BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

GoFundMe for Gifting 🎁  

The gift that keeps on giving

Available Domain: Giftjoy.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Christmas is just around the corner. It’s the season of eating, drinking, and most importantly giving/receiving gifts. Although we don’t always get the present we really want…

Ultimately for special occasions like Christmas and birthdays almost everyone ends up getting a smattering of random gifts and trinkets from friends and family. In reality though if your loved ones came together they could buy one or two great gifts, or even donate to a cause you care about in your honour. So why not build a platform to make coordinated gift giving 10x easier? Here’s what we’re thinking.

Market Size: The global gifting market size is valued at around $72.5bn in 2024.

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A coordinated gift giving platform where friends and family can come together to give funds in order to buy a present for a loved one

How it Works:

• A user signs up to the site and enters in their details (if they are the recipient) or the details of whoever will receive the gift

• Friends and family can then go to the site and give money to the person, similar to a crowdfunding campaign

• The funds can then be given directly as a present to the recipient. Other wise they can be used to purchase a present for them or the funds raised can be directly donated to a charity of the recipient’s choice directly through the platform

Go-to-market: You could try using this within your own friend group, see if the idea works then build from there

Business Model: Platform fee (take 5% of the value of payments made through the platform)

Startup Costs: You could build a very basic version of this site for a few hundred dollars here. It’s not too complex to build

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Acquisition by a company like Honey (Paypal)

Exit Multiple: You could likely exit this for 4x - 6x revenue, a little on the lower side since it’s not a SaaS product

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

FridgeGate Pro

If you’re anything like me you plan on eating your bodyweight in food over the holidays. Which is all well and good until January comes along and you step back on the scales to check the damage.

Which is where the FridgeGate Pro comes into play. You simply set your goal weight and whenever you want to open the fridge you weigh yourself. If you’re above your goal weight, the fridge won’t open. No exceptions.

Simple yet effective.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Booktok

CookTok. StudyTok. FitTok. There’s a TikTok community for everything these days. But “Booktok” is one of the most active communities where TikTok users share details about their favorite novels and books on the platform. And this reading renaissance presents a huge amount of opportunity for businesses.

Business Ideas

• TikTok for Book Summaries: A mobile-first platform delivering short video summaries of non-fiction books (from edition #241)

• Reading Companion App: A reading companion app which brings the features of eBooks to reading paperback books (from edition #30)

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THE MONEYSHOT

How Two Friends Sold +$100m of Socks

It takes two to tango. And most of the time, it takes two people to start a great company.

Take these two friends who teamed up to make +$100m from selling socks.

This is their story.

Mikael Söderlindh (right) and Viktor Tell (left) have always been creatives.

The pair met many years ago when their then girlfriends dumped them at the same time and bonded over a few glasses of wine. Pretty quickly they found out they had a lot in common. Mikael worked as an advertising executive and Viktor worked as an illustrator and graphic designer. They were both very creative and shared a passion for design, entrepreneurship and most importantly…colorful socks.

One cold, Sunday afternoon in April 2008 the pair were hanging out at Mikael’s house in Stockholm. They noticed around the city that day that many people were wearing colorful socks, mainly to bring some color to such a dull day. They wondered if you could make money selling colorful socks? So they started researching and figured out that on average people bought on average 10–14 pairs of socks per year. This was a huge market hiding in plain sight. So Mikael and Viktor moved quickly.

Rather than validating the idea instead they focussed on finding a manufacturer. They emailed 100 companies and got one answer from a small factory in Turkey.

They flew to meet the owner and hit their first obstacle…he hated their idea. However he agreed to make their socks for them after some convincing. With a manufacturer secured the two friends went back to their hotel room and drew 100 initial patterns which they ordered in three different sizes.

They agreed to purchase 60,000 pairs of socks even though they had no idea how they would sell them, investing around €100,000 in total to get their venture off the ground.

It was 2008 and they had just founded Happy Socks.

Upon receiving their 60,000 pairs of socks, the founders needed to actually sell them. So they built a website and started selling them online. They started selling some pairs through the site but they knew that retail was the big prize here. So almost immediately they started writing personalized letters to newly established local stores asking them to stock Happy Socks, which they did.

They also contacted bloggers (who were the influencers of that time) who started blogging about their socks, and sales began to take off. In their first year of trading Happy Socks made more than €1 million in revenue.

Over the next five years the brand continued to sell online and entered new retail stores around the world. By 2014, they began to expand their product line, creating their first sock collection targeted at sneaker enthusiasts and for men in suits too.

At this stage the founders wanted to take some pressure off their shoulders so in 2015 the founders sold a majority stake to Scope Capital for €16 million, with the founders retaining some ownership in the business.

In 2016, with the additional investment from Scope, the brand sold more than €100 million of socks, and Scope sold its stake to Palamon Capital Partners (a private equity house) a year later for €76 million. What a deal for Scope!

Today Happy Socks is still selling millions of dollars of socks per year across the world and is showing no signs of slowing down. Turns out colorful socks was a brilliantly simple idea.

There’s a lot we can learn from Mikael and Viktor. Firstly to move fast. They went from idea to owning 60,000 pairs of socks in just 3 weeks. In entrepreneurship speed matters. But the big takeaway I believe is that great founders, just like socks, come in pairs. Half the battle of being a founder is finding the yin to your yang.

So if you’re looking to start a business maybe the first thing you need isn’t an idea. It’s to find the right co-founder.

Because a great founding team can achieve anything.

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