The Startup Ideas Podcast
Niche Startup Ideas: Hedge Fund Data/Info Business, Expert Network, & AI-Generated Kids' Music
15 Jul 2024
Full Episode
There's a huge hedge fund information business. I remind every one of my friends, you know who the richest man in New York is? It's nobody who works at a hedge fund or private equity. This person's richer than Schwarzman, richer than all the hedge fund guys. Michael Bloomberg. No way.
By far, he is the richest person in New York because he sells all the information and the picks and shovels to all the finance people. When I worked at Goldman, there's a ton of information businesses. Alternative asset guys are great customers because they're very rational. If you make them money, they don't mind paying you a lot. They're not price sensitive at all. They're very urgent.
They need the thing when they need it. One of my ideas was, let's create a business... where the customers are hedge funds. And within a week, you and I could go get probably $5 billion of ad spend on Facebook, like agencies and friends who are running a lot of spend. And we survey them. And you can pay them a ton of money to survey them.
And first you do it for Meta, then you go do it for Google, then you go do it for Amazon. Then you basically go through the biggest public companies and you create information that the investment and hedge fund world uses. And I think that's easily a 10 million EBITDA business, maybe more.
This is an absolute pleasure to have you, Jesse Pugie. This guy has hundreds of profitable startup ideas lodged in his brain. You're my go-to guy when I want to jam ideas, so thanks for taking some time today.
Yeah, absolutely. Let's get into it. So what do you got for us? Well, what genre do you want? Because I can take us in many different directions. I think maybe I'll start with my formula. It might be helpful and then we can talk about some of them. Having launched a bunch of businesses, some which have been very successful, some which have failed, I think I've gotten a better formula down.
One of my favorite things is unique insight and unfair advantage. Part of unique insight is I always tell people, look at your own situation. Who do you know? One of my favorites is cross-sections of things you know. Like one of the very successful businesses we started last year is called Ox Insights, and it's helping private equity firms understand marketing.
Like we basically do diligence for them and help them get it. It's like, okay, well, those are two cross sections that were kind of unlikely bedfellows that we've been able to build a very successful business in. So that's one. And then the unique insight is like, what's the problem in there that somebody's got? An unfair advantage usually around distribution. Who do you know?
And so I'll start with one for fun. I'm not sure the audience will love this one, but when I was running Ampush, I was making like $200,000 a year doing GLG and like alpha sites calls. And the reason was because all these hedge fund dudes had like 100, 200, $300 million positions in meta. And they would call me every quarter and they'd go, what are your clients doing? Are they spending more?
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