8 ý tưởng khởi nghiệp nhỏ nhưng kiếm tiền khủng để lấy cảm hứng kinh doanh | Phần 5 (phần cuối)

Introduction 0:00

• This is the final video in the series on 50 small but highly profitable ideas.
• The topic is the startup category the creator considers the most promising of all covered in the series.
• The creator states profits are very good and highly passive.
• He warns this business type is not sexy and is a bit dry, but that is exactly why it has fewer competitors.
• The category is data aggregation: usually a website compiling information in a niche such as scholarships, finance, or good electronics.
• While researching these businesses, the creator tried it himself and was surprised that its profit initially ranked second among over 10 side products he has made.

Video Structure 0:46

• The video is divided into five parts.
• Part 1 covers Nomad List, the company that inspired him most in this space.
• Part 2 covers three reasons this business type has high potential.
• Part 3 covers his real experience trying it and the initial revenue.
• Part 4 goes through a list of seven other successful companies in this space for inspiration and ideas.
• Part 5 covers two valuable lessons from Pieter Levels, founder of Nomad List.

Nomad List and Pieter Levels 1:23

• Nomad List was founded by Pieter Levels, whom the creator admires because he sees part of himself in him.
• Pieter likes running many experiments continuously, each built in a very short time of 1-2 months or a few months from zero to launch.
• Last year alone he had dozens of projects running simultaneously, bringing nearly $4 million in annual revenue, about 75 billion VND.
• Nomad List is a website that aggregates and compares cities worldwide to find where is best for remote workers who also want a more interesting life.
• The idea started from Pieter's personal desire to escape the fixed 9-to-5 office routine; he realized many people wanted the same but didn't know where to start.
• Nomad List connects like-minded people so they can meet and learn from each other.

How Nomad List Works 2:26

• When first building the site, Pieter collected online data on hundreds of cities worldwide, focusing on factors remote workers care about: cost of living, internet speed, climate, city safety, and more.
• This collected data became the core content foundation of Nomad List.
• He then added a mechanism for users to contribute their own reviews and information from their real experience living in these cities.
• Thanks to that, the database doesn't only depend on available statistics he collected but is continuously enriched by people actually living and working in those places.
• The site compiles information that theoretically you could find scattered across the internet, but because it's concentrated in one place, it becomes extremely valuable.
• The creator compares it to an old phone book: everyone could ask each house for a phone number, but a book that compiles and organizes all numbers so you can look them up instantly is far more valuable.
• This is the spirit of a data aggregation website: letting users quickly compare and research without digging through individual sources.

Nomad List Results 3:39

• Right at launch, Nomad List earned over $22,000 per month, about 500 million VND per month.
• Currently Pieter earns about $225,000 per month through Nomad List and some similar sites serving the same remote-work audience.

Reason 1: It's Not Sexy 4:06

• The first reason is also why many people dislike this category: it's not sexy.
• Most people thinking about startups chase ideas that sound new and flashy, such as AI recently, and blockchain or cryptocurrency before that.
• Few think about being an information bridge, especially when the information focuses on a very niche market.
• Because of this, there is much less competition.
• The creator says a road with no people on it is wide and obviously faster to travel.

Reason 2: High Passivity 4:36

• The second reason is that it is highly passive.
• Once you've built a basic platform, you can keep earning without spending too much time maintaining it.
• If the information you sell needs frequent updates, you'll have to tend to it a bit more, but overall it's still much easier than other business types.
• Other business types require constantly worrying about production, shipping goods, or maintaining a complex application.

Reason 3: Standing Firm in the AI Era 5:01

• The third reason is that this is one of the segments that stands firmer as AI rises.
• With AI development, programming digital products is becoming extremely easy even for people who don't know much about technology.
• The downside is that competitors appear more and more, faster and faster, and products are easier to copy; your idea today could be copied tomorrow.
• In that context, companies that survive must have at least one or two of the following traits.
• Trait 1: network effect, where the product's value increases as more people use it; Facebook is a typical example because your friends are all there.
• Trait 2: being bound by law or tied to money flows that AI finds hard to replace because they involve legal processes or complex finance.
• Both traits are very hard for a new project or company to have right away; network effects and legal/money-flow niches usually require broader relationships and years in the industry.
• The only remaining trait for success in the AI era is having good information and data that others don't have.
• Even if AI helps people find information more easily, a well-organized, easy-to-search data repository remains an advantage no one can copy in a day or two.
• The rarer the information and the more only you have it, the stronger your advantage.
• Even when information is already available online, concentrating it to make it easy to find is still a strong advantage, like Google concentrating websites or online news concentrating articles.

