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Brainstorms Issue #7
Another great startup idea
Brainstorms Issue #7
My name is Keevin and business ideas are my thing. For over 7 years I’ve been working with early-stage companies, and have learned that a quality problem is worth more than 100 “good” ideas. Each week, I scour the web, engage my network, and use a few top-secret tactics to find unmet needs. I then outline the business opportunities behind them. Here’s what you can expect:
I’m all about quality over quantity - I’ll send you (1) well-researched, hand-selected business idea every Thursday.
All of the problem data synthesized, with meaningful context for why this idea is worth building or pursuing.
A short, tactical game plan for how to turn the idea into a revenue-generating company quickly and efficiently.
Pretty straight forward, right? Last thing - as your host, it’s my job to make sure your time spent here is valuable. So please, reply to this email if you have any questions or suggestions!
Let’s dig into this week’s Brainstorm!
Learning Digital Marketing is Challenging
“I’ve been trying to get into digital marketing and it hasn’t been easy. The problem is that learning all the different ad platforms is time-consuming and expensive. I’ve watched dozens of hours of YouTube videos and have even paid for courses. After sitting through the videos, it’s still a gamble whether my ads will work, and I’m mostly learning by trial and error at my own expense. I wish there was a better way to learn this stuff.”
- Digital Marketer
Market Background/Opportunity Size
Today, digital advertising is advertising. Online spending has been steadily increasing year over year, and the pandemic has accelerated that trend. In 2019, $325B was spent on digital advertising.
There are several types of digital advertising, but for the sake of simplicity I’m going to focus on the two most widely used - social media marketing and pay-per-click (PPC). In 2019, the two leading platforms that facilitated these types of digital advertisements were Facebook and Google:
~$70B spent on Facebook ads
~$135B on Google ads
While these are powerful platforms, between understanding all the jargon, learning each platform, and correctly executing properly on all the variables, it’s extremely challenging to get started. To make things more complicated, digital marketing is ever-changing in nature and each platform changes it’s best practices frequently.
With an estimated 10M professional digital marketers, 3M casual digital marketers, and 100,000 graduates from marketing programs each year in the US alone, it’s not surprising that there’s now a whole sub-industry for educational products and information on how to be a better digital marketer.
I see an opportunity to disrupt this sub-industry. But first, let’s dig into the major players educating digital marketers on PPC and social media marketing.
Major Players
YouTube:
This is the place where most people go to get information and watch tutorials. There are thousands of videos on YouTube (owned by Google) covering all topics related to up your digital marketing game.
Google:
Not only do they own the platform, but they’re also investing a lot of resources in helping individuals learn their platform - which makes sense. Check out Google Digital Garage and Google Ad Grants (this is only applicable for students). Both of these programs are for individuals trying to learn the platform.
Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs):
The one thing all of these solutions have in common is that they are time-consuming, boring, and teach people by using video lectures.
The Pain Points
When it comes to learning digital marketing, there’s no shortage of options at your disposal. That said, the current solutions have some pretty major shortcomings -
The learning curve is steep
With thousands of videos to choose from, it’s hard to know who’s legit and who isn’t.
Sitting through video lectures isn’t fun or the most effective way to learn
Watching videos about running ads isn’t the same as actually doing it. You’ll likely spend thousands of dollars making mistakes when you run ads in real life.
Let’s take these pains and turn them into an opportunity!
The Opportunity
Before I jump into it, I heard this idea on the My First Million Podcast and liked it so much I decided to dive deeper into it.
I see a huge opportunity for someone to create Code Academy for digital marketing.
If you’re unfamiliar with Code Academy, they are a successful tool that helps people learn programming languages. What sets them apart is their program is built on the principle that individuals learn by doing. Here’s how it works:
They’ve created a sandbox/simulator. They’ve created a beginner-friendly coding simulator that you use to learn code as you go.
You learn by doing. The main way you learn is by typing code into the simulator, not listening to video lectures.
They give you instant feedback. As soon as your code is submitted you know whether it’s right or wrong.
They give you real-world coding problems. It’s not theoretical, the code you write would be something you’d do for a company.
Taking those same ideas and applying them to a digital marketing tool could look like this:
Create a beginner-friendly interface with stock inputs that contain all of the main variables you need when building Facebook Ads
During each lesson, you build one part of the ad as you go (Setup, targeting, budget, copy, creative format, etc…)
Take what the student has built and run it through a simulation
The student gets immediate feedback on what worked and what didn’t without spending money on running the ads through Facebook.
Current Solutions
Simbound markets itself as a digital marketing simulation tool as well as a white-label simulation creator for companies. Unfortunately, it looks like their solution is only available for professors who teach at educational institutions, so individuals can’t use their tools.
GoPractice combines the format of a boot camp with the technology of a simulator. It brands itself as a program that will simulate what it’s like to help a VC backed company grow. It doesn’t appear to have a focus on digital advertising, and it’s unclear if they’ve actually built a simulator, or it’s just a word they use for marketing purposes.
Thinkful (and other boot camps)
Thinkful isn’t a simulator, but rather a digital marketing boot camp. I’ve added them to the list because they are a solution to learning through the status quo ways mentioned above. But, these boot camps are expensive and can take a lot of your time - I think you’re required to be full-time to participate.
How to Execute
If I were building this business, here’s what I would do -
Start With a Niche: Start by building a simulator for Facebook Ads targeted at B2C companies (for example). The more targeted you can be the easier it will be for prospects to ensure that they’ll learn what they need to. While you can expand into other platforms and types of marketing, focusing now will help you acquire customers and build a great solution.
Find Your Early Adopters: Focus on those who are struggling to learn Facebook ads, know they are struggling to learn, and are doing something about it. I’d hunt for people who are buying courses, considering boot camps, or attending conferences. Don’t target everyone who runs FB ads.
Build or Leverage an Audience: The best way for you to execute in the long-term is for you to build up an audience around Facebook marketing in the short-term. Doing this will give you access to thousands of potential customers, and give you the initial traction needed to raise a round.
Build a Smoke Test: I assume this project will be technically difficult to pull off. Before you invest a lot of resources in building the product, build a landing page, create some high fidelity mockups, and run a smoke test to gauge interest. This will help you mitigate some market and channel risk on the front end.
Challenges
This is A Big Idea: Most opportunities I talk about in this newsletter aren’t $100M+ opportunities - I think this one is. This isn’t a bad thing, but bigger ideas like this are inherently harder to pull off.
Technically Difficult: Google and Facebook’s advertising algorithms are a black box and highly protected - for good reason. Creating a simulation of an algorithm as complex as theirs isn’t going to be easy. I do believe it’s possible to get it good enough, but even that will take a person with strong technical chops and a deep understanding of digital advertising.
A lot of Competition: While there may not be many companies building this particular solution, there is a lot of competition when it comes to companies that teach people about digital marketing. While there aren’t services that are doing this, you are competing with experts in the field with their own boot camps, newsletters, guides, and whitepapers. Some competition is a good thing, heavy competition can make things really hard.
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Thanks for reading - now get out there and build it!
Catch ya next week,
Keevin ✌