Hello everyone!
I have one non-public hobby. I collect startup ideas from all over the world. Most often, I am interested in online startups or projects that seriously rely on online as a source of new clients. Perhaps my findings will be useful for your projects or businesses too. I will try to publish ideas that interest me every week.
If you write in the comments that you are interested in this topic, I will try to make such posts with special love😍
#1 Airbnb for IT training
Slip.so is a platform that helps developers get their training courses up and running quickly.
The startup performed at Y Combinator's just-held demo day on September 1st 2021. The guys raised $ 125,000 in investment from Y Combinator and this is only the first round. Y Combinator alumni are raising even more after the demo day.
The platform includes everything you need to launch a course - tools for creating lessons, hosting courses, registering and accepting payments from users.
An interesting feature of the platform is the ability to launch pre-sales of your courses indicating how much money the author is going to raise in order to decide to launch it. The founders of the startup decided to cross the training platform with the idea of Kickstarter, and this clearly makes sense.
Q: Why does almost no one single out developers as a potential "creator" category?
There are a lot of developers. And there are many who want to become a developer or learn new skills. And the demand for developers continues to grow. And they have a lot of specific topics for discussion. That is, the topic can be very rich.
You can probably think about what other services are popular in other areas and adapt them for the developer audience.
#2 Try to buy
Smytten.com is an Indian marketplace where you can buy first samples, and then normal packaging of goods, if you like them. The startup focuses on luxury brands that are too expensive to buy from without a sample.
On August 24, 2021, the guys raised another $ 6 million in investments.
The catalog contains products from more than 500 brands. Product categories are varied: beauty and health, perfumery and cosmetics, food and beverages. The marketplace also features products from well-known brands, but the main focus is on D2C products (Direct-To-Consumer), that is, products from smaller and less well-known manufacturers.
A very interesting mechanic of attraction to purchases.
When you register on the site, you get 6 points that you can spend on purchasing probes.
To actually get them, you need to pay Rs 199 ($ 2.71) for “order processing and delivery”. After a while, this money is fully returned in the form of a cashback. This cashback can be returned to your bank card or left to purchase full versions of goods on the marketplace.
When you buy the full version of the product, you again receive points (their number depends on the price of the purchased product). You can again spend them on buying probes.
This startup has created a good selling mechanic with positive feedback. The more you buy, the more opportunities you get to try something new. The more you try new things, the more you buy. And so on in a circle to infinity 😉
It is worth noting that, judging by the reviews, the prices for full versions of products from Smytten are higher than for the same products on Amazon or Flipkart. However, the startup has 5 million customers. And this proves that there are a significant number of people who are attracted by this mechanic, and who are willing to pay a little more for the opportunity to try and buy.
I think, that the number of D2C brands in other markets will also grow. This is an inevitable trend as the entry threshold for contract manufacturing continues to decline, while the volume of e-commerce continues to grow. And all of these D2C brands need an adequate range of marketing channels.
An additional plus is that the market for D2C brands is international. Most manufacturers don't care which country they ship to. The main thing is to buy it there 😉
#3 Don’t break the bank on beauty
Brandefy is a community for people who use cosmetics and personal care products. But the real core of the service is the collected and replenished database of manufactured cosmetics with a list of ingredients and the price of goods.
On August 16, 2021, the guys attracted another $ 1.7 million in investment.
Technically, the community is a free mobile app (so far only for iPhones) with half a million downloads and an Instagram account with 250,000 subscribers. Content is a description of personal care procedures, a video comparing the effect of using different cosmetics, reviews and product reviews.
They use this base for an algorithm that compares the ingredients of beauty products and their price. If the ingredients are significantly the same, but the price is significantly different, the service compares them manually in more detail and puts the resulting reviews as a guide. This guide helps users achieve the same results as with expensive tools, but at a lower cost.
In September, the startup is set to launch beauty products under its own Skincall brand.
#4 Money on the fact that someone is tired of explaining
Tango.us is a tool that helps you create illustrated explanations of how to accomplish a task in a browser.
On August 24, 2021, the guys attracted another $ 5.7 million in investment.
The main audience is companies that can use the explanations created with this tool to:
1 - faster introduction of new employees
2 - more effective answers to customer questions by support staff
3 - clearer online instructions for users of your product
Explainers are created in three steps.
Step 1. Recording a sequence of actions. To do this, a browser extension is used that monitors the actions being performed and
a) automatically breaks them into steps (selected an input field, entered data, clicked a button, etc.) and
b) automatically takes a screenshot of each step.
Step 2. Editing a recorded sequence.
At this stage, the resulting steps can be deleted, moved and new ones added. At each step, you can add and edit descriptions and screenshots.
Step 3. Saving and / or sending explanations.
The explanations themselves are saved in the service. Links to these explanations can now be sent to other people or the explanations themselves can be saved in a text-picture form within documents.
The main goal is to create a centralized knowledge base of the company from such explanations. The base itself is a directory in which the company itself can start the necessary topics and sections in which to place the necessary explanations. Access to different sections of the catalog is regulated by access rights. Therefore, part of the catalog can only be for internal use, and part for public access by users of the company's products.
It seems that in the corporate knowledge base market, the winner is not the one who sells the most advanced knowledge base tool. But the one who first realizes that you need to sell a large library of ready-made content, to which a tool for its expansion and customization will already be attached.
Most companies use in their work not only and not so much their own written internal software, but quite standard and well-known programs such as Salesforce, Zendesk, etc. And not all of them have good catalogs of simple explanations (how to do this or that). Moreover, in such a way that these standard explanations could be easily customized for the configurations used in a particular company.
In general, it turned out to be a bit of a philosophical theme 😂
#5 Like Instagram, but for podcasts
Callin.com claims they have discovered a new category they call "social podcasting." In essence, they spliced a voice social voice network like Clubhouse and a podcast library, adding one incredibly important detail.
On September 2, 2021, the guys raised $ 12 million in their first round.
Working with the service begins with the fact that the author creates a live audio event in the application, to which he invites guests to listen to it and be able to ask the author questions in real time. This event is not a room (round table), but something like a radio talk show, where the presenter himself connects guests one by one from the list.
So far, everything is very similar to Clubhouse, but no😂
Every such show is recorded. The service has a built-in audio editor that allows the author to edit the recording of the show. And that's where magic comes in. The author does not edit the sound file, he only edits the text of the recorded show, which the service creates automatically after recording the audio track. And at the output he gets a sound file, which contains only the text that he left.
A small but important detail. In the textual version of the audio tracks, interjections like "mmm" are deliberately left, which we all slip through in live speech. With the help of the editor, we can also clean them up.
The edited sound file, which contains only the text we need, can already be uploaded by the author to the service as the next episode of his podcast. Or even export it to share it on other platforms.
People learn about live events and new episodes uploaded using the usual method of social networks, by subscribing to the authors of their interest. Using the same editing technology, subscribers can also create short clips with the phrases they like from the show (Highlights), which they can share with their subscribers.
See you next week!
Cheers Gally