SaaS, Marketplace, Beauty Box, and more startup ideas

The following is a transcript from a Founder Insights podcast episode – these transcripts are produced by a third-party natural language processing algorithm, and are not checked word-for-word by humans for complete accuracy—so, there may be some errors or typos. You can listen to the podcast in full embedded below, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to never miss an episode.

Rachel Sheppard  0:01 

Alright, welcome to our sixth episode of The unfiltered podcast. I'm Rachel Sheppard, Global Marketing Manager at Founder Institute. I'm joined here by Dustin Betz and Mike Suprovici - you guys want to introduce yourselves?

 

Mike Suprovici  0:13 

Hello everyone. My name is Mike I lead the alumni success group here at the founder Institute. And our role is to help our alumni companies scale and we do that in any way that we can sometimes we do it via one on one advice on a times it's through various other structure programs to help founders to to alumni breakout

 

Dustin Betz  0:36 

and my name is Dustin Betz. I do community and content marketing at the founder Institute. So we work with our or graduate portfolio companies, featuring them on our blog and our newsletter, doing interviews, things of that nature.

 

Rachel Sheppard  0:49 

Awesome. Alright, so today, we're going to run through all of the startup ideas that we've received in the past few weeks. Thank you to everyone for all of your submissions, and we're going to give the honest feedback, it's going to be brutal, direct, and unfiltered. Let's get started. I've made from Singapore says my company East stack is developing a SAS platform for offline and online merchants to help them engage with their customers by self serving from out of box loyalty programs, tiered loyalty, etc. We have an ethical API first approach where consumers can choose to monetize their own data by anonymizing it and providing it to brands to understand their preferences. And we learn a we earn a percentage of what is given to consumers.

 

Mike Suprovici  1:35 

Okay, so it sounds like this is an API company from from what I gather here, unless unless I'm mistaken, so basically, then that means that your customer is the e commerce company from from what I gather here as well. And, and so in your pitch, it was kind of like a lot about Kind of what you do, but I'm not really sure what problem you solve for the e commerce company. Is it that, you know, you help give them more exposure or what exactly like, you know, your API? How did the API serves? Right? And so what I would do with this is like, I would almost redo the pitch and do it backwards and be like, hey, XYZ e commerce company has this hair on fire problem. If you're not familiar with that term, it's basically just think about it. If you if your hair was on fire, what would you do? The first thing you would do is you would try to, like fix that problem. Like if nothing else, you drop everything kind of thing, right? So you'd mentioned, you know, this company has this type of hair on fire problem, and then I would go deep into trying to figure out kind of like how you solve it, you know, the ethical, like API thing. Okay. I mean, it's kind of an interesting, an interesting angle, I would say, does the customer care, right? Like that's the only thing I would say, before I would go down that path because it's a little bit Using, again, where you're trying to do, you're trying to really protect people's privacy and stuff like that, which is cool. But again, this is one of those things where since your customers really like the e commerce company, you need to kind of figure out what's what's valuable, what's not, right. So just just think about that.

 

Rachel Sheppard  3:16 

That's good feedback. Awesome. Alright, so David from Sacramento says my startup is called match it. It's a social app for the cannabis community that connects users with nearby smoking buddies and cannabis dispensaries match it will be a lifestyle brand and offer great perks to the cannabis community. What makes us different will be our strategic partnerships with everyday apps like Lyft, Postmates, doordash, and Netflix.

