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- Business Ideas #75: Viral Virtual Restaurants, the Carnivore Diet...
Business Ideas #75: Viral Virtual Restaurants, the Carnivore Diet...
Plus Making $20m/year from Google Maps
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up business ideas so innovative Biden is placing tariffs on our ideas.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
Business Idea💡: Taking viral foods to the virtual kitchen
Drunk Business Idea 🍻: An app to help you land that dream job
Just The Tip 📈: The carnivore diet is exploding in popularity
The Moneyshot 🤑: Making $20m/year from Google Maps
BUSINESS IDEA | VENTURE STARTUP
Virtual Viral Restaurant 😋
Bon appétiktok
Available Domain: viralfoody.com
💡 TLDR: A virtual restaurant which sells trending food items through delivery partners
1. Problem/Opportunity❓
The Problem/Opportunity: In a world where creators are going viral, so too are dishes. Cronuts. Ramen Burgers. Sushi Burritos. Cookie dough croissants. All of these dishes have gone mega viral in recent months. And while people are dying to try these dishes a lot of us are menaces in the kitchen.
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/5257d41c-9904-4ed3-b21b-8bb069a4de38/652ff3811310d.jpg?t=1715850026)
This presents a huge opportunity. So let’s build a business around it.
Market Size: Global Online Food Delivery Services Market size was valued at $60bn in 2022
2. Solution ✅
The Idea: A virtual restaurant which sells trending food items through delivery partners
How it Works:
Users go to their food delivery app of choice and can choose what items they want to order
The business works with a network of “ghost kitchens” who are trained to prepare the dishes on the menu
The menu changes every few weeks based on trending dishes and creating scarcity, encouraging users to order more regularly
Go-to-market: Start by partnering with an influencer who created a viral dish and sell only this dish to prove out the concept
Business Model: Transaction fee on orders with rev share with ghost kitchens
Startup Costs: There are a lot of moving parts to this business so you’d need to raise here to get this off the ground
3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰
Exit Strategy: Sell to a virtual restaurant brand rollup, like Virtual Dining Concepts
Exit Multiple: A brand with a strong digital presence, efficient operations, and a loyal customer base could fetch 3-5x revenue, or higher.
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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA
Fake Job Offers App
Are you looking to get a new job? Or just looking to get a nice raise in your current role?
Well look no further than our fake offers app. Using this app you can generate fake job offer contracts from other companies to show how much they’re willing to pay you. This gives you the leverage you need to move up in your career, one lie at a time.
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/b72636ed-190a-44ce-a378-d40bb72efbf7/13_Message_List__2_.jpg?t=1715806253)
JUST THE TIP
Trend 📈: The Carnivore Diet
As a society people are eating more meat than ever before (sorry vegans). And more and more people are taking it to the extreme and eating only meat, including influencers like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan (who tried the diet for a month), as well as the Liver King (as long as we all agree that steroids are a part of a balanced carnivore diet).
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/20453486-2948-4e9e-8e33-2434744b9939/Screenshot_2024-05-09_at_08.46.24.png?t=1715806353)
Business Opportunities
Selling meats not available in certain geographies e.g. selling bison in Europe
Exotic meat subscription boxes e.g a box which contains Maui Nui Venison and other less available meats
THE MONEYSHOT
Making $20m/year from Google Maps
If you’ve been on the internet lately you’ve almost certainly come across a video of someone playing geoguessr. It’s a game that drops you in a random location on Google Maps and you have to guess where you are. And the geoguessr pros (yes, that’s a thing) are incredibly good at it.
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/5b31106f-4d0a-4d1b-aab8-f0cad9a199d4/tgjnk0qovcj61.png?t=1715843687)
But for as incredible as some of the players are the business itself is evening more astonishing.
The company was launched in 2013 by Anton Wallén and for many years the game maintained a relatively small yet active player base.
Until 2020 that is. When the pandemic hit this brought an influx of new players and the game exploded in popularity.
Interestingly, since Geoguessr is a Swedish company, their financials are public record. And their revenue growth tells the same story.
In 2019 the company did $467k in revenue. 2020? $2m. In 2021 they did $10m, 2022 $18m which brings us up to 2023.
In 2023 the app generated $21m in revenue with EBITDA of around $11m. The owner took out a dividend of c.$9m.
Geoguessr is a classic overnight success that was 5 years in the making.
Great game. Great business. Great story.
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