BUSINESS IDEA | VENTURE STARTUP

Crowdsourced Investment Research Platform 📈  

Scraping by

Available Domain: Crowdquant.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: The investment research landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift. While traditional Wall Street research dominates institutional investing, a new wave of sophisticated(ish) retail investors and anonymous analysts are producing high-quality research as good as traditional sources. Of course other retail investors take a different approach…

This valuable intelligence is scattered across various platforms, buried in forums, and mixed with low-quality content. This creates an opportunity to build a platform that surfaces, validates, and aggregates this "hidden alpha". Here’s what we have in mind.

Market Size: The investment research platform market was worth $3.2bn in 2024

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An investment research platform which surfaces equity research data from sources like forums, Reddit and other anonymous analysts

How it Works:

• A user (trading firm, investment bank, hedge fund etc.) signs up to the platform and selects what stocks or macro-indicators they want to get research on

• The platform scrapes sources like Wallstreetbets, forums and other data sources and surfaces any interesting equity research completed to the user

• Any relevant research is then shown to the user

• Over time you could recruit and pay these individuals for their inputs and onboard analysts in banks, hedge funds etc. to share their research anonymously

Go-to-market: Focus on smaller asset managers/hedge funds looking for an advantage in the market

Business Model: Enterprise licensing ($2000+ per month)

Startup Costs: Building the platform, potentially paying analysts and selling into financial institutions will all require time, expertise and cash, so be prepared to do a raise here to get this off the ground

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Acquisition by a financial data provider like Reuters or FactSet

Exit Multiple: A recurring revenue fintech with cash rich customers would get a great multiple in our opinions - likely over 10x revenue

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

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Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Weighted Comfort Products

• We’re all constantly battling to keep our weight down. Diet. Exercise. Ozempic…we’ll do whatever we can to shed the pounds. But there's an emerging trend where people are actually looking to add weight to themselves…weighted comfort products.

• Weighted comfort products have surged in popularity recently, from cozy blankets to more innovative wearables like weighted hoodies.

• Through deep pressure stimulation, these items offer therapeutic benefits like reducing anxiety symptoms, enhancing sleep quality, and creating a sense of calm.

• With more people experiencing anxiety than ever before, the weighted product market can only go up and to the right

Business Ideas

• Weighted Product Conversion Service: A service which converts a customer’s favorite blanket or hoodie into a weighted version for a fee

• Weighted Stuffed Animal Brand: Create weighted stuffed animals for kids (and potentially adults) for added comfort and stress relief

THE MONEYSHOT

The Side Project that Transformed into a $7bn Business

More often than not great businesses are built from people solving their own problems.

Take these two programmers who, by solving their own problem, built a $7bn business.

This is their story.

Dave Teare and Roustem Karimov are problem solvers at heart.

And back in 2005 these Canadian coders were running their own web development consultancy called AgileBits. But while running their agency they had a massive problem they needed to solve. Passwords. They had endless logins to different websites with different usernames and passwords, so many that they were impossible to manage.

So, as most engineers like to do, they embarked on a quest to solve their own problem. They gave themselves three months to build a tool that could streamline their internal password use and after a few weeks they had done it.

They started using the tool internally, not thinking much of it, but when they started showing the tool to friends in the field they realized they had created something promising. Seeing how useful it was, they decided to refine it and release it as a standalone product.

They built the initial version as Mac-specific application (a plug-in for the Safari web browser) and on May 19, 2006 they officially launched the first public version of their platform.

They had launched 1Password.

After launching 1Password quickly gained traction within the Apple community, so much so that Apple themselves highlighted 1Password as a recommended security tool for users, giving it significant exposure.

This early traction was enough to convince the founders to go all in on 1Password, which had transitioned from their side chick project to their main chick project.

Over time, the company expanded its offering to Windows, iOS, and Android and introduced features like cloud syncing, two-factor authentication, and much more to improve the platform.

Around 2014 businesses started showing interest in the platform, so the founders shifted their focus towards the B2B market. Oh and the team managed to pull all of this off without any outside investment.

That’s right, the company was 100% bootstrapped until 2019 when they raised $200 million in a Series A round led by Accel, helping the company to expand further into the enterprise market.

They raised another $100m in 2021 and then in 2022 raised another $620 million from investors including Iconiq Growth, Tiger Global and Ryan Reynolds (which is why he starred in an ad for the business). The business was valued at $6.8 billion at the time.

And since then the business has gone from strength-to-strength. In 2023 1Password passed the $250m annual recurring revenue mark with more than 100,000 businesses using the platform. Quite the trajectory for a simple side project.

All of which goes to prove that, as we’ve said many times before, great businesses emerge from personal problems. If you can solve your own problem, you can solve that same problem for others too.

So spend some time thinking about the problems you’re facing right now and how you could solve them. That could mark the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey.

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