BUSINESS IDEA | CASH FLOW BUSINESS

Customer Interviews-as-a-Service 🗣️  

Talk data to me

Available Domain: Userverse.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Founders are scared of lots of things. Someone stealing their idea. A 9 - 5 job. AI killing their idea. But something far too many founders are scared of is the one thing they need to do more than anything else. Talking to customers.

In truth, founders are often afraid to talk to their customers. And when they do, since they have such a vested interest in their responses, they can often misinterpret or ignore the feedback. So why not create a service to take the pain out of this experience? Here’s what we’re thinking.

Market Size: With approximately 305,000 new startups launched annually in the US and scale-ups who could benefit from the service the TAM here is in the low billions.

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A service which provides startup founders with interviewers who conduct structured customer discovery interviews on their behalf.

How it Works:

• A solo founder or business signs up to the platform. They give details about their business and what they want to achieve from their interviews

• The service then reaches out to current, past and prospective customers to conduct interviews. Proper protocols (such as those in the Mom Test) are adhered to and unbiased feedback is gathered from both happy and unhappy customers

• This is all distilled into a research report which is then presented back to the solo founder or business

Go-to-market: Start by working with startup accelerators on behalf of their portfolio companies. Then start working with large businesses looking to learn about existing customers or about what new products to launch.

Business Model: Charge a fee for a report ($1k - $5k per report).

Startup Costs: You could start this for $0.

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: This could be a great agency play with strong cash flow potential. It won’t be a venture-backed business.

TOGETHER WITH BEEHIIV

We Love Newsletter Businesses

Newsletters are an incredible way to build a tight-knit community of people just like you. Plus whether you’re sending a newsletter to 10 people or 1,000,000, the effort is the same, making them incredibly high-margin businesses.

And because our job is to spark ideas, we’ve got three killer newsletter concepts you could launch (seriously, they’re up for grabs—maybe it’s your time to shine?):

💡 Droids Daily - Morning Brew for robotics. A niche audience that’s ready to geek out and pay up. High-value, untapped potential.

😂 The Meme Times - All the day’s major headlines, told through memes. Broad appeal, viral-worthy, and a totally fresh twist on news.

🎙️ The Employee # Newsletter - Interviews with the OG unicorn employees. Packed with insider insights from the earliest employees of billion-dollar startups.

If you’re starting one of these (or your own brilliant idea), beehiiv is the platform to grow your newsletter from Day 1.

Start your free trial today and use this link for 20% OFF your first 3 months.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

RSStroom Reader

Reading the morning paper has been a daily ritual for many people for decades. But in our fast paced world who has time anymore to sit down and read the morning paper?

Well that’s why we’re creating the RSStroom Reader (we love a nerdy pun). It automatically prints the morning’s important headlines onto your toilet paper so you get up to speed on the business headlines while you do your morning business.

Easily a billion dollar idea…

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Advanced Prompt Engineering

Ever since ChatGPT was launched in 2022 a whole new field emerged…prompt engineering. And now two years into this AI revolution more and more people are figuring out different techniques to get the most out of LLMs. These techniques include zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, prompt chaining. Since it’s super early in this field there are huge businesses to be built in this space.

Business Ideas

• StackOverflow for Prompt Engineering: A platform where users can share, give and receive feedback and troubleshoot each others prompts in AI models (From edition #96)

• Prompt Engineering Bootcamp: Create a bootcamp similar to coding bootcamps which specializes in teaching prompt engineering

THE MONEYSHOT

The Founder who Sold Businesses to Microsoft and Amazon

For any founder getting their business acquired by a tech giant is something they could only dream of.

Well this founder managed to do it twice, selling businesses to both Microsoft and Amazon, before tragedy struck.

This is his story.

Tony Hsieh is the definition of a serial entrepreneur.

Tony was born to a Taiwanese American family in Urbana, Illinois. His family moved to Marin County, California when he was five and growing up in Silicon Valley no doubt shaped Tony’s love for technology.

In 1995, Tony graduated from Harvard University with a degree in computer science. After college Tony worked for Oracle but after just five months he quit. He had a business to start.

In 1996, Tony started developing the idea for an advertising network called LinkExchange with his college classmates Sanjay Madan and Ali Partovi. LinkExchange allowed members to advertise on other members' sites in exchange for placing LinkExchange banner advertisements on their own sites.

They launched in March 1996, with Tony as CEO, and found their first 30 clients by direct emailing webmasters. The site grew, and within 90 days LinkExchange had over 20,000 participating web pages and had its banner ads displayed over 10 million times. By 1998, the site had over 400,000 members and 5 million ads rotated daily. 

In November 1998, LinkExchange was sold to Microsoft for $265 million with Tony personally netting $40 million from the sale. Job done right? Wrong. Tony was only just getting started.

After LinkExchange sold to Microsoft, Tony co-founded Venture Frogs (named because of a bet) with his friend Alfred Lin, an incubator and investment firm. And through Venture Frogs Tony found his next big opportunity.

In 1999, Nick Swinmurn approached Tony and Alfred with the idea of selling shoes online. They were skeptical. In fact Tony almost deleted Nick’s voicemail. But the size of the market intrigued Tony. It was a $40bn market where 5% of sales were going through mail order catalogues. It was ripe for disruption so Tony decided to go for it.

To get the idea off the ground Nick had raised $150k from friends and family and Tony and Alfred put in $500k. Two months later Tony joined Nick’s company and became the new CEO.

The company initially launched under the name Shoesite.com, but soon rebranded to a name derived from the Spanish word "zapatos," meaning shoes.

They had founded Zappos.

Initially, Zappos operated through a dropshipping model where they didn’t hold their own inventory to keep costs down. This however led to poor customer experiences and challenges for the business. In fact Zappos ran out of money twice in its early years.

Later though the company’s strategy shifted to focussing on creating exceptional customer experiences. The company even offered customers free shipping and free returns, something unheard of at the time. They also switched from dropshipping to owning their own inventory. The strategy worked.

In 2001 Zappos generated $8.6 million in sales but sales soared to $184 million in 2004 after receiving a $35 million investment from Sequoia Capital. Zappos continued on its impressive growth trajectory, reaching $1 billion in sales by 2008. They were so successful that Amazon wanted in.

So on July 22, 2009, Amazon announced the acquisition of Zappos in a deal valued at approximately $1.2 billion. Tony is said to have made at least $214 million from the sale, not including any money made through Venture Frogs.

Now you might be hoping that Tony’s either out there building another business or is sipping martinis on a beach right now. But unfortunately neither is the case.

On the morning of November 18, 2020, Tony was injured in a house fire when he was visiting his family at Thanksgiving. He was rushed to hospital but died a week later from smoke inhalation. The medical examiner ruled his death was a tragic accident. He was just 46 at the time.

Tragically Tony’s life was cut short, but he managed to achieve more in his time on earth than many of us could in 100 lifetimes. So if your goal is to be a successful founder remember, you may have less time than you think. The best time to start your business was yesterday.

The next best time? Today.

1 - 1 FOUNDER FEEDBACK

We Need Your Help

We're on a mission to become the world's #1 entrepreneurship newsletter, but to do that we need your help. Got feedback, ideas, or thoughts on what you’d love to see next? This is your chance to help shape Half Baked. Darragh (our Head Baker) is opening up his calendar just for you. Click here to book a 15 minute call.