Starter Story - The gift that keeps on giving

Hey,

This is Pat, founder of Starter Story - every week I write this email to share the lessons we learned after talking to successful founders around the world. If you're not interested, you can unsubscribe here.

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Here are this week's stories, enjoy!

Accountability as a service 

Weight loss, improve your financials, be more organized,... there’s a new wave of apps that want to improve our lives big time.

How? Combining AI with real coaches to get the best of both worlds.

By adding a human layer, these apps are able to offer super tailor-made experiences and can really help you achieve big goals - because these coaches really stay on top of you. Hence, they can be pretty expensive.

The latest addition to the pack is this finance advice app for women that has 35K monthly users.

More niches where this approach has been successful:

• Training Amazon sellers -> $12M/year
• Nutrition advice -> $6M/year
• Fitness coaching -> $1M/year

By the numbers:

• 22% -> of people spend between $500 and $2,000 to pursue their New Year’s resolutions
• $540M -> raised by weight loss app Noom
• $75M -> raised by digital fitness coaching app Future (NBA All-Star Kevin Durant is an investor)

Our take:

This new “style” of apps could be applied to virtually any area of our lives. Improve grades, learn a new skill,... People already pay for these, this is just a new way of experiencing them.

What I love about this is that the human touch is what really makes a difference. AI solutions are neat, but they hardly get the same level of engagement. This means that technology is not an entry barrier and anyone can jump into this trend. Complicated high-tech features can come as the business grows.

Quick hitters

(1) 🌿 This $240K/year product helps women with menstrual issues. Traditionally women are prescribed pharmaceuticals to treat these. Maddie created her own solution. Every batch quickly sold out after she posted it on Instagram. Ended up selling 10K units in 9 months.

Tackling women’s health issues is often overlooked. But there are huge opportunities: $3M/year reusable menstrual pad, $120K/year app for pregnant women, $1.6M/year aluminum-free deodorant.

(2) 👔 This piece of plastic you put in your shirt generates $180K per year. They’ve sold 500K of them. Now they’ve built a second business that creates custom printed shirts and it’s killing it.

There are so many ways to make money in fashion. Some more examples: Apparel with pop culture designs ($2.4M/year), clothing brand that empowers women ($12M/year), socks brand that supports the homeless ($720K/year).

(3) 🍬 This $9K/month jawline strengthening gum was created thanks to Reddit. Reddit is an amazing resource for entrepreneurs and hustlers; we have seen its potential being leveraged in a number of ways:  This $1.4M API tool grew its userbase, this $48K/year newsletter boosted its popularity and these co-founders met on Reddit.

Also, did you know that I used Reddit to get Starter Story off the ground? Here’s a post about how I cracked Reddit to get our first users.

The gift that keeps on giving

Are you familiar with the soon-to-be $306B corporate gifting industry? 

Gift baskets, chocolates, and even those cringy branded vests were at one point everywhere.

Why? Because it’s been proven that sending gifts improves customer loyalty and makes employees feel valued (so they don’t quit).

But the corporate world is changing in 2022: companies have employees and customers all over the world. 

This company built a $470K/year platform to make gifting easier and more efficient for companies.

Investors are betting big in this space and some companies are already reaping profits:

• This AI-based personalised corporate gifting startup raised $30M
• This corporate gifting platform raised $43M
• Here’s another corporate gifting platform makes $2M/year

By the numbers:

• $100M -> raised by this corporate gifting startup
• $125B -> a year spent on gifts for employees and customers (US) 
• 40K -> gift orders processed by Giftsenda last winter holiday season

Our take:

Customers are tired of getting gift baskets. And employees are tired of getting Amex gift cards. Where is the creativity?

While we wait for the AI to completely take over, I think there is a ton of opportunity in helping companies send the perfect gifts. Employee incentives, corporate swag for events or retreats... companies are willing to pay the big bucks to get these right.

Also, if you’re a retailer or a brand, this could be a big channel to untap. Corporate gifting means large orders. This company was able to grow during COVID thanks to getting into corporate gifting.

One last thing...