Idea
The $5 headshot app with a built-in viral voting loop
Trevor pitches a $5 app dedicated solely to taking and editing headshots, with a sharing mechanic where you send 3-4 favorite shots to friends to vote on. The voting (like 99designs) both confirms your best pic and drives downloads.
“Pay $5 for an app that all it does is takes a headshot, editing tools specifically for a headshot, lighting, the whole thing. And the way that you grow it is you can share like 3 or 4 of your favorite pictures with your friends with the app logo at the bottom. They vote. This worked for like 99designs.”
Steal thisBuild a single-purpose tool that solves one editing job, then turn the 'which one is best?' moment into the viral loop.
Idea
Shopify for cash-based doctors
Trevor pitches a platform that makes it as easy as Shopify for doctors to open an independent, cash-pay practice and skip insurance entirely. He frames cash-pay healthcare as a growing secular trend because procedures are much cheaper when paid in cash.
“Being a doctor can suck a lot because you lose most of your independence depending on what type of doctor you are. One way to regain that is to open your own practice. And a way to bump that even more is to like not deal with insurance, right? And just like sell to your clients, right?. And so making that as easy as Shopify to start being able to do that.”
Steal thisBuild the 'Stripe Atlas' for a regulated profession: collapse the paperwork of starting an independent practice into a few clicks.
Tactic
Turn your training school into a staffing agency, not an ISA lender
On a 'Lambda School for EAs' idea, Trevor argues that instead of an income-share agreement (hard to collect, weak selection), you become a staffing agency: train people, hire them out, and let clients buy out the contract. It fixes selection and gives a real feedback loop on training quality.
“And so instead of getting paid for an ISA, you turn into an actual staffing agency. And if you're actually good at training people, you can take someone who doesn't have the skills, turn them into someone who does, and then charge them out as an actual agency. Right. And then when, you know, if someone really likes their EA, they can like buy the contract off you or whatever. And I think that second way solves like a lot of problems.”
Steal thisIf you train people for a job, monetize by placing them as an agency rather than chasing income-share payments.
Story
The atheist Bible salesman who built a million-user app
Trevor built a free Spanish-language Bible app monetized by selling the audiobook in-app, grew it past one million users fully bootstrapped, and sold it to a public company. He started it while leaving Mormonism, then felt conflicted when users mistook him for a pastor and asked him to pray for sick relatives.
“So I started a Spanish language Bible app. That was free to download, and you monetized it by buying the audiobook of the Bible in the app. Grew it to over a million users. It was all bootstrapped, and then it got acquired by a public company. And the reason— and basically, I started it as I was leaving Mormonism, and so it was kind of something I believed in initially, but later I was like, oh, this feels like”