BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Former Founder Jobs Marketplace ❌  

MVP to SVP

Available Domain: Pivout.ai

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: The entrepreneurial journey is a rollercoaster. Every year, millions of founders worldwide start businesses with big dreams, but nearly 90% of startups end up failing. It’s war.

So for many founders, after rolling the entrepreneurial dice, many of them decide to return to regular employment. But while these former founders possess unparalleled skills like strategic thinking, problem-solving, leadership, and resilience, traditional job markets struggle to recognize their value. But the companies who do recognize their value reap the rewards. Take Ramp, the credit card startup which is valued at $7.65bn. They have 70 ex-founders on their payroll and many of the early employees were former founders, a huge reason for the company’s success. So why aren’t more businesses focussing on hiring former founders? We think they should. Here’s how.

Market Size: In the US alone, about 3 million startups are launched annually, with a significant number of founders seeking employment post-exit or failure.

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A job marketplace specifically designed for former founders who are looking to leverage their entrepreneurial skills in new roles

How it Works:

• The former founder creates a profile which showcases their experience focussing on their entrepreneurial endeavours.

• They are then matched to jobs like growth hacking, product management, fundraising, and strategic leadership in fast-growing companies. They can also elect to apply for board positions, advisory gigs, and fractional C-level roles.

• Users get access to tailored content on transitioning from founder to executive roles, leadership insights, and career coaching.

Go-to-market: Scrape LinkedIn for ex-founders who are yet to start in a new role, they’re your early adopters

Business Model: Employers pay for premium job listings and featured placements.

Startup Costs: You could spin this up for a few thousand dollars, but raising money could help speed up your go-to-market

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Get acquired by niche talent marketplaces like Hired, Bolster, or AngelList Talent to expand their talent pool.

Exit Multiple: Businesses in the job marketplace and recruitment space generally sell for 3x to 6x revenue

TOGETHER WITH OMNISEND

Ecommerce in 2025: Smarter, not harder

In 2024, Omnisend learned a lot from data. And just as 2025 hit our calendars, they were already crunching the numbers on 24 billion emails, 230 million SMS, and 413 million push notifications sent in 2024, to see what actually moved the needle.

Here’s a glimpse at what worked:

📈 Email campaign click-to-conversion rates jumped 27.6%

🛒 Automations (abandoned carts, welcome messages, browse abandonment) drove 87% of all automated orders

💰 One in three people who click an automated message buy something, compared to one in 18 for scheduled messages

The main takeaway is that e-commerce in 2024 was less about reinventing the wheel and more about making sure the wheel works. Really, really well.

Want to see the data for yourself? The full report breaks it all down.👇

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Pet Sodas

• Are you tired of your pets giving you judgmental looks every time you crack open a cold one? Ever catch your cat or dog eyeing your soda like it's the elixir of the gods?

• Introducing ThirstyDog™ and ThirstyCat™, the first-ever line of sodas made exclusively for pets!

• Indulge your pup with Crispy Beef Flavor or treat your cat to Tangy Fish Flavor. Because who wouldn’t want a fish-flavored drink?

• Side effects may include excessive licking and/or tail wagging

Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Digital Twins

• The world has seen its share of iconic twins. Venus and Serena Williams. Mary-Kate and Ashley. The list goes on. But there’s a new kind of twin making waves, but they’re not human.

• Digital twins are virtual replicas that mirror physical objects, systems, or processes in real-time. By harnessing data from sensors, they simulate and predict the behavior and performance of their real-world counterparts.

• Take a wind turbine, for example. Its digital twin receives data on wind speed, blade movement, and temperature from sensors on the turbine. This information allows the digital twin to simulate the turbine’s behavior in real-time, optimizing its performance and predicting maintenance needs.

• But digital twins can be applied to countless fields, leading to countless business opportunities we can explore

Business Ideas

• Digital Twin for Health: A twin which mirrors the user's health metrics from their fitness device and suggests personalized fitness and diet plans for them.

• Digital Twin for E-commerce: Simulates inventory levels and order fulfillment for e-commerce stores to optimize stock levels and reduce storage costs.

THE MONEYSHOT

How a College Project Became a $5bn Business

Getting rich is fun. But you know what’s even better? Getting rich with your best friend.

Which is exactly what these childhood friends did, turning a college paper into a $5bn business.

This is their story.

Aaron Levie (right) got a lot of things right in life, but he got one thing really, really right.

Back in 2005 Aaron was a student at the University of Southern California (USC) studying business and during one of his classes he was given an assignment to analyze an emerging industry. And boy did he pick the right industry.

Aaron wrote a paper on the online storage industry which was nascent at the time, so much so that Dropbox and AWS had yet to be invented. That’s how early Aaron was to the industry…

And while researching Aaron realized that there was no simple, user-friendly solution for individuals and businesses to store, access, and share files online. He identified a massive opportunity to create a cloud storage platform that could be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection.

So he decided to create a solution that would make it easier for businesses to store, access, and share files online, envisioning a cloud-based storage platform that anyone could use.

He decided to recruit his childhood friend Dylan Smith (left) to help him to build the business, who came on as CFO. They both dropped out of college to pursue the idea full-time that same year.

They founded Box.

To get the company off the ground, the pair maxed out credit cards and borrowed $20,000 from Smith’s savings. They also raised a small amount of seed capital from angel investors, including Mark Cuban, who invested $350,000 after receiving a cold email from Aaron. Sometimes shooting your shot pays off.

They raised $1.5m in 2006 to support their growth, however pretty quickly they realised they were running the wrong race. Initially, Box targeted individual users but in 2007 they pivoted to focus on enterprise customers after realizing the enterprise market was where they should focus their efforts.

From there Box grew rapidly by emphasizing enterprise-grade security and collaboration tools, which differentiated it from competitors like Dropbox, which was more consumer-focused. The business raised a huge amount of money to support its growth, raising money every year from 2008 to 2014 (Series B to Series G), which equated to c.$560m over this period.

In 2015 Box went Public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol BOX. The IPO raised $175 million, valuing the company at around $1.6 billion. Today the business is valued at $5bn. I wish one of my college assignments led to a $5bn business…

All of which goes to show that, while having a great idea is important, picking the right market is just as important. As JFK famously said: “a rising tide lifts all boats” and if you can identify a small industry with huge growth potential, by jumping in early you can ride the wave to success (wow that’s a lot of ocean-related metaphors).

These markets are out there, we just have to find them.

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