Travis Jungroth
Income Share Agreements for Everyone
I'm not persuing this idea as a product right now. You can see what I'm working on on the homepage.
Description
Problem
Getting access to money, even when it will make your life better, is hard. Much more detail below.
Possible Solutions
Income share agreements for everyone.
Evaluation
The scorecards below are explained here.
Problem
| Metric | Terrible | Bad | Good | Great |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Popular | <10k | >10k | >100k | ✔️>1m |
| Growing | <0% | >0% | ✔️>10% | >20% |
| Urgent | >Year | <Year | <Month | ✔️Right now |
| Expensive | <$10m | >$10m | >$100m | ✔️$1b+ |
| Mandatory | Averse | Nice to have | ✔️Important | Law changed |
| Frequent | ✔️Yearly | Monthly | Weekly | Hourly |
Insight
| Metric | Won't have | Can have | Have | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Founders | 1 in 10 | ✔️ | ||
| Market | 20%/year | ✔️ | ||
| Product | 10x better | ✔️ | ||
| Acquisition | $0 | ✔️ | ||
| Monopoly | Yes | ✔️ |
Additional
Who desperately needs this product?
People who want education to increase their earning but can't get loans.
Am I the target user, know them extremely well, or neither?
Neither.
Is this designed and created to grow very quickly?
Yes
More Thoughts
This is the idea I’m least confident in, but I can’t let go of it yet. Maybe it’s just the name, Income Share Agreements for Everyone. Things seem to be sort of headed in that direction, so why not take it to the extreme? How come most people have credit cards but not ISAs?
My initial idea was in de-risking income for athletes. Minor League Baseball players are one of the most extreme cases of a high risk career. Break into the Majors and you get a half million per year minimum and healthcare for life. Don’t, and you go broke. Shouldn’t there be huge value in hedging that? Considering the diminishing marginal utility of money, it would be pretty nice to turn your maybe 500,000th dollar into your actual 50,000th.
I found a company that tried, but it seems like they’ve pivoted into just doing player analytics. If that’s what they’re moving into, I think they weren’t going about this the right way. I’m guessing the difference in the predictive ability between a top tier analytics organization for a baseball team and someone with a math degree plus two months studying sabermetrics is like 10%. This is huge in a competitive sport. But, I think it’s relatively small compared to the amount of value created by hedging.
Try to get the projection vaguely right, give them enough money to take the edge of being broke, and take an amount back if they make it that they’ll be rich enough to live without.
Perhaps my biggest problem with this whole idea is I’m not a “technical founder” on this one. Seems like the core thing here is the contracts. (And the sales. I enjoyed imaging calling up MiLB players and trying to sell them money).
Minor League Baseball is of course a niche, but it could be like the books at Amazon. It also makes a nice marketing angle when some of your customers are on TV.
From the super specific, my mind skips past all of the other specific applications (with a small stop at flight training) and jumps to everyone. What would an ISA credit card look like? What would an ISA LendingClub look like? What would have to happen for more students to use ISAs than loans? I don’t have answer to these, but they’re fun questions.
If you'd like to talk about this idea, email me at jungroth@gmail.com or put a time for a video call on my calendar.