BUSINESS IDEA | VENTURE STARTUP

Eight Sleep for Babies 👶 

Lullabuys

Available Domain: Cribsleep.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Sleep is a critical part of the healthy development of a child. Their sleep is also a critical part of their parents’ sanity.

But most parents have little to no data on how their kids sleep. They have no idea how well their child is sleeping and worse, could miss out on an emergency during the night. So let’s build a product to solve this problem.

Market Size: The sleep aids market was estimated at $59bn in 2023.

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A smart bed sheet which provides sleep tracking and active heating and cooling for young kids

How it Works:

• The bed sheet, which comes in different configurations for children of different ages, is fitted to a bed like any sheet

• The bed sheet warms up or cools down based on the child’s temperature ensuring they get the best night sleep possible

• The sheet also tracks their sleeping patterns, bedtimes and sleep duration, comparing the data to others to see if they’re getting the recommended amount of sleep for their age

• The smart sheet also tracks their vital signs and can alert a parent if an anomaly is detected

Go-to-market: Run some ads to a landing page, targeting affluent people with kids, and use this to gauge interest

Business Model: One-time charge for the sheet

Startup Costs: This will be a capital intensive business so you’ll need to do a big raise here to get this going, hence you need to validate it before you go out to raise

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Exit to a wearables company in the sleep space, like (surprise surprise) Eight Sleep

Exit Multiple: Median multiples in M&A deals stood at around 11.7x EBITDA in 2023, but businesses in the top quartile could go for double this

GIVEAWAY

Win a free subscription to Internet Pipes (worth $400)

For this week only we've partnered up with the world’s leading trend finder and internet queen, Steph Smith, to do a very special giveaway to celebrate hitting 15k subscribers.

We're giving away a free subscription of Internet Pipes (worth $400) to one lucky Half Baked subscriber.

We use Steph’s methods from her program to spot business ideas and trends and one of our subscribers will get full access to her program for FREE.

Good luck!

P.S. once you sign-up, you can increase your chances of winning by sharing your special link.

Winner announced August 5th.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Toothpaste Flavoured Orange Juice

Peanut butter and jelly. Bacon and eggs. Spaghetti and meatballs.

These are all iconic food pairings, which made us realise that a certain iconic pairing has never been brought to market. Until today.

Our new toothpaste flavoured orange juice is gonna fly off the shelves we have no doubt. There isn’t a more delicious way to start your day.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: YouTube is King

The streaming wars have been going on for years now, with Netflix, Prime Video, Disney Plus, Max and a few other streaming platforms I don’t care enough to list out have been battling for streaming supremacy. But YouTube has come along and played the ultimate uno reverse card, pulling ahead and winning the streaming war. YouTube’s enduring popularity makes business ideas in this space a good bet.

Business Ideas

• Creator Camp: A summer camp for kids who want to become YouTubers (from edition #6 of Half Baked)

• YouTube Content Licensing: A platform where YouTubers can license their content for use in commercials, films, and other media projects, providing a new revenue stream.

• Virtual Assistants for YouTubers: Provide virtual assistants to handle administrative tasks, social media management, community engagement, and scheduling for YouTubers.

THE MONEYSHOT

The 21 Year-old Who Just Launched an AI Friend

In 2020 this teenager built a website to track the spread of covid-19 which impressed the world.

But just yesterday he launched a dystopian AI powered Friend that’s confused the world.

This is his story.

As the covid-19 pandemic started sweeping across the world most of us felt pretty helpless. But Avi Schiffmann decided he wanted to be as helpful as possible.

So in December 2019 this 17 year-old high schooler took it upon himself to build a website to track the spread of covid-19.

He launched ncov2019.live (not sure about that branding), a site which gave real-time updates on the spread of the disease by scraping data from the WHO, CDC, and other government websites. The site was so good in fact that epidemiologists (there’s a word I never wanted to hear again) used the site to track the spread of the disease.

At its peak the site was getting 30 million visitors a day and Avi was offered $8m to put ads on the website…which he declined. Baller move.

Put as covid wound down so too did the website and Avi moved on to new projects, like building a website matching Ukrainian refugees with people offering places to stay when the war broke out.

But everyone has been waiting to see what his first big business launch would be…and yesterday we got our answer.

Avi just launched friend, an AI companion that lives in a pendant you hang around your neck. The launch was accompanied with a video that looks like a deleted scene from Black Mirror.

And the internet has no idea what to think. Even stranger, Avi rasied $2.5m for this project but he borrowed $1.8m to buy the domain friend.com. Quite an investment for a product this early on.

Avi is planning to ship the first 30,000 devices next January and will charge $99 apiece with no ongoing subscription fee. But it doesn’t stop there. Avi views friend as a digital relationships company, saying that in the future users will be able to talk to digital friends on the site too. Super dystopian.

Many thought this was a parody and recent bad press about similar AI pins, like Humane, made for a less than ideal launch.

We asked for flying cars, but digital friends is what we got.

Ultimately you have to admire Avi’s thinking. The loneliness epidemic is one of the defining problems of our age and trying to go after this problem is a noble quest.

Only time will tell if this is the solution to it…but for me…I wouldn’t bet on it.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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