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Business Ideas #277: Cameo for X, Metal Detoxing Shampoo...
Plus The Founder Who Started Three Unicorns (Part 2)
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up business ideas as ambitious as OpenAI’s $500bn Stargate Project 🤯
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
Business Idea💡: Bringing Cameo’s model to a new market
Drunk Business Idea 🍻: Taking some heat out of the bedroom
Just The Tip 📈: A haircare trend worth its weight in gold
The Moneyshot 🤑: The founder who started three unicorns (part 2)
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 | STARTUP
Cameo for Mentors 👨🏫
All aboard the mentorship
Available Domain: Mentorshorts.com
💡 TLDR: A platform where users can request responses from business leaders or successful entrepreneurs to questions in a short video format
1. Problem/Opportunity❓
The Problem/Opportunity: Mentorship is broken. Most of the world's most successful people and best mentors are locked behind closed doors and busy calendars, and some are locked up in prison cells.

Here’s the thing though. A lot of people looking for very specific advice relating to one or two questions they have. They only need a minute of someone’s time. So why not build a platform for exactly that? Think mentorship for the TikTok generation: bite-sized, authentic, and on-demand. Let’s do it.
Market Size: The career coaching market is valued around $15.4bn presently
2. Solution ✅
The Idea: A platform where users can request responses from business leaders or successful entrepreneurs to questions in a short video format
How it Works:
A user signs up to the platform and searches for mentors they want to interact with
They can then ask a question or for advice through a video or voice message, paying to ask the question (say $5 - $10)
The entrepreneur or business leader can then send back a response through a voice note or video recording and receive payment once it’s been recorded (or have the option to donate the money to charity if they’re not motivated by the money)
The entrepreneur or business leader also has the option to stitch the videos and responses together to create videos they can share on social media
Go-to-market: Recruit 10 high-profile mentors across a single vertical and leverage their audience to get your first users
Business Model: Take a transaction fee (say 20%)
Startup Costs: You could stitch together an MVP here using different tools before investing in building a dedicated app
Competitors: Many platforms exist which connect experts to those seeking advice, but leaning into short form responses here could be a game-changer
3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰
Exit Strategy: Sell to a company like Intro who can layer this into their existing product offering
Exit Multiple: You could exit for 5x - 8x revenue based comparable sales in this space
TOGETHER WITH BEEHIIV
We Love Newsletter Businesses

Newsletters are an incredible way to build a tight-knit community of people just like you. Plus whether you’re sending a newsletter to 10 people or 1,000,000, the effort is the same, making them incredibly high-margin businesses.
And because our job is to spark ideas, we’ve got three killer newsletter concepts you could launch (seriously, they’re up for grabs—maybe it’s your time to shine?):
💡 Droids Daily - Morning Brew for robotics. A niche audience that’s ready to geek out and pay up. High-value, untapped potential.
😂 The Meme Times - All the day’s major headlines, told through memes. Broad appeal, viral-worthy, and a totally fresh twist on news.
🎙️ The Employee # Newsletter - Interviews with the OG unicorn employees. Packed with insider insights from the earliest employees of billion-dollar startups.
If you’re starting one of these (or your own brilliant idea), beehiiv is the platform to grow your newsletter from Day 1.
Start your free trial today and use this link for 20% OFF your first 3 months.
DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA
The Air Bed
Tired of waking up in a puddle of sweat in the middle of the night? Sick of your bedroom doubling as a steam room?
Well meet the revolutionary bed that turns your night sweats into a distant memory (and possibly your pillows into projectiles). With three settings ("Gentle Breeze," "Bad Hair Day," and "Category 5 Hurricane") you'll experience cooling like never before with this amazing product.
Not recommended for light sleepers or wig wearers.

JUST THE TIP
Trend 📈: Metal Detox Shampoo
Think you're having a bad hair day? Well it may be worse than you think, because you’re almost certainly rocking some metal in your hair as we speak. And this realization has led to the development of metal detoxing shampoo which are designed to remove metals like copper, iron, and other minerals which can accumulate in our hair. They're particularly vital for people living in areas with hard water, which can leave hair dull, brittle, and resistant to color treatments.

Business Ideas
23andMe for Hair: A service which offers hair mineral analysis testing and recommends products based on the results
Metal Detox Shampoo Tablets: Develop compact, metal detoxing shampoo tablets for travelers dealing with varying water conditions
TOGETHER WITH THERUNDOWN AI
Learn AI in 5 minutes a day
What’s the secret to staying ahead of the curve in the world of AI? Information. Luckily, you can join 800,000+ early adopters reading The Rundown AI — the free newsletter that makes you smarter on AI with just a 5-minute read per day.
THE MONEYSHOT
The Founder Who Started Three Unicorns (Part 2)
In yesterday’s edition of Half Baked we covered the story of how Rich Barton founded Expedia, the $22bn travel giant.
But after leaving Expedia, Rich went on to start a similar business in another vertical which is worth $18bn today.
Here’s how he did it.

By 2003 Expedia was a c.$4bn public company and that year IAC (a conglomerate) acquired the business in a multi-billion dollar deal. But once the acquisition was completed (which, for the record, was short lived since IAC spun off Expedia in 2005) Rich was out as CEO.
But given Expedia’s success Rich wondered if he could build a similar business in another industry.
So in 2003 Rich approached an early Expedia executive named Lloyd Frink with his idea to bring transparency to a new market…real estate.
Rich recognised that there was still a lack of transparency in real estate listings, prices, and home valuations and he wanted to bring the same transparency to the housing market that Expedia brought to the travel market.
So in 2004, Rich and Lloyd began developing a platform which gave home buyers comprehensive data about house prices across the USA. They spent the next two years developing the platform and by 2006 they were ready to launch.
They founded Zillow.

Why Zillow? Well the name "Zillow" was chosen to combine the concepts of "zillions" of data points with the comforting idea of a "pillow", similar to how Expedia was named by combining “explore” with “speed” (fun fact).
Initially self-funded, Zillow operated out of Seattle with a small team of 20 employees and began with a focus on providing home value estimates through its proprietary Zestimate algorithm, which used publicly available data to estimate property values.
This feature launched alongside the website in February 2006 and quickly gained popularity, attracting over a million visitors within its first three days. This innovative approach of offering home valuations rather than just listings set it apart in the market and helped it to go viral.
Over time the company expanded its offerings adding features like rental listings, mortgage calculators, and neighborhood information, all to increase engagement.
In 2011, Zillow went public, raising $72m at a $485m valuation and solidifying its position as a leader in the online real estate market. Since then the platform has grown to become an $18bn “Housing Super App” and shows no signs of slowing down, with Rich still serving as CEO.
But while running Zillow Rich managed to find time to work on a side hustle. A small little side hustle that went on to get acquired for over $1bn. But that’s a story for another day (tomorrow actually).
Clearly Rich’s story proves that in business winning formulas exist. Once you find a winning strategy and stick to it your chances of becoming successful increase exponentially.
And we’ll do whatever we can to find and share those winning formulas with you.
1 - 1 FOUNDER FEEDBACK
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