BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

House-sharing Management App 🏠️  

The share necessities

Available Domain: Padpal.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: With the housing market as awful as it is right now, many people increasingly find themselves in house-sharing situations. And between high rent prices, questionable housemates, and tricky landlords it’s not always the best experience…

Current solutions for housemates to communicate on house matters often involve a messy combination of WhatsApp groups, spreadsheets and bank transfers. And God forbid someone new moves in and needs to learn how everything in the house works. And where we see fragmented tools like WhatsApp and spreadsheets, there’s often a business opportunity. This is one of those times.

Market Size: In the US alone there are around 32 million people living with roommates

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A comprehensive mobile and web platform that streamlines the house-sharing experience

How it Works:

• A user signs up to the app, creates an account and adds the different housemates to the app as well as their landlord (if they agree to sign up)

• They can then use the app to manage all aspects of living together. Features include the ability to manage their deposits (which sit in escrow), store key documents (like lease agreements), split bills, communicate with each other and log maintenance requests with their landlord

• If housemates move in or leave the house they are added or removed from the app as needed, with all key information about the house logged for when someone new who moves in (any rules, when bills are due, dates for bin collection etc.)

Go-to-market: Find some house shares and get them to use the app

Business Model: Monthly fee (split across the tenants)

Startup Costs: You’ll need a few thousand dollars here to build the app, but apart from that costs should be pretty low

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Most likely acquirers would be mid-sized PropTech or FinTech companies looking to expand their service offerings

Exit Multiple: Expected multiple here would be 6-8x revenue

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

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• ✅ Yes this actually exists

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JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: AI Literacy

• Everyone’s heard of ChatGPT by now. Let me ask you this though. Without looking it up (or asking ChatGPT…) do you know what GPT stands for?

• If not then you may be one of the many people out there looking to become more literate in the AI field.

• AI is the biggest technology shift of our lifetime and none of us can afford not to understand the field, which we think presents business opportunities

Business Ideas

• Gamified AI Learning Platform: Make AI education fun through quizzes, simulations, and rewards.

• AI Literacy Certification Program: Provide recognized certificates in AI literacy for professionals looking to learn about AI (+ add a certificate to their LinkedIn)

THE MONEYSHOT

Turning $25k into $25bn

Starting a company, if done right, provides better returns than any other investment on the planet.

Take these guys who took $25k and turned it into a $25bn business, something only possible through entrepreneurship.

This is their story.

Jason Robins (middle), Matthew Kalish (right), and Paul Liberman (left) are impatient guys.

The trio met while working at Vistaprint where they worked across the marketing and analytics teams. They were all pretty successful in their careers, slowly but surely climbing the corporate ladder. But there was a problem. They just weren’t moving fast enough.

So in between games of poker and playing softball together the trio discussed different business ideas. Some were interesting, others were not. But pretty soon Paul fixated on an idea in a niche they were all passionate about…sports.

Paul wanted to build a fantasy sports product that didn’t require a long-term time-investment. At the time, fantasy sports was based on a full season of professional sports. That meant players had to draft a team and keep up on roster moves for many months.

The others agreed that this was their best idea so they pooled together $25,000 to start their business, hiring a lawyer to incorporate their business in Massachusetts in 2012.

They pulled together a business plan and used it to secure $1.4 million to build their first mobile app. Incredibly, they went from prototype to app in less than three months and by April 2012 they were ready to go live.

They founded DraftKings.

Draftkings was one of the first daily fantasy sports products on the market back in 2012, but it was by no means the first. In fact in their own backyard in Massachusetts, another company called StarStreet was already building a similar fantasy sports product.

The first DraftKings contest was a one-on-one matchup slated for Major League Baseball’s opening day in 2012. The initial launch was a major success, so much so that in 2013 Major League Baseball invested an undisclosed amount in the company. In fact in 2013, the company’s first full year of trading, they awarded $50 million in prizes.

By 2014, DraftKings had grown to become the second-largest daily fantasy sports provider in the market, reporting 50,000 active users on the site daily and more than one million users had registered accounts.

It further cemented its status as one of the market leaders when it acquired the third-largest company, Starstreet, in August 2014 and raised $41 million in investment funds from several prominent venture capital firms at the same time.

The company went from strength-to-strength and in 2015 they announced funding and deals with ESPN and Fox Sports worth $550 million. But in 2016, the business was turned on its head.

That year the attorneys general of New York, Illinois, Texas, Nevada and many more opined that all fantasy sports contests constituted violations of their states’ sports betting laws. The company started pulling out of different states and the whole industry was rocked. In fact DraftKings tried to merge with FanDuel, their greatest rival in 2017 but the deal was blocked by the FTC due to the monopoly that would have been created. The company was on the ropes, but surviving, which is when everything changed again in 2018.

In May of that year the US Supreme Court lifted the Federal ban on sports betting, allowing individual states to decide whether it would be legal or not. Anticipating a new market, DraftKings studied the industry in Europe, and when New Jersey opened as the first new legal state in August 2018, the company pivoted to mobile sports betting. DraftKings Sportsbook was born.

They leaned on their existing brand to make the move and this turned out to be the right one, with the company never looking back after the pivot. In fact in April 2020 DraftKings went public at a market capitalization of $3.3 billion and today is worth around $25bn dollars. Not a bad return on a $25k investment.

All of which goes to show that in business, patience is not a virtue. These founders left their corporate jobs to pursue entrepreneurship because they couldn’t wait years and years to climb the corporate ladder.

Can you? Or should you start your own business too? I think you know the answer…

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