Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as validated as your need for a second cup of coffee in the morning ☕
In today’s edition:
💡 Why $150B in appointments vanish into thin air
🔬 We validated this idea and here's what we found
🚀 The go-to-market playbook for this idea
🤑 Can you make any money doing this?
⚔️ How the competitive landscape looks
❓ Our verdict: is this a go or no-go idea
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Shoutout to last week’s Sunday edition winner Casey Ritsick. Check your inbox!
📅 Cancellation Marketplace
No Show? Let's Go.
Available domain: Rebookd.com
The Problem: Every local service business - from gyms to salons, physiotherapists, dentists, restaurants, the list goes on - bleeds money from last-minute cancellations. In the U.S. alone, missed appointments cost healthcare providers $150B a year, and the beauty industry loses up to 25% of daily revenue due to no-shows. Salons average a 10-20% no-show rate - that's one in five appointments just gone. Those empty slots rarely get refilled because they're too short-notice to market. Meanwhile, plenty of nearby people would happily take a discounted appointment if they knew about it. That sounds like a marketplace to me. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A real-time marketplace where people can instantly book discounted last-minute cancellations from gyms, salons, and clinics nearby.
🛠️ Product:
Users download the app and set their interests - yoga classes, haircuts, massages, dental cleanings, etc. When a cancellation drops nearby, they get notified with a deal like "30% off - starts in 1 hour."
Businesses sync their calendars (Fresha, MindBody, JaneApp, Calendly, etc.) and cancelled appointments automatically appear in the local feed with dynamic discounts based on time-to-appointment.
Users can "watch" their favorite places and get instant push alerts when a slot opens up - first come, first served.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Check out the demo
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🔬 Validation
🔍 Desktop Research (4 hours of Googling + reading App Store reviews + Reddit lurking)
The appointment scheduling software market is worth $470M in 2024 and projected to hit $1.5B by 2032, but current players focus on prevention (reminders, deposits, policies), not recovery.
Salon no-show rates average 10-20%, with some research showing rates as high as 30%. Clearly for service businesses this is a big problem.
📞 Cold Outbound (100 emails/calls to local salons, gyms, and clinics)
Booked 4 discovery calls from 100 outreach attempts - a 4% conversion rate. Got 8 email replies with people business owners wanting to talk about this problem.
2 business owners said they'd "definitely try" a tool that auto-filled their cancellations with discounted bookings.
Common refrain: "I lose 3-5 appointments a week to last-minute cancellations.” Some mentioned that their existing client management software offers something similar though…
🚀 Go To Market
👥 Early Users
Cold Outbound to Businesses: Start with supply. Cold email and call local salons, gyms, and clinics with a simple pitch: "You're losing 3-5 appointments a week to cancellations. We fill them with discounted bookings. Want in?" Offer a free pilot - zero risk. Lock in 10-15 businesses in one city before worrying about demand.
Consumers: Once you've got early pilot customers on the B2B side, run hyper-targeted Meta ads to people nearby. "Get 30-50% off last-minute salon appointments in [City]." You now have real inventory to show - the ads convert because the supply is live.
📈 Scaling Acquisition
Paid Social: Once you hit 1,000+ filled cancellations, you could double down on Meta ads with real customer testimonials. Target 25-45 year olds interested in fitness, wellness, and beauty. Start with one city and expand.
B2B Outbound: Once month-1 retention hits 40%+, hire SDRs to cold-call salon chains. Pitch: "We filled 47 cancellations for [Local Salon] last month. Want in?" Warm with case study, close with free trial.
🤑 Business Model
🏷️ Pricing
Free for consumers: No fees to browse or book.
Commission on rebooked slots (10-15%): Businesses only pay when you fill a cancellation they would have otherwise lost.
🧮 Unit Economics
Target CAC (cost to acquire a customer/user): $5-15 for consumers, $50-100 for businesses.
Target LTV (lifetime value of a user): Businesses - $1000+/year.
LTV:CAC ratio: 6-10x on businesses if you nail retention.
Path to $1M ARR: 500 active businesses × $150/month average revenue = $900k ARR. Not far off $1M/yr then.
⚔️ Competitive Landscape
🏷️ Primary Competitors
ClassPass ($49-199/month memberships): They have 30,000+ partner studios and already offers last-minute deals on classes.
So Last Minute (UK-only, free): The closest direct competitor - a UK marketplace for last-minute beauty appointments. Small scale, limited to beauty, no calendar integrations. Has existed for years but hasn't scaled. That's a signal.
🎯 The Gap (Or Lack Thereof)
We thought no one owned "real-time cancellation marketplace." Turns out, some booking platforms already have this as a feature.
The reason it doesn't feel solved is because businesses don't use the existing tools well, not because the tools don't exist.
Building a standalone marketplace means competing with companies that already have the supply locked in and the feature built.
❌ Verdict: NO-GO
The pain is real - $150B in missed appointments, business owners bleeding revenue weekly. Our cold outbound proved they want a solution. But here's the problem: you don't own the distribution.
ClassPass has 30,000+ studios. Fresha has 120,000+ businesses. MindBody powers tens of thousands more. They already have the supply locked in, and they already have waitlist features built into their platforms. To win here, you'd either need to be ClassPass or sell to ClassPass.
And that's the risk - this is a feature, not a standalone product. If you prove the concept works, these platforms just incorporate it themselves. You'd be spending millions to validate something they could ship in a quarter.
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