BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Notion for Instruction Manuals 🛠️  

The write way

Available Domain: Guidedrive.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Instruction manuals are great. Without them our homes would be filled with unbuilt furniture and toys we never quite figured out how to make. Although sometimes instruction manuals can hit a sore spot for us.

But writing technical instruction manuals is surprisingly difficult. You need to use simple language (around an 8th-grade reading level), stick to standardized writing guidelines and there are even certain words you can/cannot use since manuals have to be translated into multiple languages. So why not create a platform to supercharge this process? Here’s what we’re thinking.

Market Size: The global technical documentation software market was valued at approximately $5.5 billion in 2023, although this idea would capture a subset of that market

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A workspace specifically designed for product companies to collaboratively create, critique and publish instruction manuals

How it Works:

• A company signs up to the platform and their instruction manual writers are onboarded to the software

• Technical writers work collaboratively on the text for the instruction manual. Their content is analyzed in real-time for words not allowed, its reading level and translatability (if that’s even a word)

• Writers can then embed drawings/diagrams created in other platforms into the manual created by professional technical illustrators. Over time these could also be created on the platform

• After a review process the manual is then available to be published or printed, whatever the customer’s requirement is in whatever languages they need

Go-to-market: Focus on small to medium-sized manufacturing companies in a single vertical early on and expand from there

Business Model: Charge companies per seat

Startup Costs: This will be a pretty complex build so you’ll need a great technical co-founder here or to raise some capital to work with some great engineers

Competitors: There are some antiquated competitors in this space but a new entrant who layers AI tooling into a product could compete really effectively

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: You could exit to a large document management company like Box

Exit Multiple: You could likely sell this for 8-12x ARR as it’s a SaaS business

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Cigarette-flavored Vape

Vapes are highly problematic. The damage they’re doing to people’s health. The environmental impact. But the biggest issue with vapes is clearly the flavors they come in. They’re all these fruity flavors like blue raspberry or pink fairy dust. It’s time to get back to the classic flavor that started it all.

That’s right with this new cigarette-flavored vape you can get that smooth, classic cigarette taste in vape form. It even burns your throat and lungs just like the real thing.

What a throwback.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Quantum Computing

Last week Google made a huge announcement around their new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip called Willow, which left the tech world asking lots of questions. Are Google back? What’s a qubit? Is my Bitcoin going to zero once this thing cracks encryption? This is a huge innovation in the quantum computing world, however it’s pretty clear that the quantum computing space is still in its infancy. But that’s why today could be a great time to start building in this space. Because if you do you’ll be ready to capitalize when quantum computing has its “ChatGPT” moment in the future.

Business Ideas

• The Rundown for Quantum Computing: Create a newsletter (or blog, Youtube channel, whatever your preference) dedicated solely to quantum computing, becoming the go-to source for news, research and updates in the field

• Predictions Platform: Create a platform which tracks predictions around quantum computing and other technology breakthroughs from thought leaders around the world (from edition #89)

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THE MONEYSHOT

From $0 to $9bn in 2 Years

Some businesses are so iconic that their name becomes shorthand for a startup idea. Think “Airbnb for X”. Or “Uber for Y”.

And while that normally takes years and years to achieve these founders have managed to build a $9bn business in just 2 years that already has this honor.

This is their story.

Aravind Srinivas (middle) never imagined he’d become the CEO of a billion dollar business.

He grew up in Chennai, India and went to college at the Indian Institute of Technology, studying electrical engineering. But Aravind was always more interested in computer science.

While at college he entered a machine learning contest with no prior knowledge of the field…and somehow managed to win it. He decided to go deeper in the field, eventually pursuing a PhD in AI and deep learning at UC Berkeley which he finished in 2021.

During his PhD Aravind interned at OpenAI, Deepmind and Google. Talk about a stacked resumé. But his time interning at these tech giants, particularly OpenAI, made him realise he still had a lot to learn. He spent nights and weekends improving his programming skills and learning more and more about AI and deep learning.

During his studies in 2020 Aravind was working on a problem in reinforcement learning and he published a paper in the area. To his surprise though just two days later Denis Yarats published a similar paper with very similar results. It turns out that great minds really do think alike.

They pair struck up a friendship and spent the next two years studying one particular area of AI…large language models.

In early 2022 they began looking at different applications for LLMs and decided that combining LLMs with robust search capabilities was the most interesting application of the technology. They thought they could take on the mighty Google in search.

They joined forces with Johnny Ho (left), and Andy Konwinski (sick on picture day maybe?) to start their company.

They founded Perplexity.

The team raised raised $3.1m in September 2022 and launched their product in December 2022. When the product launched it was a revelation, combining LLMs and search algorithms to create a conversational search engine to answer queries. And as a daily user of the product let me say this…it works like magic.

Through word of mouth usage exploded, going from 2,000 to 3,000 queries per day to 3 to 4 million queries per day in just one year. That’s 1000X growth for anyone counting.

The growth was so explosive that the team needed funds to keep up, so in January 2024 Perplexity raised a $73.6 million Series B which valued the company at $520 million. The company had around 15 million monthly users at this time.

But from there the company’s valuation exploded. By mid-2024 the valuation reached $3 billion and as of November 2024 the company was set to raise $500 million in a new funding round which would value the business at $9bn. That’s gotta be some kind of record right?

And amazingly they’ve managed to achieve all of this with a pretty small team. Perplexity only employs around 40 - 50 people. It turns out that’s all you need to mount a challenge against Google in search. What a time to be alive.

The company has become so successful that now many startups are calling themselves “Perplexity for X”, one of the highest honors in Silicon Valley. And boy have they earned it.

But what can we actually take away from Aravind’s story? Well a lot of his success came from being humbled by working alongside great people. That pushed him to do better, to be better.

There’s a saying that if you’re the smartest person in a room, then you’re probably in the wrong room. So wherever you are try to find the smartest people around and get in a room with them.

It will push you to have better ideas, be a better founder and even be a better person.

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