IDEA #1 | VENTURE STARTUP

Fintech Platform for College Athletes 🏈

An athlete and their money are soon parted

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

They say that your college years are the best of your life.

It’s a time to explore your interests, experience true freedom and discover who you really are…which is code for seeing how far you can push your liver.

But the life of a college athlete is very different. College athletes are world class in their fields and they have to balance their studies with intense training programs.

And until recently college athletes couldn’t even earn any money for this. Just two years ago, the NCAA (the governing body of college sports) allowed athletes to earn an income beyond their scholarships through the NIL (name, image, and likeness) Policy. And where there’s a change in legislation business opportunities always emerge.

This means a lot of college athletes have all of a sudden come into a lot of money.

But as we know athletes are not known for being the best with their money, so why would we expect student athletes to be any better?

This is a big problem crying out for a solution.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a fintech platform designed for college athletes to help them to maximize their earnings and manage their finances responsibly.

Here’s how it works. Athletes sign up to the platform and link up their bank accounts to the software. Athletes can then see a breakdown of their monthly earnings and expenditure and get projections for how much they will have in savings in the future. Users can also set savings goals and have a set amount of money automatically sent to a savings account or an investment account to earn a return.

Athletes are also issued a card with a rewards program focussed on their interests, such as cash back on health products and air miles for travel.

The platform also helps athletes to earn more by giving them access to a brand deal marketplace where brands can send offers for brands deals to athletes, which they can then accept.

The platform could even expand into loans should an athlete need funds to buy a piece of equipment they need, with dynamic credit scoring based on their connected bank accounts.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Start with a very simple application for athletes in a single college (selling through colleges first should get you users quickly) and build from there

Monetisation: Athletes pay a subscription fee + interchange on card transactions

Startup Costs: There is a lot of technical and legal complexity around building a financial services business, so you’d need some funding and a great team to get this going

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit to a big fintech player looking to work with this customer base. Fintech multiples aren’t the best right now but if multiples get anywhere close to where they were in 2021/2022 then you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.

IDEA #2 | STARTUP

Meal Prep Platform 🧑‍🍳

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Health is a new status symbol in society.

The rise of creators like Andrew Huberman, Peter Attia and Bryan Johnson reflects the collective shift in focus by many towards better health and longevity, with Johnson taking it a little too far in our opinion.

But for most people taking the necessary steps to get healthy is hard.

Between working full time jobs, kids, social lives and so on trying to stay healthy and build a great physique is extremely difficult. It also doesn’t help when celebrities share their workout and diet plans with us, acting as if they don’t have personal trainers, private chefs and millions of dollars on the line helping them to get in shape.

Most people simply don’t have the time to cook healthy meals 2 - 3x per day, so why not create a platform to help solve this problem?

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a meal prep platform where people can buy meals which have been prepared by people in their community.

Here’s how it works. Users sign up for the platform and input what foods they like, how many meals per week they’re looking for and any dietary restrictions they may have. They then search on the platform for different dishes being batch cooked by meal preppers near them.

Meal preppers, who could be anyone from Moms to college students, sign up for the platform and do large batch cooking on weekends. They list what they’re cooking and users can opt in to receiving a dish from them. Dishes are transported to a central hub where orders are combined and can be picked up by users or they can be delivered to the end user for a fee. Meal preppers get paid a cut for their work so it’s an easy way for them to earn money doing something that they (hopefully) love.

Users also have an option for a premium service where they can request specific dishes, say dishes from a specific health protocol, that they want to be made for them for a higher fee.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: start by proving the concept by batch cooking some dishes yourself and seeing if people will pay for them in your locality. Then go from there.

Monetisation: Take a transaction fee on transactions on the platform

Startup Costs: Getting this off the ground should be relatively inexpensive, but scaling will require a lot of capital

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit to a large food delivery business, think Deliveroo or JustEat. This would be a natural extension to their business.

UNHINGED BUSINESS IDEA

Vote Pay

We all have co-workers whose jobs remain a mystery to us. They could be incredibly important or doing absolutely nothing, it’s hard to tell.

Well Vote Pay fixes this by getting employees to vote on each other’s pay. This way important employees get rewarded while employees contributing nothing, get nothing.

What could possibly go wrong?

BIG DECK ENERGY

Rocket Internet’s $1.8bn IPO Deck

Year: 2014

Stage: IPO

Amount: $1.8bn

In Monday’s edition of Half Baked we detailed the incredible story of Rocket Internet and their rise to prominence in the late 2000s.

When Rocket Internet IPO'd in 2014, raising $1.8bn at an $8bn valuation, it was the largest tech company floatation in Europe for seven years. This is the deck outlining their master plan for the business.

THE MONEYSHOT

$1bn from Selling T-Shirts

T-shirts have been around for a very long time. They come in all shapes and sizes and suit almost everyone. Take this t-shirt for example. We know a lot of people who would look great in it.

But the plain t-shirt market isn’t one ripe for innovation, right?

Well that’s not what Ryan Bartlett thought. Back in 2019 he thought that no brand was doing a great job at making simple, affordable, high quality t-shirts. So he decided to do just that and with just $3,000 he started True Classic.

The key insight was incredibly simple. Designing t-shirts that were tight in the arms and the chest but looser around the stomach. This key insight coupled with some incredible marketing has led to incredible success for the business.

But how successful is the brand? Well by the end of their first year, they'd sold $15 million of apparel; their second year revenue jumped to $90m and in 2023, True Classic brought in $250m of revenue.

Today they’re looking for a buyer for the business at a $1bn valuation.

Not bad for selling plain old t-shirts.