 

Mike Suprovici  3:41 

Okay, so I on this company or for your company, I would really, I think it'd be really hard for you to do both things. Well, so you said I'm going to match you know, with people with their smoking buddies, and then you know what, like, like, partners and things like that. Would folk focus on one right and figure out which one is that where the there's the most value in the transaction and, and where you can actually monetize the transaction to I think, you know, if you you want to talk about building like a brand that's like sustainable? Well, you need to you need to monetize it, you know, and I'm not really sure how easy it is to monetize a transaction when people are getting together to basically like smoke together, I guess, or however you want to whatever you do, you know, either brownie. But I think that it might be it was some way for you to monetize, potentially, you know, combining and with it with the type right type of product or the right type of, you know, you know, you know, partner for whatever it is that you're trying to solve, right, so it just feels like that's more economical. Now, if you get one of those, right, let's say that the transaction dollars because again, I just from your pitch, I don't understand kind of the other part of it, but let's just say that transactions happening right now. Basically all connecting like the user or the The person with like a vendor or something like that, then you can you know, add this kind of cool feature about like, Hey, you know, like we can you could organize like a an event or you could organize a place where you can do that and get people together. Last thing I want to say about this is partnering with other companies like Uber and lift this is going to be very difficult for you to do you have actually a better shot at kind of trying to work with the drivers here in California there's this whole thing around like the independent whether they're independent or not, but in most cases, they are kind of like independent businesses. So think of them kind of like independent businesses. And if they're trying to figure out other ways to kind of monetize this maybe there's a way to kind of partner with the with the drivers are

 

Rachel Sheppard  5:39 

dead it's very interesting. I'm awesome. Okay, so me Hi from Bucharest says my company e parenting is developing an online platform for future and current parents to guide them through pregnancy and growth stages for their children. Our main advantages is that we understand children as we are parents, and we are in collaboration with some well known psychology Doctors and prenatal educators.

 

Mike Suprovici  6:03 

Great I, so I, you know, I'm a parent myself, but I don't understand how you would help, I guess from just from the pitch, right, and you know, like, and I think this is kind of where you actually need me to talk about some of the issues that parents house so maybe maybe you can hone in on one issue like sleep, or like sleep deprivation or something like that. And then you can use an example here is like meet XYZ parent. They're doing this. And they're, you know, the baby wakes up a lot. It's like, you know, kind of, she's in like a leap or she's having a leap or something like this. This is how you manage it, right? And then you can actually kind of build the pitch in and it can be pretty interesting. I mean, obviously, like, Look, I you know, I've been there is still there, and it's a pretty difficult, pretty difficult challenge, but I'm not really sure how you would kind of solve my problem. I do think it's helpful that you have psychologists and board and I think that's important. But I would say hone in on the use case with this kind of pitch. And by the way, when you hone in on with them use case like this, then you can get much more valuable feedback too. Because when it's like your pitches, so general like this, it's like really hard for any of us to like, go dive in deep into your like ideas and be like, Oh, well, maybe you should do this as a next up. So you know, to try to make this as actionable as possible as I would focus in on one specific use case that a lot of parents have that you can solve really, really well. Knowing that if you can solve that use case extremely well. You can go out and do solve various other use cases. Because once you're in you're in, right, like once you have a product that solves a big problem for a parent or a, you know, set of parents, then you can add additional features that can help right and so hone in on one of the most like pressing issues that you know, that the parents seem to have in common and you can you you notice from being parents, but it's also there's a way to validate that with by looking at the forums and things like that, and it Just go from there. Right? So like nap schedules are like one of them, for example, right?

 

Rachel Sheppard  8:04 

Yeah. And it was unclear to me it's like by collaborating is are they just getting advice from psychologists, doctors and prenatal educators? Are there? Is there also telemedicine involved? Like, you know, what are the other features associated with how they're helping people? That was unclear? Yeah. Okay.

 

Dustin Betz  8:20 

Yeah, I think by narrowing it as well, you know, you'll get closer to basically a path to monetization as well, by really defining the value because, yeah, kind of like Mike was saying, it's very broad. There's a lot of forums. There's a ton of information out there. But yeah, by narrowing it, it'll be clear what the value is, and then how to go forward.

