IDEA #1 | VENTURE STARTUP

Blinkist for Podcasts 🎙️

Blink and miss this opportunity

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Podcasts are amazing.

The fact that today we all have the opportunity to listen to world leading experts speak for hours on their areas of expertise for next to no cost is pretty incredible.

From Huberman on health to Peterson on psychology, there’s a wealth of information out there in podcasts waiting for us to uncover.

But there’s a problem…time. Podcasts are getting longer and longer and in our busy lives we don’t have the time to consume hundreds of hours of valuable podcast content each week.

Blinkist, a German company which provides short, bite-sized summaries of non-fiction books, solved this problem in the book space.

Let’s create a business which solves this problem in the podcast space.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a platform which provides short, bite-sized summaries of informational podcast episodes.

Users would sign up for the platform and for a small monthly subscription fee could read or listen to short summaries of podcast episodes that take 5 or 10 minutes to consume. These summaries would be generated by a mixture of human listeners and AI to ensure the summaries are of the highest quality and updated every week as podcasts are uploaded.

The platform would focus on podcasts which are informational in nature, such as Huberman Lab, Making Sense with Sam Harris, the Lex Fridman podcast and so on.

There could potentially be a revenue share agreement in place with podcast owners where they get a share of a subscription fee in proportion to how much a person listens to or watches summaries of their podcast.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: Start with a handful of popular podcasts, summarize some episodes and see if fans would be interested in subscribing

Monetisation: subscription fees

Startup Costs: will be cheap to test and get an MVP off the ground but to scale you’ll need some investment

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Blinkist was acquired last year for around $100m by GO1. This business could be acquired by a large player in the podcast space, such as Stitcher or Castbox.

IDEA #2 | VENTURE STARTUP

Gamified Health App 👩‍⚕️

GG x ECG

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Does the word “tamagotchi” mean anything to you?

If so then congrats, you’re old just like us. If you think it’s some anime thing, then I envy your youth.

The keychain-sized virtual pet simulation game, which originated in Japan, took the world by storm in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

People all over the world were focusing most or all of their attention on feeding, playing games with and even picking up after their little digital pets.

Over 91 million units have been sold worldwide, not bad for a device that’s hardly cutting edge compared to the iPhones or Apple Vision Pros of today.

In a way tamagotchis could be viewed as a precursor to fitness trackers. This meme, which is where we get most of our information from, seems to think so.

So why not build on this premise and create a tamagotchi for the modern age, one that helps people not to take care of a digital pet…but of themselves.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create an app which gamifies the process of staying healthy.

Here’s how it works - users sign up to the app and connect up any wearables or health related apps they use to the app. Based on this data the app calculates their expected lifespan based on their diet and exercise habits as well as publicly available demograhic health data. Then, based on what users do they can see how their projected lifespan increases or decreases based on their actions.

Say a user goes a whole week without exercising, this would then decrease their projected lifespan. The app would then give nudges to help users be more healthy.

Similarly users to see the devastating impacts that other actions have on their health, such as how much shorter their life would be if they were to start smoking cigarettes regularly.

The fundamental premise is to quantify all of these actions and help users to understand how their actions today will impact them in the future.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: focus on the prosumer, longevity focussed market initially to get initial traction

Monetisation: Freemium model, free with limited feature set and a small subscription fee to unlock the full feature set

Startup Costs: You’ll likely need to do a small raise here as this could be a complex, timely software build, but that will create a moat in the long term

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

If you can create a product which provides compelling health insights you could get a great exit to a medtech company or a wearable device manufacturer. Mention that you use AI somewhere to increase that exit multiple…

NO BRAINER IDEA

The David Goggins Meditation App

Introducing the most hardcore meditation app ever created, in partnership with David Goggins. Hear David shout at you and call you names while you try to relax.

Launching on the App store any day now.

BIG DECK ENERGY

Copy.AI’s $11m Series A Deck

Year: 2021

Stage: Series A

Amount: $11m

Copy.ai is an AI-powered writing tool that helps users create high-quality content in a fraction of the time it would normally take. They raised $11M in 2021 with this deck.

JUST THE TIP

$0 → +$1m in 4 months

It’s October 2021.

Covid-19 is surging around the world and lockdowns mean that everyone is bored out of their minds looking for something to do.

One such person is Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle who decided to create a word game for his partner, a game he called Wordle.

By November 1 2021, within a month of being made public, the game had just 90 players.

However, by January 2 2022 this had risen to 300,000 daily players and incredibly, the following week, Wordle’s number of weekend players exceeded 2 million.

Later that month, The New York Times announced that it had purchased Wordle for an undisclosed, low-seven figure fee.

So what’s the lesson here?