BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Public Domain Monitoring Platform ©️  

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Available Domain: Rightsvault.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: With Christmas almost upon us I’m sure you’ve listened to your fair share of Christmas music. And the interesting thing about Christmas songs is that the classics never seem to go away…

It seems like there hasn’t been a new Christmas song released in about a decade, but a lot of this comes down to intellectual property. Older Christmas songs are in the public domain, meaning they can be covered and played by anybody, anywhere. Having books, music, movies etc. come into the public domain is a big deal. Remember at the start of 2024 when the “Steamboat Willie” version of Mickey Mouse lost its copyright protection? But here’s the problem…staying on top of what works are in the public domain is incredibly difficult. There’s different rules in different countries and for different media types. So let’s make this process much easier.

Market Size: Conservative estimate of $500m-$1bn global addressable market, considering organizations that actively manage or utilize public domain content.

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform that maintains a database of copyrighted works with their protection status and tracks when works enter the public domain

How it Works:

• A user, company or institution signs up and gives details on where they are based (different jurisdictions have different copyright laws) and what type of content they’re interested in

• The platform automatically calculates when works enter public domain based on their creation date, the author’s death date, the publication date and/or any other relevant data

• The platform provides alerts as to when certain items will leave the public domain as well as offering API access for integration with content management systems

• Potential customers of this could be book publishers looking to identify republishing opportunities, film studios managing their film archives, museums tracking artwork rights, universities digitizing historical manuscripts…the list goes on.

Go-to-market: Start by focusing on one vertical and one customer, like helping book publishers to monitor book copyrights so they can identify republishing opportunities

Business Model: Tiered subscription model with basic ($19/month), professional ($199/month) and enterprise (custom pricing) plans

Startup Costs: You’ll need some expertise in the space and a little cash to get this off the ground

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Acquisition by a large media company like Comcast or a publisher if you focus on a specific niche, like Harper Collins if you stay in the book niche

Exit Multiple: You could sell here for 5x - 8x revenue

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Driverless Car Tips

As car makers and tech giants battle it out to create level 5 driverless cars something no-one’s thinking about is the robots themselves. What about getting them fairly compensated for all the driving they’re doing?

Well with this new product we’ve added tipping to driverless cars so you can tip once you arrive at your destination. Clearly these companies like Waymo need the extra funds.

It’s no different from doing anything else in America…you gotta leave a tip.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: NYT Games

We all know that legacy media outlets are struggling out there as the media landscape has completely changed in recent years. But there’s one area where the legacy media, specifically the New York Times, is dominating. Puzzles and games. In 2023 the New York Times' puzzle and games were played more than 8 billion times, helping to drive an increase in subscription revenue. These puzzles are getting more and more popular, so why not help other businesses emulate the New York Times’ success?

Business Ideas

• Media Games as a Service: Create different games which media brands can embed into their own websites, apps etc.

• Media Games Studio: Create a games studio that specializes in developing and testing new game formats for media companies

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THE MONEYSHOT

How Two Brothers Turned $500 into a +$100m Business

Some brothers spend their lives fighting. Others spend their lives building.

Like these brothers who turned $500 and an idea into a +$100m business.

This is their story.

Justin Mares (right) loves being busy.

He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in finance in 2012. While in college he founded an online platform for creating 3D printed products called CloudFab which he sold in early 2012. He also founded a roommate matching business in college too. He clearly likes being busy.

Around 2014, while living in San Francisco, Justin was deeply involved in the CrossFit community and at the time his CrossFit friends were all talking about the same thing. Bone broth. At the same time, his younger brother Nick was also seeking ways to recover from his sports injury and bone broth was recommended to him.

So Justin went out to a few stores to try and find a high-quality, shelf-stable bone broth. But he found nothing. There was a gaping hole in the market.

So Justin, 25 at the time, recruited his 19 year-old brother Nick and they decided to create a bone broth product. But since they had no experience in this space they decided to validate their idea first.

So they took $500, mocked up a landing page on Unbounce, paid someone $10 on Fiverr to create a logo. They bought some Facebook and Bing ads to push traffic to the website and waited to see what happened. The result? They pre-sold around $2k worth of products in a month, most of which were refunded since the product didn’t even exist yet. The demand was clear for the product so they decided to pull the trigger and start the business.

They founded Kettle and Fire.

Their next job was to find a manufacturer. They reached out to 500 different manufacturing partners to find one but in the end they found their supplier from a pretty unlikely source…Mark Cuban.

Nick cold emailed Mark asking if he could help him and his brother to find a manufacturer for their product. So Mark introduced Nick to a friend of his and he found them a manufacturing partner who could make their product. Jackpot.

With a manufacturer found the next thing they needed was money. The manufacturer would only do $30k minimum production runs and Justin wanted to do 4 runs, so he ploughed his entire life savings (made from selling CloudFab) into the first production runs. It was an all-or-nothing move. But thankfully for Justin it paid off.

In year 1 they did $2.8m in sales and after 6 months in business a buyer at Wholefoods saw an influencer talking about the product and the product launched in Wholefoods soon after.

From there, to keep up with demand, they raised $8m for the business from Cavu Venture Partners in a deal that valued the business around $60m at the time.

Today the business is worth “9 figures” according to Justin, meaning it’s worth at least $100m and while revenue figures aren’t available the business is likely doing at least $40m in revenue per year. But the business could be much larger.

And true to Justin’s nature he’s working on a ton of different businesses right now, including Kettle and Fire, Truemed Payments, Surely Wines all while being a venture partner at Long Journey. Busy guy.

All of which goes to show that you can just do things. Justin has started tonnes of different businesses in different fields, all because he just gave it a shot.

So don’t overthink it. If you want to do something, whether it’s in business or elsewhere, you can just try doing things.

What have you got to lose?

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