BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Duolingo for Poker ♣️  

Flush with knowledge

Available Domain: Cardcademy.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Leonardo DiCaprio. Ben Affleck. Matt Damon. These guys have a lot in common. They’re all Oscar winners. They’re all rich AF. But something you may not know is that they’re all avid poker players. And it’s pretty obvious why actors and actresses tend to be better at poker than the rest of us…

Personally I’ve wanted to learn to play poker for years. But throwing yourself into a real game with your friends is tough on your ego (and your wallet). And while there are plenty of online courses for learning poker we think someone could build something much better. Here’s how.

Market Size: The online poker market is valued at approximately $93.9 billion (as of 2023)

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A mobile app which accelerates and gamifies the process of learning poker

How it Works:

• A user signs up to the app and selects their level of poker experience

• The user is taken through bite-sized lessons on the rules of playing the game and is given opportunities to put their learnings into practice in mini simulated games against AI players

• After every few lessons users are matched against similarly skilled players for real life games where they can play for tokens which have a small real world value assigned to them (e.g. you can put any winnings towards reducing your subscription fee)

• The learning process is further gamified with streaks, daily puzzles, badges and other retention tools to keep users engaged and learning

Go-to-market: Start by partnering with poker streamers to sell to their audience and expand into more acquisition channels from there

Business Model: Freemium model with a free tier for basic lessons and limited daily exercises, then a premium tier where users get full access to all features

Startup Costs: You’ll need to work with a skilled app developer to build this out, so find yourself a technical co-founder and get building

Competitors: While there are plenty of online resources for learning poker (e.g. pokercoaching.com or Learn Poker) by focussing on beginners and gamification elements you could build a great business in this space

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Exit to a large poker site like Pokerstars or GGPoker

Exit Multiple: Based on other gaming company exits you could sell here for 5x - 8x revenue to the right strategic buyer

TOGETHER WITH OMNISEND

Boring Marketing that Delivers Big Results

The thrill of not knowing how something will turn out? That’s what gets your heart racing, right?

But you know where excitement has no place? Marketing.

With marketing, you want predictability. So predictable, it’s almost boring.

That’s why Omnisend is a marketer’s dream. In 2023, for every $1 spent on Omnisend’s email & SMS marketing, merchants made $73 back.

Yes, $73 for every $1.

It’s not flashy. It’s not a gamble. It just works. Every. Single. Time.

At Half Baked, we only recommend tools that actually deliver. That’s why we partnered with Omnisend—because they’re the real deal.

From popups to newsletters to abandoned cart recovery, 100,000+ e-commerce brands use Omnisend to grow their revenue while keeping costs low.

Use code HALFBAKED10 & get 10% off your first 3 months.

For new paid plans only, expires Dec. 31, 2024

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Protein Toothpaste

There’s a protein version of everything these days. Protein bars. Protein milk. Even protein cereal.

And now…introducing the latest protein infused product…Protein Toothpaste. With protein toothpaste you can maximize your gains while you minimize your cavities. And you better believe it comes with the 20% - 30% price markup all “protein“ products do.

How arm and hammer never thought of this is a mystery to us…

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Owala Water Bottle

While the Stanley water bottle (not to be confused with the Stanley Cup of course) has been the darling of the water bottle world for the last few years, there’s a new king in town. The Owala water bottle. Owala’s FreeSip bottle has became particularly popular due to its dual-drinking feature. It has both a built-in straw and a wide-mouth opening for regular sipping. Epic. But the main takeaway here is that the water bottle market is growing rapidly and while certain brands come in and out of fashion we believe you can build huge accessory businesses around these trending products.

Business Ideas

• Water Bottle Filters: Create a range of water bottle filters which attach to the major water bottle brands in the space

• Flavor Infuser Attachments: Create a range of flavor attachments (similar to Airup) which attach to the major water bottle brands in the space

TOGETHER WITH ROKU

Run CTV Ads on Roku This Q5

• “Q5” is a key post-holiday shopping period

• Reach shoppers where they’re streaming – on Roku

• You can run self-serve CTV ads for just $500

Discover CTV performance on Roku

THE MONEYSHOT

Turning a Free Product into an $875m Business

You might think that trying to compete with a free product we all use is a dumb idea. But that’s simply not true.

Take this founder who decided to do exactly that and built an $875m business out of it.

This is his story.

Rahul Vohra has always loved programming.

He was born in Birmingham in the UK and at age 8 he started coding. As a child he spent thousands of hours reading books on programming and coding games and apps in his spare time. In fact by the time he went to college, Rahul had already racked up more than 10,000 hours programming. Talk about a productive childhood.

Rahul studied computer science at the University of Cambridge, receiving his Bachelor's degree in 2005. He even started into his PhD but he dropped out in 2007. Why? Because he had an idea…

Rahul wanted to build a web application which enabled large organisations to crowdsource business ideas, which is exactly what he did. In 2007 he founded mo.jo. However mo.jo failed to gain the traction Rahul was hoping for, but he was undeterred. Instead he moved on to his next project which was much more successful…

In 2010 Rahul teamed up with his college friends Martin Kleppmann and Sam Stokes and together they founded Rapportive. Rapportive was an email add-on that displayed social media information about contacts inside users’ inboxes. It was a smash hit and in 2012 Rapportive was acquired by LinkedIn for $15 million. Imagine getting to announce that your company’s been acquired by LinkedIn on LinkedIn? But while this was a huge success for Rahul Rapportive was just a stepping stone for greater things to come…

While working on Rapportive, Rahul observed that the user experience for Gmail users was getting worse and worse. Users needed to add countless Chrome extensions to their browser to access features that weren’t natively available, making the experience slow and the interface messy. So Rahul decided to do something about it.

He started working on his own email platform. In 2014 he purchased his new company’s domain for a cool $175k and then started building. He planned the build meticulously, including a six-week phase dedicated to perfecting the landing page copy and creating wireframes using Balsamiq. He quietly raised some investment and by 2015 he was ready to launch his Gmail competitor.

He founded Superhuman.

Superhuman differentiated itself from other email clients in two ways. It was a cleaner, better product, but it also wasn’t free, costing users $30 per month. So how did Rahul expect to compete? Here’s how…

Firstly Superhuman was an exclusive product. He implemented an invite-onlysystem meaning you had to be selected to join the platform. And once you were selected the experience of using the product was incredibly personal.

Every new user received a personalised email from Rahul and even one-on-one training sessions on how to use the platform. And customer interviews were the norm with Rahul conducting over 700 user interviews to gather feedback and insights on the product. He knew that in order to put a dent into Gmail the product had to be perfect. Which is why he came up with a pretty unique KPI.

Rahul set the bar at having at least 40% of their users answering "very disappointed" if they could no longer use Superhuman. This maniacal focus on customer experience, coupled with neat growth tactics, meant soon there was buzz around Superhuman.

In 2016 the company raised $10m to support early growth and in 2019 the company raised a massive $33m Series B. As growth continued in 2021 Superhuman closed a monster $75 million Series C round which valued the business at $825m. And they’ve been generating strong revenues, with a reported $22.6 million revenue in 2022 and $36.5 million in 2023. Is the valuation a little high based on those revenue numbers (which may or may not be accurate). Sure. But that’s what 0% interest rates do to valuations.

As for the future of the business it’s pretty clear that Superhuman won’t ever surpass Gmail in usage, but who cares? Rahul has built a huge business by focussing on just power users. And there’s a lesson in there for all of us…

No matter how competitive or saturated a market is, there’s always room for the best. And customers will pay for the best.

Superhuman proves it.

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