- Biz Brainstorms by Connor Gross
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- The Business of Eatting Competitions, RoadKill & Patent Trolls
The Business of Eatting Competitions, RoadKill & Patent Trolls
designed to be skimmed
Welcome to Biz Brainstorms –
My name's Connor.
I go down weekly rabbit holes of business ideas, industry research & my own expensive lessons so you don’t have to.
Enjoy.
Today's Outline:
Eating Competitions
Roadkill Businesses
Patent Trolls
Loan Tracking Software
The Business Of Taylor Swift
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🌭 Eating Competitions
In honor of Joey Chestnut bringing home his 16th title this last week, I had to do a break down on eating competitions.
Major League Eating (MLE) does a supposed 6.2M per year (honestly, much smaller than I would have guessed)
The Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest being the biggest, typically drawing upwards of 300 million unique impressions.
The MLE has ~$500,000 in prize money annually to pay out across 80 events.
That means the average prize is **drumroll**
$6,250 (and a lot of heartburn)
While the overall prize money is low, the top athlete in the sport, Joey Chestnut, reportedly brought in over $500,000 in 2022.
Mainly a result of brand partnerships & his private hot sauce line.
His first sponsor was a no brainer, Pepto Bismol, who offered Chestnut $40,000 to promote 4 eating competition back in 2010.
If I were running MLE, I’d follow the Guinness Book of World Records playbook and have companies pay to help them host their own eating competitions.
🦘 Roadkill Business
Well I saw this tweet a few weeks back.
I met a guy who clears $500k a year with two crews and 3 total employees.
They run around Kentucky hauling off dead horses.
Your horse dies, call this guy and he’ll take care of the body.
— Nick Huber (@sweatystartup)
8:24 PM • Jun 29, 2023
So I went down the rabbit hole –
Is disposing of dead animals a good business?
I’ll save you the 45 minutes of research I did: NO
From 2 examples I read:
Shawn’s Deer Service in Wisconsin was charging $52 per deer collected. In one month he picked up 80 deer for a total monthly income of $4,160. Keep in mind he has business costs like insurance, truck payment, cleaning equipment, etc.
In 2001, Charles Brannon was working in PA. as a roadkill collector and collected $40 per deer and averaged collections of 1,800 deer a year. This means he was earning around $72,000 annually. He worked as a contractor with the state so he was responsible for his own expenses like mileage, gas, landfills, etc.
The reason horse removal prints money while road kill doesn’t, comes down to:
Government vs. Private customers
Hauling off a dead horse is a lot more work than a possum
🏦 Loan Tracking Software
An easy micro-saas play here:
There a lot of softwares for issuing loans (ie. banks & hard money lenders).
There are very few that help the borrower keep track.
And if you’ve ever seen loan documents, they are basically 80+ pages of issuer friendly terms and stipulations.
Building a simple UI helping the borrower see a broken down:
Date of monthly payment (with email reminders)
Simple amortization table
Breakdown of any specific terms on the note
Think of it as Mint for small scale real estate investors and keeping you up to date with your payments.
The only big competitor I’ve found here so far was Loan Boss.
📝 The Big Confusing Business Of Patent Trolls
Insane metric: Every year patent trolls win $29B+ in lawsuits.
A patent troll is someone who will often buy a portfolio of broad & unused patents that often shouldn’t have been administered in the first place, and then approach companies who are infringing on those patents to pay up.
They aim to settle. Usually between $50-100k (less than the cost of litigation)
These companies can be massive.
Intellectual Ventures is known as one of the biggest and have an estimate 70,000+ patents (though no one knows for sure because they have so many shell companies & subsidiaries)
🎙 The Business Of Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift is going to make $500M+ over the next year.
- 50 shows in 19 countries.
- each performance is 3 hours long.
- and shows mostly on back-to-back nights.insane work ethic. mad respect to her.
— Rohun ⛳️ (@RohunJauhar)
6:41 PM • Jul 9, 2023
Most reporters are estimating Taylor Swift will actually make $650M+ this tour.
If that’s true, it puts her as the 4th highest grossing tour of all time behind Elton John, Ed Sheeran & U2.
✌️ See you next week
-Connor
PS – I launched How To Quit Your Job & Not Run Out of Money. It’s over an hour of content with a step-by-step plan of going from W2 to self employed.