BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Habit Holidays 🌴 

Breaking bad…habits

Available Domain: Habitholiday.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: With the New Year upon us it’s time for all of us to become the best version of ourselves. Eating healthy. Going to the gym. Reading more books. Because this is the year we’re all keeping our new years resolutions, right? Right?

Wrong. If you’re anything like me you’ll have tried and failed more times than you can count to create and stick with new habits. Usually the toughest part is the first few days of doing anything new. As James Clear famously wrote: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” So why not create an experience which puts these systems in place. Here’s what we have in mind.

Market Size: The global self-improvement market was worth around $41bn in 2023

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A program where people go on a week long retreat to break old bad habits and create and maintain new habits

How it Works:

• Small group retreats (6 - 10 people per group) are organized where participants apply to go on a retreat. As part of the application process they outline what bad habits they want to break and what new good habits they want to form

• They then go away for seven days on a trip where they can kick their bad habits and form new ones, with every step possible taken to make it impossible for participants to fall back into their old habits (e.g. daily exercising, no junk food available to eat etc.)

• As part of the retreat there are workshops and other interventions to help people to stay on track and put systems in place to stick with their new habits

• After the retreat participants work with the team to come up with a sustainable plan to keep their habits going forward and keep each other accountable with virtual meet-ups to ensure everyone stays on track

Go-to-market: Start by doing a single retreat, nail the experience, get some great testimonials and use them for marketing going forward

Business Model: Charge for the trip (a few thousand dollars) plus an ongoing subscription for access to the app and wider support group

Startup Costs: If you get customers to prepay for trips (with a refund option) you could use their funds for cash flow and start this business for almost $0

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: This would be an amazing business to own. You’re probably not getting a huge exit here but this could easily do millions of dollars each year.

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

Segway Vacuum Cleaner

When the Segway was invented in 2001 inventor Dean Kamen believed it would kill the car industry, becoming "to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.” Turns out he was wrong. Incredibly wrong. But we think that’s because he focussed on transportation when he should have focussed on something else entirely…cleaning.

With this new Segway Vacuum Cleaner you can cruise around your house and vacuum your floors simultaneously. It’s fast, efficient and ridiculously expensive. The perfect combination.

Admit it. You know you want one.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Shilajit Honey

While Honey, the Chrome extension acquired by PayPal in 2020 for $4bn is under fire right now for stealing from creators, a very different type of honey is trending for very different reasons. It’s called shilajit honey and it’s a combination of shilajit, a sticky, tar-like substance that naturally occurs in high mountain ranges and honey of course. The combination has been shown to increase energy levels, has anti-inflammatory properties and supports digestion. So why not get in on this trend and earn yourself some sweet, sweet cash?

Business Ideas:

• All Natural Supplements Brand: Create a supplements brand which only sells naturally occurring foods and substances as supplements

• Single-serve Honey Brand: Create a range of single-serve honey products, similar to what Justin’s did for peanut butter, with different honey products including raw honey, manuka honey, shilajit honey etc.

THE MONEYSHOT

How Google Docs Inspired a +$1bn Business

Here at Half Baked we love “remixing” business ideas…taking an idea from one domain and applying it to another. It can lead to game-changing business ideas.

Take this founder as an example who took inspiration from Google Docs and went on to build a +$1bn business.

This is his story.

Amjad Masad’s story is pretty awesome.

He was born and raised in Amman, Jordan. His father was a computer programmer and Amjad started programming at age 11, learning BASIC on his dad's computer. He even went on to build websites for local businesses while still in high school. The classic tech founder origin story…

He went on to study computer science at the Princess Sumaya University for Technology in Amman, Jordan, graduating in 2010. And while he was studying and building apps Amjad had a problem he needed to solve.

Amjad wanted a tool to easily code and collaborate across different computers. A few years earlier Google had launched Google Docs and Amjad envisioned creating the Google Docs for coding, a cloud-based coding environment where users could share and collaborate on codebases.

This vision led Masad to create a prototype over a single weekend in 2011, featuring a simple text box and a "Run JavaScript" button. Now you’re probably expecting to hear how Amjad moved to Silicon Valley, raised a huge seed round and built his empire. But this isn’t that kind of story.

No, for the next few years Amjad kept working full-time. He worked for Yahoo, Codecademy, and Facebook in different software engineering roles and built the platform on nights and weekends.

Amjad was cooking up something special and by 2016 his platform had 100,000 users which he acquired completely organically all while working full-time. Talk about dedication.

Finally he decided it was time to take the plunge and go full-time on his business. He teamed up with Haya Odeh (his wife) and Faris Masad and in 2016 they officially incorporated their business.

They founded Replit.

Why the name? Well it’s derived from the acronym REPL, which stands for "read–evaluate–print loop". You know a business with a name that nerdy means business. And from its strong foundations Replit was able to grow exponentially.

By 2018 the platform reached 1 million users and raised a $4.5m seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. That has to be a record for biggest user base when raising a seed round.

In 2021 the company raised a Series A round for $20m and later that year raised a further $80m to scale the business even further. In 2023 Replit secured a $97.4m Series D led by a16z's Growth Fund, valuing the company at $1.16 billion. Amjad’s side hustle had grown into a billion dollar business, an incredible feat.

Today, Replit serves over 30 million developers from more than 200 countries around the world. And as the company has grown so too has its ambition.

The company’s overarching goal is to help anyone become a programmer and today anyone can use Replit and basic prompting to build websites and apps. Think ChatGPT for building software. It’s literally never been easier to build software than it is today.

But in the end Amjad’s story proves that anyone from anywhere can build an incredible business. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, your age, race, religion, creed. The market doesn’t care. Anyone with a great idea and a strong work ethic can win.

You can win.

1 - 1 FOUNDER FEEDBACK

We Need Your Help

We're on a mission to become the world's #1 entrepreneurship newsletter, but to do that we need your help. Got feedback, ideas, or thoughts on what you’d love to see next? This is your chance to help shape Half Baked. Darragh (our Head Baker) is opening up his calendar just for you. Click here to book a 15 minute call.