BUSINESS IDEA | VENTURE STARTUP

AngelList for Boring Businesses 🏢 

Yield of little faith

Available Domain: Yeeldstreet.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: For the last two decades, capital has flooded into venture-backed startups chasing exponential growth, massive markets, and elusive unicorn outcomes. But in the process, we’ve ignored an asset class hiding in plain sight. And no, it’s not crypto…

Main Street businesses, like laundromats, HVAC companies, auto shops and cleaning services have quietly continued to generate consistent, unglamorous profits. But there’s a problem: these businesses are hard to discover, hard to invest in, and hard to access for most individual investors. It’s time to help investors move their dollars from Wall Street to Main Street. Here’s how.

Market Size: 30m+ small businesses in the US alone

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform that allows accredited investors (or even non-accredited via SPVs) to discover, evaluate, and invest in boring businesses

How it Works:

• A syndicate lead (lead investor) finds a boring, cash-flowing businesses (like laundromats or HVAC companies) and lists them on YeeldStreet.

• Investors go to the platform and review the deal, commit capital, and join the syndicate (they could invest $10k - $100k in the deal)

• YeeldStreet sets up an SPV to pool investor funds and acquires equity in the business (10% - 20%), with the remainder of the business purchased using debt (SBA loan)

• Investors then earn passive income from profits which are paid out quarterly while the syndicate lead manages the business/deal and earns carry for his/her work

Go-to-market: Your best bet here would be to partner with an influencer in this space like Codie Sanchez or Nick Huber to get the word out there

Business Model: The platform earns from SPV setup fees and carry on the syndicate lead’s profits (the platform takes 1–2% of their carry)

Startup Costs: There’s a lot of complexity in this business so you’ll need time, expertise and cash to get this off the ground

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Acquisition by a fintech platform or a private equity house

Exit Multiple: Typical fintech/marketplace exits are around 7x–15x revenue

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Edible Cutlery

• Sick of having to do the dishes every meal? What if instead of wash your cutlery you could just…eat it too?

• Introducing ChompWare™ – the only cutlery that doubles as a post-meal treat. Why wash or throw away your utensils when you can simply eat them? It gives a whole new meaning to the term “dessert spoon”

• Edible plates and cups coming soon

Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Fruit-flavored Beer

• Wine in France. Beer in Germany. Guinness in Ireland. It’s fair to say that Europeans like their liquor. And a new beer trend is sweeping the continent in the form of fruit-flavored beers.

• Fruit-led beers have become Britain’s fastest growing beer trend, with sales volumes growing by 250% in the last year especially among younger drinkers, casual beer enthusiasts, and people who prefer lighter, more approachable flavors.

• And just like pizza, democracy and football (aka soccer) this could well make its way from Europe over to the United States in the near future.

Business Ideas

• Home Brew Kits: Sell home brew kits that let people infuse traditional beer with fruit flavors or brew fruity beer from scratch.

• Misshapen Fruit Beer Brand: Create a craft beer brand that proudly uses misshapen, “ugly,” or surplus fruits in flavoring the product

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THE MONEYSHOT

The Newsletter that Became a $75m Business

A laptop. An idea. A friend (optional). You don’t need much to be wildly successful these days.

Take these founders who turned their simple newsletter into a $75m media empire (which literally just got acquired).

This is their story.

Danielle Weisberg (left) and Carly Zakin are kindred spirits.

They met while studying abroad in Rome, became close friends, both pursued careers in journalism and ended up working at NBC News together. Which is where they noticed something…

While at NBC, they noticed that many of their peers, particularly millennial women, weren’t consuming traditional news. The duo realized that there was a massive gap in the market to create a digestible, relatable, and time-efficient way to consume news. Their medium of choice? The humble newsletter.

So in 2012, they both quit their jobs at NBC News to start their newsletter, with no technical background, no business plan, and just $4,000 in savings between them. To quote Iron Man…”not a great plan.” But still, they went for it.

They started writing on their apartment couch and sent out the first version of their newsletter, a daily email that broke down complex news stories in a whimsical, funny tone, to a small circle of friends.

This was the first edition of theSkimm.

The name, which came from the idea of “skimming” the news, was catchy and the content was fire, which caused the newsletter to grow quickly through word-of-mouth.

Then, in September 2012, the pair managed to raise $60k in seed funding to get them through their first year of operations. By 2013 they reached the sacred 100k subscriber milestone and that year they raised $1.1 million to scale the business.

Their core growth tactic was ingenious. They leveraged ambassador-style marketing, creating a network of loyal readers who helped spread the word on campuses, workplaces, and online called “Skimm’bassadors”. And their strategy worked.

By 2016 theSkimm was growing steadily and that year they raised $8m to keep growing. Just two years later they raised $12m at an estimated $75 million post-money and reached over 7m subscribers across their newsletters.

Having gained millions of subscribers (goals) they expanded into new products and shows including a calendar product (Skimm Ahead), a book recommendations product (Skimm Reads) and a daily news podcast (Skimm This). They became a darling of the media space, so much so that other media businesses started viewing them as an acquisition target. Which brings us to today…

On March 20th theSkimm was acquired by Ziff Davis for an undisclosed amount, which I always hate to hear. Like c’mon…just tell us how much it was sold for. But you can bet it was a pretty good outcome for all involved.

All of which goes to prove that you don’t need a big team, fancy tech, or millions of dollars to get started. All you need is an idea, a laptop and to believe that you can create something great.

Pull it all together and it could be the start of your multi-million dollar success story.

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