BUSINESS IDEA | CASH FLOW BUSINESS

Screen Time Accountability App 📵 

Giving a new meaning to “I’ll share my screen“

Available Domain: Screenteem.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Regret is a part of the human experience. We regret the things we’ve said and the things we’ve done. Bt more often we regret the things we didn’t do.

So here’s a question to ponder, what are you doing today that you’ll regret in the future? Well we think that when we’re old and grey almost all of us will regret how much time we’ve wasted on our phones throughout our lives. It’s time to get this under control. So let’s build an app to do exactly this.

Market Size: Revenue in the digital fitness & well-being market is projected to reach $59bn in 2024

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An app where users automatically share their daily screen time with each other to encourage each other to reduce their time on devices

How it Works:

• Users sign up, download the app on their phone and join their friends or co-workers in their teams

• The phone tracks their screen time and phone usage each day

• Within a team everyone’s screen time is made public and there’s a leaderboard where the winner is the person who spends the least amount of time on their phone over a specified period of time

• You could also further gamify this by allowing users in a team to pay into a prize pool where the winner wins a prize for having the lowest screen time

Go-to-market: Start this as a movement where you get people to post their screen time in group chats to validate the idea, then productize it

Business Model: Freemium model

Startup Costs: You could validate this idea for nothing, building the app itself would require a talented dev

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: This could be a great micro-SaaS business

TOGETHER WITH OMNISEND

The Most Boring Marketing Tactic

Let’s be real.

Email marketing is not the “sexiest” member of the marketing family.

And that’s okay. As a business owner, you have enough “exciting” stuff happening.

Who wants more excitement when you can have stable and effective instead?

Let us be boring, in the best way possible.

Brands using Omnisend on average make $73 for every $1 spent.

No need to learn anything new here. A platform so boringly intuitive, it’s like you designed it yourself.

No venturing into the great unknown. Their support team is available 24/7 to make sure you don’t have any unwanted adventures.

Use code HALFBAKED10 & get 10% off your first 3 months (you won't get a discount for Omnisend anywhere else).

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

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Politician Stat Tracker

Politicians talk a big game, but it’s hard to know how effective (or ineffective) they really are. Or at least it was.

With our new, incredible politician stat tracker app you can track politician’s stats like you would with a professional athlete. Laws passed. Debate wins. Lies told. It’s all there.

This app will almost certainly decide the election…

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Postbiotics

As the wellness industry continues to expand, postbiotics are emerging as a massive business opportunity. Now you’ve probably heard of probiotics or prebiotics, but wtf are postbiotics? Well postbiotics are created when probiotics (beneficial bacteria) break down prebiotic fiber, but all you need to know is they’re something that’s good for our gut health. And as we know at Half Baked, if something’s good for someone’s health it could be great for our wallets.

Business Ideas

• Postbiotic Gummies: Create a line of postbiotic gummies, since every supplement seems to come in gummy form these days

• Postbiotic-enhanced Food Products: Create a line of functional foods or beverages fortified with postbiotics, such as yogurts, snack bars, or drinks.

THE MONEYSHOT

How a “Friend Date” Led to a $2.8bn Business

Finding a co-founder can be tricky for entrepreneurs.

But for these co-founders, who met each other on a “friend date”, went on to start a $2.8bn business together.

This is their story.

David Rogier (pictured right) grew up in LA. During his childhood his grandmother told him her life story. As a World War II refugee, she was forced to flee from her hometown in Poland to the US, where she and her mother worked in a factory line to save up for her own education. She told David that "education is the only thing that someone can't take away from you", a lesson he never forgot.

David attended Stanford University, where he initially pursued a degree in political science before entering the MBA program in 2009, after which he became a VC with Harrison Metal.

In 2012, David left the firm to start his own company, despite not knowing what to build. He spent a year looking for inspiration for an idea, but struggled to find it. Until one dinner changed everything.

One evening David and his good friend Aaron Rasmussen (pictured left) attended a small group dinner with computing pioneer Alan Kay. David and Aaron had met a few years earlier on a “friend date”, which is how most of my actual dates went in the past.

Aaron described the dinner with Alan Kay as "one of the most perspective-altering conversations” he'd ever had. They saw an opportunity to create a platform where users could learn directly from the world’s best experts. But they had a problem…they didn’t know any world class experts.

So David decided to start cold-calling different experts to get them on the platform, which worked. He managed to bring fiction author James Patterson and tennis legend Serena Williams on board, as well as Dustin Hoffman, since David was friends with Dustin Hoffman's daughter.

Before going live the pair raised $6.4 million, $1.9 million in a seed round and $4.5 million in a Series A and by May 2015 they were ready to launch their platform.

They launched Masterclass.

They marketed it as a platform where "anyone can learn from the world's best” and received as astonishing 30,000 signups in the first four months.

Over the next two years, MasterClass grew to a dozen classes from world-class instructors.

In 2017 the business raised $35 million in funding but Aaron decided it was time to leave Masterclass. He felt they had solved the problem they set out to solve and that it was time for him to go.

But Aaron’s departure didn’t slow the business down, with the company hitting $30m revenue in 2018 and raising $80 million in a Series D round that same year.

The company went on to raise a further $100 million in May 2020 (Series E), and $225 million in May 2021 (Series F), valuing the company at approximately $2.75 billion at that time.

Today the platform has expanded to include over 100 classes taught by renowned figures across various disciplines and does over $100 million revenue per year.

We’re just waiting for David and Aaron’s masterclass in entrepreneurship to drop.

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INFLUENCER IDEAS

#HalfBakedBizIdea

Chris Green sharing an idea very similar to one we shared in edition #89 👀 

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