BUSINESS IDEA | VENTURE STARTUP

Food Challenges App 🖥️

Munch Madness

Available Domain: Thesnackdown.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Food challenges are everywhere these days…on TikTok, in local diners, and especially in my kitchen late at night…

And as more and more people want to try their hand at food challenges it’s interesting that there’s no one place to discover, join, and share these deliciously daring feats. Which is why we think there’s an opportunity here to build an app which gives anyone the ability to start or participate in a food challenge. Here’s what we have in mind.

Market Size: The global food delivery & experience market was estimated at $150 billion in 2024

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An app that lets users discover, participate in, and share virtual food challenges

How it Works:

• User Discovery: Users sign up to the site and are met with a vertical video feed (nice) of users completing different food challenges (e.g. fastest time to eat a Happy Meal).

• Social Engagement: Users can then search for or join challenges where they enter and upload short form videos of them participating in the challenge, with likes, comments, and shares

• Challenge Participation: Users can also create their own challenges, setting the rules of the challenge.

• Leaderboard & Rewards: A dynamic leaderboard showcases top participants in each challenge, rewarding them with digital badges and prizes.

Go-to-market: Partner with creators who make short-form food content who can seamlessly integrate this into their content and shoutout the platform

Business Model: Get large brands to pay to get food challenges promoted on the platform

Startup Costs: You may need to do a small raise here to get the app built and pay some influencers to promote the product

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Exit to one of the big players in the FoodTech space like Yelp or DoorDash

Exit Multiple: Social app exit multiples typically range from 6x to 10x revenue, depending on user engagement and growth potential.

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Elondoms

• Need we say more? Clearly Elon Musk needs these more than anyone else…

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Skynight Calendars

• So it turns out one of the hottest products on the market right now is a calendar?

• In recent months the Skylight Calendar has become a breakout product. It’s a digital smart calendar designed to help families to stay organized by displaying events, reminders, and to-do lists on a sleek touchscreen display.

• But while the product is super popular it has problems, mainly the price (it costs $200 + a $40 per year subscription) and the fact that users can’t customize or modify the software on their screens. Which is why we think this market is still all to play for.

Business Ideas

• Family Organization and Coordination App: Create an app which mimics the functionality of the Skylight Calendar which can be used for iPads or other tablets

• Customizable Skylight Calendar Competitor: Create an open-source, fully customizable competitor to the Skylight Calendar

THE MONEYSHOT

How a Blog Turned into a +$100m Revenue Business

Let’s cut to the chase - this guy is one of the most interesting founders in the world.

He’s the Godfather of a world-famous movement, wrote multiple best selling books, expects to live to one hundred eighty years of age and built a +$100m revenue business. Strap in, this is a good one.

This is his story.

Dave Asprey is a fascinating individual.

In his youth in the 70s and 80s, Dave developed a fondness for entrepreneurship and in fact he claims to be the first person in history to sell products over the Internet, starting by selling a T-shirt that read "Caffeine is my drug of choice" through Usenet. And it turns out caffeine would be a theme throughout his career…

Dave studied Computer Information Systems at the University of California, Santa Barbara and later earned an MBA from Wharton School of Business. And you’re expecting Dave to have dropped out from college yes? No. In fact, for the next 20 years Dave pursued a pretty ordinary career.

He spent the next two decades working across various tech companies like Blue Coat Systems, Citrix Systems and Trend Micro. But as Dave built his career over the years, his health suffered hugely. He spent years struggling with obesity, brain fog, and chronic fatigue and at one stage weighed 300 pounds.

He decided to take radical action to take back control of his health. He started exploring everything from nootropics (smart drugs) to stem cells and neurofeedback. He invented, and in fact coined the term, biohacking, to describe all of the testing and optimizing he was doing for his health. But Dave’s big break did not come from some incredible biohacking discovery. It came from much humbler origins…a cup of tea on the side of a mountain.

In 2004 Dave travelled to Mount Kailash in Tibet, considered to be one of the most sacred places on earth. Why? Because he wanted to learn how to meditate from Buddhist pilgrims. One day while on his journey temperatures dipped to 10 degrees below 0 and Dave felt “really, really crappy.” So he stumbled into a one-bedroom mud hut in search of warmth, where a Tibetan woman gave him a drink known as po cha, a traditional tea mixed with yak butter. 5 minutes later he felt a warmth over his body and a newfound sense of mental clarity and energy.

Upon returning home Dave wanted to make his own version of this magical elixir, so he spent the next 7 years mixing and matching different types of butter with hundreds of varieties of tea and coffee in search of the perfect combination. Finally he landed on the three core ingredients that made the perfect product for him.

He shared the recipe on his blog in 2009, which gained significant traction.

Dave had founded Bulletproof Coffee.

In 2011 Dave decided to productize his concoction, creating kits where customers could buy these three ingredients and brew the drink themselves at home. The three core ingredients were grass-fed butter, high-quality mold-free coffee beans and MCT oil in case you want to brew it yourself too.

Soon the product took off and by 2014 Jimmy Fallon was talking about Bulletproof Coffee on his show. But rather than launching new products to expand the business Dave went a different route. In 2014 he authored the book "The Bulletproof Diet" which advocated for a high-fat, moderate-protein and low-carbohydrate approach to dieting (which of course Bulletproof Coffee was perfect for). The book became a New York Times bestseller, further promoting the brand. Dave didn’t build a brand, he had started a movement.

This laid the groundwork for a $9m Series A funding round led by Trinity Ventures which closed in July 2015. From there the brand went on to raise a further $70m in funding across different funding rounds from 2017 - 2020, closing over $100m in sales over the same period.

Dave also went on to pen five more books, started a world-famous podcast and has spent millions of dollars on his biohacking protocols which he believes will allow him to live to 180 years of age. He’s the original Bryan Johnson.

Ultimately this guy is one of the most interesting founders and human-beings I’ve ever read about. And there are about 50 different takeaways from Dave’s story, but I think the big one is this: pursue interestingness.

As Jeff Bezos wrote in his 2020 annual letter to Amazon shareholders, “the world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.”

Dave is a great example of what you can achieve by being atypical. So whatever you decide to do, whether it’s in business or in life in general, take the interesting path.

Because interesting paths taken by interesting people lead to incredible destinations.

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