Business Munchies: Vitamin Epidemic, Disrupting Water Purifier Market, Prediction Gambling, Unbundling of Upwork

Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out to discuss some business ideas.

Timeline:
(00:40) - Latest regulations surrounding Bill Discounting
(6:11) - Vitamin D & B12 Deficiency Epidemic
(16:40) - Disrupting Water Purifier Market
(27:30) - Prediction Gambling 
(34:00) - Unbundling of Upwork

Business Ideas from the episode

1. Regulations in Bill Discounting Market: Recently, the Lok Sabha passed a Factoring Regulation Amendment Bill that allows NBFCs to participate in the bill discounting marketing without any minimum % of business committed to Bill discounting. The earlier bill required Bill Discounting NBFCs to have 75% of their business dedicated to Bill Discounting and therefore there were just 7 NBFCs that had this license. This should inject much needed liquidity in the market and we expect huge growth in this segment in the next few years. 
2. Vitamin D & B12: 90% of Indians suffer from Vit D Deficiency. And more than 40% suffer from Vit B12 deficiency. Both these result in various day to day energy and mental health challenges amongst other things. There is an opportunity to build an education/content led business around creating awareness of these deficiencies and then building a business around it. 
3. Disrupting Water Purifier Market: The water purifier market in India is ~$400 Million (Rs. 3000 Cr) and is expected to be ~$1 Billion (Rs. 7500 Cr) in the next 5 years. The current market is dominated by a few players (Eureka Forbes, Tata Chemical, Kent RO) and they tend to rely on information asymmetry to confuse the customers and make them buy products they might not need. Add to this, the after service market for this Industry is huge and currently filled of scams. There is a great opportunity to build a D2C Subscription service around Water Purifiers. 
4. Prediction Gambling - In the absurd idea for the week, we discussed how there could be gambling service built on top of Shaadi.Com to predict how the matches fair in the overall journey to get married. We also discuss the blockchain platforms that are coming up around prediction gambling (Polywork, Augur). 
5. Unbundling of Upwork: Upwork is a marketplace to connect freelancers to end customers. It's a horizontal marketplace, i.e it targets freelancers across different skill sets. Last few years has seen the unbundling of Upwork into individual niche marketplaces like TopTal ($200 mill in Revenue) and the homegrown, Flexiple. We talk about the various opportunities in unbundling Upwork.