Unvalidated Ideas #056

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Here's a fresh idea you can take out there and validate.

Discord ModMail Hosting (🗒Raw Notes)

Discord reportedly has 140 million active monthly users, and it supposedly made 130MM USD in 2020.

What percentage of those Discord channels do you think will want a bot at some point? I think that number has to be close to 90+%.

This idea isn't about building a nondescript Discord bot hosting service -- there are plenty of those, and sites already doing the content marketing to help you pick:

• The Best Discord Bot Hosting for 2023 (Compared) (by codeless.co)
• 9 reliable (by Geekflare)

This is about a very specific bot. kyb3r/modmail. Modmail is really common functionality for Discord channels, and having single-click access to very cheap ModMail is brilliant.

Unfortunately, this is a battle on price performance (a "race to the bottom") -- most people do not expect to pay a ton for individual moderation bots on their Discord channels, so the business has to work in volume.

Building a very efficient infrastructure operation is the only way this works out:

• Find very cheap hosting
• Build/wire together a system that spins up the exisitng bot on incoming requests (alternatively build a serverless implementation of modmail)
• Build a website that gets users to "Add to Discord" as fast as possible (yearly pricing only)
• Advertise to as many discord channels as you can find.

Obviously, the hard part is step 4 (getting people to actually know you have a service that can solve their problem for minimal $ per month) -- but this is the kind of B2C product that can massively scale (remember that 140MM active user number from before?).

NOTE There's a really important signal at the top of the notes. It's one of the things that put this idea on my radar.

What was in this week's uncut edition?

Like being teased? I hope so, because here's what was in the uncut edition this week:

Ideas:

• ███████████for██████LLMs
• Discord ModMail Hosting
• ██████cross-cloud███████

Bonus:

• Finding the "fast moving water"

Don't forget, there's always money in the banana stand 3x more in the uncut edition.

Thanks for reading!

If you liked this letter feel free to criticize, comment on, remix, and share these ideas with your fellow builders and entrepreneurs!

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Victor (victor@unvalidatedideas.com)

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