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Business Ideas #320: Tech Swag, Agency...

Plus The Instagram Account that Became a +$50m/yr Business

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up business ideas as shocking as 23andme filing for bankruptcy 😲 

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

  1. Business Idea💡: Making money with merch

  2. Drunk Business Idea 🍻: Helping your kids to burn off their excess energy

  3. Just The Tip 📈: “The most important idea of the 21st century“

  4. The Moneyshot 🤑: The Instagram account that became a +$50m/yr 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

Tech Swag Marketplace 🧢 

Vest to impress

Available Domain: Fullstackfits.com

💡 TLDR: A marketplace for users to buy and sell highly sought after tech merch

1. Problem/Opportunity

The Problem/Opportunity: The tech industry is becoming more fashion conscious. And it’s no wonder since tech CEOs are more dripped out than ever before. Take Zuck, whose transformation will be studied by generations to come…

Similarly startup merch, something employees used to cringe at wearing, has taken on new life with these items becoming sought after purchases. Take Bluesky who made an insane amount of monry by selling t-shirts mocking Zuckerberg, or how vintage Apple t-shirts have become hugely sought after. And don’t get me started on the market for defunct tech company merch where you can drop $500 on a Fyre Festival hat or $150 on a Silicon Valley Bank branded chopping board. Yet there's no go-to place to buy, sell, or discover this stuff. The sneakerheads have StockX. The fashionistas have Depop. Let’s build something for the techies out there.

Market Size: There are around 12 million tech employees in the US alone

2. Solution 

The Idea: A marketplace for users to buy and sell highly sought after tech merch

How it Works:

  • List Your Swag – Upload photos of your tech merch, add tags (company, year, size), and share the story behind it.

  • Browse and Buy – Discover rare, vintage, or modern tech gear from startups, unicorns, and everything in between.

  • Secure Checkout – Buyers pay through the platform; sellers get paid when the item ships.

  • Drop Alerts & Auctions – Get notified about exclusive swag drops, limited-edition items by partnering with brands, or auctions on rare finds

Go-to-market: Build hype on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and Reddit (especially r/startups, r/techwear etc.)

Business Model: Take rate of 10–15% per transaction

Startup Costs: You could spin this up incredibly cheaply, all you need is a basic website and you’re good to go

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: This is more of a cash flow business than a mega venture scale opportunity

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Kid’s Treadmill

  • Is your child dangerously full of energy? Tired of your toddler doing parkour off the couch?

  • Introducing Lil' Treader™, the world's first treadmill for kids.

  • With Lil' Treader™, your little ball of energy can now jog, sprint, or tantrum-walk their way to a nap-worthy level of exhaustion…all from the safety of your living room.

  • Optional extra to use the energy they create to power your home coming soon…

Vote

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: High Agency

  • It’s being said that being “high agency” is the most important trait for success in the modern world.

  • Being high agency means you believe you can influence the world around you by taking initiative, solving problems and having a bias towards action.

  • And today, in a world dominated by AI, execution is getting cheaper and cheaper, the only barrier is actually taking action and being high agency.

  • George Mack (who thinks agency is the most important idea of the 21st century) wrote an amazing article on what it means to be High Agency. Oh and he advertised this article on a Times Square billboard for exactly $0 (the perfect example of a high agency move. Chef’s kiss.)

Business Ideas

  • High Agency Challenges App: A mobile app with weekly challenges that build high-agency muscles e.g., negotiate something, solve a bureaucratic problem, cold-email 10 people.

  • High Agency Coaching Platform: A marketplace connecting people with coaches who specialize in cultivating high-agency traits (clear thinking, action bias, disagreeability, etc.)

TOGETHER WITH SURFSHARK

You are being watched 👀 

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THE MONEYSHOT

The Instagram Account that Became a +$50m/yr Business

In today’s economy, attention is everything.

Case in point…check out these guys who turned a big Instagram account into a +$50m business.

This is their story.

Elliot Tebele (right) is a super high agency person (see…it’s a big deal).

At age 19 he dropped out of Hunter College in New York and went to work for his brother's wine distribution company. And during this time, like many of us, Elliot was constantly texting funny videos and memes to his friends.

So in 2011 he decided to create a Tumblr page to post these memes, eventually switching his focus to Instagram. As a big Seinfeld fan he named the account after a T-shirt worn by a character in the show, calling it (cover your eyes kids) f***jerry.

Throughout the early 2010s the account grew rapidly as Instagram itself exploded and by 2015, the account had millions of followers and became one of the most influential humor accounts on Instagram.

Eventually Elliot and his brother Maurice Tebele decided to turn this account into an agency by starting Jerry Media, a marketing agency that helped brands go viral using meme marketing. Jerry Media worked on many high-profile campaigns, including a marketing campaign for the infamous Fyre Festival. Yikes.

With Jerry Media ripping Elliot wondered what else he could do with his massive audience? He wanted to create a business that was more scalable and had more viral potential, settling on the idea of creating a card game.

At the time Cards Against Humanity was dominating the party game space. So in 2016 Elliot teamed up with his childhood friend Ben Kaplan (middle) and an early Jerry Media employee Elie Ballas (left) to launch a physical party game similar to Cards Against Humainty but based around memes, something they knew their audience would love.

The first prototype was pretty straightforward, a deck of caption cards with phrases written on them and a stack of photo cards of popular meme images.

This was the first version of What Do You Meme?

They used the massive reach of their Instagram account (tens of millions of followers across accounts by this point) to instantly market and distribute the game. The product was the perfect fit for their audience and pretty soon they were swimming in sales.

They began by selling on Amazon, where the game rose to become one of the top-selling games and not long after they expanded into retail stores like Target and Walmart.

The company grew into a multi-million dollar brand in a few years and they went on to build a multi-product portfolio of games to capture as many players as possible. They launched games like Incohearent, Let’s Get Deep and New Phone, Who Dis?, eventually creating an entire brand of these games called Relatable.com.

In total we estimate the brand does over $50m in revenue per year across its various properties, not bad for a brand basically built around memes.

All of which goes to show that you don’t have to take business too seriously to be successful. These guys followed their intuition and just created fun content and products they thought people would like.

It really is that simple.

1 - 1 FOUNDER FEEDBACK

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