Startup Ideas #373: Live Buying, Lipo Gummies

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as often as Anduril raises billions of dollars 🤯 

We’ve added a new section to today’s newsletter, scroll to the end to check it out 👀 

Let’s goooo 🚀 

In today’s edition:

• 💡 Bringing strangers together to save some money

• 📈 The latest trending TikTok supplement

• 🛠️ Google’s tool for full stack app development

• 🤑 From $0 to a $3.2B exit in 3 years

• 🍻 The ultimate stress management product

👥 Live group Buying

Creating cart-els

The Problem: E-commerce sites will do anything to get you to hit “Buy Now.” They'll throw in discounts, flash sales, countdown timers…whatever it takes to get you to buy. Why all the different techniques? Because over 70% of online shopping carts are still abandoned, so they’ll do whatever they can to get you to buy. But the most interesting conversion trick I see these days are those mysterious little pop-ups: “10 people are viewing this item right now.” Which got me thinking. If 10 people are really viewing this product at the same time, can’t they all team up and get a shared discount for buying together? We think so

The Solution:

• In a line: A Chrome extension that detects simultaneous product interest and prompts group buying for instant discounts.

• Product:

  • 🌐 A user downloads the Chrome extension and installs it

  • 🧠 It detects when users are viewing the same product (using URL fingerprinting, cookies etc.) and a popup appears which invites them to a time-limited group discount chat

  • 💸 Once a specified threshold of buyers is met they all unlock a group discount on that specific product (decided upon by the e-commerce store)

• Business Model: Take a cut (5–15%) of total cart value via affiliate/referral fees or charges retailers for deal orchestration.

• End Goal: Sell to a large affiliate network (like Honey/PayPal) or an e-commerce platform (Shopify) for a 7–10x revenue multiple.

📈 Drive your sales growth

Pipedrive is the CRM designed to help you close more deals with less effort.

Built by salespeople for salespeople, it gives you full visibility into your pipeline, automates repetitive tasks, and keeps your team focused on what matters most - selling.

Whether you're scaling fast or just getting started, Pipedrive makes it simple to stay on track and hit your targets.

Sign up today to get an extended 30-day free trial + 20% off your first year.

Learn more

⚖️ Lipo Gummies: Probably Not What You Think

The Trend: Lipo gummies are all the rage on TikTok right now, marketed for their weight-loss benefits. And no, “lipo” doesn’t refer liposuction like I incorrectly assumed it did. It actually refers to liposomes, which are tiny fat-like particles used to encapsulate nutrients and improve their absorption in the body. Regardless, the benefits of these products are still pretty dubious. It’s not liposuction in a gummy, but it sure is marketed like it is.

Opportunities:

• Supplement Stack Audit: Give details of your current supplement stack and get a breakdown of what’s worthwhile taking and what isn’t

• Supplement Sample Store: An online store which sells samples of different brand’s sports supplements for consumers to trial (from edition #9)

🌐 Create full-stack web apps without coding

The Tool: Google has launched a ton of new products lately, but one of the best is Firebase Studio. This is their AI-powered prototyping platform where you can build web apps without having to write a single line of code. Here’s how.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Firebase Studio and log in with your Google account

2. Describe your app in great detail and hit the “Prototype with AI” button

3. Review and test the AI-generated app, making tweaks as needed

4. Deploy your app when you’re ready!

Check it out

🍕 He was a 19-year-old pizza delivery driver. Now he’s a billionaire

Ben Francis started Gymshark in his garage - sewing fitness gear by hand and selling it online between pizza shifts.

He built a Shopify store, went viral, and scaled his brand into a global fitness empire.

Now Gymshark is worth over $1.5 billion. Ben didn’t have investors or a roadmap - just a laptop, an idea, and the will to build.

Whether you’re just starting out or ready to scale, Shopify gives you everything you need to go from driver to billionaire. Start your store with a 3-day free trial, then it’s just $1/month for your first 3 months.

Learn more

🪹 From $0 to a $3.2B Exit in 3 Years

The Idea: Tony Fadell (left) is a Silicon Valley legend. Often dubbed the “father of the iPod,” Tony left Apple in 2008 after leading teams that built the iPod and contributed heavily to the iPhone. After leaving Apple, Tony started building his vacation home in Lake Tahoe (nice for some), until he ran into an unexpected problem. Every thermostat on the market sucked. They were ugly, dumb, and impossible to program. So Tony reached out to Matt Rogers, an engineer on the iPhone team and together they decided to reinvent the thermostat. This was how Nest began.

The Execution:

• The MVP: They hacked together early versions in Tony’s garage, creating a sleek, circular dial with learning capabilities. It learned user behavior and adjusted heating accordingly, saving energy without manual input.

• The Launch: Nest launched in 2011 through a direct-to-consumer strategy. They avoided traditional HVAC sales channels and sold it online with a clean, Apple-like brand (naturally). Word-of-mouth among design nerds and energy-conscious homeowners helped it catch on fast.

• Growth & Traction: Through leaning into storytelling around energy savings and elegant design, Nest became a must-have for early tech adopters and eco-conscious buyers. Their biggest hack? Turning a dull category into a sexy product you actually wanted on your wall.

• Investment: Nest raised around $80 million from top-tier investors like Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.

• The Result: In 2014, just three years after launch, Google acquired Nest for a whopping $3.2 billion in cash, partially due to the concentration of hardware talent at the startup.

The Lesson: Tony honed his craft and reputation at Apple, laying the groundwork for Nest and his eventual success. So no matter what you’re working on right now, focus on bettering yourself. That’s how you lay the groundwork for your future success.

🔇 The Scream Silencer

• Stress starting to get to you? Feel like screaming at the top of your lungs but worried your neighbors will call the cops on you?

• Introducing the Scream Silencer™, a padded, face-hugging mask that lets you scream your lungs out while sounding no louder than a distant hum. Whatever your frustrations, this emotional muffler has you (literally) covered.

• Scream Silencer™, you let it out, it keeps it in.

Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

🔍️ Founder Finds

• 🚨 Raise Radar: Loosid is raising money to build a community and dating app for sober people (260k+ users, $1.3m invested already). Interesting business.

• 🛠️ AI Tool: Perplexity recently released Perplexity Labs for anyone to create analytical reports, presentations and dynamic dashboards within Perplexity

• 📚 Must-Read: This is a great piece on the future of AI wrappers, well worth reading (3 min read)

• 🎁 Free Resource: Google Cloud is offering $350k in cloud credits to early stage startups. Check if you’re eligible here

• 💬 Founder Quote: “You can’t discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” André Gide (French Writer)

👥 From the Community

• Back in edition #355 we published the idea for Brandmint.ai, an AI Brand Builder. And lo and behold a team led by one of our readers has already built and shipped an MVP of this idea 🚀 

• Domain Finder (the first feature of Brandmint.ai) does one thing brilliantly - it finds the best available domains, automatically ranked for brandability. How exactly? You’ll need to check it out for yourself to find out…

• The product just went live on Product Hunt today too, so make sure you check the product out and support a fellow Half Baked reader with their launch. You love to see it 🥹 

👋 That’s All Folks!

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See you soon,

John and Darragh | The Half Baked Team