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Business Ideas #308: Meeting Intel, Tattoo Generators...

Plus How a Side Project Became a $7.5bn Business

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up business ideas as hotly anticipated as Discord’s upcoming IPO 🤑

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

  1. Business Idea💡: A tool to make meetings 10x more effective

  2. Drunk Business Idea 🍻: Removing one of the biggest barriers to reading

  3. Just The Tip 📈: Where art and technology meet

  4. The Moneyshot 🤑: How a side project became a $7.5bn 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 | STARTUP

Pre-Call Research Agent 📞  

Big data, small talk

Available Domain: Callscout.ai

💡 TLDR: An AI Agent which researches a prospect or candidate before a call and provides summary information about the person

1. Problem/Opportunity

The Problem/Opportunity: We all spend too much time in meetings. Standups. Check-ins. Syncs. By the time you're done talking about the work, there's no time left to actually do any work.

But the only thing worse than a meeting is showing up to one completely unprepared. This is particularly true for salespeople and recruiters who do nothing but meeting strangers all day. So why not build a tool help them to get the most out of these calls by being incredibly well prepared? Here’s what we have in mind.

Market Size: The B2B sales & marketing intelligence market is worth around $20bn

2. Solution 

The Idea: An AI Agent which researches a prospect or candidate before a call and provides summary information about the person

How it Works:

  • The AI integrates with Google Calendar or Outlook and knows when a user has a new meeting booked in and who it is with

  • The agent then pulls publicly available data from LinkedIn, Twitter, company websites, news articles, and more on the person or people coming onto the call

  • Before the call the AI generates a briefing where it summarizes key information about the prospect depending on the use case (work history for recruiters, common interests for sales calls etc.) which the user can study before or during the call

Go-to-market: Start by selling into sales teams and recruiters

Business Model: Freemium model

Startup Costs: By building on top of existing models you could build this pretty cheaply

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: You could likely exit to a buyer like Zoom, Gong etc.

Exit Multiple: 5x - 10x ARR if acquired by a competitor.

TOGETHER WITH LIQUID WEB

High-Performance Hosting Minus the High Price

Premium performance always meant a premium price, until disruptors changed the game.

  • Nespresso made barista-level coffee affordable.

  • Uniqlo brought luxury basics to everyone.

  • MacBook Air proved power doesn’t have to be bulky.

Now, Liquid Web is doing the same for hosting.

No costly downtime, Blazing-fast performance, 24/7/365 support.

Exclusive for Half Baked readers: Get up to 77% off high-performance VPS Hosting and Dedicated Servers.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

The ChairCase

  • Are you tired of getting up to grab a book? Do you dream of a world where reading requires absolutely zero physical effort?

  • Introducing the ChairCase™, the revolutionary chair with a built-in bookcase that eliminates the exhausting task of walking to your bookshelf.

  • Keep your favorite books within arm’s reach, expending minimum effort while you maximize your intelligence.

  • Books sold separately of course

Vote

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Tattoo Generators

  • Tattoos: bold art, drunken regret, or your parents’ worst nightmare? Whatever the story, they come in all shapes and styles.

  • And for tattoo enthusiasts looking for tattoo design inspiration, more than ever they are turning to tattoo generators to help them get cool designs.

  • Tattoo generators are digital tools that help users create custom tattoo designs quickly and easily. They offer a wide range of templates, fonts, and symbols, allowing for personalization and creative expression.

  • Some even use AI to suggest styles based on user preferences, making them a popular choice for modern tattoo enthusiasts.

Business Ideas

  • Figma for Tattoo Design: A cloud-based collaborative design platform for tattoo fans and artists to work together to design their tattoos (from edition #232)

  • Print-on-Demand Temporary Tattoos: Allow users to generate designs and order them as temporary tattoos. Great for people who want to "try before they buy" a permanent piece.

TOGETHER WITH RYSE

Mr. Wonderful Lost Out on $400 Million… Will You?

The Sharks passed on Ring before it sold for $1.2 billion to Amazon. Now, there’s another smart home company catching investors’ attention.

Meet RYSE—a leader in smart shade automation with $10M+ in revenue, 200% year-over-year growth, and distribution in 127 Best Buy stores (with Home Depot launching in 2025).

RYSE’s patented technology is making waves in a booming market—and you can invest at

$1.90/share before their next growth phase.

Past performance is not indicative of future results. Email may contain forward-looking statements. See US Offering for details. Informational purposes only.

THE MONEYSHOT

How a Side Project Became a $7.5bn Business

Great tech isn’t just about invention, it’s about adoption.

Take these founders who took a new invention, made it more accessible, and built a $7.5bn business out of it.

This is their story.

Tom Preston-Werner (in the chair), Chris Wanstrath (left), PJ Hyett (behind the globe for some reason?), and Scott Chacon (thinking deeply I guess?) are some of the best founders you’ve never heard of.

And this group of rag-tag coders all met through the Ruby programming community in San Francisco. I can only imagine how wild those Ruby programming parties are…

But back in 2007 they were all discussing their frustrations with existing version control systems when they were developing software. Interestingly though, this was a problem that had already been solved.

Back in 2005 Linus Torvalds had created Git, an incredible tool that solved for distributed version control system, but it had a problem…it was incredibly cumbersome to use. So these developers decided to team up and build a web-based Git repository hosting service that would simplify the process of using Git. They weren’t inventing anything new, just making the existing technology more user-friendly.

So in January 2008 the team started coding the platform over nights and weekends, balancing other commitments.

Just three months later, GitHub was born.

The platform took off immediately.

Within months, GitHub hosted 46,000 repositories, as open-source projects flocked to its clean, intuitive interface. By the end of the year, it hit 100,000 repositories, thanks in part to the endorsement of major open-source communities like Ruby on Rails.

Unlike many Silicon Valley startups, GitHub didn’t chase venture capital from the outset. Instead, it relied on a simple but effective business model: a subscription service for private repositories. This approach made GitHub one of the rare tech companies that was profitable from day one.

The company’s growth was relentless. In 2010 GitHub hit 1 million repositories, then 2 million in 2011. Finally in 2012 they relented and raised $100m from Andreessen Horowitz in one of the biggest Series A funding rounds ever at the time.

With funding secured, GitHub continued its ascent. By 2013, it surpassed 10 million repositories. By 2015, it wasn’t just indie developers and open-source projects using GitHub. Corporate giants like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook had integrated it into their workflows. GitHub had gone from a weekend side project to an industry standard.

Then suddenly, in 2018, there was an announcement that sent shockwaves through the developer community…Microsoft was acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. Devs were worried that the integrity of the platform would be under threat. But under Microsoft’s stewardship the platform has thrived. And the founders’ got a very, very nice payday for themselves too.

All of which proves that even the best inventions can fade into obscurity unless they’re made simple and accessible to the masses.

So keep your eyes peeled for innovations like this…because you could be the one to bring them into the mainstream.

1 - 1 FOUNDER FEEDBACK

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