BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Car Repair Bidding Platform 🛠️

Doing your bidding

Available Domain: Repair Rank

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Having your car breakdown is the worst, particularly if you know nothing about cars, since going into a car mechanic can be like going into a lion’s den. Although my mechanics tend to act more like laughing hyenas I deal with them.

Some mechanics can be highly opportunistic, where they exploit people (like me) who think that a carburetor is a type of fancy cheese. It’s an information asymmetry problem which leads to customers getting ripped off. So let’s return some power to the people.

Market Size: The US automotive repair & maintenance service market size was valued at $183m in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform where local garages place bids for how much they will charge to repair a customer’s car to ensure that customers don’t get ripped off

How it Works:

• Users sign up to the platform and give details about their car and the problems they are having with it

• This is then posted to a portal where mechanics in their area can place a bid for how much they will charge to fix the car. Importantly they can’t see each other’s bids so they can’t collude with each other

• Mechanics’ bids are also analyzed and they’re given a rating for how fair their pricing is

• The user can accept the cheapest price to fix their car and drops the car off to that garage to get repaired

Go-to-market: Start with a few small garages in your hometown to test the concept

Business Model: Take a transaction fee on each repair

Startup Costs: You could spin up a web application cheaply here to get this off the ground

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: You might not get to a venture scale outcome here, but this could easily do millions of dollars per year in revenue

TOGETHER WITH OMNISEND

Spend $1 ➡️  Earn $72

E-commerce is a game of money-in vs money-out.

You spend $1 and make $2.

The higher that ratio is, the more successful you’ll be.

So check this out…In 2023, for every $1 spent on Omnisend’s email & SMS marketing, merchants made $72!

We (Half Baked) want to work with brands that deliver for our readers (you). That’s why we asked Omnisend to work with us. They agreed.

Omnisend offers affordable, scalable pricing that grows with your business. From popups to newsletters & abandoned carts, 100,000 e-commerce brands are selling more stuff while paying less.

Use code HALFBAKED10 & get 10% off your first 3 months.

For new paid plans only, expires Dec. 31, 2024

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Cheetos Deodorant

Coca-cola’s recent collab with Oreos proves there’s appetite in the market for brands to expand their horizons with new products.

Which brings us to Cheetos, who clearly need to release a deodorant, right? Flamin’ hot version coming soon…

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Seed Oils

In recent months seed oils, like sunflower or canola oils, have come under scrutiny as being potentially unhealthy or even harmful to people’s health. It’s said that using cooking oils derived from seeds can cause issues like heart disease, inflammation and even bad skin. While there’s some disagreement about the validity of these claims people rarely take chances with their health, and where there’s a new health trend there are businesses to be built.

Business Ideas

• Seed Oil-free Pet Food: Develop and market pet food products that avoid the use of seed oils, appealing to pet owners concerned about their animals' health.

• Seed Oil-free Baby Formula: Moms on Reddit are crying out for this

THE MONEYSHOT

Making $550m from Writing about Sports

We’ve all heard the old adage that “if you do what you love, you won’t work a day in your life.”

Well these two founders turned their love of sports into a $550m exit.

This is their story.

Alex Mather is a lifelong sports-fan. He attended Penn State where he initially majored in pre-med before switching to Information Sciences and Technology.

While in college he founded a web design studio which, in his own words, helped him and two of his friends to pay for food and beer in college. In 2006 he also founded a real estate platform, but this ultimately failed after about 18 months.

A few years later he found himself working at Strava where his life changed forever when he met Adam Hansmann.

Adam was a finance graduate from the University of Notre Dame (go fighting Irish) and like so many co-workers he and Alex spent a lot of time talking about sports. But in particular they spoke about how poor the quality of sports journalism had become. Media companies were dying and sports departments were down-sizing, leading to the drop in quality.

Alex and Adam believed that sports fans would be willing to pay for detailed sports reporting, great writing and no ads. So that’s exactly what they started, a subscription-based sports journalism company.

They called it The Athletic.

The site originally launched in Chicago in January 2016 and operated on a city-by-city model where the team would hire experienced editors and writers in each area to produce the content.

They got their first big break in mid 2016 when they were accepted into Y Combinator in their summer 2016 batch. This paved the way for the company to get their first major funding in January 2017, where they raised $2.3 million in seed funding, only to raise a further $5.4 million in July of that year.

They used these funds to expand to more cities in 2017, including Cleveland, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, St Louis and all of Canada.

Their subscriber numbers were exploding and in March 2018, the company announced they had raised $20 million in funding.

Over the next few years they business kept expanding to new cities and even new countries.

By 2019 the site reached 500k subscribers paying an average of $64 per year for their subscription, giving the platform $32m of annual recurring revenue.

Incredibly, just a year later in late 2020, The Athletic hit the sacred 1m subscriber mark, the perfect example of hockey-stick growth.

The business was thriving and eventually legacy media became interested in the brand. They wanted in and in 2022 the New York Times made an offer to buy The Athletic for $550m, an offer Alex and Adam couldn’t turn down.

All of which goes to show that you don’t need to invent some crazy new technology platform to make serious bank. These guys did it through writing and reporting.

In the end there’s a million ways to make a million dollars. You only need to find one that works.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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