BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

BetterHelp for Founders 🧘  

Less grind, more mind…ful

Available Domain: Zenfound.ai

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: In yesterday’s edition we broke down the story of the founding of BetterHelp and how the founder (Alon Matas) initially founded the platform to help himself as he struggled with the trials and tribulations of being a founder. And he isn’t alone…

Which got us thinking…why not verticalize BetterHelp for what it was originally intended for? You could make a version of it tailored for the specific challenges of being a founder. Part therapy, part sports psychology. Here’s what we’re thinking.

Market Size: There are 400m+ entrepreneurs worldwide, 50m+ early-stage founders and roughly 1m active venture-backed startup founders

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A mental wellness platform specifically designed for startup founders, combining therapy, coaching and peer support

How it Works:

• A founder signs up to the platform and shares details of their life, business and any challenges they’re facing right now in their business

• They can then book in for 1-on-1 therapy, coaching or psychology sessions with licensed therapists experienced in startup stress, imposter syndrome, burnout, co-founder conflict, etc.

• Users can also partake in group therapy circles for shared experiences and local meetups can be organised between founders for peer support

• The site contains a specific content library covering topics like burnout recovery, fundraising anxiety, relationship management etc.

Go-to-market: Partner with accelerators, incubators & VCs to offer the service to their founders

Business Model: Freemium model + users pay for sessions

Startup Costs: You could build an app here relatively cheaply

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Get acquired by a major teletherapy company like BetterHelp or Talkspace

Exit Multiple: Therapy/wellness SaaS products typically exit at 5x–12x ARR

TOGETHER WITH RYSE

Alexa, Ring, Nest, Apple, Roku…

What do all of these smart home products have in common?

They are must-haves in homes everywhere, and now there’s one more to add to the list…

Meet RYSE – the revolutionary way to automate your window blinds & shades.

And here’s why investors are taking notice:

📈 $10M+ in revenue and growing 200% year-over-year

🏢 In 127 Best Buy locations, with Home Depot launching in 2025

🔒 10+ patents protecting industry-leading technology

RYSE is on track to be the next big name in smart home automation—and you can invest at $1.90/share, and earn up to 25% in bonus shares, before their next wave of expansion.

Invest Today

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Touch Grass App

• Do you spend too much time on your phone? Looking to get your screen time down to an acceptable level?

• Well with the Touch Grass App™ now you can. This app locks distracting apps until you literally walk outside, get your ass to some grass and take a photo of yourself touching it.

• Build up a streak, challenge your friends, and take back control of your life

Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

• Want the ultimate way to spot an emerging health trend? All you have to do is follow what Bryan Johnson is up to and whatever he starts doing you can be sure it will become popular in a few months. And this is his latest therapy…

• Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). It involves breathing pure oxygen in a pressurized chamber which allows your lungs to absorb significantly more oxygen than they would under normal conditions.

• It ranks as one of the highest value health therapies Bryan’s done according to him, which means you can bet demand for this service is about to skyrocket

Business Ideas

• HBOT Franchise Model: Create a franchise-ready, low-footprint, high-margin HBOT studio model.

• Routines.club for Biohackers: A website that tracks the daily routines, habits and practices of biohackers and longevity athletes (from edition #288)

TOGETHER WITH KIXIE

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Local Presence Dialing ensures prospects see a familiar number, AI-Powered Spam Minimization keeps you out of spam folders, and Progressive Number Rotation keeps your outreach fresh and effective. More live answers mean more sales.

If that sounds complicated, don’t worry—just know you’ll 4X your connections and close more deals.

Book a free demo today and mention Half Baked for 10% off.

THE MONEYSHOT

The Accidental Hit That Made +$250m

Sometimes the simplest innovations can lead to incredible outcomes.

Take these founders who teamed up to create a simple card game which has generated more than $250m in revenue.

This is their story.

Elan Lee (right) has always loved games. So much so that he decided to make a career out of it.

After studying computer science at the Rochester Institute of Technology Elan went to work at Industrial Light and Magic where he worked on special effects for Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace where, despite his best efforts, he still couldn’t make that movie any good. Sorry Elan, you know it’s true.

But many years later and well into his career Elan got invited on a Hawaiian vacation with his friend, YouTuber Matt Harding. There he met another friend of Matt’s, Matthew Inman (left), whose web comic The Oatmeal had been growing since it started back in 2009.

At the time Elan had been toying around with an idea for a fast-paced card game involving a “bomb” card that would end the game if drawn. Matthew loved the idea but had a question…why a bomb? Why not make it something you’d really want to avoid blowing up? Something, perhaps, cuter? Like a cat maybe?

So the pair decided to pursue the idea and launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce sets of cards, promoting it on The Oatmeal. They set a modest goal of raising $10,000, one which they reached it in just eight minutes. Within 24 hours they’d raised more than $1 million and by February 2015 their campaign became the most successful in Kickstarter history at the time, raising nearly $9 million from 219,000+ backers. They had an accidental hit on their hands.

They founded Exploding Kittens.

The game was incredibly simple. Players take turns drawing cards, trying to avoid the dreaded Exploding Kitten. They can use action cards to skip, defuse, or sabotage others and the last one standing wins. It’s super fun to play if you ever get the chance.

But while playing the game was fun the team had to figure out how to create and ship 700,000 games. By mid-2015 they started shipping the product to their early backers and by 2016 they were already selling the game in major retailers like Target. Pretty quickly the business was bringing in tens of millions in revenue. But they team didn’t stop there.

They capitalized on their momentum and started releasing new games like Throw Throw Burrito, Poetry for Neanderthals and Bears vs Babies (which also launched via Kickstarter, raising c.$3.2 million). If it ain’t broke don’t fix it as they say…

They also expanded on the Exploding Kittens franchise by launching a mobile game, and more recently, a Netflix animated series and mobile game version, expanding the brand even further. The result?

Since the game was launched they’ve sold more than 11m games, making well over $200m in revenue. Including all product lines, it's likely their total cumulative revenue is closer to $250m. All from a simple bomb card.

Which goes to prove that innovation doesn’t necessarily have to be some deep, profound discovery or insight. It can be incredibly simple, even something as simple as the idea for a card game.

The key is to follow these instincts, because you never know where they might lead you.

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