The Business of Eatting Competitions, RoadKill & Patent Trolls

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.

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:

The reason horse removal prints money while road kill doesn’t, comes down to:

1. Government vs. Private customers

2. 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:

1. Date of monthly payment (with email reminders)

2. Simple amortization table

3. 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

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.