IDEA #1 | VENTURE STARTUP

Brand Consistency Software 🆕

A brand new opportunity

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The importance of brand cannot be overstated.

A brand is a company’s identity, its soul, its…best chance to get us to buy their products, ideally for a lot more money.

So when a company decides to rebrand it’s a huge decision. Look at how much our boy Julius Pringles (yes he’s really called Julius) has changed over the years, going from a classy mofo to an egg with a mustache.

Rebranding isn’t only a huge decision, it’s a huge investment too. Take Pepsi, who in 2008 spent a cool $1m dollars to completely transform and reinvent their brand.

Money well spent.

When a company does decide to rebrand it’s a huge, manual undertaking, where websites, paperwork, internal presentations and documents and more all need to be updated. Today this is a tedious, manual process.

But it doesn’t have to be.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a software solution that scans and analyzes a brand’s digital and print materials to verify brand consistency.

If a company changed their name the tool would scan the company’s website, applications, contracts and internal documents for any mention of the old name and prompt the team to change it to the new name or change it automatically.

The tool could also scan for any watermarks or use of a previous logo and replace it with an updated version if it formed part of the rebrand. The tool could also scan any presentations or other documents to ensure that any colours used are within the brand guidelines.

An advanced version of the tool could also leverage generative AI to create templates using a brand’s new guidelines, such as powerpoint decks or

Not only this but the tool could be used on content, using the brand’s previous content as training data, to ensure that any content produced is in line with the brand.

This tool would automate the meticulous process of brand auditing, saving large corporations a huge amount of time, which they’d be willing to pay for.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Start by selling into design agencies that work on rebrands. If they can get rebrands done more quickly or offer this as an additional service and charge more for it, they’ll happily pay for the software.

Monetisation: charge company’s a monthly subscription fee for the software

Startup Costs: This could be quite a technical build on the tech side, so you’d likely need to raise a small seed round to secure engineering talent to spin up an MVP

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

You could exit to a large brand consulting firm who would be willing to pay big bucks for a tool like this, particularly if you can incorporate AI into the software (and the valuation).

IDEA #2 | STARTUP

Startup Jobs Platform 🚀

Picking your seat on the rocket ship

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

“If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat.”

When Sheryl Sandberg, former Facebook COO, said this she wasn’t talking about a seat actual rocket ship. She definitely wasn’t talking about taking a seat on a starship going through a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, also known as blowing up.

No Sheryl was talking about joining a fast growing company since being involved in the early days of a startup can be life changing, no matter what your role is.

She’s not wrong.

Take David Choe who famously painted the walls in Facebook’s first office. Sean Parker famously offered David $60k in cash for the work, but opted to get paid in Facebook stock. When Facebook went public in 2012 at $38 a share, Choe’s stock was worth $200 million.

When people apply for jobs they tend to search by role and hope that

So why not build a jobs platform which does the opposite?

That’s the opportunity here.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a jobs platform that only lists roles in high growth startups on the site.

The business would begin by identifying sectors which are growing quickly and find companies who are small but are on a strong growth trajectory based on their revenue, traction to date, the size of the market they’re operating in, how much money they’ve raised to date and from what investors and so on.

Companies would then be graded across these different areas and those who reach a certain threshold would be invited to post jobs on the platform.

It would be invite only, exclusive.

This would give startups the chance to post their job to a pool of incredibly high intent potential employees.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Start by identifying and outbounding some high growth startups and get them to sign up for the platform

Monetisation: Charge startups to list their jobs on the platform. You could also charge users for access to the site to view these jobs.

Startup Costs: These would be minimal, it’s a jobs board which would be cheap to build

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

This could be a great cash flow business or a tidy exit if it grows to a big enough size to a large jobs platform, like Wellfound or Otta. Job boards are generally valued between 1x - 4x revenue.

JUST THE TIP

Using Pink Mustaches to Make Billions 🥸

Uber owns the ride sharing market, with Lyft playing second fiddle to the big dog in the market.

But as a $5bn company today Lyft has still been a huge success story, seemingly against the odds.

Uber, founded in 2009, had a three year head start on Lyft and has historically had much deeper pockets than Lyft on the back of some monster funding rounds. By 2015, for example, Uber had raised $3bn to Lyft’s $300m.

So in the early days Lyft had to find innovative ways to compete with Uber and one of their most successful ways to compete was using furry pink moustaches.

That’s right, for around 5 years every Lyft driver’s car sported a so-called “carstache.”

When it was first introduced the carstache was an instant hit. It made Lyft cars instantly recognisable and gave the Lyft brand more personality. It also gave the brand millions of dollars in free advertising over the years, with articles galore written about the mustaches.

That’s all well and good but what can we actually learn from this?