Good morning to all new and old readers! Here is your Wednesday edition of Capital Ideas, exploring four startup ideas and five success stories from the last week to help you find your next business or investment.

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Today’s edition:

Cheers,
Alex

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Ideas

1: Amazon for Buying SMBs

SMBs are making a comeback.

But were they ever really out of fashion? 99.9% of US businesses are considered SMBs, and they’ve been a massive part of the US economy’s success.

But it’s no secret that the SMB business owners are aging. 51% of SMB business owners are over the age of 55. And with the new generations uninterested in taking over, the question remains: what happens to the SMBs out there?

People like Codie Sanchez have brought that question to the forefront of the internet—millions of people are now interested in buying small businesses.

So here’s the idea: Building an Amazon for SMB acquisition. Competition exists in the form of BizBuySell, Flippa, and Empire Flippers, but none of them have made it as easy as it could be.

A marketplace for the new generation consumer, one that doesn’t have to rely on business brokers and outdated technology—sounds like it would be the opportunity of a lifetime.

2: Lemonade for Companies

Insurance is one of the most complicated industries to ever exist.

Health insurance, Car insurance, Homeowner’s insurance—they’re all extremely complex, and a hassle to get right. And it’s not something you can afford to ignore, because you’re legally obligated to have it.

Lemonade took one market (Renter’s Insurance) and made it much more accessible for the normal human. Using AI and chatbots to process claims quickly and efficiently, the company quickly grew to a billion dollar valuation.

The idea here would be to take Lemonade’s playbook and apply it to another industry—Commercial insurance.

Commercial insurance is designed to protect businesses from financial losses associated with various risks and unexpected events. And it’s a hassle to get.

But a simple UI chatbot that asks for information about your business, then tells you what insurance you need to buy, and allows you to purchase that insurance on the spot would solve a lot of headaches for business owners.

As the commercial insurance market cap only continues to grow, this is an opportunity that’s ripe for the taking!

3: Next-Gen Autocomplete

Imagine a world where you won’t have to write another boring corporate email again.

Google has taken the first stab at this in Gmail, where the autocomplete finishes your sentences, but without much personality. It just takes the most common phrases and tries to match them with the few keywords that you’ve already written. It’s also hard to predict when the autocorrect will pop up or not.

So the idea here is a browser extension that learns your writing style and makes you 10x faster at email (and anything else you write).

The ideal experience would be deeply personalized based on everything you've ever written and could author an entire email with just a couple of words of context.

A step beyond that might be using the multimodality capabilities of today’s AI models and all the context you have to become a second brain.

Though Grammarly has taken some steps to getting there with their AI writing assistant, there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

It’s a bit hard to nail exactly what the market cap for this technology is, given that the tech is so new. But some early estimates make it look positive, with an estimated global market cap of $175.3 Billion by 2033.

Seeing as we’re still early, this could be a home run project if done right.

4: Self-Updating CRM

If you’ve worked at a company at any point in time, you’ve likely used a CRM. Some are simple, with limited functionality—not much better than using an Excel sheet—some are very complex, like Salesforce.

But no matter how advanced a CRM is, they require a lot of hand-holding. Manual data entry, mass updates, data cleanup—it’s all included in the package.

In the age of AI, that seems unnecessary. And even though Salesforce has been working on an AI model with Einstein, it’s nowhere near as usable as it could be—and I’m willing to bet other CRM systems are in the same boat. Most have been around for so long that introducing AI into their outdated code will take longer than expected.

It’s the perfect opportunity for someone to come along and make a major disruption in the industry - a CRM that uses LLMs for real-time data capture from internal data and the internet to enrich data, update communication sequences, and supercharge GTM teams in their roles.

The CRM market is massive, and the technology has been relatively unchanged since Salesforce introduced the cloud—the perfect time to get something going.

Success Stories

> What It Takes to Reach $100M+ Revenue as a Startup | CircleCI (Read it here)

> Lens End Media acquired by BrandStar (Read it here)

> Quit His Job to Make $480K/Month (Read it here)

> Jovan Meljevic, Founder of BountyHunter (Read it here)

> Thrive Market: Nick Green (Read it here)

That’s all for today, folks. As always, please give me your feedback. What do you want to see more or less of? How can we make Capital Ideas more useful to you? Other suggestions? Please let me know.

Have a wonderful rest of week, all.

Cheers,

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