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Today’s Edition
🪴 Urban Gardening Solution
🔔 Ring Doorbell Founder Is ‘Too Dumb to Fail’
👀 Minimum Viable Referral Program is getting a revamp
🍔 Jeet Yet? Recipe Builder
💡 Today’s Minimum Viable Idea
🪴 Gardening Solution for Urban Dwelling
IDEA: Living in an urban area can make getting fresh produce extremely difficult. High land costs, zoning regulations, and low investment in low income areas can cause food deserts in highly populated areas. Outside the occasional farmers market, there may be few options for fresh fruits and vegetables. Growing your own veggies in a small apartment is virtually impossible outside some herbs on the windowsill. What if there was a way to save floor space while maximizing growing potential allowing urban dwellers to grow their own food?
PRODUCT: Create a vertical gardening solution designed specifically to meet the needs of urban and highly populated living areas. Allow gardeners to hang the product from an exterior wall, place them near windows, or fit effortlessly on a small balcony area. Develop a subscription plan for plants that grow the best in these conditions and deliver based on seasonality and user preferences.
MVP: Stable vertical gardening solution designed to make the most of small urban dwelling spaces.
REVENUE MODEL: Transactional (pay per unit), or subscription for perennial plants or units.
EXIT STRATEGY: Sell to a national lawn care or gardening retailer trying to expand into urban areas for 6x revenue.
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🚨 Startup News 🗞️
Publication: Crunchbase News
Summary: Following extensive early layoffs by tech giants, a second wave is now reshaping the startup labor market. Employers are now flooded with experienced professionals, giving job-seekers more leverage for flexibility and alternative career paths (such as side gigs). Meanwhile, startups are trimming core teams and relying more on freelancers, enabling leaner operations and faster execution. For workers, traditional full-time roles increasingly look less certain, while startups offer equity and the promise of growth, though with higher risk. For founders, this moment presents a rare opportunity to hire top-tier talent under new terms, provided they adapt hiring and culture to the changed reality.
Spin: Now is one of the best times to startup a company. AI is making it easier than ever to stay lean and with these layoffs, you may have top talent available to you for the first time in a while. Every company starts with an idea, just pick one and GO.
Publication: GeekWire
Link: ‘Too dumb to fail’: Ring founder Jamie Siminoff promises gritty startup lessons in upcoming book
Summary: Jamie Siminoff, founder of Ring and current VP at Amazon overseeing home-security devices, has written his debut book titled Ding Dong: How Ring Went From Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door, due out November 10. He promises a “raw, true story” of building Ring, sharing moments of near failure, relentless hustle, and unexpected wins. Siminoff says he “never set out to write a book” but felt the journey, from rejection on Shark Tank to a billion-dollar exit, was worth telling. His hope: to inspire others chasing big dreams by showing that grit and persistence matter as much as invention.
Spin: Siminoff and Ring are proof that as long as one person, you, believes in your vision, you can be successful. Resiliency is an attribute that is often overlooked in entrepreneurship, but Siminoff is the embodiment of it. Ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of people would have given up when the Shark Tank panel told him his idea was terrible, but getting knocked down is part of the journey. Staying down is simply not an option for the successful.
🚂 Motivation Station
🧱 Ready to run through a brick wall or do you need an extra push?
Today’s Motivation comes from the book That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea. Sort of going with the theme from the Ring Doorbell news, Marc Randolph, cofounder and author, tells the full story of Netflix. From the first attempt to send a DVD in the mail, to being laughed out of a conference room by Blockbuster, to the IPO, this story has everything a startup founder can expect from launching a company.
🔥 HighDEA
Jeet Yet? Recipe builder app
IDEA: Inspired by the number one question my grandmother used to ask me, Jeet Yet? could be used to build recipes out of what people have available in the fridge or pantry, help build grocery lists based on preferences, or even remind neurodivergent people to eat a meal. Bonus points if you can partner with Instacart and handle all daily and weekly food needs.
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