BUSINESS IDEA | VENTURE STARTUP

AI for Auto Repairs 🚗 

Braking Bad

Available Domain: Autoally.ai

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem: There are few things worse in life than having your car break down. Particularly if you have no idea how to repair it.

But repairs are no cup of tea if you’re a mechanic these days either. There are an estimated 60,000 unique car models in the US, all of which need to be repaired in different ways. This leads to cars being repaired incorrectly, if at all in some cases. But with a little AI magic we can build tooling to solve this.

Market Size: There are c.240,000 auto repair companies in the USA

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: Create a verticalized LLM to assist mechanics with auto repairs

How it Works: The platform is an LLM trained on manufacturer repairing guidance, technical service bulletins, plus on a vehicle’s own service history. When a mechanic is faced with a repair, they simply input details about the car and the problem and the model gives a step by step guide on how to make the repair. This allows independent mechanics to repair cars more accurately and quickly. The natural progression here would be to pair this data with a wearable, like a hololens, to record repairs and generate your own proprietary data for training your model.

Go-to-market: Build on top of an existing LLM using data from the most popular vehicle on the market and build from there

Monetisation: Monthly subscription fee

Startup Costs: A technical team should be able to get this off the ground for a few thousand dollars

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Sell to a national auto repair chain, like Midas, looking to make their mechanics more efficient

Exit Multiple: SaaS multiples are sitting at around 5.9x revenue currently

TOGETHER WITH SAASTOCK

Last Chance: Win a Free Ticket to SaaStockUSA 2024

Worth $999 each

SaaStockUSA, the world’s leading conference for SaaS founders, is in Austin, Texas this year from May 13 - May 15 2024.

We’ve teamed up with the SaaStock team and still have a few more General Attendee tickets (worth $999 each, max 1 per person) to the conference to giveaway for FREE so our readers can join the 1,500 SaaS founders, investors and operators at the conference.

We’ve already emailed last week’s winners of the competition, but we have more tickets to give away and this week…it could be you.

To enter just click the link and fill out the Google Form (takes < 30 seconds). Good luck 🫡

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Bank Balance Dating App

You may have seen that viral clip a few months ago where a girl says she asks for her date’s bank account info on the first date. So this one’s for you Sofia!

Introducing MoneyMingle, the dating app for women where all they see about potential matches is their bank balance. Nothing else. Why bother with all of that other noise about their values, interests or even what they look like?

Coming soon to an app store near you.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Crypto Startup Investment Surges

Crypto is dead. Long live crypto.

According to data from Galaxy Research in Q1 2024 venture capitalists invested $2.49 billion into crypto/blockchain-focused companies, a 29% increase from the previous quarter.

So if you have a crypto related startup idea, the markets are starting to slowly open up.

THE MONEYSHOT

Bootstrapping from $0 to $50m ARR

Getting to $50m ARR is really hard. Getting there without outside investment is near impossible. Unless you’re these two guys.

Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded Atlassian in 2002, a company that develops products for software developers and project managers. Here they are reinforcing certain stereotypes about tech companies and their ping pong obsession.

While running their services business, this Aussie duo built an issue tracker on the side to track their dev work. They saw the potential in this and in 2002 took on $10k in credit card debt to start Atlassian and launch their first product, Jira (which many of us don’t like to use)

Years later they launched Confluence too and by 2010 the company hit $50m ARR with no outside investment.

Ultimately in 2010 the company decided to raise $160 million to fuel acquisitions and supercharge growth. In 2023 the company did $3.5bn in revenue. So it all worked out in the end.