Startup Sphere Weekly #9

Hey all, it’s Vlad and welcome back to another edition of Startup Sphere 👋

Thanks again for being a subscriber! Let’s get into this week’s weekly roundup of businesses on sale for life-changing amounts of money.

Avatar creation app with an AI-powered dance feature

Asking Price: $690,000
Monthly Revenue: $12,000
Monthly Profit: $9,000

The business for sale is an AI portrait generator. Users can upload a set of pictures of themselves and get back AI generator portraits/avatars in different settings. The feature that sets this business apart from its competitors is that it can make AI-generated dance videos of the avatars you create.

What interests me most about this listing is that 80% of the total user base is from Japan. This means you have an opportunity to grow in the Japanese/Asian market without having to compete directly with giants like Lensa.

The business has 2 pricing plans. Users can pay 5$ per week, or 32$ for a year of access.

The biggest competitor in this space is Lensa, which absolutely blew up about a year ago. Everyone from Megan Fox to Lebron James was generating AI portraits of themselves. So there does seem to be an interest in AI-based avatars and portraits. However, it does make me wonder if the novelty has worn off.

Some other competitors include Wonder-AI, Photo AI, and EPIK.

👉 View the listing here

MacOS screenshot app

Asking Price: $169,000
Monthly Revenue: $4,000
Monthly Profit: $3,000

The premise of the business is very simple: a macOS app that helps you take beautiful screenshots. I believe the business for sale in this listing is called Xnapper and was founded by Tony Dinh. Tony even posted a fact sheet for the business if you’re interested.

Overall, I think it’s a great product. It generates beautiful screenshots and has received a lot of positive praise on Twitter.

My concern with taking over a business like this is that the new owner likely won’t have a large Twitter following like Tony. From my understanding, this is what drove a majority of sales.

The largest competitor in the space is CleanShot, which is doing ~$80,000 per month.

👉 View the listing here

Essay writing agency for students

Asking Price: $373,000
Monthly Revenue: $11,000
Monthly Profit: $4,000

This is a great example of how you can start a business with almost any skill that you have. The company for sale is an agency that writes essays, and research reports for busy students.

Students are always busy, so a service that gives them back some valuable hours to study for a big exam or get some sleep is often a no-brainer.

I can imagine running a business like this is expensive, mainly paying writers. And it’s not like you could outsource essay-writing work to the Philippines or Ukraine since the quality of work would suffer.

The big advantage for students using a service like this instead of an AI like ChatGPT to help them write their essays is that they won’t be flagged for AI-written content or plagiarism.

An example of a competitor is EduBirdie.

👉 View the listing here

Weekly Poll

That’s all for this week! Don’t forget to vote in the poll above for the best business idea in this edition. Till next week 👋

— Vlad Verba

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