 

Mike Suprovici  8:37 

And that's also how you monetize it, right? Because you're going to monetize it. Let's say you have a marketplace of psychologists for for parents and you. Let's say I wanted to hire a coach, right? That's a very different way to make money than if you provide me with a subscription app that can provide me with various different things both both work really well right. Like you know, if you look at the mindfulness apps, particularly call headspace right now. They're their billion dollar businesses, right? So you can definitely create some sort of freemium or even just, like just premium, like literally, thing and it can be very, very valuable because if you're solving an acute need, right, so just just think about that.

 

Rachel Sheppard  9:16 

All right. Peggy from Dallas says my company super chill HQ is developing content to help burned out 30 somethings start making changes to become more satisfied with their lives. Our competitive advantage is providing resources about everyday life and mindset upgrades with a dose of levity mixed in along the way.

 

Mike Suprovici  9:36 

That's super chill.

 

You know? Okay, so if it's if so if this is a content of this is a content play?

 

You first you have to identify the people that feel this way, which is one one difficult thing to do, but then you gotta kind of figure out what Which ones are wanting to kind of do something about it? Right? And so I'm not really sure kind of what the business is, given what you've said here. But if if if you were able to kind of identify this, this target market of, like you said, like 30 somethings that are kind of feel stuck and are look are actively looking for first for ways to kind of improve their, their, their kind of like the the next thing, you know, in their, in their career and things like that. I think that there's there's definitely like, you know, there's definitely value to what you're providing, you know, I'm just not really sure how you are doing it. I'm not sure that like you just giving people just advice is going to be a business. You know, like, it's really difficult to be in the content space in general. Let's just kind of put it out there, right, like you're seeing what's going on with all the news publications, okay, that's like those aren't Content pieces. And it's harder and harder and harder to monetize that. You can monetize it through ads, you can monetize it with this or whatever. But I think it you know, given what you're telling me, it seems like it's a very, very, like, big problem very challenging problem. And for if you can find people that are desperate enough for this, and I'm sure that there's quite a few, then you can probably charge people a lot of money to basically solve this problem for them. Right. And I think that maybe content is one of the problems but you can almost be even more high touch with something like this whether it's to introduce them to like a career coach or just the right kind of like life coach a life coach is hard because it's more just like it's super broad but like, if you just look at it just career and like career coach, that's like super data super valuable, like thing that you can actually charge a lot of money for, and you can actually build a business. So it can be like more like a marketplace. Of course, you can have content and stuff, but that's more like marketing things that you're going to do. I just don't I'm not I'm just not sure That you can actually build like an actual business that's enduring that will generate and throw off enough cash for you to be able to pay employees for very long time. By just providing content for stuff like this, I think that you, you probably need to go a little bit deeper and provide a much more comprehensive solution and charge a lot more money because like I said, like, a lot of people could assume that they have this as a very big problem.

 

Rachel Sheppard  12:23 

I could see it to being an issue, I would like to know a little more about whether or not you're trying to help them in a career way because they're burned out or if it's more like a wellness, you know, mental well being type of way. And so that wasn't really clear to me either as to which way this was going to go. So I agree with Mike, it would be nice to, to look, dig a little deeper into the model in terms of your pitch and how you're going to help people but also how you're going to help them specifically not just how it's going to be delivered. Yeah,

 

Dustin Betz  12:53 

yeah. And if it becomes a kind of connecting somebody to a personal coach, right. There could be different types of coaches for different types. wellness as well as you know, just career coaching.

