BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Group Buying for Solo Travellers 🌏️  

Prices so low…

Available Domain: Solowcrew.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Solo travel is surging. From digital nomads and remote workers to women traveling independently for the first time, more people than ever are choosing to travel alone. Funds permitting of course.

But while travelling solo is amazing, it’s super expensive. Most travel deals are built for groups, couples, or families with solo adventurers getting left out. Which got us thinking, what if solo travellers could unlock group-level discounts without needing to actually travel as a group? Here’s what we have in mind.

Market Size: The global travel and tourism market is $2+ trillion, where solo travellers make up 18-25% of total travel bookings, meaning your TAM is $360bn to $500bn here

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform that lets solo travellers unlock group discounts on hotels, tours, and experiences by joining deal pools with other solo adventurers.

How it Works:

• A user goes to the site and can browse curated travel deals (hotels, tours, experiences) designed specifically for solo travellers.

• They can then join a deal pool where, once enough solo travellers opt in, the group unlocks a discounted rate.

• Users then only pay if a minimum number of people join the deal pool (similar to Kickstarter) and there is no charge until the group minimum is hit.

• Users also have an option to connect with fellow travellers in their pool before or during the trip, or to keep it totally solo.

Go-to-market: Initially focus on Millennial and Gen Z solo travellers, limit to 3 cities, then expand

Business Model: Commission on bookings and affiliate deals.

Startup Costs: You could start this relatively cheaply with just a few thousand dollars

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Get acquired by a major travel business like Booking.com, Expedia etc.

Exit Multiple: For travel tech platforms with traction, exit multiples range from 3x to 7x revenue

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Welcome Mat Weighing Scale

• Tired of feeling good about yourself for even one second? Looking to keep yourself accountable to your weight goals?

• Introducing the ScaleMat™, the first smart doormat that doubles as a weighing scale. It doesn’t just collect dirt it collects data, logging your weight every time you step on it when you come home.

• This amazing product also tracks your visitors' weights. Great for parties! Not great for relationships though…

Vote

• ✅ Shut up and take my money

• ❌ It’s a no from me dawg

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Air Purifying Plants

• With increasing awareness around indoor air quality, many of us are turning to houseplants to act as cheap but effective air filters in our homes.

• The snake plant (Dracaena trifasciata) and the spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum) are two of the best detoxifiers…just about the only time you’re happy to have snakes and spiders in your home.

• Air quality is something we’re all going to be talking about a lot more in the coming years, just you wait.

Business Ideas

• Smart Air-Purifying Plant Pots: Develop a line of plant pots with built-in sensors that monitor air quality, humidity, and plant health and syncs to an app

• Bioengineered Purifying Plants: Collaborate with biotech startups (like Neoplants) to create or distribute genetically enhanced houseplants that purify air more efficiently (total moonshot)

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THE MONEYSHOT

How a Startup Inspired by Jackie Chan Got Acquired Five Times

What do pirates, Jackie Chan and a tech startup have in common?

No this isn’t the opening line to a bad joke. It’s the story of these founders started a multi-million dollar business which went on to get acquired five times.

This is their story.

Senh Duong (right) has a truly remarkable story.

Senh, who is ethnically Chinese, was born in Vietnam. And during his youth he lived through The Fall of Saigon, during which non-Vietnamese nationals were driven out of the country by the communist party.

So Senh and his family fled on a ship to escape persecution, only to encounter trouble on the high seas when their ship was hijacked by pirates. Actual pirates. Luckily their valuables were well hidden so the pirates never found them. Clearly these weren’t Jack Sparrow level pirates. Finally Senh and his family reached Hong Kong but they eventually settled in rural Sacramento by the early 1980s, which is where Senh grew up.

And in his youth Senh discovered he had two major passions in life…building software and watching movies. He especially loved action movies, like those of Jet Li and Jackie Chan. However Senh had a problem…

He hated not knowing how a movie was received by critics, especially martial arts movies, which often got overlooked by mainstream reviewers. So he decided to build a site that would aggregate reviews of movies and calculate the percentage of critics who gave it a positive score.

He timed the launch of his site to coincide with the release of Jackie Chan’s Rush Hour, an all-time classic (if you know, you know), and on August 12, 1998 his site was ready to go live.

He launched Rotten Tomatoes.

At first, Rotten Tomatoes (named after the old cliché of audiences throwing rotten tomatoes at bad performances) was just a hobby project. Senh was working full-time at a design firm and built Rotten Tomatoes in his spare time. But pretty quickly film geeks and media outlets started linking to his site. The reviews came pouring in. He was onto something.

Seeing the growing popularity of the site, Senh brought on Patrick Lee (left) and Stephen Wang (middle), two of his colleagues from UC Berkeley and Design Reactor, to help build the business.

In early 1999 the trio decided to leave their jobs and go full-time on Rotten Tomatoes, raising a small round of angel funding (around $1m) to support them.

They then began hiring a team to manually curate reviews and maintain the site. Bit-by-bit Rotten Tomatoes became a beloved tool for both film nerds and regular moviegoers. Until it all very nearly came crashing down.

When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000-2001 internet companies were failing left, right and center. This was a tech extinction event and in order to survive Rotten Tomatoes kept the team lean, just about making it through. And it’s a good thing it did, because shortly after they were an acquisition target.

By 2004 Rotten Tomatoes had etched itself in movie culture which is why IGN acquired the business for a low seven-figure amount that year. But this would not be the last time the business changed owners.

In 2005 News Corp bought IGN, assuming control of Rotten Tomatoes. Then in 2010 Flixster acquired Rotten Tomatoes in a deal estimated at $10–15 million. Just a year later though Warner Bros acquired Flixster + Rotten Tomatoes and finally in 2016 Fandango (NBCUniversal) acquired a majority stake in Rotten Tomatoes in a deal estimated in the $25–40 million. The company’s been passed around more than a…well you can fill in the blank yourself.

But ultimately Rotten Tomatoes still endures today, 27 years after it was founded, a testament to it’s place not only in movie culture…but in history itself.

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