BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Notion for Lead Magnets 🧲  

Lead on me (when you’re not strong)

Available Domain: Optinn.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Lead magnets are everywhere. You know the free eBook, report, template or resource you get for giving a company your email address? Because everyone out there wants your email address…

But for marketing teams and indie founders making lead magnets is no joke. It’s a frustrating mix of tools, formats, and friction where you write the content in Word or Google Docs, design it in Canva (maybe), build a landing page, add an email form then hope it all works. It’s a mess. No-one’s built a modern, clean, content-native platform built specifically for creating, gating, and delivering lead magnets. But someone should. Here’s how.

Market Size: The global digital marketing tools market reached $88bn in 2024 and is growing rapidly

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A Notion-style platform purpose-built for creating and sharing high-converting lead magnets (checklists, templates, guides, etc.) with built-in email capture and analytics

How it Works:

• A user creates a lead magnet using a Notion-style editor with drag-and-drop blocks and built-in templates based on high converting lead magnets

• The content is then automatically gated with an email capture form to collect leads before giving access

• The user can choose from a collection of different landing page templates or design their own landing page on the platform themselves

• Once someone signs up, the lead magnet is automatically delivered via email or direct access.

• The user tracks performance through a simple dashboard showing views, submissions, and conversion rates.

Go-to-market: Launch to a creator niche first (Twitter creators, newsletter writers etc.) then widen your aperture to marketing teams and beyond

Business Model: Subscription model

Startup Costs: This is a complex build, so you’ll need a cracked engineer alongside you to make it work

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Get acquired by a landing page/funnel software builder like Unbounce or Leadpages

Exit Multiple: You could probably exit for 5x - 8x ARR here

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Hot Dog Soda

• You’ve had cola. You’ve had root beer. You’ve even pretended to enjoy kombucha. But are you ready for this?

• Introducing Hot Dog Sparkling Water, the first hot dog-flavored sparkling water brand on the market.

• This incredible product combines the artificially smoky essence of mystery meat with crystal clear spring water to create a sensational product. Critics and food bloggers are calling it the “Würst” drink on the market today, so you know it’s great!

Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Peptides

• The whole world seems to be talking about peptides right now. Which begs the question…wtf is a peptide?

• Think of peptides as mini-proteins that play a wide range of roles in the body, from cell signalling and hormone regulation to healing and muscle growth.

• Semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy), a peptide-based drug, opened the floodgates and brought peptides into the mainstream and now startups are flooding into the market to create the next big healthtech company by riding the peptide wave

Business Ideas

• Telehealth Peptide Platform: A full-stack virtual clinic where users consult with doctors, get blood panels, and access peptides legally via compounding pharmacies.

• Peptide Stack Recommendation Engine: An AI-driven quiz or platform that recommends peptide stacks based on goals (e.g., fat loss, energy, libido, gut health).

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THE MONEYSHOT

From $0 to a $30m Exit in 4 Months

Sometimes ideas are ahead of their time.

Take these founders who sold their business for $30m, but it could have been worth 100x more.

This is their story.

Back in June 2012 three friends Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll were brainstorming ways to make mobile video creation easier, as we all do with our friends right?

They realised that while people were getting more comfortable recording videos on smartphones, editing and sharing them was still clunky. Which is when they had an idea. What if they removed editing altogether?

The idea was simple. Instead of recording a full video and then trimming it, you’d hold your thumb down to record, and lift to stop, stitching the clips together instantly.

They experimented with different video lengths and found that 6 seconds was the sweet spot for making these videos. It was just long enough to tell a joke or make a point, but short enough to make it accessible for more creators. They also believed that this constraint would boost creativity, similar to Twitter’s belief that a 140 character limit would do the same.

Idea in hand the team set to work building their prototype.

This was the founding of Vine.

While building their prototype they started speaking to different people in New York’s tech community.

With its slick interface and novel “tap-and-hold to record” feature Vine caused a bit of a stir amongst investors and other tech companies. Which is when Twitter heard about Vine.

At the time, Twitter was mostly text and photos (via acquired startup Twitpic). They saw Vine as a perfect native video play…and a potential Instagram killer.

Twitter wanted Vine. So much so that just four months after founding, before even launching publicly, Twitter acquired Vine for around $30 million. The founders thought Twitter would help Vine scale massively and for a while, it worked.

Vine officially launched in January 2013, and quickly exploded, launching the careers of King Bach, Lele Pons, Logan Paul and countless others with questionable levels of talent.

But under Twitter’s stewardship, Vine slowly died. The product became stale, creators found it difficult to monetize and competition from Instagram videos, Snapchat stories and Musical.ly (which became TikTok) pushed Vine into obscurity.

By 2017, Vine was dead. There were some efforts to revive it, even by Dom himself, but the window had closed. Vine had lost.

Because in business timing is everything. Launching a product too early or too late is the same as being wrong, meaning Vine only reached a fraction of its true potential.

But how do you know if it’s too early or too late? You don’t. All you can do is launch and find out.

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