Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as unstoppable as Max Verstappen overtaking 100 go-karts from dead last 🏎️
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to put luxury on loan for creators
⛽️ An AI agent eyeing a $10bn valuation, a €600m fitness empire + more
🔍 Tobi Lütke on running Shopify with AI, Dan Koe's viral guide + more
🍻 An idea to give your phone a soft landing
Let’s goooo 🚀
FYI: Always wanted to start a business but never knew where to begin? Applications for START are now open, our free 30-day programme that takes you from no idea to a launched business. You'll get playbooks, live sessions, a founder cohort and a shot at cash prizes. We kick off on 5 October and spots are limited.
💡 Luxury Rentals for Creators
Borrowed time.
Name.com Domain: Openvault.io
👤 Source: I was sitting in my Airbnb yesterday watching videos about watches when it clicked: if someone will rent me their home for a few days, why not their Rolex?
❌ Problem:
Creating luxury content comes with a luxury price tag. From designer bags to jewellery and watches, keeping your feed fresh means accessing expensive things you might only need for an afternoon. Buying a Rolex to film a 60-second video is quite the production budget.
Meanwhile, owners have luxury items sitting in wardrobes and drawers between outings. Creators need something new to shoot. Owners have something they rarely use. There’s a business in introducing them.
✅ Solution:
Build an Airbnb for luxury items where owners rent their watches, bags and jewellery to creators for filming. Browse a collection, book a few days, shoot your content and return it.
Owners set rental prices and approve bookings. The platform would handle identity checks, documented condition checks and payments, with suitable insurance arranged to cover damage and non-return.
Take a cut of each rental. Start with a vetted group of owners and creators in one city, using local handovers to build trust before expanding.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: The first thing to validate is whether people will hand their prized possessions to what’s effectively a stranger. Insurance, vetted renters and secure handovers could help, but the real test is whether an owner actually says yes when a booking comes in.
Rate this idea
📦 Team lunch shouldn't come with a side of logistics
Getting the team together is the good bit. Chasing lunch shouldn't be part of it. ezCater helps US workplaces order boxed lunches, individual meals or sharing trays in one delivery, with updates when food is on its way and delivered.
Add 24/7 human support, and you've got one less thing competing for your attention.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻 SaaS: People are creating some incredible stuff with Codex and Hyper3D. Check it out.
📱 Mobile: Your camera roll might be hiding your next app idea. This one gives getting dressed a great interface.
🛍️ E-commerce: In 2024 we pitched a Google for e-commerce products, one search and one checkout across thousands of indie stores. With AI agents now shopping for us, the timing looks even better.
💵 Side Hustle: Everyone remembers the Tropicana and Jaguar rebrand disasters, yet nobody's properly documenting them. That's a gap for a newsletter breaking down iconic rebrands, the hits and the howlers.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: Here’s a guide on how to write, build, and deploy landing pages using Codex. We love this.
🛠️ AI Tool: Instinct is a personal AI agent that uses your software for you, answering emails, negotiating bills and booking reservations. It's in talks at a $10bn valuation, up from roughly $50m this spring. Wild.
📘 Playbook: Shaan Puri on 8 simple rules for building an audience from nothing. Give it a listen if you’re growing your accounts.
🤑 Money Shot: From a 600-person race in Hamburg to a €600M fitness empire. Here's how.
P.S. Got an idea you're ready to take seriously? Our Founder pack has the deals, playbooks and exclusive content to get you moving, and it's 100% free.
📦 Your First Wholesale Order. Now What?
Landing a wholesale order is exciting. Working out how to ship a pallet? Slightly less glamorous.
ShipStation’s less-than-truckload (LTL) freight platform lets you compare carriers, book and track your shipment in one place.
You’ve convinced a retailer to stock your product. Now give getting it there the same attention.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: N3on is launching a 24/7 AI stream. Expect to see a lot more of these in the near future.
📚 Must-Read: Dan Koe's guide to articulating yourself intelligently is a few months old, but it's doing the rounds again for good reason. Absolute gold mine.
📺 Must-Watch: Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke sits down with Shane Parrish for their third conversation, covering how Shopify runs on AI, whether CEOs will be replaced by it, and the three books that changed his thinking.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Greg Isenberg on why he reckons we’ll see 5x the number of people becoming hardware and robotics founders. Megatrend in the making.
⭐️ Reader's Pick: No one’s built this viral app idea yet. We think it could be easily done and monetised quickly. (top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Parachute Phone Case
Tired of your phone swan-diving onto the pavement every time you pull it out of your pocket? Wish it could land a little more gracefully?
Introducing ParaShoot™, the world's first phone case with a built-in deployable parachute. An onboard accelerometer detects freefall in 0.2 seconds and fires a 1.2m ripstop nylon canopy, floating your phone down at a gentle 4mph. Works off kitchen worktops, Ferris wheels and 38,000ft.
ParaShoot™ - The ultimate screen saver.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks
Before you go, one quick public service announcement:
Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you asap.
See you soon,
