Entrepreneurship – Contactout blog

Part 2: Picking An Industry

contactout — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 04:25:55 +0000

Picking an industry

You want to pick an industry with at least 1 billion in revenue potential.

One easy way to judge this is if there’s an incumbent company, in my case, in the recruiting there’s LinkedIn, and in the sales industry there’s ZoomInfo. Where they’re both making over a billion dollars.

You want to find a big industry where consumers are unhappy with current solutions, because that’s where there’s a gap in the market to provide a solution that’s significantly better.

The biggest industries in the world are not what you think.

Most startup founders are like, Oh, I’ll just start another B2B software as a service company.

When actually, according to IbisWorld, the biggest industries globally are telecommunications, energy, insurance. real estate, automotive, banking, healthcare, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, as well as schools and universities.

I can think of so many problems that I’ve personally experienced in most of these industries.

For example, education.

School was a massive waste of my life.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are creating a new school curriculum called Summit that’s focused on mentoring, real world projects, and self directed learning.

There’s also Minerva University where you get to solve real world problems and work at 8 internships across 8 different countries instead of just learning from books.

Then there’s startup accelerators. Imagine if you can get rid of MBA programs and just do a two year startup accelerator where you actually build your business instead of learning about business.

There’s real estate and housing affordability. What if we can house people in 50, 000 houses? like the one that Elon Musk lives in.

There’s affordable energy. Bill Gates is working on a mini nuclear reactor that is safe and doesn’t melt down and which you can put in your neighborhood to source virtually unlimited energy.

Then there’s healthcare, which is the biggest expense in the US. Instead of treating disease when we get it, what if we can allow people to be healthier by slowing down and reversing the process of aging so we don’t get sick in the first place, which is what Dr. David Sinclair of Harvard University is working on.

There’s also advances in editing our DNA with CRISPR, which literally allows to be superhuman and disease free, from Nobel scientist Dr. Jennifer Doudna.

Part 1: How To Come Up With Startup Ideas

contactout — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 03:37:58 +0000

Hey guys, I’m making video series on how I built ContactOut to 8 figures in revenue. Step by step videos on how to start a startup with screen shares of our teams exact process for competitor research, customer interviews, product design, marketing and sales. Actionable and tactical stuff – no fluff.

Here’s part 1:

How to come up with startup ideas

Pick an industry (with a big market size)
Study 100 companies
Study their product
Study marketing channels
Study sales process
Talk to ex-employees, ex-founders
Talk to 50 industry experts
Talk to 100 users
Become an expert and create a 10x better solution

Picking an industry:

This is because it’s easier to inspire people to join you, it’s easier to raise money, and you also have more room for error.

If you’re trying to solve artificial general intelligence, Even if you get 1 percent of the way there, you’ll still make 10 billion because it’s a trillion dollar problem.

Whereas if you tried to start a restaurant, if you execute perfectly, your maximum upside is maybe 3 million.

An easy way to pick an industry with a massive problem to solve is to follow venture capital companies.

I like to read.

A16Z, where they talk about AI, biology and health, the latest developments in consumer technology, in enterprise software, games, crypto and lots of other stuff.

Also FirstRound capital’s review series and Khosla venture.

There’s books like Singularity is Near from Ray Kurtzweil.

They have a university called the Singularity University.

They have like a YouTube channel as well

As well as Craig Venter that worked on the Human Genome Project.

Brian Johnson, some crazy guy that’s trying to live forever on YouTube.

Gates Foundation for all the developments for global impact, like solving poverty, sanitation, vaccinations, as well as nuclear fusion.

For education, I love Global Silicon Valley, which is the biggest ed tech conference in the world. They have speakers like Sheryl Sandberg and Bill Gates and lots of famous teachers and educators.

I also like to just listen to demo days from the famous startup accelerators, like 500 Startups or Techstars. This is 20-30 companies pitching in a video and ideas in concentrated form.

Podcasts are great. 20VC and inDepth have a lot of startup stories and ideas.

There’s Marketing School from Neil Patel.

There’s AI Breakdown.

And then I like to find people on Twitter to follow.

I would go to Spark Toro, where I can enter any topic and it will tell me the top influencers, Twitter accounts, subreddits and websites to follow.

For AI there’s Andrew NG, Andrej Karpathy.