BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

AI Proofreading Tool ✅ 

The proof is in the publishing

Available Domain: Smartproof.ai

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: If you’re a regular Half Baked reader you may notice the odd spelling mistake in our newsletters. Hell there could be one in this issue for all I know. But at least our typos are pretty harmless.

But while most word processors have pretty basic spell check built in, this doesn’t cut the mustard. So let’s create a better alternative.

Market Size: The US proofreading industry was worth $2.7bn in 2022 (honestly thought AI killed this industry, guess not)

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An AI tool which provides intelligent, contextual proof reading of a user’s writing

How it Works:

• Users sign up for the platform and download the Mac or Windows app. This could also be built into word processors or writing platforms directly, depends on the business model you pursue.

• The tool offers basic spell-check and word suggestion features like many other platforms do. But goes much further.

• It offers more advanced proofing, such as checking dates referenced are factually accurate and that the writing is internally consistent

• It also trains on previous writing to ensure consistency across different pieces of writing, even down to details like identifying square brackets/placeholders that need to be filled out

Go-to-market: The GTM strategy here should be to sell to writing platforms who can integrate your tool directly into their platforms which you charge them for

Business Model: Charge platforms for the ability to embed this tool in their products

Startup Costs: This is pretty technically challenging to build, so you’ll need to find a savvy engineer who wants in or do a small raise and just hire someone

Competitors: Grammarly is the big dawg in this market, valued at $12bn back in 2021. If you can take some of their market share you’re in business

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: The exit strategy is simple…get the big dawg or another big player in this space to buy you out

Exit Multiple: Grammarly is valued around 40x revenue ($8bn valuation and $200m of revenue) right now, but good luck getting that valuation! 5x - 8x revenue would be a solid valuation here

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Office Worker Action Figure

When kids buy action figures they want to buy Batman, Spiderman or action heroes, all of which set unrealistic standards for young, impressionable minds.

But we can fix that by introducing the office worker action figure. Instead of saving the world from supervillains watch as your kid gets his action figure to book in meetings, work on spreadsheets and maximize shareholder value.

What better role model could there be?

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Polymarket

While we’re still unsure who’ll win the US Presidency (probably Trump let’s be real), there’s already been one big winner from the campaign. Polymarket. Polymarket is a decentralized, crypto-based predictions market where people can bet on the outcome of anything, from the US Presidential Election to whether Taylor Swift will announce she’s pregnant this year. (37% chance of yes apparently). This will be a multi-billion dollar business, we have no doubt.

Business Ideas

• Public Wager Platform: A platform for influencers to make large, public wagers which others can bet on too (from edition 97 of half Baked)

• Polymarket for Crypto: A platform to bet on future prices of crypto tokens, sell this data to exchanges

• Predictions Market Research Platform: a business intelligence platform using data from predictions markets to predict future trends for businesses

THE MONEYSHOT

The 17 Year-Old Who Raised $22m from a Bathroom

Back in high school people went to the bathroom to smoke, kill time or occasionally to actually use the toilet.

But this guy went to his high school’s bathroom to take investor calls, something he did so often his principal banned him from using the restroom during school hours.

This is his story.

At age 12 Eric Zhu didn’t even own a computer, since his parents were worried about him using social media.

But when he got his first computer it opened up a whole new world to him.

The year was 2020 and Eric had nothing to do during the pandemic, so he learned to code and started joining every discord server he could find on entrepreneurship.

He had caught the founder bug.

This interest led him to launch a company called Esocial, a digital platform for schools, in 2021. He scaled the platform to over 50 schools with 49k+ total students using it. It was acquired just 10 months later. Baller move.

Shortly after this he and a friend started Bachmanity Capital, a name Silicon Valley fans will recognise, where they raised $20m to fund to back early-stage deep tech companies.

He also started a dating app for founders and VCs called Aviato, as a joke. This guy clearly loved Silicon Valley.

And while working in his fund Eric noticed something.

He realized that while companies like PitchBook and Crunchbase were good at tracking data about startups, they were lacking that analytical layer that he thought was missing to make these platforms really useful.

This gave him an idea for a new business…to build the Bloomberg for private market data.

So like any good startup story Eric pivoted and Aviato became an analytical platform for private market data.

In fact Aviato just came out of stealth yesterday, having raised $2.3m in funding from 8VC, Soma Capital and SoftBank, among others.

So while it’s still early days for Eric (the dude is still only 17) he clearly has a bright future ahead of him.

Absolute legend.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

#HalfBakedBizIdea

Pat Walls coming in with a super simple (but potentially lucrative) idea

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