BUSINESS IDEA #1 | VENTURE STARTUP

Waste Marketplace 🚮

One man’s trash is another’s treasure

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The world generates around 2 billion tonnes of waste annually. And it’s not hard to see why.

Modern life consists of people buying crap they don’t need with money they don’t have to impress people they don’t like. And that leads to a lot of waste.

Some of this is more systemic though. Like food waste.

38% of all food produced in America is thrown away, which you wouldn’t guess based on the obesity epidemic they’re facing.

But businesses are constantly looking for ways to be more green and to introduce more “planet-friendly“ inputs into their production processes.

So let’s create a business to streamline this process.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a marketplace where businesses can source and use other companies’ waste as inputs into their production processes.

Here’s how it works. Businesses sign up to the platform and list the waste products of their production processes. This could be anything from excess wood, to plastic shavings…anything at all. These are then listed for sale at an extremely low price. Why? Because the alternative is to pay someone else to get rid of the waste for them.

Other businesses can then swoop in and buy these waste products on the cheap that serve as inputs into their manufacturing process. Take fruit and vegetable waste as an example. Supermarkets throw out around 30% of fruit and vegetables since they’re misshapen. But these could easily be used as inputs into the production of flavoured water drinks where the shape of the fruit or vegetable is irrelevant.

One business gets to offload some of their waste for a small profit. The other gets to reduce their raw materials cost in production. Both get to claim to be more environmentally friendly.

It’s a win-win scenario.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Start by focussing on a single vertical and expand from there

Monetisation: Take a transaction fee on payments through the platform

Startup Costs: This could be relatively inexpensive to start but will be expensive to scale, so you’ll need to do a venture round here to get to a venture-scale return

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

If this business grew big enough it could be an acquisition target for companies who offer supply chain optimisation services, such as Netsuite (owned by Oracle).

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BUSINESS IDEA #2 | STARTUP

AI Productivity Tracking ⏲️

Time is money

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

This generation is obsessed with productivity.

Which is ironic, since we’re the most distracted generation to ever live.

Productivity gurus are constantly inventing new hacks and tricks to help people to be more productive, none of which actually get to the heart of the issue. Output per unit of time.

Even for people who believe they work hard and are productive don’t realise where they’re falling down

So let’s create software to solve this problem.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create AI powered software which tracks all of the activities a user does and how productive they really are.

Here’s how it works. The user signs up to the platform and downloads the software. Once installed the software monitors the users actions on their computer, from the apps they use to their internet search history. All of this usage data is stored locally and is not kept by the app. The app then amalgamates all of this data and shows a breakdown each day of how long a user spent on each app or activity that day, giving them an incredible, data driven insight into how productive they really are.

There are some companies attempting to do this, like Timely, but no-one’s cracked this product just yet.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Start by selling to single users but ideally you’ll want to sell to businesses in the long run since that’s much easier to scale

Monetisation: Single payment for the software.

Startup Costs: You’ll need a strong tech team here to build the software, but apart from that startup costs will be low

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

There’s an infinite number of productivity software platforms out there who could acquire a business like this, such as Todoist or Freedom. Failing that this could be an incredibly high margin cash flow business.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

House Savings Calculator

Are you trying to save to buy a house?

Well this savings app shows you how long it will take for you to save before you can afford one.

You may be one of the lucky ones who can buy one before they’re 80. Fingers crossed!

BIG DECK ENERGY

Youtube’s $3.5m Series A Deck

Year: 2005

Stage: Series A

Amount: $3.5m

YouTube requires no introduction.

Back in 2005 Jawed Karim, one of the co-founders of YouTube, uploaded the first YouTube video ever. Today 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute worldwide.

But back in 2005 the founding team of Jawed Karim, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley needed some money to get the business off the ground.

Click the link to see the (surprisingly bland) deck they used to do it.

THE MONEYSHOT

Making 6 Figures from Drawing Cats

Some people like cats. Like Steve Gadlin.

Not only did Steve like cats, he really liked to draw cats.

So much so that he set up a website that would allow you to purchase one of his cat drawings for $9.95 a piece. He called it I Want To Draw A Cat For You.

Beautifully simple branding.

Turns out people really wanted Steve to draw them a cat. Over the space of 5 years, Steve sold more than 18,794 drawings, making him around $187,000.

Steve also appeared on Shark Tank, earning an investment of $25,000 from billionaire investor Mark Cuban for 33% of the company. Yep, Mark Cuban invested $25,000 in Steve’s cat drawing business. Mark drew 10 cats himself which he sold on the website for a tidy profit.

Cats and the internet as a combination is still yet to be beaten.