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Today’s Edition
🛖 Turning Abandoned Buildings into Amazing Vacation Experiences
🎬 Vine is BACK - CEO Jack Dorsey on the Reboot
🏥 Startup Iambic Starting Clinical Trials on AI-Discovered Cancer Drugs
✅ Startup Checklist by David S. Rose
🛜 Find My Remote
💡 Today’s Minimum Viable Idea
🛖 Turning Abandoned Buildings into Amazing Vacation Experiences
IDEA: According to Montrose Environmental, there are over 1.5 million abandoned properties in the United States. These properties are not just homes; they run the gamut of vacant schools, old government-owned buildings like jails, and even lighthouses. Each city has plenty of options on AirBNB and VRBO, but they all offer the same thing: a clean place to put your bags down and sleep. And that’s fine if that’s what you’re going for, but they aren’t anything to write home about. Travelers are dying for a memorable and unique stay and you can give it to them.
PRODUCT: Buy abandoned properties (some are available for under $500k) and renovate them to offer renters a truly memorable vacation experience. Create a strong brand for each property showcasing the uniqueness of the listing. Many travelers want more than just a place to sleep, so be sure to include amenities that guests can’t wait to share on social media. After all, a rentable jail or lighthouse is destined to go viral.
A few ideas:
Buy an abandoned middle school with a basketball court and make it the ultimate bachelor party destination.
Buy a vacant observatory in a rural area to give renters a retreat with a night sky full of stars.
Buy an old lighthouse and rent to guests coming to the beach for a destination wedding or those looking for the best view of the sea.
Buy a warehouse and recreate Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory.
This one might be ridiculously expensive upfront, but a recreation of Night at the Museum could go for thousands per night.
MVP: Start with just one property. Renovate a building in a nearby tourist hotspot into a unique short term rental masterpiece.
REVENUE MODEL: Transactional, renters pay per night stay.
EXIT STRATEGY: Sell rental business to a vacation rental company for 4-7x revenue or sell real estate portfolio for 2-3x original sale price.
Your annual insurance check, now headache-free
When did you last review your insurance rates? Life changes, driving records improve, and insurers update pricing constantly. You might be missing big savings by not checking. Use EverQuote as your yearly insurance reset—compare trusted carriers quickly, confirm your coverage, and ensure you’re getting the best price with zero hassle.
🚨 Startup News, Trends, and Resources 🗞️
Publication: MedCity News
Summary: Iambic has raised $100 million to advance its AI-discovered cancer drugs into human clinical trials. Its lead asset, IAM1363, is a selective small-molecule inhibitor targeting HER2 in breast cancer, designed to avoid the toxicity seen when hitting EGFR. Iambic presented promising Phase 1/1b data showing anti-tumor activity and a favorable safety profile. The funding will also support two additional candidates: a dual CDK2/CDK4 inhibitor and an allosteric KIF18A inhibitor.
Spin: I present to you: the brightest side of AI. The amount of data processing needed for a scientific breakthrough is tremendous and can take decades, but thanks to AI, we are seeing supercharged advancements. The most horrible diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s can now be attacked head on. There are of course downsides of artificial intelligence like environmental and privacy concerns, but health research needs to remain.
Publication: Newsweek
Summary: The short-form video platform Vine is being revived as diVine, backed by former Jack Dorsey through his nonprofit “and Other Stuff.” The app will allow users both to access over 100,000 archived six-second clips from the original Vine and to upload new six-second videos. It’s being positioned as a “human-first” space explicitly designed to resist proliferation of AI-generated content, unlike larger platforms dominated by synthetic media. Built on decentralized protocol Nostr, diVine aims not so much to dethrone giants like TikTok but to provide a more transparent, trust-oriented alternative for creators and users.
Spin: Vine is, by far, the app that I have wasted the most time using. Brevity is the soul of wit and the 6-second time span forced creativity in a way the TikTok can’t. While some still mastered it, 6 seconds was almost not enough time to be cringy. Anyway, let’s stop talking about it and let’s watch a vine compilation.
Early access to the app launched November 13, but stay tuned for updates.
🚂 Motivation Station
🧱 Ready to run through a brick wall or do you need an extra push?
Today’s motivation comes from the book Startup Checklist by David S. Rose. Most books covering entrepreneurship will focus on strategy, successes, failures, and eccentric founders. There isn’t really a great guide or roadmap that can help you get from 0 to 1 then 1 to 2 or 10. Building a company is a lot like building any physical structure. If you don’t have a solid foundation, you can’t expect it to stand the test of time.
Find your customers on Roku this Black Friday
As with any digital ad campaign, the important thing is to reach streaming audiences who will convert. To that end, Roku’s self-service Ads Manager stands ready with powerful segmentation and targeting options. After all, you know your customers, and we know our streaming audience.
Worried it’s too late to spin up new Black Friday creative? With Roku Ads Manager, you can easily import and augment existing creative assets from your social channels. We also have AI-assisted upscaling, so every ad is primed for CTV.
Once you’ve done this, then you can easily set up A/B tests to flight different creative variants and Black Friday offers. If you’re a Shopify brand, you can even run shoppable ads directly on-screen so viewers can purchase with just a click of their Roku remote.
Bonus: we’re gifting you $5K in ad credits when you spend your first $5K on Roku Ads Manager. Just sign up and use code GET5K. Terms apply.
🔥 HighDEA
🛜 🖱️ Find My Remote
IDEA: The TV remote does not discriminate. Whether you are trying to turn on the game, tune in to Jeopardy!, or curl up on the couch for a Netflix binge, the remote could vanish with no warning. You check the couch cushions. Nothing. You get on all fours and look under the sofa. Nope. You even make everyone get up and accuse them of sitting on it. Not guilty.
What do you do? Well, we have the technology to find our iPhones; why don’t we put that same kind of tracker in TV remotes? Movie night saved.
📣 We Want to Hear from You! 📢
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