BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

AI Menu Translator 🍽️ 

Fork yeah

Available Domain: Roamfork.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: One of the best parts of travelling is getting to try foreign cuisines. Although sometimes menus can leave you scratching your head rather than licking your lips…

A lot of the time local menu translations can be…poor. But even modern solutions like Google Translate misses the mark too, since you still have no idea what the dish will look like, the ingredients, any potential allergens, its nutrient profile…the list goes on. There has to be a better way. And we think this is it.

Market Size: $300bn+ in annual revenue across app categories like travel guides, restaurant discovery, translation, and utility tools

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An AI-powered scanner that translates and explains menu items in any language

How it Works:

• A user opens the app and scans any menu using their smartphone camera

• The AI translates the dish into your preferred language and offers a visual preview of the dish

• The AI also shares allergen details, dietary data and can even give a rough estimate of macros and other nutrient information

Go-to-market: Target frequent travelers, digital nomads, backpackers, and expats via Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok.

Business Model: Allow businesses pay to advertise dishes locally and you could also monetize the data here too

Startup Costs: By building on top of existing models you could get an MVP working for very little cost

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Get acquired by a large travel tech business like TripAdvisor

Exit Multiple: You could likely sell for 4x–8x ARR here

TOGETHER WITH OMNISEND

Gone Viral Yet? Us Neither…

Going viral sounds nice and exciting, but even if you succeed the fame is more like 15 seconds than 15 minutes.

So why not talk directly to the people who already like you and your brand (and we aren’t talking about your mom).

Email & SMS marketing is the GOAT when it comes to this.  As boring as it sounds, Omnisend can help you build an audience of people who like you and convert them into recurring sales.

1. Collect contact details of people who already like your brand.

2. Segment them.

3. Send them personalized offers.

4. Watch sales happen in front of your eyes.

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Pillow Fridge

• Is there anything more satisfying than flipping over your pillow in the middle of the night to reveal the cool side? Well what if every side could be the cool side?

• Introducing the Chillow™, the world’s first refrigerated pillow storage system. Simply store your pillows inside and grab a cool one whenever you need it, day or night.

• Gone are the days of flipping your pillow for the "cool side." With the Chillow™, every side is the cool side.

• Coming soon…

Vote

• ✅ Shut up and take my money

• ❌ It’s a no from me dawg

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Vibe Marketing

• Vibes are taking over. First there was vibe coding, now we have another term…vibe marketing.

• Vibe marketing is when a marketer is an orchestrator of AI workflows/agents freeing them up from "boring" manual tasks so they can focus on more creative stuff and prompting.

• For example a marketer will create a high level goal like "acquire 1,000 users" and the bulk of work is then done for them by AI

• I wonder what the next “vibe“ term will be. I’m betting on vibe sales, but let’s wait and see…

Business Ideas

• Cursor for Marketing: A collaborative AI workspace specifically designed for marketers

• Brand Voice OS: A central hub where AI learns and protects your brand voice across all marketing outputs

TOGETHER WITH TURBOTENANT

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THE MONEYSHOT

How a Blog Became a $4bn Empire

Simple ideas can have latent potential inside them waiting to be unleashed.

Take these two founders who took a simple blog and an email list but transformed them into a $4bn business.

This is their story.

Back in 2007 the startup world was still in its infancy. Facebook was only a few years old, Twitter was only getting started, and the iPhone was about to launch and change everything.

And at the time, venture capital was a black box for anyone who wanted to jump into the tech space. Complex, opaque, and inaccessible to most founders.

So Naval Ravikant (right) and Babak Nivi set out to change that. They launched Venture Hacks, a simple blog aimed at demystifying the startup landscape. The blog offered practical advice, broke down term sheets, and shed light on how investors really operate.

Over the next few years the blog gained traction among early-stage founders who were disillusioned by traditional VC gatekeeping, and as the blog grew in popularity Naval and Babak wondered what else they could offer these budding entrepreneurs. Their answer? By 2010 they realised they could directly connect startups with angel investors…which is exactly what they did.

They founded AngelList.

The first version of their product was incredibly simple. It was a simple email list of startups curated by Naval and Babak which was sent to a group of high-profile angels like Ron Conway and Mike Maples.

Despite the simplicity, they got some early success. In fact within the first month, 50 startups raised funding through AngelList.

In 2011 AngelList evolved into a web-based platform which allowed startups to create profiles and pitch directly to investors. But they didn’t stop there…

They then expanded to help startups to recruit and put job listings on the site, something that later morphed into AngelList’s Talent. Oh and in 2013, for good measure, they introduced AngelList Syndicates, which allowed individual investors to pool money and co-invest with lead angels. That year the company raised $24 million to accelerate the development of the business across all of these areas.

By 2015 AngelList’s Talent platform had exploded, becoming a go-to marketplace for startup hiring. In fact it became so successful over the years that by 2022 AngelList Talent officially spun off AngelList Talent, into a standalone company called Wellfound.

That same year AngelList raised a $100 million Series B led by Tiger and Accomplice at a $4 billion valuation. By this AngelList had transformed from a simple blog to the AWS for venture capital, encapsulating syndicates, rolling funds, SPVs and LP Management & Software Tools all in a single platform. Not a bad outcome for something that began as a blog…

The AngelList story goes to show that it’s impossible to understand the potential of an idea until you start. Naval and Babak would never have believed that their simple blog would evolve into a $4bn empire, yet it did.

The only way they could unlock this potential was by taking that first step and starting something.

Which is exactly what you need to do too.

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