BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Loom for Pitch Decks 📈  

Check your deck before you wreck yourself

Available Domain: Deckchek.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Creating a pitch deck is a rite of passage for every founder. Even though we all know they’re mostly smoke and mirrors…

But still, having a killer pitch deck can make or break your raise. But there’s a problem…getting pitch deck feedback from the right people can be pretty challenging. Founders need a way to get honest, structured pitch feedback, in a fast and async way, similar to Loom. It’s time for a platform that does exactly that. Here’s how.

Market Size: There are around 500k early-stage startups actively pitching annually

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform where founders upload their pitch decks and get asynchronous, recorded video feedback from expert reviewers

How it Works:

• The founder uploads their pitch deck (PDF or Google Slides) to the platform

• They choose reviewers (VCs, ex-founders, advisors etc.) to review their pitch decks, paying the price set by the reviewer

• The reviewer receives the request and records an async video (Loom-style) giving the founder slide-by-slide feedback on their deck

• They can then upload a new version of the deck and repeat

Go-to-market: Start by building a free, AI-powered pitch deck feedback tool, this is your lead magnet and you can then upsell the service

Business Model: You take a % cut from reviewers for each paid session

Startup Costs: You could build this pretty cheaply, for just a few hundred or thousand dollars

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Sell to a business in this space like Pitch.com

Exit Multiple: You could sell for 8–12× ARR with strong network effects

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Bark Beats

• Tired of your dog barking incessantly at mailmen, squirrels, or just about anything? Looking to turn it into something easier on the ears?

• Introducing BarkBeats™, the world’s first smart collar that turns every bark, yap, and howl into a certified banger. Whether you want smooth jazz or deafening dubstep (God only knows why) you can choose what your dog’s bark becomes.

• BarkBeats™: Less dog worms, more earworms.

Vote

• ✅ Shut up and take my money

• ❌ It’s a no from me dawg

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Wellness Lighting

• In today’s world, it seems like almost everything around us is quietly chipping away at our health. And yes, even lighting makes the list…

• The problem is that conventional indoor LED lights flicker rapidly, leading to eye strain and headaches, and also emit blue light, negatively affecting sleep.

• That’s why so-called “wellness lighting” (flicker-free and circadian-friendly lighting) is gaining traction, with companies like Sunlight Inside cashing in on this trend. But why let them have all the fun?

Business Ideas

• Home Lighting Health Audit: A service that evaluates and optimizes your home lighting for better sleep, focus, and wellness

• B2B Wellness Lighting Consulting: Help offices, coworking spaces, clinics, or schools transition to lighting that improves focus, reduces eye strain, and enhances well-being.

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THE MONEYSHOT

How a Pub Conversation Birthed a $250m Business

Pubs are not usually a setting where great decisions are made.

But a conversation in a pub was the beginning of this duo’s journey to building a $250m business.

This is their story.

Jon Reynolds (left) and Ben Medlock have always been ambitious.

Jon, a former civil servant at the British Foreign Office, and Ben, a computer science PhD specializing in natural language processing, met at Cambridge (so fancy) through a mutual friend and immediately hit it off. And one fateful day in 2008 they decided to go to the pub and had a conversation that changed their lives.

Back then, the iPhone had only been out for a year, and Android was still in its infancy. And Jon had a major gripe with these mobile operating systems. Typing.

Touchscreen typing was clunky and error-prone, something that frustrated Jon immensely. But Ben, with his background in NLP and AI, thought that machine learning could be used to make a digital keyboard that not only corrected errors, but predicted what you'd type next based on your personal language patterns.

So, with no external funding, the duo decided to try and solve this problem. They began prototyping the keyboard in Ben’s parents’ house, working long hours to refine the core prediction engine. Eventually they were ready to go.

They launched SwiftKey.

The business got off to a slow start, but in 2010 SwiftKey received a major boost when it was accepted into the first cohort of the UK-based startup accelerator Seedcamp. This brought initial funding, mentorship, and exposure to a broader investor community.

Later that year, SwiftKey raised $2.4 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures, Octopus Ventures, and angel investors. They used the funding to hire top talent and further develop the engine behind the keyboard.

SwiftKey launched their keyboard on Android in 2010 which immediately stood out because it didn’t just correct spelling, it could predict full words and learn context over time. By 2011, it was one of the top paid apps on the Google Play Store.

The company expanded into other platforms, including iOS when Apple allowed third-party keyboards in 2014 and soon it was one of the most used apps in the world. And all of this success didn’t go unnoticed.

By early 2016, the app had over 300 million users worldwide, growing from a niche product to a core utility for millions of Android and iOS users. The platform and team they built was incredible, which is why in 2016, Microsoft acquired SwiftKey for around $250 million.

After the acquisition, SwiftKey tech was integrated into Microsoft’s products, including the Word Flow keyboard, and later into the broader Microsoft AI ecosystem. And Jon and Ben rode off into the sunset with millions of dollars to their name. Legends.

All of which goes to show that sometimes solving seemingly tiny problems, like making typing better, can lead to gigantic outcomes.

The key is to find the right problem to solve.

1 - 1 FOUNDER FEEDBACK

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