BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Crowdfunding for Kids’ Business Ideas 👦 

Thinking big, starting small

Available Domain: Kidstarter.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Lemonade stands. Paper routes. Bake sales. Many people get bitten by the entrepreneurial bug early in their lives. And some kids take their early ventures very seriously.

But kids these days are wildly talented. They’re building apps, creating service businesses and coming up with other cool ways to make money. So why not create a platform for them to get some early support from parents, friends and family to start their venture? Maybe they need raw materials for a clothing brand they want to create? Or to buy a lawnmower to start their local lawn care business. It could be anything. Here’s what we’re thinking.

Market Size: The crowdfunding market was valued at $17.2 billion in 2023. This would be an offshoot of that market.

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A specialized crowdfunding platform designed specifically for young entrepreneurs (ages 8-16) to get their businesses funded

How it Works:

• A parent or guardian of the child signs up to the platform and gives details of the business they’re starting

• A page is created which gives details of the business being started, how much money the kid needs, what the funds would be used for etc. This page can then be shared with friends and family who can donate through the site

• Once the funding threshold is passed the funds are released to the parent’s bank account and can be spent on whatever’s required for the business. The young entrepreneur can then share updates on their page on progress they’ve made.

Go-to-market: Start by working with schools to create programs to encourage entrepreneurship and have students use the platform for their projects

Business Model: Platform fee of 5% of successfully funded projects

Startup Costs: You could spin up a website for a few hundred dollars here, crowdfunding sites aren’t particularly complex from an engineering perspective to build

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: You could sell to a crowdfunding platform (shocker) like Kickstarter who could use the platform for PR and create content from the platform

Exit Multiple: You may not get a huge multiple here, since an exit is less predicated on revenue, more on the brand value it would drive for a potential acquirer. Hence we’d estimate a 3x - 6x revenue multiple here.

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

Smart Doormat

Ring famously reinvented the doorbell by turning it into a smart device and sold for over a billion dollars to Amazon. But they missed something. Something that was right under their noses (or more specifically their feet) the whole time. Doormats.

That’s right with this Smart Doormat ,which connects to your smart doorbell, you can see who’s at the door and personalize your welcome message to them. No censoring of course.

Out with the platitudes, like Home Sweet Home, and in with the insults.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Red Light Therapy

Red light therapy (RLT) has been around for a while, but increased interest in biohacking and longevity protocols means it’s surged in popularity in recent months. Red light therapy exposes the body to low wavelength red and near-infrared light and is purported to reduce inflammation, improve skin conditions like acne, help wounds heal faster and increase collagen production in the body. Bryan Johnson is a big fan, so there’s clearly something to it right? Not to be confused with “red light, green light therapy” of course which is something very different…

Business Ideas

• Mobile Red Light Therapy Service: Bring portable red light devices to clients' homes or offices

• Red Light Therapy Device Financing: Offer financing to clinics to buy red light therapy devices for treatments and they pay back the loan over the lifetime of the machine

THE MONEYSHOT

Failing 20 Times Before Becoming a Billionaire

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." It’s a saying we’ve all heard before, but very few of us really live up to.

But this founder, who launched and abandoned more than 20 businesses before building a +$1bn business, embodies this very idea.

This is his story.

Apoorva Mehta’s mama didn’t raise no quitter.

He was born in India in 1986 but moved to Ontario, Canada at age 14 with his parents. Apoorva went on to study electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo. After graduating he worked for both Blackberry and Qualcomm briefly until he joined Amazon in 2008 working as a supply chain engineer.

But by 2010 Apoorva decided to leave Amazon and moved to San Francisco with ambitions to become a successful entrepreneur. But it was far from the fairytale he envisioned.

Apoorva spent the next 2 years trying out different startup ideas. In fact he launched and abandoned more than 20 different startup ideas, including an advertising network for social gaming companies, a social network specifically for lawyers and an app for reviewing individual menu items. But nothing worked.

It was a gruelling two years for him, but he refused to give up. He had to keep trying. Then finally in 2012 the eureka moment came when Apoorva found himself staring at his refrigerator in his tiny San Francisco apartment which was completely barren, apart form a single bottle of hot sauce.

Apoorva realized that while people could shop for almost everything online, groceries remained an offline category. He wondered if he could build an online delivery service for groceries. 21st times the charm right?

He locked in and spent three weeks coding the first version of his grocery delivery app. To test the app, he placed the first order himself, went to the store, picked up the groceries, and delivered them to himself. He even left himself a tip (and hopefully a good review).

He had just founded Instacart.

The next turning point for the business came later that year when Apoorva decided to apply for Y Combinator. Except there was a problem…he missed the deadline. But again Apoorva didn’t give up. He used the Instacart app to deliver a six-pack of beer to Garry Tan, securing him a meeting and eventually admission to the summer 2012 batch. Turns out beer + bribery is a winning combo.

During YC he managed to raise $2.3 million in funding and even met Max Mullen and Brandon Leonardo who joined Instacart as co-founders.

Instacart started as a basic service in the San Francisco area, relying on word-of-mouth marketing to acquire users. They raised a Series A in 2013 of $9m and used the funds to hire a team of personal shoppers to fulfill orders and expand to other major U.S. cities, including New York and Los Angeles.

From there Instacart grew like crazy. Between 2014 and 2021 the company exhausted almost the entire alphabet in funding rounds, going as far as their Series I which they raised in 2021. Over that period the company raised approximately $2.9bn from just about every investor in the Valley. You gotta spend money to make money I guess.

Finally in 2023 Instacart went public, posting revenues of $3bn that year, and as of today the business is worth around $11bn. This is down considerably from its peak valuation of $39bn in 2021. But hey, what scaleup hasn’t been marked down since then?

Apoorva meanwhile stepped down as Instacart’s CEO in 2021 and was replaced by Fidji Simo. Today he’s building a medical consulting venture called Cloud Health Systems that raised $30m at a $200m valuation in 2022. And who would bet against Apoorva turning this into a billion dollar business just like Instacart? We certainly wouldn’t.

All of which goes to show that entrepreneurship is really a war of attrition. The most successful founders are the ones who keep trying until they eventually win. Sure some founders hit a home run on their first try, but for others like Apoorva it takes 20 attempts.

So whatever you do, if being a founder is your dream, don’t give up on it.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

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