IDEA #1 | STARTUP

AI Sales Training Platform 🤖

Putting the “AI” in sales training

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Sales is a tough job.

Whether you’re cold calling or trying to close huge enterprise level deals, it never gets easier. You constantly have a target on your back. Plus you’re only as good as your last month, making it a pretty f*cking stressful career.

But it’s not all doom and gloom since sales does have one huge benefit…the pay.

Sales people get amzing compensation in large organisations, since the output of their work can be so easily measured. You close a $1m contract for your company? They can afford to give you a few Benjamins for your work.

But revenue organisations face one huge challenge on the sales side…training new sales staff. It can take months and months for a new sales rep to ramp and become effective, if they ever do.

Lectures and workshops only get reps so far. There’s no replacement for actually speaking to customers and companies don’t have leads they can burn in the name of training sales staff.

AI, however, could offer a solution here.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…

Build an AI role play platform which allows reps to practice speaking to customers, bring the time to train reps down from a few weeks to a few days.

Reps speak to AI generated customers who could come in different difficulty levels and would closely mimic customers that reps would meet in the real world. Different scenarios could be available to sales reps, like pricing calls, or closing calls for example, with the customer giving objections which the rep must handle

The platform would record all sessions and judge the performance of the rep on areas such as their ability to handle objections and their talking speed. It could be trained to identify when reps are using filler words or swear words too.

The opportunity here is massive and no one seems to have cracked this yet!

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: This is a B2B SaaS product and your customers are going to be SMEs and large enterprises. Focus on organisations with large revenue functions and high margins, they’ll be willing to a lot pay for any incremental improvement in the performance of their reps.

Monetisation: charge organisations monthly based on the number of seats they use. Classic SaaS.

Startup Costs: If you happen to know a 10x engineer then give them a ton of equity in your startup and get something shipped asap. Otherwise you’ll need a bit of capital to get this off the ground. Proper engineers ain’t cheap.

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

This is 100% an exit play. SaaS multiple aren’t what they were back in 2021, but they’re still holding at c.5x revenue depending on where you look. A business like this would be a prime target for any large sales software platform, think Gong or maybe even Hubspot.

IDEA #2 | VENTURE STARTUP

Topgolf for Pickleball 🎾

Topgolf is huge. Topgolf for Pickleball could be huger.

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Pickleball is big business. In 2022 around 24m people in the USA played tennis. How many played pickleball you ask? 37m. That’s right there are more picklers (is thaw what they’re called?) than tennis players in the USA right now.

For the uninitiated pickleball is a racquet sport where players hit a hollow plastic ball with paddles over a net within a court the dimensions of a badminton court. Basically if tennis, badminton, and ping pong had a lovechild, it would be pickleball.

Pickleball’s popularity, particularly among the older demographic, has skyrocketed in recent years. The google search activity doesn’t lie:

Golf, another sport who’s audience trends older, has seen a similar recent surge in popularity of late, as more husbands try to find ways to spend even less time with their wives. This brings us to one of golf’s most recent success stories…Topgolf.

There are over 80 Topgolf locations worldwide where golfers can enjoy a few drinks and some food while laughing at their mate who keeps shanking the ball.

Truly a paradise.

Topgolf did $1.5bn of revenue in 2022 after being acquired by Callaway in 2021 for a cool $2bn.

Could you do something similar for Pickleball? We think so.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the big idea…build a destination venue for pickleball players which combines food, drink and pickleball into one fun social outing.

Pickleball is a very social sport and doubles isn’t particularly taxing, meaning it lends itself to this kind of social outing similar to golf.

During the day the venue could function as a normal pay-as-you-go pickleball venue too, so you’re maximising court usage and revenue for the business. In the evening it turns into an entertainment venue.

The branding here could be a little challenging here - “Top Pickle” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Plus, the Google search results around this could be a little sus.

