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Business Ideas #344: Wedding Savings, Sperm Racing...

Plus Making $230m from Delivering Food

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up business ideas as talked about as whether 100 men could beat a gorilla in a fight (for some reason) šŸ¦ 

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

  1. Business IdeašŸ’”: An idea to solve the biggest problem with weddings

  2. Drunk Business Idea šŸ»: Getting a helping hand with your junk mail

  3. Just The Tip šŸ“ˆ: A new sport we don’t know how to feel about

  4. The Moneyshot šŸ¤‘: Making $230m from delivering food

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

Wedding Group Buying šŸ‘°ā€ā™€ļø 

Know the usual prices

Available Domain: Matchrimoney.com

šŸ’” TLDR: A platform that lets engaged couples share wedding costs (like flowers, venues, rentals) with other couples getting married around the same time

1. Problem/Opportunityā“

The Problem/Opportunity: Weddings are beautiful, magical experiences. Except for one thing of course…the cost. The average wedding in the U.S. now costs around $30,000, which explains why ā€œfor richer or for poorerā€ is slipped into the vows…

The second you mention to a vendor that you’re planning a wedding, they’ll magically increase their prices. So it’s time to fight back. How? Through group buying. You see 90% of weddings need the same basic stuff: chairs, tables, arches, flowers, DJs who keep playing "Mr. Brightsideā€ā€¦the list goes on. So why not let couples getting married at similar times team up, share resources, and buy smarter together? Here’s what we have in mind.

Market Size: The US wedding market is worth $70–$80 billion/year.

2. Solution āœ…

The Idea: A platform that lets engaged couples share wedding costs (like flowers, venues, rentals) with other couples getting married around the same time

How it Works:

  • Couples input their wedding date, city, budget, and style.

  • The platform matches them with other couples nearby with similar styles/timelines.

  • They can then coordinate and negotiate discounted rates with vendors for grouped services (flowers, decor, rentals, venues).

  • Savings are split among the couples, while the vendors get more guaranteed volume.

  • The platform takes a fee from the savings and/or charges a coordination fee for its services.

Go-to-market: Partner with wedding planners and vendors offering incentives for early buy-in.

Business Model: Success Fee Model - take a 10% cut of the total amount saved for couples.

Startup Costs: You could do this manually to test the concept first, prove it works, then build the platform after

3. How You’ll Get Rich šŸ’°

Exit Strategy: Acquisition by a major wedding player (The Knot, WeddingWire etc.) looking to diversify into savings-focused solutions.

Exit Multiple: Wedding tech companies typically sell for 3–6x revenue if profitable with strong vendor networks.

TOGETHER WITH OMNISEND

Boring Marketing that Delivers Big Results

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But you know where excitement has no place? Marketing. With marketing, you want predictability. So predictable, it’s almost boring.

That’s why Omnisend is a marketer’s dream. In 2023, for every $1 spent on Omnisend’s email & SMS marketing, merchants made $68 back.

It’s not flashy. It’s not a gamble. It just works. Every. Single. Time. At Half Baked, we only recommend tools that actually deliver. That’s why we partnered with Omnisend—because they’re the real deal.

From popups to newsletters to abandoned cart recovery, 125,000+ e-commerce brands use Omnisend to grow their revenue while keeping costs low.

Use code HALFBAKED10N & get 10% off your first 3 months.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Post Shredder

  • Is junk mail ruining your life? Tired of endlessly throwing out letters you never should have received?

  • Introducing the PostPurgeā„¢, the world's first letterbox-connected shredder, designed to destroy unwanted mail the moment it arrives. No more rifling through bills, jury duty summons, or invitations you wish you never received. They go straight to the shredder, no questions asked.

  • The PostPurgeā„¢, get a helping hand with your junk…mail

Vote

JUST THE TIP

Trend šŸ“ˆ: Sperm Racing

  • Let me start by saying no…we’re not kidding. Sperm racing is a real thing now.

  • The world's first live sperm racing event was just held on April 25, 2025, at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles. During this inaugural event two university students (Tristan Wilcher and Asher Proeger) battled it out for a $10k cash prize, which (spoiler alert), Tristan won.

  • Honestly, we don’t know what to make of this, but there’s clearly some opportunities here for anyone who wants to get involved.

Business Ideas

  • Home Sperm Health Kits: Sell FDA-approved home sperm testing kits that integrate with a mobile app showing "race" simulations based on the motility/speed of the sperm.

  • Sperm Racing Game: Create a digital game where friends race against each other but as sperm (Mario Kart vibes)

TOGETHER WITH BOUNTI.AI

AI + Humans = the GTM Dream Team

Cut through the noise and reach your ideal customers faster. Bounti combines the precision of AI with the nuance of human expertise to eliminate the grunt work of sales research and personalization. Instead of spending hours manually digging for insights, your team gets instant access to everything they need to win target accounts.

From identifying key decision-makers to surfacing deep company intel and crafting custom outreach that actually resonates, Bounti equips you to engage smarter, move faster, and close more deals.

It’s everything your go-to-market team needs, without the usual time sink.

THE MONEYSHOT

Making $230m from Delivering Food

ā€œDo things that don’t scale.ā€ We’ve all heard this saying, but very few of us truly live by this.

But this guy, who started his business by following that exact principle, is about to sell his business for $3.6bn.

This is his story.

Will Shu wasn’t always a founder.

In fact he began his career in the only profession where people work longer hours than founders…investment banking. And back in 2013 Will had just moved from New York to London to work for Morgan Stanley. But as an investment banker spending every waking hour at the office, Will ran into a problem. Food delivery.

In New York City, he was used to having a wide range of restaurants available at his doorstep. In London? Not so much. He couldn’t believe how few options there were.

Rather than just complaining though, Will decided to do something about it. So he teamed up with his childhood friend Greg Orlowski, a software engineer based in Chicago, to build their own food delivery service.

The pair used their savings and a small amount of angel funding to get started, meaning the early days were scrappy. Orders were taken through a basic website, and Will would manually dispatch drivers via text message, if he wasn’t making the deliveries himself.

But since so many Londoners craved better delivery options, the concept resonated and the company grew rapidly through word-of-mouth.

This was the beginning of Deliveroo.

Building on this early momentum in 2014 Deliveroo raised a $3.3m seed round to build up their platform. And from there, as it took off, the money came pouring in.

From 2015 to 2018 Deliveroo raised just over $500m to pump into marketing, expanding their fleet of riders, entering more countries around Europe and to invest into their technology platform.

Then in 2019 the business got another huge boost when Amazon (oh yes, that Amazon) led a $575 million funding round into Deliveroo. In for a penny in for a pound as they say…

However covid was a tough time for the business (as it was for most businesses), but after some layoffs and restructuring Deliveroo came out of it the other side and in March 2021 the business listed on the London Stock Exchange at a $10bn valuation.

Today though? Well Deliveroo hit the headlines today because Doordash have just offered $3.6bn to acquire the business. Should the deal close Will, who still owns 5.9% of the business, would make $230m from the sale. That’s a lot of Benjamins.

All because in the early days Will was willing to do things that don’t scale. So many founders fail because their egos won’t let them follow this path of starting small and building from there.

And I can give you 230m reasons why starting small is the right path.

1 - 1 FOUNDER FEEDBACK

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