Reddit's Data Value 7:00

• Reddit is a social network where millions of users ask, answer, and share on all topics.
• In the past Reddit let users search their posts by keyword and other criteria, but in recent years, as user-written information became rarer, Reddit hid that data repository.
• This is especially true for training AI to answer like humans, which requires data written by humans.
• Content written by users themselves, like on Reddit, has become extremely valuable.
• A few months ago Reddit signed contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to sell data to companies like Google and OpenAI for training their AI.
• If you can put in the work to build such a hard-to-compile information repository, you can sell not only to ordinary users but also sell that data to businesses, and earn through ads, affiliate ads, and many other ways.

His Own Experiment: The Idea Repository 7:53

• In the last months of last year he made videos analyzing 1,000 startup ideas from YC and over 100 ideas from a company called MF.
• After those videos, viewers were quite interested and wanted to see all the idea lists.
• He asked himself why not compile more and sell the data repository, since he already had a bunch of ideas compiled.
• This wasn't the first time he thought about compiling a startup data repository.
• In 2018 he made a toolbox to help young people start up and had compiled over 200 ideas.
• Because of limited time and technology, expanding from 200 to thousands of ideas was extremely hard.
• He had to hire a Vietnamese person to translate each idea from the English version he collected into Vietnamese, but the translation was very slow and quality didn't meet standards, so he had to read and fix each section himself to finish the 200 ideas.
• The effort didn't match the results, so he paused it at that time.
• Now with AI, translating thousands of ideas from English to Vietnamese is no longer a barrier.
• Once the biggest barrier disappeared, within a few weeks he built a repository of over 6,000 startup ideas in an Excel file.
• He didn't have a website yet, so when the video came out he sold the Excel file directly.
• There was no website and no complex ad campaign, only his video advertising the Excel file.
• He didn't think it would sell much, but in the first week he sold over 14 million VND after a few days of posting the video.
• This experience made him truly believe in the potential of this business type after his initial skepticism.
• Last month he used AI to build a simple website so buyers can access the data repository and search more easily instead of always opening the Excel file to read all the rows.
• With a website, advertising became much easier and he can run ads freely without depending only on viewers from his videos.

Hostinger Horizons Sponsor Segment 10:12

• The creator recommends Hostinger Horizons, the sponsor of today's video, for building websites quickly with AI.
• He usually goes through many steps when making a web app.
• Step 1: build a website, for which he now recommends using AI for speed and low cost.
• Step 2: host the website to keep it online.
• Step 3: find a domain and assign it to the website.
• Step 4: find a tool to store the product's data, such as storing over 6,000 ideas.
• Step 5: if the product has potential, create a separate email, such as his lienhesitung.com, so people can contact him.
• Normally these steps require different service providers, but Hostinger does it all from A to Z.
• You describe the website you want in detail, such as what it does, where data comes from, and whether user login is needed, then wait a bit and it produces a working, live website.
• You go from idea to a complete website using a single tool instead of many at once.
• For beginners wanting to test many ideas, the Starter package is best because it lets you build up to 25 different websites.
• It also helps you quickly set up a full-featured site so you can sell products from digital to ordinary physical goods.
• If you sign up for a full year, Hostinger gives you a free domain and hosting for the whole year.
• To get an extra 10% discount you can use the code y tuong.

