IDEA #1 | VENTURE STARTUP

StockX for Tickets 🎫

A big ticket item

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Sports games. Concerts. Festivals.

It seems like all of the best things in life are ticketed. But buying tickets for events has a lot of problems.

If you’re lucky enough to buy tickets for the big game or concert the second they go live, then you get hit with all kinds of fees from ticketing platforms.

If you can’t buy tickets directly from the source then that leads you to the dark market of ticket reselling, a market rife with fake tickets, information asymmetry and fans getting ripped off by scalpers looking to make a quick buck.

But there’s another industry that has to face these exact same issues. Sneakers

The sneaker industry has to deal with scalpers, fake shoes and people getting ripped off on a daily basis…at least they did until StockX came along.

So why not create StockX for tickets?

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a stock market like marketplace where buyers and sellers can buy and sell tickets.

Here’s how it works. Someone looking to sell their tickets signs up to the platform and lists their ticket for sale. They can either set the price at the amount they would sell it for, called the “ask” price, or they can just sell now at the current highest bid.

At the same time buyers of tickets on the platform can set their “bid” price, or the price they’re willing to pay for a ticket or just buy now at the current lowest ask price.

The market works in the exact same way as the stock market does, with natural price discovery and the market dictating prices based on supply and demand. Also, the details of the latest transaction being shown to ensure full transparency.

When a transaction goes through the seller then submits the tickets to the platform to verify their authenticity and once they’re verified to be authentic then the tickets are sent to the buyer. If the tickets are found to be fake then the transaction does not proceed, protecting the buyer and the seller gets banned.

This mechanism simultaneously solves the problem with fake tickets and sky high prices being charged.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Start by focusing on one particular niche of tickets, such as just concert tickets, then build form there

Monetisation: Charge a transaction fee on each successful transaction

Startup Costs: You may need to do a small raise here to get this off the ground but it shouldn’t be too expensive to get operational

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

The path here to an exit is to sell to a large ticketing platform, such as Stubhub or Ticketmaster. EV/Revenue multiples for marketplace are sitting around 5x - 7.5x currently, meaning you could have a huge exit on your hands here if you start generating big revenues.

IDEA #2 | CASH FLOW BUSINESS

Creator Product Store 🛍️

Cashing in on the creator economy

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

In recent years creators have started to build their own businesses to take advantage of their incredible reach. Why take a brand deal with some random company when you can start your own and sell those products to your audience, getting paid in the process while building a business you own equity in too.

Feastables. Prime. Chamberlain Coffee. More and more of these creator brands are popping up every few months with fans doing their best to get their hands on their favourite creator’s products and avoiding any cheap knock-offs.

Here’s the thing…many of fans of Youtubers are not just fans of particular creators, they’re fans of YouTube in general. When any of these big creators launch a big product it’s seen everywhere on YouTube and fans of YouTube want to try out these products.

So why not take capitalise on this fact and create an e-commerce store to cater to this audience.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create an e-commerce store which exclusively sells creator products.

Here’s how it works. The owner sources and buys creator products in bulk and then sells them on the store. This could include Feastables bars, Prime and so on. You would ideally stay away from clothing since there would be a huge number of different products you would need to list then.

Fundamentally, as a reseller, margins could be quite low but as time goes on you could open up relationships with the creators themselves and improve your margins by lowering your cost.

You then target their fans on social media with ads in order to acquire customers.

You could also do a popup store in real life and create content around it to drive traffic to the online store.

Easy!

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Start with a small number of products from some very large YouTubers and go from there.

Monetisation: Earn margin on everything sold on the site

Startup Costs: Need a little bit of funding to buy some inventory but not too much

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

This could be a great cash flow business, unlikely path to an exit here though.

NO BRAINER IDEA

Plant Watering App

We’re all murderers. Not of people (I hope) but of another life form. Plants.

We’ve all made the cardinal sin of forgetting to water our plants, costing the lines of millions of innocent houseplants every year.

Well not anymore. Because with this app, combined with a device embedded in the plant soil, your plants will call you out if you’re forgetting to water them, saving countless plant lives.

BIG DECK ENERGY

Carta’s $6.8m Series A Deck

Year: 2015

Stage: Series A

Amount: $6.8m

Carta is a global ownership management platform that helps companies, investors, and employees manage equity and ownership. The company is valued at $7.6bn but earlier this year had to manage a complete PR disaster. They were found to be using unethical tactics to build a secondary market for shares, a product they have since stopped pursuing. Back in 2015 the company (known as eShares, Inc but doing business as Carta) raised $6.8m. Here’s the deck they used to do it.

THE MONEYSHOT

How Product Hunt Became Product Hunted

For startup founders launching on Product Hunt is a rite of passage.

In fact, many founders skip over some pretty important steps in their entrepreneurial journey in lieu of launching on Product Hunt.

Since its founding in 2013 the site has been the go-to place to discover the newest products in tech. Until now.

In the last few months a new competitor has emerged and dethroned Product Hunt as the go-to website for finding cool new tools.

It’s called There’s an AI For That and it was launched in December 2022 by Andrei Nedelcu, an indie developer from Bucharest, Romania. The site got 100,000 visitors in its first week and today it gets more traffic than Product Hunt (black line in the chart).

Product Hunt does around $2.2m in revenue per year, has raised $7.5m and has 76 employees per LinkedIn. In comparison There’s an AI for That has raised no money and only has 10 employees, most of whom only joined very recently.

This points to a wider trend of leaner businesses coming along and creating new products which are similar to legacy ones for a fraction of the cost. They need less employees and less capital to get there, which could make things very difficult for incumbents with lots of employees and high cost bases.

The world is changing.