BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Global Trend Tracker 🌏️ 

Trend it like Beckham

Available Domain: Foundforeign.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: What do Red Bull, bubble tea and sriracha sauce all have in common? It’s not that two of them are delicious and one tastes horrible. I’ll let you guess which one…

It’s that all of these products started out in a foreign market before someone brought them back to the US or Europe and built huge businesses from them. This is an incredibly savvy way to start a business, so much so that we have a name for it - “geo-arbitrage”. But how do you get access to these opportunities without travelling around the world? We know exactly how.

Market Size: The global market research industry was valued at c.$80bn in 2024

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform which tracks popular products and technologies in foreign markets for aspiring founders

How it Works:

• A user signs up to the platform and subscribes

• The platform uses AI & web scraping to track emerging product and technology trends in Asia, South America, and other innovation hubs.

• It identifies high-growth products based on search volume, sales data, funding rounds, and cultural adoption trends.

• Subscribers can then access real-time reports, trend scores, and case studies of these different products and movements.

Go-to-market: Start by focussing on a single country, likely Japan or China, and compile data on that market to sell as a test. Expand from there.

Business Model: Subscription model for individual users and teams

Startup Costs: The tough part here will be building the web scraping/research engine of the business, which you’ll need a skilled developer to help with.

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Acquisition by a market intelligence firm like CB Insights etc.

Exit Multiple: Market research firms typically exit for 5-8x ARR multiples

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Fork’n’Fan

• Tired of waiting precious minutes for your food to cool? Do you dream of a world where molten-hot soup doesn’t scorch your mouth as badly as Kendrick burned Drake at the Super Bowl?

• Meet The Fork’n’Fan™ – the world’s first fork with an in-built cooling system. With the high-powered (but definitely not overpowered) fan embedded in the handle, you can cool your food in the blink of an eye.

• Say goodbye to frantic plate-blowing, awkward food fanning, and those embarrassing ahh-haahhh noises as you try to enjoy your lasagna that feels like it emerged from the fires of Mount Doom.

• Spoon’n’Fan™ coming soon.

Vote

• ✅ You were cooking coming up with this

• ❌ It’s a no from me dawg

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Wellness Shots

• If you hear the word “shots,” your mind might jump to late nights, bad decisions and hungover mornings. Or, depending on where you are in life, you might think of health, vitality, and wellness.

• That’s because shots aren’t just for the bar anymore. Wellness shots, the small but powerful drinks packed with nutrients designed to boost your health in just a few ounces, have become a staple in the fitness space.

• These potent elixirs are crafted with ingredients like ginger, turmeric, lemon, apple cider vinegar, wheatgrass, honey, and cayenne pepper, each chosen for its unique health benefits.

• And while drinking these shots is great for your health, building a business in this space could be great for your wallet.

Business Ideas

• Customizable Wellness Shot Packs: Customers receive monthly deliveries of customized, pre-mixed wellness shots with specific ingredients for them.

• Powdered Wellness Shots: Develop powder or liquid concentrate versions of wellness shots for easy travel.

THE MONEYSHOT

How a 2 a.m. House Party Led to a €5bn Business

There’s an old adage that says “nothing good happens after 2 a.m.” (and by old adage I mean it came from an episode of How I Met Your Mother).

Well for these founders that’s just not true, because a chance meeting at a house party at 2 a.m. inspired them to start a €5bn.

This is their story.

Back in 2008 Milda Mitkute was a typical college student.

The Lithuanian was in her early twenties and had just moved to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to complete her master's degree. But she had a problem. Milda was moving into a new, small apartment meaning she had to get rid of most of her 100-piece wardrobe which wouldn’t fit in her new home. But rather than dumping her clothes she wondered if she create a platform online to help her sell her clothes?

A few days later Milda went to a house party where by chance she met Justas Janauskas, who was a developer. It was 2 a.m. and pair started talking about Milda’s idea. One thing led to another and…Justas agreed to build a website for them (not how that sentence usually ends). He said he’d come back in two weeks with a prototype. But Justas lied, because it only took him ten days.

With the website ready they needed to get the word out there about their new platform. So they reached out to Milda’s friends who had studied journalism and through their contacts pretty soon people were talking about the website across Lithuanian newspapers and even radio stations.

They initially named the website Manodrabuziai.lt (catchy) and pretty soon it started to catch on. In fact it caught on so much that they launched a sister site in Germany in 2009 called Kleiderkreisel (another catchy name).

By 2010 though, hoping to create a recognisable brand, Milda and Justas decided to rename the business.

They renamed it to Vinted.

For the first three years of the business, Vinted served as a side project for the duo. Milda was completing her master's in culture management and working at a PR agency, and Justas was an IT engineer. Their only costs were web hosting, which they covered by selling ads on the site.

But in 2011 the pair met Mantas Mikuckas, who convinced them to go all-in and turn Vinted into a household name. He joined the cause and soon they started expanding into new markets. They launched their mobile app and growth started to really accelerate.

In 2013 Accel Partners, the guys who invested in Facebook and Spotify, flew the Vinted team out to San Francisco and put €5 million into the business. They secured another €24.8 million the following year from the same backers.

They were crushing it, until 2015 when the team made a huge error. They started charging users to sell clothes on the platform, which led to a huge decline in user engagement and financial instability in the business. They sought the counsel of Dutch entrepreneur Thomas Plantenga in 2016 who managed to turn things around and by 2017 Vinted reached 10 million members.

From there the platform went nuclear, raising €128 million in 2019, €250 million in 2021 and €340 million in 2024, with the latest round valuing the business at €5bn.

Today Vinted operates in 21 countries and has more than 65 million registered users. Annual revenue is more than €600m per year, and the business is even profitable, making €18m in profits in 2023.

And as far as they’re concerned…they’re only getting started.

All of which proves that business partnerships can be forged in the most unlikely places. A café. At work. Even at a house party it turns out.

This is why you need to put yourself out there, meet new people and discuss big ideas whenever you can. Because who knows, you may be just one random conversation away from starting your founder journey too.

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