Thread by @theSamParr

A super fascinating industry with tons of room for new stuff: Negotiation as a service (NaaS?)

It's a wildly interesting business model.

Why?

Only pay if you save money, making it a no brainer to buy.

Here are a few examples that exist as well as opportunities in the space:

Also, just FYI.

@ShaanVP and I went over this on the pod (we break down business ideas and opportunities).

The pod goes live tomorrow, so subscribe here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-…

OK, now let's get into it...

We'll start with the MOST interesting.

Inside Car Buying.

Maybe the most interesting example because its an old site, bad design, and rarely updated. Aka lots of opportunity!

How it works: Pay $499, tell 'em the car you want, they find and negotiate the best deal for you.

insidecarbuying.com

They claim average savings of $4500. If they don't save $, you get ur money back.

Seems straight forward. They likely have email scripts and blast out emails to dealers that have the car you want and they know patterns in deals.

Prolly lots of offshore workers doing it.

I think someone could take this model and spruce it up. Make the design better, do a bunch of marketing via YouTube car channels and Instagram.

There's something like 20m cars sold a year. Getting 100,000 customers would be huge ($50m/year), saving customers close to $500m.

mainstreet.com

Mainstreet saves startups $ by getting tax credits most accountant miss. Connect your payroll to them and they find money to save. Mainstreet gets a cut of savings.

I've done this by hand. Saves TONS.

No brainer to let them do it.

I heard they crush.

Where's the opportunity here?

Well, prolly doing this same thing. It's a huge, huge market. The hard part is likely acquiring customers (expensive), not the tech to make the product.

So if you have a good built in distribution (like a 1m email list :) ), it could crush

buyer.co

Partially owned by @awilkinson, Buyer saves startups money on software. Tell Buyer the saas you use and it appears they email the vender to get you a better deal.

I guess they scale by hiring loads of offshore folks to email venders for you.

If you spend $500k a year on SaaS, Buyer says they'll save you $76k.

I think this can be huge, but they claim they'll help you save on more than SaaS. Even office furniture.

IMHO, I'd focus solely on saas. Doing more seems super difficult.

One of my favs that no longer exists: Fixed.

Now shut down, Fixed helped me save money on parking tickets.

I used this app. It was magical. Fixed alerted me when I got a parking ticket, often before I got to me car then fought it automatically.

techcrunch.com/2015/10/12/fix…

Fixed automatically fought tickets for you.

And if you won, you paid them $75 instead of the $150 ticket.

SF shut the app down.

@DoNotPayLaw is another app in this space. It's not as magical, but neat. They automatically send a letter to the gov to fight your ticket.

These are a few examples of NaaS that I think are interesting.

Now let's talk about new ideas where we can use this model:

1. Salary. I've hired a lot of people. The diff between good negotiators and bad is pretty big. Could easily be a 5-10% increase.

Negotiating for salaries is uncomfortable. But if you make $100k-$200k/year, this could be +$10k of extra money for you!

Having a negotiator help you reply to offer emails could be huge! And if they can get 10% of your increase, could be quite lucrative for writing 3 or 4 emails

2. Taxes for consumers. This is already a thing. You'll hear the ads on the radio. They sound pretty shady tbh. But it's a huge space.

Companies help you negotiate debt with IRS, credit card companies.

The problem here: acquiring customers.

Debt settlement is one of the most expensive words to buy on Google.

Also, repeat customers. How often will a user use this service?

Regardless, this area is industry is intriguing simply because its old but notoriously shady. AKA: opportunity to improve.

Ok. That's it.

What else am I missing?

Rent? Cell phone bills?

Comment below.

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