IDEA #1 | VENTURE STARTUP

AI Language Learning 🌏

From languishing to language learning

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The second we decide to learn a new language we all envision ourselves travelling to that country and fluently conversing with the locals as if it were our first language.

Unfortunately, learning languages ain’t easy.

This is where language learning apps like Duolingo or Babbel come in to play. But here’s the thing, language learning apps just don’t cut it.

Duolingo even resorted to giving their bird mascot a butt lift during the Super Bowl in order to drive downloads…

Fundamentally, the best way to learn languages is to immerse yourself in the culture and language of that country. But we don’t all have 6 months to spare to move to France to learn the language.

So why not create an app which creates this immersion in our everyday communications through technology?

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a language learning platform which converts your everyday communications into a different language in order to learn it.

Here’s how it works. Say you’re speaking to your friend on WhatsApp. The app uses a bit of AI magic to automatically translate what they’re saying into the language you want to learn. Then you can reply to them in that language for practice. Your responses are translated back to the language of the person you’re speaking to as if you were conversing in the same language. This could be done in other written domains too, such as email, slack or any other medium where you’re speaking to people.

In fact, recent advances in AI means that this could be done for video calls too. People’s voices can be translated into different languages in real time, as this video shows.

This means that users on a Zoom call for example could get their friend’s speech translated into the language they want to learn which they could then speak back to the person, which is again translated into their native language seamlessly. The platform could also give feedback on someone’s language proficiency after each call too, rating their pronunciation and accuracy.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Start by building a single app for a single platform, say WhatsApp, then build out the ecosystem from there

Monetisation: monthly subscription fee

Startup Costs: The major cost here will be the dev costs, so you may need to do a small raise here to get this going

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

The goal here has to be to exit to a language learning platform, like Duolingo. If they’ve got Super Bowl commercial money, they’ve got acquisition money.

IDEA #2 | STARTUP

AI Work Prioritization 👔

To-do? Ta-da!

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

X, FKA Twitter, is an incredible source of idea inspiration.

It’s a window into people’s lives. Their problems, their experiences and their thoughts…no matter how questionable they may be.

The platform is a founder’s dream since people constantly post about problems they have and the products they want someone to build that they would buy.

Take Steph Smith.

Steph is an internet badass obsessed with uncovering the latest trends on the market, making her a great source of idea inspiration.

Like here:

Sure thing Steph!

Let’s figure out what this would look like.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea. Create an AI which goes through emails, slacks, teams chat etc. and prioritizes messages, updates and tasks in order of importance.

Here’s how it works. Users sign up to the platform and link their emails, slack, teams chat or any other work communication tool to the platform. The platform then ingests all of this data and uses AI to prioritise these messages and any actions into a tier list, like Steph outlined above (urgent, non-urgent and FYI).

Messages and updates are prioritised based on the content of the message and the sender and as time goes on the model will get better and better at recognising what messages are more important. Also any actionables arising from any comms are automatically listed for the user.

Users could provide feedback to help with this, where the classification and ranking of updates and tasks can be manually changed by the user, acting as input into the reinforcement learning model. This means that over time the model will learn which co-worker’s requests can simply be ignored.

This hybrid communication prioritisation/dynamic to-do list application would be a game changer for productivity in large organisations. Someone’s gotta build it.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: The goal here is to ultimately sell to large corporates, so to get there start by selling to small startups and go from there

Monetisation: Charge companies per seat for the software

Startup Costs: pretty minimal here, this is a software build so should be relatively inexpensive to create

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

The goal here is to exit to a large SaaS platform with enterprise customers where this tool could be bolted on to their existing offering. Take a company like Monday.com, they could upsell this to their existing customers and it’s a natural extension of their existing product range.

UNHINGED BUSINESS IDEA

Screen time App

We all spend too much time on our phones. We know this.

So why not help people manage their screen time by building an app which charges them 10c for every minute of screen time they have per day?

After a few days you’ll see your phone usage plummet, protecting your brain and your bank account! Genius…

BIG DECK ENERGY

Tinder’s Pre-seed Deck

Year: 2012

Stage: Pre-seed

Amount: Unknown

Dating apps have been coming under some pressure lately.

Gen Z are opting out of using them creating internal crises across dating app businesses. Take Bumble, who just laid off 30% of their workforce. But the granddaddy of all dating apps is Tinder.

But back in 2012 Tinder, which was known as Match Box back then, set out with a very simple deck to raise some money to get the idea off the ground. This is that exact deck which shows tinder before swiping and their plans to charge users per match.

THE MONEYSHOT

The $8bn Startup Cloning Factory

“Good artists copy, great artists steal”

This famous quote is widely attributed to the painter Pablo Picasso. Whether he actually said it is still debated, however three German brothers took this advice to heart and made millions from it.

Back in 1999 Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer decided to start copying Silicon Valley startups in the hopes of emulating their success. They started by founding Alando, a clone of eBay, which they sold to eBay for $38m just 100 days after launching. And when we say clone, we really mean a clone.

Then in 2005 they tried the same tactic again founding StudiVZ, a German version of Facebook. Two years later they sold the company to a German VC for $85m.

Clearly this strategy was working, so they decided to formalize this approach to business building by creating Rocket Internet, one of the most hated companies in the world.

Since then Rocket Internet has founded clones of Zappos (Zalando), BlueApron (HelloFresh), Airbnb (Wimdu) and many other companies, culminating to the company’s IPO in 2014 at an $8bn valuation.

While the company has been through some turbulent times of late, including a delisting from the stock market in 2020, this is an incredible story of how sometimes…the bad guys do win.