🔨 3 Pre-Revenue Startup Ideas Kernalers Are Building

Joel Hansen

Jul 23, 2021 • 8 min read

Howdy Builders,

Who else is still fired up from that game 6 thriller? 🏀 Well, let me tell ya. Giannis Antetokounmpo wasn't the only one making headlines with his rebound game. The crypto market took a big tumble dropping under $30k on Monday but has recently bounced back after a couple of you Kernal whales piped in.

Today's breakdown is spotlighting ideas that members are trying to build. Cuz at the end of the day, that's what it's all about. Let's riggidy roll. 📰

👏 Warm Welcomes:

Meet our latest hustlers and capital allocators that have joined the fold:

Lance Priebe was 1 of 3 co-founders at Club Penguin 🐧. After starting, scaling and then selling that household name to Disney for $700 million, he transitioned to SVP of Creative at Disney Interactive. Since then, he's moved on to launch two studios: RocketSnail Games and Hyper Hippo Entertainment. Wanna leave a good first impression?

Chime in on his latest startup idea. He may just hire you to help build it...

Emily Davies is a Partner at Linde Equity and a recent 30 under 30 recipient. Davies, who leads the fund, has tripled its AUM (assets under management) in three years, to $96 million. For those of you spinning up social impact startup ideas, she could be worth connecting with.

Connect with her about your idea or question

Nick Loper is the founder and chief hustler of Side Hustle Nation. A community of side hustlers focused on the path to financial independence. His podcast has 100,000 listeners and his newsletter goes out to 55k+ startup folks. We can't wait to see what ideas he drums up on here.

Slippidy Slide into his DMs

Emily Binder is the founder of WealthVoice, an Alexa marketing platform for financial professionals. Since we're all fans of launching ideas, here's a sneak peek of some recent launches she's behind: 3 podcasts since 2012, 2 startups (a marketing company and a voice CMS), and 2 rated Alexa skills. Here's the graph of why you should keep an eye on her startup:

Phil Starkovich: Ever tried to grow your youtube channel? You'll have heard of the company Phil co-founded and led as CEO for 6 years. The name: TubeBuddy. It has millions of downloads and is used by over 500,000 creators daily. Got a video idea to pitch? This is your guy. And he's likely friends with all the Youtube OGs 😉

Follow Phil on Kernal to get notified about his ideas

3 Startup Ideas Kernalers Are Building:

Ideas are great, but seeing you build them is even better. To keep the momentum rolling, we wanted to spotlight some of you founders spending late nights building out your startup ideas. The theme we were digging for in this newsletter was startup ideas based on communities.

Readers, if you're interested in the concepts, get in touch with the founder. That is what this newsletter is all about. 🔥

Solving Loneliness for Seniors by Oded Rochman

Loneliness among seniors is at an all-time high. Nearly 1/3 of all seniors live by themselves, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s close to 13.8 million seniors ageing alone.

COVID has been difficult, but it's also rapidly accelerated tech adoption among seniors. When Obded saw the trend of loneliness mixed with the rise of mainstream video chat, he had the startup idea for Pastime: a platform to connect seniors to build relationships.

After testing it some early users, they've been impressed by the results. Some #'s:

over 250 events in less than 3 months
50% Weekly retention
20% daily retention
450 registered seniors

Some other keen investors have already bought in on the idea and he's managed to secure 50% of his fundraising goal. He's hoping to finish the round with one more strategic investor who has a B2C background. He's also looking for anyone that can help increase their awareness in the seniors market and a couple advisors. If your grandma is a Tik Tok influencer, you better step up for an intro.

Wanna chat? Email Oded or check out his website for more dets.

A Marketplace for Outdoor Experiences by Milly Tamati

For the past 10 years, Milly has been living in some of the biggest concrete jungles in the world. What she's found is that she's actually happiest and healthiest when spending time outdoors. After doing some digging, she realized he wasn't the only one searching.

She found out that the average American spends 11 hours per day looking at a screen. And Over 60% of adults report spending 5 or fewer hours outside in nature each week. The problem she wants to address: there is no centralized place for people to discover and book these outdoor experiences. 🗺

So her startup idea is: Rooutes: the go-to marketplace for unique outdoor experiences.

In her startup sheet, she points out:

global adventure tourism market was valued at $586 billion in 2018
it's projected to reach $1.6 trillion in 2026,
and has a CAGR of 13.3% from 2019 to 2026.

Milly thinks there's a huge opportunity to spearhead an education campaign on mental health, getting outdoors, and providing a marketplace to find an activity close by that you can easily engage with.

Her monetization strategy has 3 tiers:

If she gets the right type of validation, Milly's goal is to build this. She's asking Kernal users for feedback on the idea, to connect if you'd like to join the team and to send her a note if you'd like to learn more about the fundraising options. You can read her business plan on Notion or send her an email to connect directly.

Read up and vote on her Kernal idea below:

Tinder for Travel Partners by Sakshi Shukla

On the note of travel, here's another summer-themed idea to get your brain spinning. Our team first noticed Sakshi from a viral tweet of hers that shared a travel startup idea:

With over 11,000 likes and 1,600 retweets, we had to reach out to let her know about Kernal. She was intrigued by the idea and said she'd love to check it out. She's recently joined, set up an account and has re-purposed that idea onto Kernal to start looking for fundraising and a product roadmap if she gets the right level of conviction.

If you're someone that has experience in this space, leave a comment on her idea. You can also tweet her to let her know you'd like to learn more next steps.

Startup Zingers:

🍋 Level up the lemonade stand: Snag Shopify's free startup kit built for 9-12 year olds that wanna learn about the startup world.

🎧 Club-what? Remember the audio app your best friend told you to download last fall but you "needed" an invite code to access? It's called Clubhouse and they just opened up to the world.

👷 Test Test: Dorsey took a page out of Alex Ohanian's playbook (hopefully he asked) and begins testing a dislike button for Twitter.

😏 Got cash to burn? Spend it on the latest NFT making waves: a handwritten job application from 18-year-old Steve Jobs.

✨ Watch out Mcdonalds: MrBeast Burger is now ready for pick-up in 800+ locations in the US, Canada, and the UK, and is asking for collabs on menu items.

😏 The F word: According to CB Insights, $1 of every $5 in venture last quarter went to fintech. Sounds like a kick to toss up some Kernal one-liners in this space.

Members Making Waves

💭 Dream job: Read how Kernaler, Dru Riley of Trends.vc, built a six-figure, one-person newsletter.

💰 A-List Investor Group: If you're on Twitter, it was hard to miss Andrew Gazdecki's big news this week. The founder of Microacquire spilled the beans and raised another $3.5m ($6.3m total) from 50+ entrepreneurs whom he (and 99% of the startup world) respect.

⚡️ Innovation Challenge (with cash on the line): Got a Kernal idea you wanna throw in the ring? Submit it to Leauge of Innovators' Innovation Challenge by Aug 5th for cash and startup prizes. Kernal members, Manisha and Joanna are game to chat if anyone has questions.