PitchBook

Cartoon dog canvas: $150 product fulfilled by a $5 Fiverr job

Shaan describes businesses that look like one thing but are humans doing cheap work behind the scenes. His test case: customers upload a dog photo, you get a cartoon made on Fiverr for $5, put it on canvas for ~$25, and sell the finished product for $150.

“The first is I found a website online that you pay $150 and you get a cartoon dog canvas. And so what you do is, it's like, I've— and I made a website to test it. All it is is You upload a photo of your dog, they send it out to like fiverr.com, they get the cartoon made for $5, and then you can get it put on canvas for like $25. They sell for $150.”

Steal thisFind an impressive cheap deliverable, wrap it in a polished niche website, and resell it at a large markup while managing the contractors.

Split expensive B2B tools and pro services across buyers

Sam wants group-buying for things businesses buy: split a $20K/year PitchBook subscription with others, or split a lawyer across yourself and five other people instead of retaining a full firm.

“I want to buy PitchBook, but it's $20 grand a year and I'm not going to use it that much, but I would love to split it with someone. So I think that's incredibly interesting. One weird idea is I think that I would want to figure out a way to use it for lawyers. So instead of having a legal firm, um, be my lawyer, I split a lawyer with you and 5 other people, right?”

Steal thisBuild a way to split high-priced B2B subscriptions or pro services across multiple buyers who each underuse the full seat.

PitchBook does ~$120M a year selling private-company data

Sam notes that PitchBook, which sells access to private-company financials (subscriptions around $25K), does about $120M a year in revenue and is owned by publicly traded Morningstar.

“Well, and they do it in a really interesting way, and they're owned by a publicly traded company. They do about $120 million a year in revenue.”