Seven Successful Companies 11:46

• WebMD:
  • Provides information on symptoms, diseases, and treatment drugs for users.
  • Revenue of over $100 million USD per year and tens of millions of monthly visitors.
• NerdWallet:
  • Provides comparison information on credit cards, banks, insurance, and more.
  • Revenue over $380 million USD per year, about 95,000 billion VND, from commissions paid by banks and financial institutions.
  • The creator notes that anything related to finance, even being a finance YouTuber, usually earns more than other niches.
• Rome2Rio:
  • Helps users find all transport options between any two places in the world.
  • Includes information on planes, trains, buses, ferries, cars, and more, along with time and price.
  • Revenue of tens of millions of USD per year, also from commissions from travel agencies and online ticket sales.
• PCPartPicker:
  • Has a catalog of computer components with full technical information so people can compare.
  • Also checks the price history of these components.
• There's An AI For That:
  • Has a list of many AI tools on the market to help you complete any task you're struggling with.
  • Before visiting the site, the creator didn't realize there were so many AI products.
• StackShare:
  • Has data on all the technologies and software other companies use, plus comparison lists between these tools.
  • The creator says it sounds extremely niche, but its revenue reaches a few million USD per year, also from commissions for companies selling these technologies and components.
• Examine.com:
  • Summarizes thousands of studies on nutrition and functional medicine so viewers can better understand the quality of functional nutrition products on the market.
  • Hundreds of thousands of visits per month, estimated revenue of a few million USD per month.
  • Unlike the companies above, Examine.com also earns from users subscribing to read more in-depth reports and from selling data to other businesses, not only relying on commission revenue.
• Common point: each company doesn't necessarily invent something completely new; they collect what already exists, organize it, and make it easier to access.
• It sounds simple, but the value created is not small at all.

Pieter Levels' Background 14:18

• The creator says analyzing how founders work and think is more important than analyzing the idea itself.
• Pieter Levels, founder of Nomad List, currently earns nearly $4 million per year from all his projects.
• For most of them he is the sole founder, with no big team and no grand office.
• He likes building products by hand, and the creator strongly relates to his way of working.

Lesson 1: Build in Public 14:52

• The first lesson is building in public.
• This is a trend where, when you have an idea and execute it, you share the entire development process on social media.
• It's not only the final result but also from the idea stage, building the app, mistakes and difficulties, and times you don't know how to continue.
• Instead of working secretly behind closed doors, you update publicly and continuously on social media.
• While building Nomad List, Pieter shared very transparently about his ideas and early development steps.
• Thanks to that he attracted many users even before his product launched, and when he was ready to launch there was already a community waiting and following him daily.
• Building in public is also a double-edged sword: your idea can be copied early.
• But the creator believes ideas are actually cheap; what's valuable is execution: building a product, bringing it to market, listening to users, adjusting, and continuing.
• That is the part no one can copy from you.
• As concrete evidence, after years of compiling over 6,000 ideas for his data repository, he realized everything he ever thought of had already been thought of by someone else.
• Ideas are not rare; the person who dares to do is what's truly rare.

Lesson 2: Test as Fast as Possible 16:20

• The second and final lesson is to test as fast as possible and not let your idea sit and marinate.
• In 2014 Pieter set himself a crazy challenge: launch 12 startups in 12 months, meaning each month he would make a new product and launch it.
• His goal was not that each one had to succeed; the main goal was to learn fast, understand the market extremely quickly, and quickly distinguish what works from what doesn't.
• That challenge is what produced Nomad List.
• In recent months the creator has tried this approach, developing products with many finished in just 3-4 weeks each.
• These include Roc.App, the Voicote app, The Weab, and his idea repository page compiling all his small digital products.
• All were made in just a few weeks.

Challenge Invitation 17:10

• If you feel an itch and are wondering whether you can do it or should try, the creator has an attractive offer.
• If you want to join the process of testing and developing ideas quickly like Pieter but don't know where to start, join his challenge: 3 months, 3 ideas.
• Participants will join a community group doing this challenge together to motivate each other.
• He will have detailed materials to help you research and develop ideas as fast as possible, with access to AI tools to create a product for free.
• The app with the most potential will get a small prize from him to put into a Facebook marketing strategy, helping your idea get past the first break-even threshold, the threshold where many people give up.
• Because of his long work schedule, he can only commit to organizing this event if at least 50 people or groups want to join.
• If you want to register, fill in the form below.
• He thanks viewers for following the five videos in the series analyzing 50 small but highly profitable ideas.
• If you're interested in following his startup journey in the future, don't forget to subscribe.