 

Mike Suprovici  13:03 

Yeah, and you can use the content to funnel the person to the right coach, right? Like you use the content to kind of walk almost like a, I don't want to say like bought but kind of like okay, I read this thing then I read this other thing then oh, I think you should connect with so and so person to help you here, right? Or am I just be like an advisor, you know, like an advisor, whether it's within your company or another company, there's a whole b2b player with this, by the way, right? Like, you know, their employee retention is really a big deal, right? So you can probably go into some business to some businesses and kind of figure out how to kind of implement this so that the workforce is really, you know, really happy. Essentially,

 

Rachel Sheppard  13:42 

I've seen more and more companies pop up like that. Yeah, it's definitely getting more popular specifically as people in the US are moving more remote and you have to keep people who are in a hybrid or remote, setting happy and you have to check in with them and know if they're burned out or not. And that's a lot harder to do when someone's not in front of you and The office so awesome. Okay, so Troy from St. Louis at my company local live is a membership based app and website for musicians. It's driven by a digital engagement platform that gives each member whether a hobbyist or pro control to create their own personal music experience. We remove frustrating barriers like scheduling, organizing a teaching session, finding others to collaborate with assessing studio grade equipment and soundproof space and identifying performance opportunities, the the business becomes a franchise model in the mid term of the growth curve.

 

Mike Suprovici  14:34 

Okay, um, so basically you your target market are musicians and you are providing them the tools to basically make music easier. It's how I read this.

And we'll get to the franchise thing a little bit later, but but I I'm not, I guess I just I'm not sure. I'm not sure that there's enough Enough musicians there that need this to want to pay you so you can build a sustainable business. Now granted, like I don't know the music industry as well as you do careers, like, clearly you've made some research there. So there's, there's a couple ways to look at this right? Maybe there's a way for you to meet help musicians who generally tend to at least certainly the ones that get started tend to not have a lot of money, make more money, okay. And if you can do that, and you can take some of that transaction somehow, whether it's just, you know, people paying you a fee for your app, or just charging 2% or something, there may may be something there, particularly if you get musicians that go big, right? So if you're almost kind of like making an investment on one musician, the way you're going to make money, essentially, the way I see this becoming a big business that's sustainable is that maybe you get an early with a whole bunch of musicians that are up and coming. And one of them turns out to be the next Taylor Swift, right. And so And then you know, you kind of get to ride that wave. And you get to continue to provide help provide services for a musician like that. And, and all of a sudden, a $50 a month or $5 a month, you know, contractors and to $5 million a month kind of contract. And again, I'm just making this up, I'm trying to kind of figure out kind of like, how do I kind of scale this business otherwise, what I worry about is that there's just not enough people there for you to basically build like, again, an enduring business that you can work at full time with a bunch of employees that you can basically support them with salaries and benefits and all this other stuff, right? Because there's just like not that many musicians and musicians tend to be pretty broke especially when they first get started. And so you know, you're kind of going after like this customer that doesn't have any money. Now it's okay to go after a customer that doesn't have any money if there's enough where you can there's enough of them that ultimately become customers that will make you a lot of money, right. So like, like the startup ecosystem. For example, you know, the legal teams like Law Lawyers you know tend to basically you know, incorporate companies for very little knowing that if they can build a relationship with you and you turn out to basically build go out and raise a series A and then go get acquired then they can make, you know, hundreds if not millions of dollars on that transaction so it's almost like a marketing class for them right? So maybe there's a way to kind of think about like, applying some of that like you know, to your business in regards to like the franchise model I'm not sure how this how this applies, right? For a franchise model like you need to kind of like take this business and his brand and be able to kind of go into like a physical location usually with it and just like do really really well right, like, okay, I owned the subway, I got the brand and I can do all this stuff. So if you what you're telling me is that instead of you just being an app that provides you with the stuff you're kind of more like you know, like oh we work and I hate to use this because right now like it's not it's not the most favorable company in the press, but if you can, like provide like okay, the musician space to practice venue to go out and perform all this other stuff is like a kind of like a package deal, right? And then you can brand add, you can add like all the marketing material to it and all that, then you can probably like do that, but then it's like a different business than like kind of what you provide here, which is like this app that kind of like helps.

 

Dustin Betz  18:16 

Yeah, I think the franchise is probably like not exactly the right word that they're going for. I'm sort of imagining a service that could be very valuable for not musicians, but maybe the managers of musicians and so maybe a way to scale something like this would be to yet create a kind of like, out of the box business sort of for up and coming very beginning. Manager musicians so you know, used to bring on other musicians for themselves. And that could be potentially a way to scale it.

