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Business Ideas #149: Trustpilot for X, Sea Moss...

Plus How Reading 500 Research Papers Led to a $3.6bn Business

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up business ideas as magnificent as Jensen Huang’s bank account.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

  1. Business Idea💡: Creating trustpilot but for a new market

  2. Drunk Business Idea 🍻: Making smoke alarms exponentially better

  3. Just The Tip 📈: Sea moss is popping off right now

  4. The Moneyshot 🤑: How reading 500 research papers led to a $3.6bn business

P.S…if you want to read any previous editions of Half Baked you can on our website.

P.P.S…if you were forwarded this email and want to subscribe, you can here.

Let’s get into it.

BUSINESS IDEA | CASH FLOW BUSINESS

Trustpilot for Courses 🎓

Course you can

Available Domain: Coursescred.com

💡 TLDR: A platform which evaluates the trustworthiness of online courses

1. Problem/Opportunity

The Problem/Opportunity: There are online courses for everything these days. In fact you can bet there are people out there making serious bank selling online courses about how to create online course right now.

But it’s hard to know what courses are the real deal, and which are cash-grabs by creators more interested in buying another home than worrying about what you actually learn. So let’s solve for this.

Market Size: As of 2024, the global creator economy is currently worth $156bn.

2. Solution 

The Idea: A platform which evaluates the trustworthiness of online courses

How it Works:

  • Pages are created on the site automatically for different online courses

  • Users can then leave reviews of the courses on the site, with links (such as affiliate links) banned to prevent any gaming of the system

  • The site also includes “verified video reviews” which are short video reviews of the course done by experts in the field who have taken the course and have no incentive to promote it, giving an honest review of it

Go-to-market: Start with a niche like stock trading where terrible courses are widespread

Business Model: Course creators pay a monthly subscription to claim their review pages and get access to features like being able to reply to reviews, connect up accounts to prove their claims made in courses are true etc.

Startup Costs: These are pretty minimal here

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: It’s unlikely you’ll get a huge exit here but this could be a great cash flow business

TOGETHER WITH INTERNET PIPES

You Think You Know The Internet. You Don’t.

What do glowing sunscreen 📈, butterfly pea tea 📈, air quality monitors 📈, and permanent jewellery 📈 have in common?

They're all trending, but most people have no idea.

These insights are scattered across the web, hiding in plain sight. But with the right knowledge, anyone can access them.

Internet Pipes exists to give you that access. If all goes well, you will walk away with an upgraded pair of “Internet glasses” that give you a high-fidelity view of what people actually desire. What you do with that information is up to you.

Use code HALFBAKED at checkout to get 30% off Internet Pipes.

P.S. Internet Pipes' price increases with time, and this discount code is temporary, so this is the best value you will ever get.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Jungle Sounds Smoke Alarm

Ever had your fire alarm go off and think…”man this beep is annoying.”

Then the jungle sounds smoke alarm is for you.

Hear the deafening sounds of the rainforest anytime your smoke alarm goes off, guaranteeing you’ll wake up and adding even more excitement to the fire.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Sea Moss

Sea moss, also known as “Irish moss”, has taken the business world by storm in recent years. This incredibly versatile material is being used in a wide range of industries, from making seaweed bacon to seaweed packaging and even sequestering carbon through growing sea moss. So it’s a goldmine for business ideas.

Business Ideas

  • Sea Moss Gummy Supplement: Develop sea moss-based dietary supplements in gummy form

  • Sea Moss Functional Beverages: Create a line of sea moss-infused drinks, such as smoothies, teas, or energy drinks.

  • Sea Moss-Based Pet Products: Develop a line of pet supplements or treats that incorporate sea moss for its health benefits.

THE MONEYSHOT

How Reading 500 Research Papers Led to a $3.6bn Business

Getting your first 100 users is a huge milestone for any business.

But for this founder LeBron James and Michael Phelps were among the first 100 users of his product, which has become a $3.6bn business.

This is his story.

Will Ahmed was an active kid. As a child growing up in New York he excelled at soccer, hockey, lacrosse, tennis, swimming and golf. I’m surprised this dude isn’t in Paris competing right now.

So it’s no surprise that Will went on to study human performance as an undergrad at a little-known university called Harvard, where he was a student athlete for good measure.

And during his undergrad Will read around 500 research papers, which gave him an idea. While everyone was focussing on training to maximize performance Will believed that they key to maximizing performance was hidden in all the hours not spent working out.

He enlisted two of fellow Harvard students, John Capodilupo and Aurelian Nicolae, and together in 2012 they built a prototype of a wearable that would track rest and recovery at the Harvard Innovation Labs.

They decided to name if after a phrase John would use before big games in college.

They created WHOOP.

In July 2013 the team raised $3m and set to work building v1 of their product. They spent years building, raising millions before they even launched.

And it was a tough time for the team. During this period Nike launched their fuel band, Apple launched the Apple Watch and investors were growing impatient.

But the team stayed strong and finally in 2015 WHOOP launched their first product, the 1.0.

People were surprised about the no-screen design, but Will made this decision intentionally. He was worried about “feature creep” and that by adding a screen they would inevitably add non-health related features and end up competing in the smartwatch market rather than building a fitness tracker business.

The product was selling well but a few years in they ran into a problem…their devices were too expensive for many consumers to buy.

So in 2018 they took a huge risk and pivoted from charging users for the device upfront to giving the device for free but charging a monthly recurring fee for using it, targeting a payback of 18 months.

It was a huge risk, but it paid off.

Fast forward to 2021 and WHOOP raised $200m from Softbank at a $3.6bn valuation and today the business is thriving.

WHOOP’s story proves one thing above all else…even if you end up competing with giants like Apple or Nike, with the right execution and enough belief you can still win.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

#HalfBakedBizIdea

Devendra coming in with a super cool idea (plus a killer business name too)

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