IDEA #1 | VENTURE STARTUP

E-commerce Internationalization Service 🌍

The biggest US x Europe collab since the 1940s

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

As the world’s leading startup idea newsletter (at least that’s what we like to tell ourselves), you might imagine that the Half Baked team would be based in San Francisco, London or New York, hubs of entrepreneurial activity.

In fact, we’re based in Ireland, the land of green landscapes, Guinness and leprechauns looking for investment opportunities to diversify away from gold.

But here in Ireland, as in much of Europe, we consume a lot of American tv, movies, YouTube videos, podcasts and so on, which can cause a big problem.

Consuming American content also means consuming American ads and when we want to buy these products it’s always a nightmare. Most of the time they’re not available in Europe, meaning we have to go the reseller route where products are far more expensive and take weeks to arrive, if they ever do.

US brands don’t focus on going international since the US constitutes a massive, single currency, single language market whereas Europe…isn’t. But because of this they’re missing out on millions of customers who are looking to buy their products.

Let’s build a business to solve this problem for them (and for us too).

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a platform which helps US e-commerce brands to easily enter and sell in foreign markets.

Here’s how it works. A brand who wants to enter a new market signs up to the platform and decides on what markets they want to sell in internationally. They then ship inventory to warehouses owned by the platform in those local geographies and the platform handles everything from there.

Customers can order goods from the brand’s own website or from a separate website operated by the platform. Orders are fulfilled by the platform and all tax considerations and local currency conversions are handled by the platform too, giving customers just as good an experience as if they were ordering from the brand’s US store. After the platform takes a % cut, profits are then remitted back to the US company who can monitor performance through analytics and performance dashboards. The US company doesn’t even have to set up entities in these markets either, saving them cost and admin work too.

For brands this is internationalization on autopilot, unlocking new sales for them in news markets with minimal input.

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: start by focussing on a single small brand and a single market, like helping a brand launch in the UK and build from there

Monetisation: the platform takes a % of each sale made

Startup Costs: The path here would be to raise a small pre-seed round and get scrappy to prove demand for the product, then raise a very substantial seed round to build out the infrastructure to scale this

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

This is 100% a scaleup and exit play. Big players in the e-commerce space like Shopify would be lining up to acquire this business. In fact, with enough demand over a long enough time horizon this could end up going public.

IDEA #2 | STARTUP

Reading Companion App 📖

I’m bringing paper back

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

Amazon’s achievements really cannot be overstated.

From their core e-commerce business to building AWS, Prime Video and countless other products Amazon dominates in almost any market they participate in. Jeff Bezos has made so much money that he literally looks exactly like the stonks guy.

But one of Amazon’s most underrated products has to be the Kindle. This simple reading product has transformed the way millions of people read all around the world.

Kindle books have a lot of great features, like bookmarking, note taking and arguably the best feature of all…the reading progress feature which shows what % of the book you have read so far and what % you have left, gamifying reading and encouraging readers to keep reading to hit milestones.

While paperback books have their own magic qualities they certainly lack some of these features which eBooks have.

So let’s build a companion app to recreate some of those features for paperback books.

2. Solution ✅

Here’s the idea…create a reading companion app which brings the features of eBooks to real life.

Here’s how it works. Users download and sign up for the app. They then scan the ISBN of any books they’re reading using their phone so the app knows exactly what books they’re reading.

Then when users go to read they can enter what page they’re on and the app will show what % they’ve completed of the book and how many pages to get to the next milestone. While reading they can take notes and once they’ve finished reading they can bookmark where they are too.

Readers would build up reading streaks of consecutive days of reading, similar to streaks on Snapchat, all in order to encourage them to read more (and use the app more).

The app would also make intelligent recommendations on what a person should read based on their library and link to where they they can buy physical copies of these books (affiliate links of course).

3. Business Model 🏦

Go-to-market: engaging creators big creators in the reading space (yes they exist) would be a great start, giving you distribution straight to your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

Monetisation: we’d suggest a small, one-time fee to use the app for life as well as cashing in on affiliate links but you could go the subscription route too

Startup Costs: minimal, this should be a relatively straight forward build

4. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

This doesn’t seem like a venture scare opportunity, feels more like a digital cash flow business but you never know how these things can play out if it gets big enough

NO BRAINER IDEA

Alarm App with Alarming Consequences

Many of us are guilty of overusing the snooze function on our alarm. Just 5 more minutes, it won’t harm anyone right?

Introducing the app that punishes you for sleeping in. If you hit snooze too many times it sends your internet history to a random person in your contacts.

Coming to an app store near you…

BIG DECK ENERGY

Canva’s $3m Seed Deck

Year: 2015

Stage: Seed

Amount: $3m

Canva is an Australian graphic design platform, used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content. Canva raised $3m in 2012 with this deck.

JUST THE TIP

Why Flappy Bird’s Creator Killed It

Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb. Alfred Nobel and dynamite. Sometimes inventors live to regret the very innovations they bring to the world.

So too was the case with Flappy Bird.

More than 10 years ago Flappy Bird took the world by storm, becoming an overnight sensation that garnered 90 million downloads and raked in $50,000 a day in ad revenue.

The mobile game was built by Dong Nguyen in 2-3 days, crafting an addictive game where the goal was to fly a bird between a series of vertical pipes. The game had a somewhat lacklustre launch but after shoutout from Pewdiepie was launched into the limelight. All of a sudden Nguyen was bombarded with interview requests, media attention, and even death threats from players who couldn't conquer the game.

All of this attention, coupled with with the guilt he felt over the addictive nature and overusage of the game, meant that in February 2014 Nguyen decided remove the game from the the app store and google play stores.

He lived to regret the product he built and launched and there’s a lesson we can all learn from that.