BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Personal Essays ✍️ 

Write of passage

Available Domain: Ivylink.ai

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Getting into a top college is almost impossible these days. That is unless you know the one cheat code to get in wherever you want…

In fact even huge business success won’t guarantee you get accepted. Take the tale of Zach Yadegari. 4.0 GPA. 34 ACT. Built a $30m ARR business (Cal.ai) by age 18. But he got rejected by every Ivy League school he applied to. Why? Well according to the comments on his viral Twitter post it’s because of his personal statement. The consensus is that if he had a different personal statement he could have gotten into his dream school. So let’s build a platform to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Market Size: Over 1.3 million students apply for colleges each year in the USA

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An AI platform for students to get highly specific feedback on their college application personal statements

How it Works:

• Students upload their essay and choose which colleges they’re applying to (e.g., Stanford, NYU, Oxford).

• The platform then forks their personal statement into different versions (one for each school) and provides line-by-line feedback, tone suggestions, and rewrite prompts depending on the schools in question e.g., “builder” tone for MIT, “global impact” for Yale.

• Students also have the option to hire a human (remember those?) to review their essay too if they want additional feedback

Go-to-market: Create TikTok vids around the concept and push users to a lead magnet rating their chance of getting into college

Business Model: Monthly subscription fee

Startup Costs: Pay-per-school tuning: $10–$20 per essay per school

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Get acquired by an EdTech giant like Chegg or Study.com

Exit Multiple: SaaS with high-margin recurring revenue and strong user engagement would sell for 8–12x EBITDA or 5–7x Revenue

TOGETHER WITH SURFSHARK

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Nearly half of employed individuals fell victim to cyberattacks in 2024. That’s not just a stat, it’s a warning.

Hackers, trackers, and who-knows-who else can see where you browse, shop, and scroll. Your DMs? Not as private as you’d hope. Personal info, location, even your chats with Grams about what dish to bring to Thanksgiving? All up for grabs.

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Shopping Cart Drones

• Tired of carrying your groceries like some sort of medieval peasant? Ever wish your shopping basket could hover ominously above you like a loyal robot servant?

• Introducing Basket Buddy™, the world’s first shopping basket drone.

• Say goodbye to sore arms and awkwardly navigating crowded aisles as Basket Buddy™ floats gracefully beside you, holding your oat milk and organic kale without mentioning your frozen pizza choices

• Version with guns (to really speed up your weekly shop) coming soon…

Vote

• ✅ Shut up and take my money

• ❌ It’s a no from me dawg

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Neuromorphic Computing

• You’re going to hear a lot more about neuromorphic chips in the future.

• Also known as brain-inspired chips, they’re designed to emulate the way the human brain processes information, using artificial neurons and synapses to perform computations.

• Unlike traditional computers that process data in clock-driven sequences, neuromorphic systems respond only when events (like spikes in neural activity) occur, enabling faster and lower-power computation

• Neuromorphic chips excel at tasks like pattern recognition, real-time decision-making, and sensor fusion making them well-suited for robotics, autonomous systems, and next-gen AI.

Business Ideas

• Benchmarking-as-a-Service for Edge AI Chips: Run a service that compares neuromorphic chips with traditional ones across common AI tasks (e.g. image classification, anomaly detection) for startups, labs, or OEMs choosing edge AI hardware.

• Neuromorphic App Store: A curated app store of pre-built AI models or plugins designed to run on neuromorphic chips inside wearables, robots

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THE MONEYSHOT

From $0 to a $150m Exit in 4 Years

If you can ride the right wave at the right time, you can make millions.

Take these founders who rode a wave to a $150m exit.

This is their story.

Back in the mid-2010s Michael Mignano (right) and Nir Zicherman were ahead of their time.

The pair met while working at Aviary where Michael was the VP of Product and Nir was the head of server engineering.

And after working closely together for 3 years and going through Adobe’s acquisition of Aviary in late 2014, the duo decided to start a business together. All they needed was an idea.

At the time they were both massively into audio content, mainly radio alongside this newly emerging format known as podcasting.

So they decided to build a mobile-first app that allowed users to record and publish audio clips (called “waves”) directly from their phones. The idea was to make creating audio as easy and social as tweeting or posting on Instagram. Part social network. Part podcasting platform.

They launched publicly in February 2016 with a strong emphasis on short-form audio content.

This was the founding of Anchor.

Over time the app gained popularity with a niche audience, but it never achieved widespread traction. The founders were at a crossroads, wondering if they should shut down the platform. Which is when they noticed something. Many users weren’t just using Anchor to chat. They were trying to create podcasts using it.

That insight triggered a pivot in 2017 and the team repositioned Anchor as a platform for full podcast creation: recording, editing, hosting, and distributing…all for free.

This made it drastically easier for anyone to become a podcaster without needing expensive equipment or software at a time when podcasting was starting to take off. The right idea at the right time.

They relaunched Anchor as an all-in-one podcasting tool and began gaining serious momentum. Their free hosting model disrupted the space and helped thousands of creators launch shows over a few months.

In 2018, they raised a $10 million Series A, led by GV (formerly Google Ventures), and others including Accel, Eniac, and The Chernin Group. This was around the time that a certain music streaming service was becoming interested in the podcasting space. They wanted in.

So in early 2019, Spotify acquired Anchor in a deal that was reportedly worth around $140m. That same day Spotify acquired Gimlet Media (a premium podcast content company) too. They were going all in on the space.

Spotify gradually folded Anchor into their platform and in 2023, Spotify rebranded Anchor simply as “Spotify for Podcasters”.

All of which goes to show that in business, just like in life, timing is everything. If you can get in early on a big wave you can ride it to success. Or to use another nautical metaphor…”a rising tide lifts all boats”.

So watch for movements you’re early to, then start building.

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