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Business Ideas #257: Relationship Wrapped, ART...

Plus How Sam Altman’s Brother Built a $3bn Business

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up business ideas as often as Michael Saylor and Microstrategy are buying bitcoin 📈 

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

  1. Business Idea💡: Remixing Spotify’s wrapped to make a new product

  2. Drunk Business Idea 🍻: Making parking 10x less painful

  3. Just The Tip 📈: WTF is ART and why is it growing so quickly?

  4. The Moneyshot 🤑: How Sam Altman’s brother built a $3bn business

P.S: If you want to read any previous editions of Half Baked you can on our website and if you were forwarded this email you can subscribe here.

P.P.S: Half Baked is free. Half Baked will always be free. That’s thanks to the support of our sponsors. We’d love if you could take a moment to check them out.

Let’s get into it.

BUSINESS IDEA | CASH FLOW BUSINESS

Wrapped for Relationships 💌  

Heart drive full

Available Domain: Lovelog.ai

💡 TLDR: A digital service that creates automated, shareable memory books of photos and key moments in a relationship at the end of each year

1. Problem/Opportunity

The Problem/Opportunity: Spotify’s end of year Wrapped campaign has become a cultural phenomenon. And thankfully every app doesn’t do their own version of Wrapped…

But one area the Wrapped concept should be applied to is relationships. Imagine receiving a highlight reel of all the big moments in your relationship at the end of each year? That would be an incredible experience to share with your partner. So let’s create exactly that.

Market Size: The dating app market is worth around $8 billion currently which is a pretty good proxy for this market

2. Solution 

The Idea: A digital service that creates automated, shareable memory books of photos and key moments in a relationship at the end of each year

How it Works:

  • A couple jointly signs up for the platform

  • Throughout the year they can submit photos, journal entries or anything else they want of key milestones or events in the relationship during the year

  • AI analyzes the inputs and creates a digital memory log which is released at the end of a year for the couple to view

  • They can also get a version of the log made into a physical book and shipped to them and over many years can build up a collection of these books

Go-to-market: Start by beta testing with 100 couples then start working with influencers to get more users

Business Model: Use a freemium model where users can create a digital memory log for free but to get it printed and get more advanced features must pay a subscription fee

Startup Costs: You could start this incredibly cheaply, likely for a few hundred dollars, by doing most of the work manually through a simple portal

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: Hold here and this could be an incredible cash flowing business

TOGETHER WITH BEEHIIV

We Love Newsletter Businesses

Newsletters are an incredible way to build a tight-knit community of people just like you. Plus whether you’re sending a newsletter to 10 people or 1,000,000, the effort is the same, making them incredibly high-margin businesses.

And because our job is to spark ideas, we’ve got three killer newsletter concepts you could launch (seriously, they’re up for grabs—maybe it’s your time to shine?):

💡 Droids Daily - Morning Brew for robotics. A niche audience that’s ready to geek out and pay up. High-value, untapped potential.

😂 The Meme Times - All the day’s major headlines, told through memes. Broad appeal, viral-worthy, and a totally fresh twist on news.

🎙️ The Employee # Newsletter - Interviews with the OG unicorn employees. Packed with insider insights from the earliest employees of billion-dollar startups.

If you’re starting one of these (or your own brilliant idea), beehiiv is the platform to grow your newsletter from Day 1.

Start your free trial today and use this link for 20% OFF your first 3 months.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Parking Drone

In the coming days many of us will finally emerge from our Christmas cocoons to replenish our food supplies or to take advantage of some killer post-Christmas sales. There’s only one problem though. We’ll all be doing it at the same time. This means finding parking spaces will be more of a nightmare than it normally is. But fear not, we have the solution.

With this Parking Drone you can find a parking space in record time. Simply release the drone from your car, let it scan for spaces and it sends back a live feed to your phone directing you to an empty space.

