Startup Ideas

How I Created An Annual Conference That Generates $1.6M/Year

Startup Ideas

Philip Taylor explains how he created FinCon, an annual conference and trade show for content creators and brands in the personal finance niche. It has grown to 3,000 attendees and $1.6 million in revenue in less than ten years.

Big Idea: Live events are a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader. Everyone wants to connect with the connected.

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12 Frameworks for Finding Startup Ideas — Advice for Future Founders

Startup Ideas

12 Frameworks for Finding Startup Ideas — Advice for Future Founders

“Hoping to start a company someday? We’ve gone back through our archives to surface the best advice on problem selection from first-time entrepreneurs and repeat-founders.”

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The Best Ideas are Often the Simplest

Startup Ideas, Social Media
The Best Ideas are Often the Simplest

Here are a few ideas that I came across this week that center around simplicity.

  • Venture capitalist, Nikhil Basu Trivedi, has been getting some publicity for his Canva investment “screenshot memo.” What would normally be displayed in a blog post, gets summarized in a nicely designed graphic.
  • MasterWiki is summarizing MasterClass videos for free with illustrations and text.
  • Donald Miller has a great 2 minute video on what all great marketing has in common. Good marketing is an exercise in memorization. People don’t choose the best products or services, they choose the offerings they can remember. You want your offer to be like a bumper sticker. A short, pithy statement that people will remember. (His video series is great. You should subscribe.)

It is very easy to over-complicate business ideas by adding features or services when customers want simpler solutions. The next Doopool article supports this idea. Twitter was just 140 characters. Instagram took off because of its photo filters. Trends.vc has a simple bullet-point format. What is the simplest idea you can offer? That is probably a good place to start.

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How ConvertKit got their first 1000 customers

Growth, Startup Ideas
How ConvertKit got their first 1000 customers
ConvertKit is now making $22m ARR and is on an exponential growth trend.

The company was started in 2012 with a Web App Challenge. The premise was to hit 5k/month in monthly recurring revenue in 6 months.

Two of the restrictions that the founder Nathan Barry imposed on the idea was he could only spend $5000 of his own money and he couldn’t spend more than 20 hours a week on the idea.
 
first1000.substack.com

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Startup Ideas and Opportunites with VC Garry Tan

Startup Ideas
Startup Ideas and Opportunites with VC Garry Tan
Gary Tan of Initialized Capital has a good conversation on That Creative Life about his background and startup ideas. 

Here is a good summary of the interview on Podcast Notes.

“Any industry that is not taking advantage of software is ripe for innovation.”

“The hard part is, you have to have the right idea and the right need, at the right time” 

No-Code Tools: If you know how to use spreadsheets you can run a whole business without hiring an engineer. They discuss tools like  Airtable, Notion, and Zapier.

“The new normal is going to be a tech co-founder and an influencer co-founder” – Sara Dietschy
 
thatcreative.life

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3 product ideas I’ve been thinking about

Startup Ideas
3 product ideas I've been thinking about
Jakob Greenfeld offers three interesting startup ideas in this IndieHackers post.

My favorite is:

“a Shopify app that focuses just on syncing between Amazon and Shopify and really nails the interplay between the two, therefore, seems to be an opportunity worth looking into.”
 
indiehackers.com

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Idea to Startup – Mini Series Kickoff – Picking The Startup Idea We’ll Start

Startup Ideas, Startups
Idea to Startup - Mini Series Kickoff - Picking The Startup Idea We'll Start
I really like the Idea Resume framework introduced here. Tacklebox Founder, Brian Scordato argues that the best way to build a startup is to go from Problem then Customer then Solution. Many start with the product first and that often leads to failure.

“The product needs to be pulled out of a specific scenario where a specific customer has a specific problem.

Start listening at about 10:10 for the Idea Resume part.
 
podcasts.google.com

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How to save yourself from a bad startup idea that looks good

Startup Ideas
How to save yourself from a bad startup idea that looks good
The worst kind of bad startup idea is one that looks good. Here are 10 patterns to identify plausible sounding, but bad startup ideas.
 
jitha.me

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The Beach Bum Who Beat Wall Street and Made Millions on GameStop

Startup Ideas
The Beach Bum Who Beat Wall Street and Made Millions on GameStop
This post isn’t startup related, but it’s a fascinating read about a small investor that discovered the GameStop opportunity in time to make millions of dollars off of it.

“Mike McCaskill spent years scouring the stock market and betting on long shots. Then he found the opportunity that changed his life—and helped spark the mother of all short squeezes.”
 
theringer.com

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