IDEA #1 | VENTURE STARTUP

Virtual Food Brands 🌯

A delicious opportunity

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Influencers are taking over the world.

Take Prime, KSI and Logan Paul’s hydration drink, which is in stores all over the world or how Messi has single handedly transformed the business landscape of soccer (or football as it should be called) in the USA.

And this influence comes at a hefty price. The global influencer marketing market value stood at $21.1bn as of 2023, having more than tripled since 2019.

The power of the influencer cannot be overstated and this is particularly true in the food vertical. Social media algorithms seem to know exactly when we’re hungriest, normally late at night know late at night, and start serving up the most delicious food content on our timelines. This normally puts us in a bind.

But imagine a world where you could watch a creator make something delicious, go to your food delivery app of choice and within 30 minutes you’re eating that exact dish?

That’s what we’re proposing here.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a technology platform which works with creators to create virtual food brands available on food delivery apps.

The company would work directly with food influencers to create food brands which they would point their fans to. Their fans could then order food on Grubhub, Deliveroo, Postmates etc. which would be prepared in so-called “ghost kitchens.” This is where restaurants utilise excess capacity in their kitchen to make the food which is then delivered to the end customer.

This model isn’t exactly new. Mr Beast famously used this model with his MrBeast Burger venture which did hundreds of millions in revenue, but we think the focus here should be on food related influencers.

Take Nick DiGiovanni, a chef with 13.5m subscribers on YouTube. Imagine a world where a viewer watches him prepare a dish and can instantly go to their favourite food delivery platform to order that exact dish. You could change menus around periodically to create urgency and drive more sales too.

Quality control issues would be the biggest obstacle to overcome here, which is why MrBeast Burger was discontinued despite its huge success.

Recently Lanch, a Berlin based startup, raised $7m for a platform in this space. This market is still in its infancy with everything to play for, so go play.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: start by working with one influencer in one city and expand from there.

Monetisation: end customers pay for the food and you would do a revenue share with the ghost kitchens preparing the food.

Startup Costs: you’d need to raise money to get this going, probably a few hundred thousand dollars, given all of the upfront costs and logistics involved

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

You could exit to a large hospitality player. For example Nextbite, the owner of a group of delivery-only restaurant concepts, was acquired by SBE Hospitality for around $30m.

IDEA #2 | VENTURE STARTUP

Water Taxi Rollup 🛳️

Water, water, everywhere, and money to be made

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Kanye West is no stranger to controversy.

But in 2023 he added an interesting scandal to his rap sheet (a line Kanye himself would be proud of).

Kanye managed to get himself banned from a Venice water taxi. We’ll let you work out why…

When this headline went viral around the world last year it got us thinking about the water taxi market, the market for short boat trips across small bodies of water. This kind of thing:

We did some digging and were shocked. The market for short, water taxi trips is $160bn, which is understandable when you see how expensive short boat trips are.

This market is incredibly fragmented, with many small owner operators running one or two boats on the same route every single day.

And here’s the thing…in the coming years many of these owners will be looking to retire and sell these businesses.

So why not buy up a number of these businesses (a rollup) and create a water taxi empire?

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a business why buys and operates water taxis around the world.

Boats on routes where there’s no alternative mode of transport are preferred, since they get steady revenue and also have massive pricing power. To go 5 miles in a water taxi in Venice costs $100.

These businesses are also relatively cheap to operate. Once you’ve bought yourself a boat or two, apart from some maintenance costs, your operating costs are pretty low.

One problem these business can have is seasonality, where water taxis on a lake for example will make the majority of their revenue in the summer months, but very little in winter. By doing a rollup here over time you could solve the seasonality problem, where a quiet US winter business could be offset by a busy Australian business during their summer.

This one big transportation market that companies like Uber won’t go into themselves, but would buy their way into if the right business was around.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: focus on a small number of routes with little to no alternative transportation available, ensure these are profitable then build from there

Monetisation: customers are charged per trip

Startup Costs: This would be pretty capital intensive in the beginning, to either acquire a water taxi business or start your own up. You’ll need some partners on this with relatively big pockets, but the payoff could be incredible.

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

At a small scale this could be an amazing cash flow business. If this got big enough you could exit to a large transportation company, like Uber.

JUST THE TIP

7 Lines of Code = $50bn

In many ways Stripe is this invisible giant.

We all interact with their payments infrastructure everyday, but they’re not the household name that Uber or Airbnb are, despite their $50bn valuation and them processing 1 trillion transactions per year.

In the company’s early days, back when it was called slashdevslashpayments (it actually was), founders Patrick and John Collison were looking to onboard users as quickly as possible. Onboarding was already very straight forward, with users adding 7 lines of code onto their website to get started, but this wasn’t simple enough for them. So they invented an onboarding method known as the "Collison installation."

When anyone agreed to try their product they'd say "right then, give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot.

No waiting, no hoping, just guaranteed sign ups.

So what’s the lesson here?