Startup Ideas #369: Sauce Dupes, V02 Max...

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as often as Elon Musk’s companies are raising money 👀 

If you want to read any previous editions of Half Baked (which you totally should), you can on our website.

Let’s goooo 🚀 

In today’s edition:

• 💡 A delectable idea someone needs to steal

• 📈 Another health metric everyone’s obsessed with

• 🛠️ Creating an AI Agent to prep for meetings

• 🤑 Pivoting to Create a +$3B Business

• 🍻 A product idea to ignite your curiosity

🌭 Condiment Dupe Brand

Gotta ketch’um all

The Opportunity: Fast food places are defined by their sauces. Chick-fil-A Sauce, In-N-Out Spread, Big Mac Sauce…the list goes on (as do the pounds on the scale unfortunately). But those particular sauces and flavors are locked inside major brand IP. Or are they? Well in the last few years you may have seen dupe perfume companies, which make dupes of designer brands, appear. These exist simply because smells can’t be trademarked…and neither can flavors. So why not take on the $197B global condiments market by creating viral dupes of popular condiments? There’s clearly an appetite for this. Hear us out.

The Solution:

• In a line: A DTC brand which makes legally-safe, similar tasting dupes of iconic fast food sauces.

• Product:

  • 🍔 You reverse-engineer the flavor profiles of cult-favorite fast food and grocery sauces.

  • 🥙 Each dupe has simple packaging that nods to the original without infringing on IP.

  • 🔬 Conduct blind taste tests to give the products as much validity as possible.

  • 📱 Create viral short form content on the dupes, team up with food influencers to taste test etc.

• Business Model: Direct-to-consumer sales with retail expansion in the future

• End Goal: Acquisition by a major condiment conglomerate (e.g., Kraft Heinz, Unilever), likely at a 4–8x revenue multiple, for category expansion and gen Z brand relevance.

📧 Boring Marketing Delivers BIG Results

The Pitch: With marketing, you want predictability. So predictable, it’s almost boring. That’s why Omnisend is a marketer’s dream.

The Details:

• In 2023, for every $1 spent on Omnisend’s email & SMS marketing, merchants made $73 back.

• 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 HALFBAKED10 & get 10% off your first 3 months.

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🫁 Six-packs are out, V02 Max is in

The Trend: Originally used by elite athletes, VO2 Max (the maximum amount of oxygen your body can utilize during exercise) is becoming a mainstream fitness metric thanks to wearables like Apple Watch, Garmin, and WHOOP. And like everything else in the longevity market these days, this presents great opportunities to build businesses.

Opportunities:

• High Altitude Fitness Retreats: In-person retreats focused on VO2 Max improvement via altitude training, cold exposure, and breathwork.

• Home VO2 Max Testing Device: A smart device that gives accurate VO2 Max estimates without needing lab testing.

📞 Using AI Agents to Prep for Meetings

The Tool: If you’re a founder (or in a corporate job) you’re probably on a lot of calls. Like, all the time. Well Lindy, a no-code platform to build AI agents, can help prep for those meetings by researching whoever you’re about to talk to (both externally and searching your own email inbox). Here’s how.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Lindy.ai and set up your account (they have a free tier)

2. Go to the “Meeting Prep Alert” AI agent and click on the Flow Editor button to configure each step (This video can help guide you through it, it takes 2 mins to watch).

3. 10 minutes before a meeting you will receive notes on the person. Very cool

Check it out

🗞️ 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.

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🧰 Pivoting to Create a +$3B Business

The Idea: Back in 2017 David Hsu, an Oxford trained computer scientist, was building Cashew…a UK-based Venmo alternative that quickly gained traction around Oxford. But the unit economics of the business were brutal, with Cashew burning $1K/day and losing money on every payment. Even after getting into YC, the writing was on the wall. Cashew wasn’t sustainable. So David shut it down and instead he turned to the internal tools they had built for Cashew. He wondered: ”what if we gave it to other developers so they didn’t have to build the same internal systems from scratch?” With that insight, Retool was born.

The Execution:

• The MVP: David built the first version of Retool himself, a drag-and-drop interface for building internal tools. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. The team demo’ed the product at YC’s demo day, having already secured a $1.5 million enterprise pilot.

• The Launch: Retool avoided a big public launch in the early days. They quietly iterated on the product, kept selling, and finally decided to publicly launch after they reached $2M in ARR.

• Growth & Traction: Retool grew by targeting developers inside fast-growing companies. They leaned heavily on direct outreach, live demos, and an “if you know, you know” brand vibe. Engineers who tried it became internal champions and once they used it, they were hooked.

• Investment: Retool was profitable early on but eventually raised to scale. They raised $5M in 2020 and a $50M Series C in 2021 at a $925M valuation. Interestingly, David bought back $200M worth of secondary shares to maintain control. Big money move.

• The Result: As of 2022, Retool was valued at over $3.2 billion, and is used by companies like DoorDash, Amazon, and Plaid. David remains CEO to this day.

The Lesson: Writers are famously told to “kill your darlings”, i.e cut the pieces of writing you love if they don’t serve the story. Founders have to do the same. David killed Cashew but from its ashes Retool arose.

⛽ Gasoline Scented Candle

• Tired of candles that smell like vanilla, lavender or sandalwood (whatever that is)? Looking for something with a little extra edge?

• Introducing the Gasoline Candle, the only candle that captures the rich, aromatic beauty of unleaded gasoline. Light it up, breathe deep (responsibly), and let the high-octane aroma take you for a ride.

• The Gasoline Candle - ignite your senses.

Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

🔍️ Founder Finds

• 🚨 Raise Alert: MUBI, a streaming platform for independent films, closed $100 million in funding from Sequoia Capital

• 📚 Must-Read: 7 ways to build your “founder brand” (30 sec read)

• ✖️ Trending Tweet: Sam Altman’s guide on how to be productive (30 sec read)

• 📊 Big Deck Energy: Here’s the pitch deck that Rogo, AI for investment banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds, used to raise their $7m seed round in 2024

• 🎁 Free Resource: Hubspot have 40+ free startup resources for founders here, worth checking out!

• 💬 Founder Quote: “Courage is in even shorter supply than genius” Peter Thiel (PayPal)

👋 That’s All Folks!

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See you soon,

John and Darragh | The Half Baked Team