 

Rachel Sheppard  18:43 

Yeah, I think it's super interesting because musics in a really unique spot right now. Right? So the way all musicians make money has significantly changed in the last five years, right? So you're no longer selling CDs, you're now being paid by stream. And so it's you know, it's changed it for Everyone it's also had its effects on certain genres of music. With some people sit thinking that rock music has significantly changed and its growth has changed because shorter songs that are able to go to market faster because of streaming services are you know more along the lines of like EDM and rap and things like that are able to gain traction much faster. Whereas rock music is, is really still all about the festivals and the experience. So I think you could also dig in a little bit on certain types of genres of music. You know, I don't know specifically what's located in St. Louis, but if there are, you know, certain musicians, you can help around you and build a really good base of really good model and a good app potentially then I think you could scale out from there. Okay, Tamara from Toronto says my company finger feast is developing a seasonal subscription service to help fashion forward millennia women attained envy where the hands with a curated and on trend selection of nail polish jewelry and hand care products that take the guesswork out of everyday styling.

 

Mike Suprovici  20:07 

Well, I it, you did pick a kind of like a category that you can kind of like scale, right? Because it's like, I guess around that that the hand you can, you can kind of do much more like, let's say one size fit all, but certainly, like the product line is there's not as much like variants and like, you know, like dimension as that there would be with like clothing and other things like that, you know, you know, again, I I'm not in your target market. So I can't I can't really think of this kind of like a, like a consumer of this. But I do think that there's an opportunity to build a brand and in a space like this industry, but basically that's kind of how you want to think about the company, right? This is basically a brand This is you're trying to be like the next big like makeup line or whatever. And so with the brand, right it's it's It's all about like, notoriety about, like, people like figuring out a way to, for people to come to you. Because otherwise what's going to happen is is that your cost of customer acquisition on on something like this will be very high. And, you know, because you're competing with all these other companies that have a lot of money and they're spending a ton of money and ads and things like that. And, and the lifetime value of products like this is just not that much. And you know, you can build that into your margins and things like that and make it super expensive building like a luxury brand. But I think that, you know, ultimately, it'll just be pretty pretty, still pretty challenging for you to scale. So you kind of are going down the, you know, I've forgot the lady's name, the Kardashian that has like that billion dollar like line of product, but kind of like that's kind of like the idea here, right? Like if you could build like a brand, whether it's you whether you're the celebrity or somebody else's a celebrity, and you kind of build like a lot of interesting things like on YouTube and things like where people can like really associate your brand with this, and then it becomes kind of like a, like a name, like a household name. So I, you know, what you want to do is, you know, come up with, like, you know, a really, really like interesting, like, you know, like a really interesting like name for, you know, for the company, like, I'm not really sure if you know, finger fast or feast is like super, super memorable. You know, it could be I could argue, but I would do a lot of work on that, right? Because it needs to be kind of like this really short word that everybody can just like, remember, like, Oh, I'm using this thing, right? I'm using this thing, right. So like, I will do a little bit more work on the name because the name is essentially going to be your company.

 

Dustin Betz  22:44 

Yeah, these are direct to consumer and beauty box subscription spaces, I think are pretty competitive. So you need something that's going to be unique.

