responses

• These responses (usually 3 - 5) are sent back to the user who then rates the most useful response. The person who sends the most useful response receives a payment for their services

• In the future you could expand this product to a corporate solution for businesses to get advice when making large Capex outlays

Go-to-market: Start with a small, high value niche, like yacht purchases and grow from there

Business Model: Users pay for the advice received and the platform takes a % of this

Startup Costs: You could start this relatively cheaply by building a simple website and acting as the middleman, then build out the platform once you’ve proved out the model

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: You could exit this business to a strategic buyer like a consulting firm or a financial buyer like a PE house

Exit Multiple: You could likely sell this for 6-8x revenue to the right buyer

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Tanning Phone App

With winter just around the corner it’s gonna be a while before you can regain your summer glow (or summer burn if you’re pale af like me). Or at least it would be if it weren’t for this brand new app…

The Tan App turns your phone screen into a high powered tanning bed, shining a blindingly bright light (literally) on your face to give you that summer glow you desire (and probably ruin your skin, we’re not sure yet).

Oh and if your phone overheats and/or catches on fire that’s not on us…

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Permanent Jewelry

Ayer, an ad advertising agency, famously invented the slogan “A Diamond Is Forever” to help De Beers sell more diamonds. And a recent rise in the popularity of permanent jewelry means that all jewelry can be forever too. Permanent jewelry is typically a bracelet, anklet, or necklace that does not have a traditional clasp, so it cannot be easily removed. Instead, the ends are soldered together. so what businesses could we build on the back of this trend?

Business Ideas

• Medical ID Permanent Jewelry Brand: Create stylish permanent jewelry designs for medical ID bracelets

• AR for Permanent Jewelry: Create a virtual reality preview of how permanent pieces will look on a wearer, given the commitment

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THE MONEYSHOT

Turning $900 into a $250m+ Business Selling Chicken

It doesn’t take a lot of money to build a successful business.

Take this founder who scraped together $900 with three of his childhood friends to create a +$250m/year business.

This is his story.

Dave Kopushyan has always loved food.

He grew up in Hollywood, California with his three best friends, Arman Oganesyan, and brothers Tommy and Gary Rubenyan. In his youth Dave was the guy who would show up to his friends house with a new cookbook or would insist on cooking for them. We all need a friend like that.

Dave went on to train as a professional chef under Thomas Keller at the prestigious three-Michelin-star restaurant, The French Laundry in California. But while Dave loved making complex dishes he also enjoyed fast casual food…particularly In-N-Out Burgers.

Dave and his friends were inspired by the straightforward business model of In-N-Out Burger, focusing on quality and simplicity in their menu offerings. Then around 2017 they noticed there was a growing demand for fried chicken in Los Angeles, specifically Nashville hot chicken. They wondered if they could meet that demand?

So the foursome decided to start experimenting with different Nashville hot chicken recipes. They pooled together $900 to buy a fryer and began frying chicken. They spent months refining and perfecting their recipe until they had one that lived up to Dave’s lofty standards.

Now that they had their recipe in May 2017 they decided to start selling to the public. So they set up a small street food stand with a portable fryer and a few picnic tables in a parking lot in the East Hollywood. Initially the stand sold only one item: a hot chicken combo plate. Not the most glamorous start, but hey you have to start somewhere.

This was the first Dave’s Hot Chicken location.

Initially they build their customer base through word-of-mouth and social media marketing. But a pivotal moment came for the business when a writer with Eater LA stumbled across them and loved the food. He wrote about it on the website and all of a sudden there were lines around the block with eager customers looking to try their food.

It was clear the brand had potential and in the fall of 2019. In fall 2019, the founders formed an agreement with an investment group including former Wetzel's Pretzels CEO and co-founder Bill Phelps to franchise the restaurant. The deal made plans for more than 300 locations in the United States and Canada, with Bill joining as CEO.

That winter the chain opened 2nd and 3rd locations, both in Los Angeles, but they were just getting started. The injection of capital allowed the business to open locations incredibly quickly, and as more locations opened up the brand was getting more and more recognition.

In 2021 the brand raised some investment from a number of notable investors including Samuel L Jackson and Drake, and based on his beef with Kendrick Lamar, Drake clearly knows a thing or two about getting cooking (or getting cooked really). That year revenue surged to over $17.6 million. The brand was riding a gravy train to success, despite the fact that gravy doesn’t appear on their menu.

Today the brand has more than 200 locations worldwide and is pulling in $250m+ in revenue per year, all in just a 7 year time period. Quite an upgrade from a parking lot.

All of which goes to show that when you get down to it business isn’t really that complicated. You make a product people want and you tell them about it. That’s it. Oh and if you can happen to do it with your childhood friends and build a business doing hundreds of millions of dollars per year, even better.

So no matter what business you’re building or decide to build in the future, remember the KISS rule always applies.

Keep it simple stupid.

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