'No-code as a Service', Shaan's $10m/yr idea, a shitty social network and more...
Includes ideas from MFM #137 and Product Ideas #2 podcasts
Welcome to Everyday Startup, a weekly newsletter all about bootstrappable startup ideas and trends. We bring together ideas and strategies from all over the internet including My First Million podcast.
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Weekly roundup of startup ideas & trends…
This edition includes:
Shaan’s $10/m yr idea (MFM)
Cameo-style business opportunities (MFM)
Profit form OnlyFans’s huge popularity (MFM)
Podcast discussion group service (Product Ideas podcast)
‘No-code as a Service’ (Product Ideas podcast)
A shitty social network app (Product Ideas podcast)
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A “combine” for youth sports (Shaan’s $10m/yr idea)
(Source: My First Million #137 at 16:40)
This idea was on a MFM podcast previously. Shaan tweeted the idea to his audience telling them he would invest his cash if someone did the hustle and sweat to make it a reality. Basically, the idea is a “combine” for youth sports. Since the tweet, he got a plethora of responses saying he should start this including professional athletes who suggested the NBA would be interested in getting onboard.
So here’s the idea…
What is the combine? Before athletes get drafted to professional leagues (NBL, NFL, etc) they go to this place called the combine. Basically, it’s where these athletes gets graded on their abilities like their time on a 40 yard dash or highest vertical jump, etc.
Shaan noticed how increasingly competitive youth sports are these days. Parents can get very involved and pushy to make sure their kids are not only the best, but also noticed. The parents buy equipment, professional trainers, join competitive leagues, etc. It turns out this is a $20 billion per year industry, according to Shaan.
What if you could create a “traveling circus” where a company goes town to town and youth athletes can pay to take a standardized test for their athletic skills.
SPARQ was a company that used to do something like this. They called it the “SAT for athletes”. 44,000 atheltes have taken the Sparq test and received a rating including Tim Tebow, Reggie Bush and others.
Shaan was not aware of SPARQ at the time he thought of this idea. However, things have changed since SPARQ including Instagram which is natural marketing channel for a business like this. This is why Tough Mudder was so successful. Youth sports have also exploded and kids are starting very early. This gives an opportunity to go after the younger kid market.
NOTE: I found a company called Virtual Combine that offers a software so organizations can set up their own combine to help young athletes get noticed. The website states, “Validate and brand every student-athlete for up to 50X less than competing recruiting and showcasing services.”
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What tiny markets today will be worth trillions in the future?
(My First Million #137 at 27:40)
Sam Altman asked this question in a tweet recently. The guys put their heads together and came up with this list (or borrowed from others):
Falling romantically in love with something digital / artificial
Induced pluripotent stem cell (taking a stem cell and training it to be for another purpose)
Homeschooling industry and related products and services
Designer babies (gene editing)
self-driving cars
Carbon credit trading [see more from my previous newsletter]
5-minute cities (designer planned communities where everything you need is a 5 minute walk)
AI generated video entertainment
NFT (non fungible tokens) [see ‘Opportunities in collectibles’ newsletter for more]
nuclear fusion/fission
Clean water & desalination as water becomes scarce
modular housing (trailer homes)
Protein design
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Cameo-style businesses
(My First Million #137 at 53:15)
A cameo is where an ordinary person pays a famous person to send a video of themselves to a friend for something like “happy birthday”. A character from the TV show The Office (Kevin Malone) has made $1 million in 2020 by doing $195 paid cameos for people, according to Shaan.
One idea: There’s many countries where cameo services are not popular, such as Indonesia. If someone started a cameo service there they may have such a big head start it will be popular.
Second idea: Why not use Disney characters for cameos? So you would pay for Elsa to call your daughter and tell her happy birthday. This could be a part of Disney+. You could substitute Disney for Blizard game characters, etc. Shaan calls this idea “absolute gold”.
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Business opportunities in the massive OnlyFans market
(My First Million #137 at 57:00)
It is estimated OnlyFans does over $1 billion in total annual revenue.
A guy started OnlyFansMetrics.com where he tracks OnlyFans models with estimates of how much they make. He currently has about 500 people in his database but if the model is not in his database, you can request it and he will add it.
Kayla (from the challenge) makes $133,000 per month on OnlyFans.
How can you capitalize on the OnlyFans trend? Why not start an online marketing firm offering services directly to OnlyFans models? You could target the OnlyFans models and convince them to let them help you for free—you would only charge them a percent of profits above what they are currently making (using an Income Share Agreement). You could teach them how to market themselves or do the marketing for them and pay for the marketing. That way there is no cost to the models.
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Podcast discussion group service
(Source: Product Ideas podcast #2)
Brian Burrous guested on Product Ideas podcast and shared some interesting startup ideas.
The first idea from Brian was a Podcast discussion app. Podcast popularity has exploded. Mainstream adoption might even be around the corner. But one bottleneck is continuing the conversation with friends after the podcast episode is over.
How to jump on this idea: Could someone create a platform that allows listeners to get together online to discuss each episode? If the platform allowed audio or video, the discussions could even be recorded and tagged to the podcast episode which would make brand new content. You could use the service Capiche.FM which allows groups of people to call into a “conference line” and it will live-stream, record, and publish your conversations automatically.
A simpler solution may be to offer a type of match making service where people would pay you to connect like-minded people together based on their Podcast listening or book reading. You can make is easy by organizing Zoom calls. You could create a simple landing page that asks your for your email and your favorite podcasts. Using the submissions you could match people or groups of people together.
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‘No-Code as a Service’ for small businesses 11:40
(Source: Product podcast Ideas #2)
There are probably tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) small businesses that are stuck using either paper forms or excel spreadsheets as a critical point of operating their business. This could be estimates, recording customer data like dimensions of rooms for contractors, customer databases.
You could create an agency that works one-on-one with these small businesses and create an easy, no-code app, website or platform that will make them more organized and more efficient at what they do. This could be done in a short period of time.
If you stumble on a large enough problem that many companies need (probably in the same niche), you could create it as a product.
How to jump on this: I like the fact that you could get going pretty quickly with little or no upfront cash. You simply need to teach yourself the no-code tools and find your first client. Buildbase is one such no-code tool that helps you create SaaS type products and offers combined functionality of popular no-code platforms such as Airtable, Webflow, and Zapier.
It’s also very hard for this idea to be oversaturated due to the sheer volume of small businesses out there and the different niches that could use this service.
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A shitty social network app
(Source: Product podcast Ideas #2 at 33:00)
Social media has it’s downfalls well-known to most of us. It’s addicting, Facebook has turned into a dumpster fire, it’s made us all narcissists, it was designed to exploit our psychology, etc. There’s a growing movement of people who have deleted Facebook, Instagram and others. Is this a revolt?
However, social media can be a useful tool that can help us connect with others.
So how do we reconcile these realities? How about creating a social network that is purposely ugly and cumbersome but still serves the primary purpose of connecting us with other people?
It could be an interesting marketing tactic as well: “We created an ugly app with a pretty purpose” or something like that. This would allow you to jump on the anti-social media trend.
How to pounce on this idea? I would create this shitty social media network to look something like the out-dated, yet wildly successful Drudge Report or perhaps Craig’s List. They are super simple designs but completely serve it’s purpose. You could use a no-code tool to build this thing out yourself without funding—making it bootstrappable. This would be a perfect product to submit to Product Hunt to gain initial traction.
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