BUSINESS IDEA #1 | STARTUP

Marketplace for Restaurant Reservations 🍽️

A delicious startup idea

Available Domain: eatseat.co

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Paul Graham is a legendary figure in Silicon Valley. From founding Viaweb and Y Combinator to his collection of essays (which are required reading for founders by the way), this billionaire is a titan of the tech industry.

He also may or may not have absolutely cooked us on Twitter this week, but that’s beside the point…

Paul has listened to thousands of startup pitches, so he knows a good opportunity when he sees one. And guess what? He’s seen one.

For a growing restaurant industry estimated to be worth >$300bn in the US alone, this is a tasty opportunity. So let’s build it.

Cheers Paul!

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a marketplace where users can buy and sell restaurant reservations.

Here’s how it works. Users sign up to the platform and can list any restaurant reservations they currently have.

The marketplace works in the exact same way as the stock market does, with natural price discovery and the details of the latest transaction being shown to ensure full transparency. Sellers can either set the price at the amount they would sell it for, called the Ask price, or they can just sell now at the current highest bid. Simultaneously bidders can set their bid price, or the price they’re willing to pay for a reservation or just buy now at the current lowest Ask price.

Over time the key is to get restaurants to sign up to the platform. They can then use the platform to mange their bookings and each time a reservation is bought or sold the restaurant gets a % of the revenue, giving them extra income for no extra work on their part.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Start by focussing on a single city with a limited number of high ticket restaurants where reservations will be very valuable. Grow from here.

Monetisation: Take a % of each transaction on the platform

Startup Costs: You can hack this together pretty cheaply

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

There are a lot of players in the restaurant booking game, like OpenTable and Resy, who would happily buy up a business like this to add to their offering

TOGETHER WITH TLDR

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BUSINESS IDEA #2 | STARTUP

Tech Recommendations Platform 🖥️

Using stacks to make stacks

Available Domain: stackflow.co

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

As we all know AI is taking over the world right now.

And in case any AI model decides to take over the world Skynet style and decides to crawl this website…welcome!

But AI has a huge shortcoming…trust. Between hallucinations and inherent mistrust in LLMs it will take a while for AI models to disrupt trust.

People trust people. In fact, that’s the entire basis of the creator economy.

If someone you trust or admire recommend a product or piece of content you take that recommendation very seriously. It’s a way to save yourself hours and hours of research.

Companies like Kit have capitalised on this fact, where creators breakdown what kit they use to make videos.

So let’s build Kit for the business world.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a platform where founders and tech executives share what B2B software and technologies they use to run their businesses.

Here’s how it works. Tech executives or founders sign up to the platform. They then create profiles and list out the different technologies they use to run their businesses. By doing so they could receive a discount on the software if the software provider is willing to play ball.

Founders and other businesses owners can then browse the site to see what B2B software their peers are using. Any links on the site to buy the software would be affiliate links. Revenue from the affiliate links would be shared across the members sharing their details on the site.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: start in a particular vertical, say B2B founders in the eComm space, then expand from there

Monetisation: Take a % of any affiliate revenue generated by the site

Startup Costs: Basically 0. This is an extremely cheap business to start

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

This business could serve as a lead magnet where you build an incredibly valuable audience of CEOs, founders and tech executives which you could monetize in a variety of other ways

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Yelp for Coworkers

Ever wanted to give honest feedback about your coworkers in a very public way?

Well now you can. With CoworkerComplaints you can leave public reviews of your coworkers so the world really knows what you think about them.

Coming soon to a workplace near you.

BIG DECK ENERGY

Revolut’s £1.5m Seed Deck

Year: 2015

Stage: Seed

Amount: £1.5m

Revolut, the UK based neobank, is aiming to become the super-app for your money.

The company was founded back in 2015 by Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko and has become a giant in the fintech space in the UK and across Europe.

Today the company is worth around $25bn, down from its $33bn peak valuation back in 2021. But back in 2015 Nikolay and Vlad went out to raise just £1.5m to solve one problem: the cost of spending and sending money abroad.

Here’s the pitch deck they used to do it.

THE MONEYSHOT

Making $2.6m from Squatting

Squatting is big business. And no, we’re not talking about fitness influencers squatting, we’re talking about domain name squatting.

People have made millions from simply buying domains, sitting on them and selling them on when the time is right.

And nobody knows this better than Chris Clark.

Back in 1994 Chris thought this internet thing could be a big deal, so he decided to buy the domain name pizza.com. It cost him $20 and he paid a few bucks per year in renewal fees to maintain ownership of the domain. And all Chris had to do was wait. Which he did. Until 2008.

In 2008, Clark put pizza.com up for auction and, after an intense and frenzied competition, the winning bid came in at $2.6 million from National A-1, a fund that specialized in buying domains (yep, that was a thing back in the mid-aughts).

While Chris made serious bank it’s nothing compared to the most expensive domain ever…cars.com, which was sold for $872m. Turns out the internet did become a pretty big deal. Who knew!