Bootcamp Business is Booming, DFS Meets Tinder, and AI Haircuts

Hey there, how was your weekend? Ours was great, we had an amazing brunch. Hope you had a good one, now we're back to spotting those startups 💪

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In this week's spotter:

• Quick correction from last week

• Coding bootcamp doubles job posts

• Fast-paced DFS app is growing like crazy

• AI is coming for barbers

A Mistake?

What, we could never make a mistake! Oh, we did? Hmm, our mistake.

Last week, we wrote about a brand spanking new company started by 3 former Google engineers call highflux, but we linked to the wrong site. The correct site is highflux.io.

Our apologies, we'll go back to never being wrong again.

Learn to Code?? In This Economy??

"Coding bootcamps" are not a new phenomenon in the US.

The promise to potential students is usually pretty simple: "Give us some money and a few months, we'll teach you to code, then you can get a sweet, sweet programmer job with a sweet, sweet paycheck."

Today, there are over 100 bootcamps in the US alone and though the market is growing (the market size was ~$400mm in 2022 and is projected to be over $1 billion by 2030), it's very hard to differentiate from competitors.

Outside the US, the market landscape is very different. For instance, at the end of 2021, there were only about a dozen coding bootcamps in Germany.

And one of those bootcamps is stackfuel.

stackfuel is a Berlin-based coding bootcamp that offers a part-time, 17-week program focused on teaching data science and artificial intelligence.

Many bootcamps target individuals trying to change careers, which stackfuel does.

But stackfuel also (wisely) targets large corporate customers who want to train their workforce on new AI techniques. B2B is obviously a much more sustainable way to make this business work.

And their corporate sales appear to be going well: their sales team boasts a 36.11% email response rate and 10.42% meeting booked rate (we got that info from a stackfuel testimonial for a sales product; you can't hide from startup spotter 👀).

Plus they have just doubled their open job posts from 6 to 11, including Sales Manager, Account Executive, and Sales Development Rep roles. Sounds to us like business is booming 💥

They've only announced $1.8mm in fundraising, so there may still be opportunity to get in relatively early.

Contact their CEO Leo Marose if you'd like to learn more.

As always, we've added stackfuel to our spreadsheet of companies with job spikes; you can find that here, share it with your friends/colleagues/grandparents.

"DFS Meets Tinder" Company is Growing Like a Weed

The term "sports betting" tends to evoke a depressing image of a dimly lit, overcrowded, smoke-filled casino (where we may or may not have lost a lot of money on the Chargers on Saturday, grrr).

Sports betting has come a long way since then thanks to things moving online, as well as daily fantasy sports companies like DraftKings.

But things can always be made even more fun and fast paced, and that's exactly what new company TopProp is doing.

TopProp mixes the "swiping" of dating apps like Tinder with daily fantasy sports.

TopProp will show you a matchup between two players, let's say Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers. You swipe the player you think will get more points, and then if another bettor chooses the other player, you have a live bet between the two of you.

This is an easy-to-learn, fast paced approach to DFS that should ultimately appeal to younger generations and provide an easier entry point to betting on sports than many other products.

Even though the DFS market is a crowded one, TopProp has seen 24% MoM growth through this NFL season.

TopProp has raised about $500k so far; contact their CEO Michael Zavango if you'd like to learn more.

Can AI Cut My Hair?

In the mid 2010's, it seemed like there was a "Machine Learning for X" startup for absolutely everything...even fish farming (that company has raised $50mm since 2018, whoa).

We're getting to that point even faster with generative AI.

Twitter user @fryingneurons ("Nick") has built an AI-based app call HairstyleAI to show users what they look like with different haircuts.

And it's pretty cool! Check out this example from their website:

Right now, you get 35 different hair styles for $19.

Nick is a "build in public" person, which means he shares his business progress publicly. The app is brand new, but here are the revenue numbers so far:

• November 2022: $700

• December 2022: $1710

It might sound like a toy, but he has seen fast, impressive progress for a B2C app, and it's easy to see how the current model could develop into a recurring subscription instead of one-off payments; many people change their hair often, or it also could easily evolve into more of a general fashion/style AI application.

It's unclear if Nick is looking for venture investment ("build in public" folks tend to prefer self funding), but it's probably worth a DM. You can find Nick on twitter.

That's the News and We Are Outta Here

Hope you enjoyed this week's edition; remember, we're working on a premium startup spotter product where you get all of our data in real-time (this week, we saw 8 other companies with job post spikes that premium subscribers saw).

If you might be interested, just fill out this form and we'll be in touch 😎

Later,- startup spotter