3 Things: Jungle Scout for Non-Amazon, DoNotPay for Medical Bills, Modern Toastmasters
Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotions so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Jungle Scout for Non-Amazon Platforms
DoNotPay for Medical Bills
Modern Toastmasters
1. Jungle Scout for Non-Amazon
Founded in 2015, Jungle Scout was the first Amazon product research platform, equipping e-commerce merchants with product intelligence to help find, launch, and sell goods on Amazon. They offer a suite of tools for first-time sellers, veteran vendors, or agencies who run multiple brands. They pull in search, product, and purchase data on over 500 million Amazon products and provide a Chrome extension and web platform that helps retailers optimize their advertising (which is already a $21.5B annual market) and sales. Today they have over 500k sellers using their tools and in March 2021, they raised $110M from Summit Partners. Given Amazon has around 2.5 billion monthly visits, 300M active users, and $295B in annual marketplace revenue, it’s no wonder that millions of sellers have flocked to the platform and are all clamouring for data and tools to give them a leg up and help them sell products and earn revenue.
To date, Jungle Scout has focused almost exclusively on the Amazon platform. It made sense given the dominance of Amazon which now touts 1.9M active sellers, however over the past 2 years we’ve seen the rise of numerous other e-commerce marketplaces including Walmart, MercadoLibre, Rakuten, Shopee, Etsy, Target, and many more which now have hundreds of thousands or millions of sellers each. Take the Jungle Scout playbook and apply it to one of the other behemoth marketplaces. Scrape all product data and build a Chrome extension and web app that helps sellers figure out which products to sell, how to price, when to advertise, and more. This is a perfect SaaS subscription product as sellers want continuous access to real-time data and this naturally becomes a sticky tool in their toolbox. Jungle Scout charges between $29-84/month so even charging $15-30/month for a more basic product could become a large business pretty quickly given the size and growth of these platforms. As you build out more robust features you could sell a premium tier with multiple seats and features optimized for agencies or brands with a large number of product skus.
2. Do Not Pay for Medical Bills
There are many things that make little to no sense about the US healthcare system but medical billing has to be up there as one of the most backward. It is estimated that upwards of 80% of medical bills contain errors, most often resulting in patients being overcharged. When you receive a bill, it is not clear at all what services the bill is for and on top of that, patients have no clue what various procedures and visits should cost leaving them helpless and on the hook for paying large sums whether they are warranted or not. On top of that, bills for a single procedure like a surgery often come in bits and pieces since different providers like the surgeon, nurses, anesthesiologist, radiologist, physical therapist, etc might all bill separately. Having recently had a baby, I personally have received a slew of bills from a ridiculous number of different providers, many of which don’t even seem relevant. I have zero clue what I should be actually paying nor which services I’m being charged for. One bill was for STD tests in Sacramento… I haven’t been to Sacramento in over 5 years and have never had an STD test so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To dispute a medical bill, there are nearly a dozen steps including getting an itemized copy of your bill (the fact that bills don’t come itemized automatically is mind boggling), contact the provider, contact your insurance company, dispute the bill with the collection agency, work with a medical advocate, negotiate the bill with the providers, etc. Each step is daunting in and of itself so the idea of actually fighting your bills feels nearly impossible for the average person and an incredible and undue burden on the patient when they did nothing wrong. DoNotPay is a company that provides an “AI lawyer” in chatbot form that helps people fight tickets, create power of attorney, combat email spam, deal with chargebacks, and much more. The idea is to create a purpose-built platform like DoNotPay to help patients fight their medical bills. Adopt the chatbot interface to make it both easy to use and mobile friendly. Enable users to upload copies of their medical bills and link their insurance information and the bot will help assess which bills are accurate and which need challenging. For the ones where there are suspected errors, the bot will fight the charges on your behalf and push you notifications if it needs any human-in-the-loop intervention. The business model could be a freemium app with paid features and then take a percentage of all money that you are able to successfully save patients.
3. Modern Toastmasters
Nearly 100 years ago, a club was founded at a YMCA (yes, YMCA is also that old!!) in Santa Ana by Ralph Smedley with the goal of improving the communication skills of young men. This club turned into Toastmasters International, a nonprofit organization that has helped over 4 million people around the globe gain confidence in public speaking and hone their leadership capabilities. They have a local club structure with around 20 members each who meet (usually) weekly. The meetings involve a set of organized speeches and feedback. One main component of the meetings is called “Table Topics” where participants give impromptu, unrehearsed speeches on a subject specified by the Topicsmaster. This helps teach thinking on your feet and being able to articulate information clearly without preparation. They even have an annual public speaking championship called Toastmasters International World Champion of Public Speaking.
For many people, the fear of public speaking is greater than the fear of death! If you ask a Millennial or GenZ, my guess is 9 out of 10 have never heard of Toastmasters. It has a somewhat stodgy, outdated connotation and has not done well to encourage young participants. A hip, digitally native brand can easily build a modern Toastmasters to help the next generations get comfortable with public speaking and communication. These skills are even more challenging to master when you start to think about navigating remote work or spending the majority of our time in the metaverse. Clubs don’t need to be hyper-local anymore and can be formed online based on affinity groups. You could create a franchise model where influencers can create their own branded experiences kind of like masterminds. Each group would have monthly or annual dues making this a clean and simple recurring revenue business.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine