IDEA #1 | STARTUP

Marketplace for Warm Intros 🤝

Network to add to your net worth

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Networking is incredibly important. It helps people to get jobs, meet co-founders and can lead to sales or partnerships worth millions of dollars. “Networking event” is also great to put in your calendar when you’re going for a few beers with friends.

But meeting the exact right people you want to meet is almost impossible. You can try cold emailing or cold calling people, but you’ll quickly find that it doesn’t work very well.

Conversely, warm intros are highly effective and there are people out there with huge, untapped networks that people and companies would kill to have access to. Ok maybe not kill, but definitely pay.

So let’s create exactly that.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea: create a marketplace for individuals and businesses to buy and sell warm intros to people in their network.

Here’s how it works. An individual or company signs up to the platform and describes who they want intros to (their Ideal Customer Profile as salespeople like to say). They also decide how much they’re willing to pay for these intros, say $100 for a meeting getting booked.

Then, users on the platform can browse intro requests from other users and if there’s someone in their network who they believe is a match they can submit their details to the. If there’s a successful action, such as a meeting is booked, then the referrer gets paid the bounty set by the user.

There are some companies trying to do this but no-one’s cracked it yet.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Follow the money. Work with B2B businesses who want warm intros for their sales teams and expand from there.

Monetisation: Take a transaction fee on any bounties paid through the platform.

Startup Costs: Minimal. You don’t need a big budget to get this idea off the ground.

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

There are tonnes of B2B prospecting tools on the market, like Cognism or Lusha who would be chomping at the bit to add a business like this to their product line

IDEA #2 | STARTUP

Indeed for Stealth Startups 🥷

Can never B-2 careful

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Shoutout to the business idea machine Nirmal (@nahaknirmal on Twitter) for another bangin idea. Will anyone else manage to get their idea featured?

Stealth mode startups are something of an enigma.

Many stealth mode startups just don’t have a compelling reason to be in stealth mode. For others everyone knows so much about them they may as well not even be in stealth mode.

But some stealth mode startups have a genuine reason to be in stealth and getting in early on these rocket ships can lead to life changing outcomes.

But for stealth startups it’s incredibly difficult to recruit given the level of secrecy around what they’re doing.

So let’s solve that problem.

2. Solution ✅

The idea is to create an exclusive job board for stealth startups to confidentially attract and hire exceptional candidates.

Here’s how it works. Startups sign up for the platform and are vetted before joining to ensure they’re a legit company. They can then post detailed job descriptions on the platform without revealing the company name.

Candidates are pre-vetted for their quality before being allowed to sign up for the platform and all sign NDAs as part of onboarding. They can search for jobs on the platform and are recommended for roles based on their skills and the characteristics of the companies on the platform, but without any extraneous information about the company being revealed to the candidate.

Once a company finds a candidate they like they can being the interview process and hopefully hire a new member to their team.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Reach out to some startups in stealth mode and offer to recruit for them using this exact process. Then productize it if it’s successful.

Monetisation: Charge startups a fee for any employees they hire through the platform.

Startup Costs: $0. You could start this business tomorrow.

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

The long term play here would be to exit to a jobs platform, like a Monster or Indeed

UNHINGED BUSINESS IDEA

Relationship Launch App

It’s hard to know what someone’s relationship status is these days. Are two people at the talking stage? In a situationship? Just seeing each other?

Well that all changes today because with the Relationship Launch app you can make it official by announcing to the world that you’re officially dating.

Get feedback from friends, family and the entire world on your new found relationship. What could possibly go wrong?

BIG DECK ENERGY

Facebook’s $500k Seed Deck

Year: 2004

Stage: Seed

Amount: $500k

Today Facebook (or Meta I guess) is a +$1 trillion tech behemoth.

But back in 2004, it was just like any other startup. A small team with limited resources trying to find their way.

Back then it was called the Facebook. Eduardo Saverin was still in the business. Sean Parker still worked there too (you can see his FB profile in the deck)

And at this time the team managed to raise $500k from the now legendary investor Peter Thiel, who’s mainly an investing legend because of this one investment.

Click the link to see the pitch deck they used to raise from him.

THE MONEYSHOT

Making $100k in 3 Days from Glitter

Mark Rober is arguably the king of glitter bombs. Across 8 videos of building high tech glitter bombs (which are great btw) he’s amassed nearly 2 billion views.

But before Mark…there was Mat.

Back in 2015 Australian entrepreneur Mathew Carpenter launched a website that charged you $9.99 to post an envelope stuffed with glitter to anyone on the planet.

He called it Ship Your Enemies Glitter. And the internet went crazy for it. In a matter of hours, the site got global media coverage and he sold 2,000 glitter bombs, netting him $20k of revenue.

This was far more than Mat could handle though. So what did he do? He sold the business at its peak for astounding $85,000. The buyer took over the business as a going concern, fulfilled all the orders and the business is still going today.

What a fucking ride.