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Business Ideas #278: Faith Tracking, AI SEO...

Plus The Founder Who Started Three Unicorns (Part 3)

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up business ideas as game-changing as OpenAI releasing their first AI agent šŸ‘€ 

Hereā€™s what weā€™ve got for you today:

  1. Business IdeašŸ’”: An idea we have massive faith in

  2. Drunk Business Idea šŸ»: A product for all the Dads out there

  3. Just The Tip šŸ“ˆ: WTF is LLMO and why does it matter?

  4. The Moneyshot šŸ¤‘: The founder who started three unicorns (part 3)

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. Thatā€™s thanks to the support of our sponsors. Weā€™d love if you could take a moment to check them out.

Letā€™s get into it.

BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Strava for Faith āœļø  

Pray hard, play hard

Available Domain: Soulsyncs.io

šŸ’” TLDR: A platform for people of faith to track and share their faith-based activities

1. Problem/Opportunityā“

The Problem/Opportunity: Faith is making a bit of a comeback. A biblical scholar went on Joe Rogan recently. Bible sales are up 22% in the US, which is likely leading to some interesting realisationsā€¦

But as more and more people are turning to faith why not help them on their journey? Hereā€™s what we have in mind.

Market Size: The religious and spiritual apps market size was valued at approximately $11.5 billion in 2023.

2. Solution āœ…

The Idea: A platform for people of faith to track and share their faith-based activities

How it Works:

  • A user signs up to the platform and gives some details on what they want to achieve from using the platform

  • They can then track different faith-based activities that they complete like prayer, meditation, scripture reading etc.

  • Users can also share spiritual milestones such as baptisms

  • They can also use the platform to create reading plans to follow of religious texts, set goals around prayer or other activities and they can complete challenges all in the name of deepening their faith

Go-to-market: Start by building a product for a single faith, say Christianity, then expand into other religions

Business Model: Monthly subscription fee

Startup Costs: You could spin up an app here for a few thousand dollars

3. How Youā€™ll Get Rich šŸ’°

Exit Strategy: Sell to a well-capitalized business in this space, like Hallow or Pray.com

Exit Multiple: Your exit multiple here would likely be 5x - 8x revenue

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 youā€™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, weā€™ve got three killer newsletter concepts you could launch (seriously, theyā€™re up for grabsā€”maybe itā€™s your time to shine?):

šŸ’” Droids Daily - Morning Brew for robotics. A niche audience thatā€™s ready to geek out and pay up. High-value, untapped potential.

šŸ˜‚ The Meme Times - All the dayā€™s major headlines, told through memes. Broad appeal, viral-worthy, and a totally fresh twist on news.

šŸŽ™ļø The Employee # Newsletter - Interviews with the OG unicorn employees. Packed with insider insights from the earliest employees of billion-dollar startups.

If youā€™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 Ultimate Dad Shoe

Are you a Dad struggling to find the perfect shoe that meets all of your needs?

Introducing the CrocBalance Ultrasā„¢ļø, where comfort meets peak dad energy. This revolutionary footwear combines New Balance's signature chunky athletic sole with Crocs' ventilated style, creating the ultimate hybrid dad shoe. The built-in fanny pack also provides quick access storage for essentials like car keys, a wallet thatā€™s way too thick, and receipts from the local hardware store.

Each pair comes with a complimentary pair of baggy cargo shorts too. Get them while theyā€™re hot!

JUST THE TIP

Trend šŸ“ˆ: AI SEO

Earlier this week a chart went viral on Twitter showing how Hubspotā€™s organic traffic has tanked in recent months. The cause? Some say itā€™s a bug. Others say itā€™s down to an algorithm change. The other big culprit being cited is that no-oneā€™s searching Google anymore instead of LLMs. Ultimately we donā€™t know the exact cause here, but we do know that search is moving away from Google and towards LLMs, which opens up a whole new field. AI SEO, LLM Optimization (LLMO), AI Content Optimization (AICO). Whatever you want to call it content needs to be optimized for both search engines and AI language models so they can cite them. And where a new field emerges so too does opportunity.

Business Ideas

  • LLM Content Optimization Platform: Build tools to make content more retrievable by LLMs through semantic structuring and metadata enhancement

  • Competitor Analysis Service: Use AI to track competitors' content strategies, identify gaps, and provide actionable insights for clients to improve their rankings

THE MONEYSHOT

The Founder Who Started Three Unicorns (Part 3)

Freelancing. Dropshipping. Tutoring. Everyone loves a good side hustle.

But while Rich Barton was building Zillow into a multi-billion dollar business he had his own side hustleā€¦which went on to get acquired for +$1bn.

Hereā€™s how.

It was 2007 and Rich (right) was in the middle of scaling Zillow into the tech giant it is today.

But while working at Zillow Rich made a huge mistake. He accidentally printed out sensitive salary and stock data related to employees on a printer, meaning his assistant had to rush out and retrieve the documents before they could be seen by anyone. Luckily she did, because if she didnā€™t it would have been a disaster. Or would it?

Rich wondered why it would have been such a disaster? Why wasnā€™t salary information more readily available to everyone? By democratising access to travel and real estate information Rich had built two billion dollar businesses. So why not try to go for a third?

Rich pitched this concept to Robert Hohman (left) and Tim Besse (middle), who were both early employees at Expedia. They loved the idea.

After several months of development in March 2008, just before launch, Rich, Robert and Tim raised $3 million in funding from Benchmark Capital to build their product.

They founded Glassdoor.

Glassdoor officially launched its website in June 2008, featuring over 3,300 reviews across 250 companies. And it got off to a strong start. On its launch day, the site received over 1.2 million views, demonstrating immediate interest and traffic.

The company built on this early growth with hacks like entering users who shared reviews anonymously on the platform into raffles.

The platform gained early traction due to its unique data, but just like Expedia and Zillow, over time the platform expanded to other areas including job listings, recruitment tools and much more.

This gave Glassdoor a path to monetization and today the business earns most of its revenue from job advertising, employer branding services and subscription plans from employers. Quickly the business scaled to million of dollars of revenue per year and became an acquisition target.

By 2018, Glassdoor had amassed over 10 million job listings and more than 60 million reviews and Recruit Holdings wanted to acquire the business. So that year Glassdoor was acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion. Rich had hit his third home run.

Three businesses. Three unicorns. Rich is clearly one of the greatest founders of our time. So what can we take from his story?

Itā€™s time to think bigger. Much bigger. There are people like Rich out in the world building billion dollar businesses like itā€™s going out of fashion.

So think bigger, move quicker and donā€™t give up until you make it.

1 - 1 FOUNDER FEEDBACK

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