BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Food Recall App 🌭 

Saving your bacon

Available Domain: Recallradar.io

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

McDonald's burgers. Eggs. Green onions. Frozen waffles. No this isn’t a list of what I ate yesterday (but it’s close). This is a list of foods that have been recalled recently due to food safety concerns, which is news you never want to hear.

And as food recalls are becoming more and more prevalent it’s pretty clear that we don’t have a good system for informing consumers about these recalls. We mostly hear about them on the news or you might use an app to do it, but the apps in this space aren’t great. So let’s build a system to solve this.

Market Size: The US food recall market size is worth around $6bn annually

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An app which uses location and payment data to intelligently alert users about food recalls that may affect them

How it Works:

• The users signs up to the app and connects up their banking data to the app, as well as sharing their location data

• The platform performs real-time monitoring of FDA and USDA recalls and cross-references purchase history and location data with active recalls which relate to specific stores which the customer purchased food from

• Consumers are then alerted to recalls that may affect them and can take steps to return the food to the store or throw it out

Go-to-market: Focus on one particular jurisdiction or state where the highest quality food recall data is available and start from there

Business Model: Charge consumers a subscription fee or open up the data you have via an API and sell to grocery stores who can then include alerts in their own apps

Startup Costs: This will be pretty costly to start so you’ll need to think about doing a raise here to build the product. Either that it be willing to give away plenty of equity to acquire the necessary engineering talent

Competitors: Some food recall apps exist already, but none are as comprehensive as this one

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: This would be a prime candidate to be acquired by a foodtech focussed PE firm like Finistere Ventures

Exit Multiple: SaaS companies in the food safety space have sold for 5-7x revenue in the past

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Avocado Protector

You may or may not be aware of the banana bunker, a plastic case to protect bananas which took the internet by storm a few years back. It was a huge hit online (with some incredibly funny comments about it) so we thought, what’s more important to protect than a banana?

Well an avocado of course. Think of all of the avocado toast that goes uneaten due to damaged avocados.

But thankfully the avocado protector solves this problem.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Mastic Gum

The earliest known chewing gum was made by the ancient Mayans and Aztecs from tree resin called chicle, around 2000 years ago. And today a form of ancient gum has surged in popularity…mastic gum. It’s made from a resin that comes from the mastic tree, which is an evergreen shrub that grows on the Greek island of Chios. It’s primarily known for supporting digestive health and reducing stomach acid, while also offering oral health benefits through its natural antibacterial properties. We reckon there are some pretty big businesses to build in this space.

Business Ideas

• Mastic Gum Jaw Brand: Create a line of mastic gum-based chewing gum designed to improve the definition of your jawline

• White Label Mastic Gum Business: White label mastic products for wellness brands so they can create their own mastic gum products

THE MONEYSHOT

The Founder Who Made $1,036,175 in 67 Days

Making a million dollars is something all founders dream of, but for most it takes years of blood, sweat and tears to hit the $1m mark.

But not for this founder. He thought of a business idea, started selling the product and made $1m in just 67 days.

This is his story.

Marshall Haas is a badass founder.

At age 19 he dropped out of college (without his parents knowing) to start his first tech company with $40k of investment he received from the Chilean Government.

At 22-years-old he founded a startup studio called Need/Want that started different e-commerce brands. Alongside co-founder Jon Wheatley they tried a lot of different products. Some took off, most failed. But their biggest success came from selling phone cases. The pair launched a slim phone case brand called Peel, which is still running today.

Now if all of this sounds familiar (it should since it’s from this edition of Half Baked) then you’ll know that Marshall went on to found Somewhere.com in 2020 during COVID. But that’s not the only business he founded during COVID…

At the time Marshall and his wife just found out they were having a child. And Marshall was terrified his e-commerce business wouldn’t survive the lock downs.

So he got busy creating.

He realised that, in a world where everyone was more conscious of germs and cleanliness, that people needed a new way to interact with the world. So Marshall had the idea to create a brass keychain hook that allowed you to pull open doors, press buttons at the gas station, etc without touching those things with your hands…ultimately to avoid germs.

He had the idea for the Keychain Touch Tool.

Once he had the idea Marshall didn’t wait around. The same day he had the idea he texted an industrial designer friend named Jordan Westerberg. They went back and forth on designs with Jordan 3D printing a few designs. Just 4 days later they had a finalised design for the product.

He also started sourcing manufacturers and just 5 days after having the idea Marshall’s product went into production in China.

Just two days after production began the product went live on Peel’s website using the renderings as their product images and Marshall emailed Peel’s customer list announcing the product but explaining it would ship in a few weeks.

The launch was a huge success.

On launch day the product cleared $50k in sales and on day 2 they passed $100k in sales. Momentum didn’t slow and by day 67 they crossed $1,036,175 in revenue by selling 27,227 units of the Touch Tool. Not bad for a time when most of the world was watching Netflix in their PJs.

If you want to get a more detailed account of the story from Marshall himself, he wrote a great thread on it on Twitter.

But ultimately Marshall’s story proves that, in this day and age, you can achieve incredible things in just a few weeks. They key is to move as quickly as possible.

Who knows, just like Marshall you could be one idea and a few weeks away from your first $1m.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

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