Once you nail the first site there’s definitely a franchise opportunity here too, taking the Mcdonald’s approach. To paraphrase Harry Sonneborn, McDonald’s first President famously portrayed by “Ryan from the Office“ in the 2016 movie the Founder:

“you don’t build an empire by taking a cut of pickleball court bookings, you do so by owning the land upon which that pickleball is played”.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: You’re going to start with a single location, nail it, then you start to expand. Your first location should ideally be on the outskirts of a major city to keep costs down and be near a city where pickleball is popular.

Monetisation: There’s huge monetisation opportunities here, from charging for entry to decent margins on food and drink, as well as equipment upsells to customers. The key here is to maximise bookings and revenue per visitor, that’s how you make the big bucks in this racket (pun very much intended). Then franchise this baby and you’re good to go.

Startup Costs: This is a pretty capital intensive business, not the sort of thing you can start from your bedroom. I’d recommend hanging around some fancy sports clubs, find some wealthy pickleball enthusiasts and sell them the dream.

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

This could be a huge business. If you want to go the same route as Topgolf and exit there are plenty of huge pickleball brands who would jump at acquiring a business like this. Topgolf laid the path, you just have to walk down it.

IDEA #3 | VENTURE STARTUP

Nicotine Gum for Vaping 🚭

Declaring war on vape nation

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Vaping is a huge market (or problem, depending on how you think about the world).

1 in 20 Americans vape, and teenage e-cigarette consumption has increased by 1,800% over the last year, despite what vaping companies will tell you about their advertising practices.

As more and more people take up vaping, the number of people actively trying to quit vaping also increases. This is where nicotine gum comes into play.

But here’s the problem…

Nicotine gum brands weren’t designed for gen-Z, they were designed for Boomers.

Until now.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea - create a nicotine gum brand targeting young vapers…vapists…eh…people who vape, to help them quit vaping and/or smoking. Do what Liquid Death did for water, but in the nicotine gum space.

The value proposition here is very compelling, nicotine replacement gum can double someone’s chances of quitting vaping successfully by curbing nicotine cravings and reducing withdrawal symptoms.

On the product side get creative with your flavours and try and make sure the product tastes good. On the marketing side slick branding, Gen-Z lingo and memes will get you a long way.

You could offer customers a companion app too which allows quitters to track their progress, set a quit date and work with support groups for people trying to quit for when the going gets tough.

The law could be your friend too. If countries start banning vaping then a whole lot of people will be looking for a replacement for it.

On the competition side Blip is the only other real player in the market targeting this demographic, so there’s plenty of room for another entrant into this market.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: This should start as a DTC brand with some slick, dollar shave club style marketing and eventually morph into a retail play once the brand matures.

Monetisation: The product lends itself to a DTC subscription model, given there should be a very strong returning customer rate and lifetime value (LTV) in the product.

Startup costs: this won’t be cheap to get started, you’re going to need to raise some funding to create the product and give yourself some runway while you wait for FDA clearance.

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

This is 100% an exit play. Big smoke (as in the big smoking companies, not the GTA character) are diversifying their portfolios, so this could be a great opportunity to exit to one of the big cigarette brands. You might want to leave your morals at the door however in this deal.

THEIR PAST, YOUR FUTURE

How 55 people made $19bn

We all dream of a multi-billion dollar exit, but very few achieve it. Very few achieve that feat in less than 5 years. And an even smaller portion do so with a team less than 60 people.

Well these guys managed to do all of that. Legends.

This is Brian Acton and Jan Moir and in 2009 they founded Whatsapp, a company so well known it requires no introduction.

The app grew like a weed in its early years and by 2013 the company was bringing in $10.2 million in revenue, but losing more than $100 million per year. Then in 2014 Whatsapp famously sold to Meta (née Facebook) for $19bn dollars. What’s incredible is that the Whatsapp team were just 55 people when they were acquired by Facebook.

What’s the takeaway? Small teams can achieve great things.

So build your team and go achieve something great.