Good afternoon,
Most parents will pay £50/month to save their kid’s GPA. Most landlords will give you free space to differentiate their building. Most developers will pay £299/month to avoid writing documentation. Today: Three ideas that tap into desperate buyers with real budgets
Homework Tutor: The £50/Month Lifeline
Parents panic when kids are failing. They'll drop £3-10k annually on tutoring centers like Kumon, but hate the commute and rigid scheduling.
Enter the AI tutor: subscription-based homework help for £50/month. Take a photo of the problem, get step-by-step explanations (not just answers), track progress, send weekly reports to parents.
The magic? It guides students through problem-solving like a real tutor would. No cheating, just learning.
The numbers: 71 million K-12 students, £15B tutoring market, 21M already using tutoring services. Parents will pay £30-75/month for unlimited help.
Go-to-market: Start with parenting subreddits and TikTok showing grade improvements. Then leverage the ultimate growth hack—desperate parents at school pickup lines.
Why it works: You're 85% cheaper than tutoring centers, available 24/7, and curriculum-aligned. GPT-4 is finally good enough to teach. Parents are comfortable with AI now.
The exit: Prove it works, get school partnerships, expand to test prep and college essays. Target £600k ARR year one, then sell to Khan Academy or Duolingo.
Micro-Gyms: Free Real Estate, Pure Profit
Here's the arbitrage: apartment residents pay $50-150/month for gyms they barely use. Landlords have 1,500 sq ft of dead amenity space earning $0.
Connect the dots. Install a 24/7 gym in apartment buildings, charge residents $50/month, landlord gives you space for free.
The pitch to landlords: "I'll install a private gym at zero cost to you. You can charge higher rents and reduce vacancy. I handle everything—equipment, insurance, maintenance."
Unit economics per location: $47k upfront (equipment + buildout), $600/month overhead, 50-60 members at $50/month = $2,000-2,400/month profit. Payback in 20 months.
The scale play: Once you prove it in 5-10 buildings, franchise it. Charge $25k franchise fee, take 30% royalty on membership revenue. At 100 locations, you're making $60-90k/month recurring.
Why now: Post-pandemic behavior favors hyper-local convenience. Remote workers are home more. Landlords need differentiation. Used equipment is cheap.
The comp: Anytime Fitness went from 1 gym to 5,000 locations using the same convenience-over-amenities playbook. You have better economics.
Auto-Generated API Docs: Developers Will Pay to Avoid Writing
Every company with an API needs documentation. Every developer hates writing it. Current options suck: manual Markdown files that go stale, ugly Swagger output, or $500+/month enterprise tools.
The solution: Connect your GitHub repo, get beautiful interactive docs in 5 minutes. Auto-updates when code changes. No manual work.
Pricing: Freemium for public repos. $29/month for basic, $99/month for pro features, $299/month for teams. Enterprise at custom pricing.
The market: 27 million developers, 5 million companies with APIs, $2.5B market potential. Current leaders like ReadMe are at $15M ARR but expensive and complex.
Go-to-market: Launch on Hacker News with "I built the tool I wish existed" angle. Open-source the free tier for marketing. Let individual developers adopt, then they convince their teams.
Why you win: Simplest onboarding (one-click GitHub connect), automatic sync (no maintenance), beautiful output (Stripe-quality docs), 10x cheaper than alternatives.
The defensibility: Integration depth with popular frameworks, switching costs once docs are live, become synonymous with "automatic API docs."
Your weekly haul of tools, links, and discoveries worth stealing.
Five things worth stealing time from your day.
Five quieter corners worth a click this week.
A clear-eyed breakdown of why most SaaS plateaus at “comfortable” (Julian Shapiro)
What actually happens after a tiny startup gets acquired (Acquire.com)
A founder documenting slow, profitable growth in public (numbers > vibes) (Transistor)
Why “default alive” beats blitzscaling almost every time (Paul Graham)
An unusually honest look at failed indie products and why they stalled (Indie Hackers)
That’s it for today.
Got an idea you want feedback on? Just reply—I read every one.
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Tomorrow: Carbon credits, pet tech, and no-code analytics.
See you in the morning, Connor
P.S. Saturday’s deep dive: “Audience Is Not Demand (And Why It’s Killing Your Startup).” If you’re not subscribed, click here