IDEA #1 | STARTUP

Private Community for Creators 🔗

Creating creator communities

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Private communities have been around for decades.

These communities allow incredibly successful business leaders to come together with their peers and learn how they can better run their businesses, share problems they may be experiencing to find solutions to them all in the name of trying to make the world a better place.

Take companies like endeavor or Hampton, these private membership communities are incredibly successful because being a business leader is incredibly tough.

It’s lonely at the top, so having a peer group to lean on is incredibly valuable.

Just like being a creator.

Being a creator is a tough, lonely endeavour and creators could benefit from the support of a similar community that business leaders have enjoyed for decades.

So let’s create one.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a highly vetted membership community for creators.

The community would be a space for creators to come together and learn, share and network.

There would be core groups of 8 - 10 creators who would meet regularly where advice and critical feedback can be shared to help accelerate everyone’s development.

Members would also get access to unique workshops delivered by experts across a range of topics, from business leaders for example, as well as access to a digital community where everyone could engage asynchronously.

The community would also have monthly member dinners and annual retreats to allow everyone to get to know each other.

This would be an elite community meaning you would charge a high price, something like $10k per year to be a member. YouTubers seem to throw around $10k like its play money, so they won’t have any issue footing the bill.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: we’d recommend a pairing strategy here - find a way to get in touch with a creator and find out another creator who they would love to meet, then get them to join, and so on, so you’re giving someone a specific reason to join the community each time

Monetisation: membership fee

Startup Costs: minimal, the difficult part here will be getting in touch with creators and getting them to join

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

You could potentially exit to a large business community here, but in truth there’s huge value in staying involved in this business for the network alone, so we’d suggest running it up to millions in revenue per year and stay involved.

IDEA #2 | CASH FLOW BUSINESS

Time Capsule Service ⏳

A modern take on an old classic

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Having kids is amazing.

Sure they cost a fortune, ruin your sleep for years and don’t ever shut up. Ever.

But then there’s those magic moments when you realise that having kids was totally worth it.

Inevitably, when kids get older and even into adulthood they all start to wonder more about their childhood.

What was it like? What were our parents like at the time? What memories have we long forgotten that we once held dear?

Well…let’s create a service which captures this.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a service which, over the course of many years, works with parents to create time capsules that they can give to their kids later in life.

Here’s how it works: new parents sign up for the platform and can decide when they want their kids to receive the time capsule, it could be on a specific date or at a specific event in a few years or in decades.

Each year a member of the team would interview the parents to get their thoughts and feelings about where they are in life. Parents could also contribute items to go into the capsule that they don’t want to get lost. They could also submit any pictures or videos they don’t want lost when they inevitably change phones and their camera roll gets lost.

All of the materials collected over the years could then be transformed into books to be shared with the recipients. Once a time capsule is opened by someone they get to keep it forever.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: since this is a service which skews towards people with higher discretionary income you’re going to want to target people

Monetisation: subscription fee until the capsule is opened

Startup Costs: minimal, you’ll just need to be patient af with this business

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

It’s hard to see a strong exit opportunity here, but this could be an incredible cash flow business for the right founder, throwing off millions of dollars each year. The value of a single customer would be incredible.

NO BRAINER IDEA

QR Code Watch

Alright hear us out…a QR code watch. Stylish, elegant, practical. All you have to do is take out your phone, scan the QR code and then you can tell the time.

Once we partner with Rolex on a design we’ll really start making the big bucks.

BIG DECK ENERGY

Arcane’s $5m Seed Deck

Year: 2023

Stage: Seed

Amount: $5m

Arcane is an AI-powered co-pilot for modern marketers. Arcane raised $5m in a round led by Accel, with participation from angel investors including Monzo founder Tom Blomfield and WeWork President Anthony Yazbeck. This is the deck they used to do it.

JUST THE TIP

2 Pivots and a $27bn Exit

Pivoting. The hardest decision a founder has to make and the best way to move a couch.

But when it comes to pivoting Stewart Butterfield is the master of the pivot, where he turned two failed video game businesses into Flickr and Slack respectively.

Butterfield started out in 2002 developing a browser-based game called Glitch but the money ran out and the company ended up taking elements from it to create a real-time messaging system called Flickr, the successful photo-sharing service, which was sold to Yahoo for $35m.

This allowed Butterfield to revisit his game idea again. However Glitch did not win a big enough audience to sustain itself, so Butterfield pivoted again, back to another messaging service, which the Glitch team had developed for their own internal communications. This became Slack which Salesforce acquired for $27bn in 2021.

So what can we learn from Stewart?