IDEA #1 | STARTUP

Audio Mentions Platform 💬

Ears burning

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Social media has been a God send for brands.

They’re able to interact with their customers, jump on trends and engage with celebrities who mentioned their brand which is amazing. Until it isn’t…

Ultimately brands want to know when they’re being mentioned online, which is simple on text-based platforms like Twitter or Instagram with tagging, but much harder to do for video or audio platforms.

So let’s solve this problem.

2. Solution ✅

The idea: create a platform which notifies a brand if they get mentioned in a video or podcast so they can engage with the creator.

How it works: brands sign up to the platform and can select a few keywords, such as their company’s name, founder’s name, slogan etc. that if mentioned in a video or podcast the company gets a notification.

The platform works by transcribing audio from content all across the web and indexing it. Then if the brand name or any other keyword is mentioned they get notified, with mentions prioritized algorithmically. For example negative mentions would be prioritized so they can be addressed by the brand.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: start by working with brands who have had negative mentions of late, since they’re more likely to care about this data and managing comms around it

Monetisation: subscription fee

Startup Costs: should be pretty minimal here given, software product

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit to a social analyticscompany, like Brandwatch

IDEA #2 | VENTURE STARTUP

Black Box for Bikes 🚲

Bringing black boxes to biking

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Cyclists get a bad rap.

In the US around 51m people cycle. Most of them abide by the rules of the road but some really don’t.

Despite this though a a lot of cyclists get injured on the roads each and every day.

This invariably leads to finger pointing, calls to insurance companies and a lot of unpleasantness.

So let’s try to solve this problem.

2. Solution ✅

The idea: create a black box for cyclists which they install on their bikes in case of a crash.

How it works: the black box is mounted on the front of the bike, similar in size to a GoPro. It contains a 360 camera which means that all angles are covered by the camera which streams whenever the camera is turned on and is saved back to the cloud.

The black box also contains an accelerometer and a gyroscope. These sensors work together so that in the event of a crash the data, combined with the camera footage, tells the story of exactly what happened.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: start by focussing on power users who run the highest risk of crashing on their bike

Monetisation: charge for the box. The data could also be valuable for insurance companies

Startup Costs: This is a hardware play so you’ll need to work with some talented engineers to get this going. You’ll need funding for that.

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Sell to a company like GoPro.

UNHINGED BUSINESS IDEA

WiFi bathroom Blocker

Helping workplaces to 10x their productivity with a single app…

BIG DECK ENERGY

LinkedIn’s $10m Series B Deck

Year: 2004

Stage: Series B

Amount: $10m

LinkedIn is an incredible business (despite all the cringe), with more than 1 billion users around the world.

Back in 2004 the company raised $10m in Series B funding from Greylock using this deck which outlined Reid Hiffman’s vision for the business, a vision he was incredibly able to achieve, growing to 433 million users by the time the company was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for an estimated $26.2 billion.

THE MONEYSHOT

The $1.75bn Streaming Failure

What if I told you that in 2018 a company, led by a team of industry veterans, raised $1.75bn to create a platform for streaming short form content before Tiktok owned the short form game.

So an amazing team, with a great idea coming in just before a major trend, with all the money in the world started this company. Surely this would be a home run, right?

No.

The company was (was being the key word here) called Quibi and Quibi will go down as one of the greatest failures in corporate history.

It was founded by Jeffrey Katzenber who previously sold Dreamworks to Comcast but in the end he couldn’t make this company a success.

But how was it such a failure? Well the contributing factors were terrible shows, high pricing, problems at the C-suite, lack of social sharing, no effective marketing. Ultimately despite everything going in their favour they didn’t understand their customers.

So after 7 short months in business Quibi was shut down, burning the $1.75bn in investment.