V2 of the drone will have guns to fight off any potential space poachers which we’re very excited about…

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Assisted Reproductive Technologies

There’s no getting around it, birth rates are plummeting. Sure some of this is down to people choosing to have fewer kids, but it’s also caused by an increase in couples experiencing fertility issues. 12% of women experience difficulties becoming pregnant and 33% of Americans have turned to fertility treatments or know someone who has. This is why the market for assisted reproductive technologies (“ART”) like IVF are exploding in popularity, growing 70% - 80% per year. This is a huge problem society is grappling with and we need all the help we can get to solve it.

Business Ideas

  • Fertility Meditation App: Launch a meditation app designed for women to reduce their stress while trying to conceive and while pregnant

  • IVF Medical Tourism Business: Launch a concierge service helping patients navigate IVF treatments in different countries

TOGETHER WITH CONFLUENCE VC

Get your news where Silicon Valley gets its news 📰

The best investors need the information that matters, fast.

That’s why a lot of them (including investors from a16z, Bessemer, Founders Fund, and Sequoia) trust this free newsletter.

It’s a five minute-read every morning, and it gives readers the information they need ASAP so they can spend less time scrolling and more time doing.

THE MONEYSHOT

How Sam Altman’s Brother Built a $3bn Business

Sam Altman is slowly becoming a Silicon Valley legend.

But his younger brother has made waves in the Valley too, building a $3bn business most people have never heard of.

This is his story.

Jack Altman, just like his brother, is a great founder.

He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and as the younger brother of Sam he was highly influenced by his older brother’s interests, namely technology and business.

Jack graduated from Princeton University in 2011 with an A.B. in Economics and after graduating he worked as an analyst at Gleacher & Company and later as an investor at Hydrazine Capital. In 2013, he joined Teespring as their VP of Business Development and at Teespring Jack met a kindred spirit of his, Eric Koslow. Eric was one of the company’s first engineering hires and after getting to know each other they knew they wanted to start a company together. All they needed was an idea.

The first idea they came up with was for a pharmacy benefit management platform - but they quickly realized their hearts weren’t in it and moved on after a few months.

They then started thinking about the problems they saw at Teespring. They witnessed the company's rapid growth from 10 to 500 employees in under two years and saw how this put a strain on their people management systems.

So the pair decided to build software to help businesses and employees track their OKRs (objectives and key results as pioneered by Andy Grove of Intel). They got a product in front of companies but they weren’t engaging with the product.

So the co-founders decided to stop beating around the bush and started talking to their users. They also spoke to HR teams to ask about other paint points they were experiencing.

Soon it became blatantly obvious that there was a big gap in the market around performance reviews so the co-founders mocked up a product to help companies to create and track employee’s performance reviews.

They had founded Lattice.

After this pivot their prospects changed overnight. Jack and Eric went from spending nine months beating their heads against the wall on the OKR product to selling annual contracts based on just design mockups.

In 2016 the team raised a $2.8m seed round quickly followed by a $6.4m Series A in 2017 to support their growth.

Over time, as the company grew, the founder’s never forgot their early lesson and kept speaking to their customers. This ongoing customer feedback informed product decisions and eventually Lattice expanded to become an all-in-one people management platform. And as the product expanded so too did the product’s TAM, and the amount of investment they required to capture the market.

Lattice went on to raise $25m in 2019, $45m in 2020 and $60m in 2021, becoming a unicorn on the way.

Oh and for good measure while all of this was going on Jack was an active angel investor, investing in Opendoor, Instacart, Pinterest, Gusto, and Patreon among other hugely successful companies.

In January 2022, Lattice raised $175 million in a Series F funding round, which tripled the company's valuation to $3 billion. Clearly pivoting was the right call.

Today Lattice has more than 5,000 enterprise customers and is crushing it, but Jack is no longer at the helm. In December 2023 he stepped down as the company’s CEO, transitioning to the role of Executive Chairman. Jack believed it was time for new leadership to guide Lattice through its next phase of growth and wanted to go back to his first love…the earliest stages of company-building.

All of which goes to show that talking to people, whether they’re customers or prospective customers, is not optional when building a business. It’s a requirement.

You can’t build businesses in your head, you need to get out into the world and listen to your users.

They have all the answers you’re looking for.

1 - 1 FOUNDER FEEDBACK

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