 

Rachel Sheppard  22:51 

Yeah, absolutely. You're not just competing on the brand side, but you're also competing against so a lot of these subscription boxes have run into some signals. became challenges over times, right. So there's, there's all sorts of different ones. And Ipsy is one of the main ones that comes to mind in terms of the beauty industry. And I don't believe they do jewelry, but they do have, you know, the makeup and the nail polish. And so those are going to be it's going to be hard to break into this industry but and so I agree with like a larger brand play could be very significant in helping you grow. However, it's it, there's also the added layer of a lot of the products don't want to be in these boxes because it cuts margins of, you know, thoroughly in order to make these boxes affordable. So I would really look into a lot of the challenges that have, you know, developed over the last five years as as some of these major companies have, you know, experienced regarding delivering services and stuff like that,

 

Mike Suprovici  23:49 

and not knowing much about kind of we're stage and how far along you are with this idea. This is the kind of thing where you could just maybe just go with one product, right and probably uh if that product is really good and it's really good for this season or whatever then you know you can build like a loyalty and then you know people like influencers on Instagram will just use it or on the snap will just use this thing and and and get people to use it and now all of a sudden you got a customer base right? And then you can kind of build a brand from there versus like just trying to come and collect a lot of different things that might just be too difficult to execute right because not only do you need a miracle for one product to work you need like a lot of products to kind of work right so it just creates more risk right so maybe start with one

 

Rachel Sheppard  24:37 

all right, so we got one more for today. Ivan from Zagreb said my company laugh tonic is developing a system for web films and series in the idea phase and during production to validate their market and get key insights. We use an affordable but accurate testing method that combines a live online audience with machine learning will co produce validated content and help filmmakers crowdsource their projects by using the gathered Intel.

 

Mike Suprovici  25:03 

Yeah, so this is a pretty tough space, I'm sure you probably know this just because you know you've been in it sounds like you this you've got some sort of like domain expertise in it is, you know, again, I don't really know who your your customer is if it's like the YouTube star or if it's like an actual film studio. But if you are going after film studios, you probably know that this is just a really difficult market. And it's very difficult to make a lot of money and it's difficult to build an enduring sustainable business, mostly because of just like the business model of Hollywood, right. It's just just the way businesses the way the way movies are funded and how they you know, how they get funded. And, you know, the tax breaks of various different jurisdictions making the movie studio move from like Canada to like New Zealand to wherever, like everything changes and the economics change with that. And it's just really difficult to kind of build like a scalable product in that in that space. So maybe, if you're going after like this new wave of content producers, which is like YouTube's YouTube type folks YouTube stars that want to kind of like self edit and self produced a lot of their information maybe that's something that's a little bit more scalable and then you can actually like, you know, charge charge a lot of money for it, I think what's hard about like, the scalability of something like this is that you know, you know, you do need, it seems like you are you do need to kind of create like this mix between product and like a testing bed of people, you know, in regards to like co producing stuff, you know, that's carries a lot of risk as well, right? Because you're going to invest a lot of stuff a lot of money into it and you need to make sure that this works and then you are able to get a return on investment. So you know, I think maybe it's okay for you to do it for us just so you can dog food, your own product. So in other words, you can try to try your own product along to kind of figure out what works and what doesn't, but I'm not really sure that this is a long term like sustainable like strategy for you like ideally, this to This machine learning tool that you have, should be able to stand on its own. And you know, should be able to, you know, help people get an idea and validate any sort of market about it. So that's number one. Number two, I don't know that. This is how people make movies. You know, like, I don't know that people go and start a movie by saying, oh, there's a market for people that like this type of thing on Netflix. So we should go and make our own version of it, maybe, you know, you know, maybe like, at the high level with HBO and Amazon, but even they don't do that, right. They kind of try to create like their original content. So I'm not really sure that they would do it this way. So maybe there's another type of of production, where they do do a lot of this stuff and they do a ton of market research this way, and then maybe you can help with that.

 

Rachel Sheppard  27:55 

Awesome. Alright, well, thank you everyone for submitting your ideas. We really We appreciate it and we'll see you guys next time.

 

Mike Suprovici  28:02 

All right, bye bye

*  *  *

Graduates of the Founder Institute are creating some of the world's fastest growing startups, having raised over $1.75BN in funding, and building products people love across over 200 cities worldwide.

See the most recent news from our Grads at FI.co/news, or learn more about their stories at FI.co/journey.