Startup Sphere Weekly #47

An SEO tool selling for $243,000. Also, a white noise app selling for $305,000.

Author

Vlad Verba
November 27, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Hey, Vlad here.

Welcome back to Startup Sphere, a 5-minute weekly digest about online businesses selling for life-changing amounts of money.

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Thanks again for all the support. Let’s get into this week’s businesses ⤵️

Weekly Rundown

App to flag AI content and plagiarism

Asking Price: $40,000
TTM Revenue: $38,300
TTM Profit: $19,000

I’ve been seeing these types of businesses get some traction recently, with the rapid rise of AI content on the internet.

The tool aims to identify AI-generated or plagiarized content.

My thought with these types of businesses has always been - who is the audience? I understand there is some value here for teachers and schools. But other than that I can’t exactly pinpoint who would use a tool like this.

With that being said, this app has 52,000 users, 570 of which are paying customers. So clearly there is some level of demand for a solution to this problem.

This is a good acquisition for someone who knows the space and how to find the target customer (aka not me lol). The asking price is also quite reasonable.

*****

White noise app to help users sleep

Asking Price: $305,000
TTM Revenue: $99,000
TTM Profit: $98,000

Businesses like this always get me excited because they show you that you don’t need to build anything extremely complicated, you just need to solve a small problem that people have.

The business for sale is an iOS app that helps users sleep or focus by playing noises at different frequencies. I think this is a great business because it helps people with 2 things they often struggle with (sleep and focus).

As you can imagine building something like this isn’t incredibly complicated, allowing the business owner to focus a lot of effort into marketing.

The app monetized by offering in-app purchases for unlimited noise options. I’m sure you can add more features on top of that, like removing ads. The business also has very good profit margins, since they don’t have many tech and operational expenses.

I would be interested in seeing someone try a TikTok strategy for this business by making short-form videos about how this app helped them sleep better.

Competitors include Noice Machine and Brown Noise for Sleep.

*****

AI-powered SEO content generator

Asking Price: $243,000
TTM Revenue: $104,000
TTM Profit: $94,000

This is a website, that in theory, would be super powerful in helping companies increase their traffic and get new customers.

The business is Copymate - a SaaS that helps companies generate a large volume of SEO content with AI. The idea is that they will save users a lot of money and time and increase organic traffic.

I’m not super familiar with SEO, but I have seen some discussions on Twitter/X (follow me btw) about AI-generated SEO. Some users say Google will flag you, while others say that as long as the content provides value it will not be flagged.

I’d love to get a clear answer on this. But from my perspective, Google does not want AI-generated content populating its search engine, so I think they’ll do whatever they can to stop it.

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Last week’s results: 75% of voters chose the private jet comparison website as the best business to acquire. Read last week’s newsletter here.

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Till next week 👋

— Vlad