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Startup Ideas #380: Tabletop Lockbox, n8n...

Plus Turning PDFs into a $50M Exit

June 17, 2025

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as often as Ramp’s valuation jumps by billions of dollars 📈 

Make sure you check out today’s sponsors, they allow us to keep Half Baked free. Now and forever!

Let’s goooo 🚀 

In today’s edition:

  • 💡 A product to make evening dining 10x better

  • 📈 WTF is n8n

  • 🛠️ How to use AI for market research

  • 🤑 Turning PDFs into a $50M exit

  • 🍻 The ultimate product to get closer to your furry friend

🍽️ Tabletop Lockboxes for Restaurants

Forkget about it

Available domain: Tabletox.com

The Problem: We all love going out for dinner. Getting dressed up, ordering a few drinks, eating waaaay too much food. It’s glorious. But going out for dinner still has one major problem…phones. 89% of people admit to using their phones during a meal, ruining these rare moments of connection we get with our loved ones. It’s time to incentivize diners to put their phones down and live in the moment. Here’s how.

The Solution:

  • In a line: A smart tabletop lockbox that rewards diners for putting their phones away and enjoying real-life conversation.

  • Product:

    • 📲 Diners place phones into one of four soft-lit slots in the centerpiece lockbox when they sit down for their meal

    • 🔐 A built-in sensor detects the phone and starts a “mindful dining” timer automatically

    • 🎉 If no phones are removed until the end of the meal, the box unlocks a reward: QR for discount, free item, or loyalty points

    • 📊 Optional dashboard lets restaurants track usage, improve guest experience metrics, and run “Phone-Free Nights”

  • Business Model: Hardware + SaaS subscription where restaurants pay monthly for lockbox rental, analytics, and reward management.

  • End Goal: Exit to a hospitality tech company like Toast, SevenRooms, or Square at a 5–8x revenue multiple as a brand-enhancing upsell product.

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🔀 Welcome to the n8n Nation

The Trend: n8n (short for “nodemation”) has taken off in recent months. It’s an open-source, low-code workflow automation tool that’s gaining traction as a more flexible and developer-friendly alternative to Zapier. It lets users automate tasks between APIs, databases, and services using a visual editor. You can be sure we’ll cover some sick n8n automations in future editions of Half Baked.

Opportunities:

  • White-Label Automation-as-a-Service: Build a vertical SaaS tool (e.g., for real estate, logistics, agencies) using n8n behind the scenes for custom automations, and sell it as a product.

  • n8n-Powered Automation Consultancy: Launch a boutique agency that builds and maintains custom n8n workflows for SMBs, helping them save time and reduce software costs.

🕵️‍♀️ How to use Claude for Market Research

The Tool: Doing market research for your business idea is critically important. And luckily Claude's Research mode is the perfect tool for the job. Here’s how.

Step-by-step:

  1. Head over to Claude and select the Research button (only available if you have a Pro plan FYI)

  2. Create a comprehensive prompt: “Research the [industry], analyze the top 10 competitors, give me a market size using the TAM, SAM and SOM framework, investigate pricing strategies and give me any white spaces in the market worth exploring from a product perspective”

  3. Download your complete research as a PDF or make prompt refinements as needed

🫀Y Combinator Dropout Raises $14M from Investors to Disrupt $5B Market

Meet Future Cardia, a bold and scrappy innovator redefining implantable cardiac monitoring, taking on billion-dollar giants in the $5B+ estimated annual market.

How’s It Going?

✅ 39 successful human implants, evidencing its breakthrough technology in real-world patients.

✅ 60,000+ hours of real-world cardiac data collected, delivering exceptional insights for early disease detection.

✅ Accelerated by Stanford StartX and Incubated by Johnson & Johnson’s JLABS

Future Cardia has already raised $14M across all offerings, and now, investors have the chance to own a stake in the next big innovation in heart health.

🏃 Turning PDFs into a $50M Exit

The Idea: Dom Maskell (left) and Ben Parker (no, not Spiderman’s Uncle, a different Ben Parker) go way back. The pair met playing lacrosse at the University of Southampton in England, but after college their paths diverged with Dom joining McKinsey and Ben becoming a running coach. So when Ben was looking to run his first marathon he called up his old friend for some help. Ben was amazed at Dom’s insights and was shocked to discover that there wasn’t a single app out there that was remotely close to what Ben was able to offer. Which is when they decided to team up and build one themselves. This was the idea for Runna.

The Execution:

  • June 2021: Dom and Ben started working on the business on weekends and evenings. They launched their MVP, which they called, The Run Buddy where users would pay £80 for a personalized marathon plan which they received as a PDF. Simple. Scrappy and they sold over 1,000 plans. They were onto something.

  • September 2021: Ultra athlete Joshua Patterson became their first investor giving them the runway to hire a team and build their app

  • March 2022: They officially launched the Runna app on iOS and Android, acquiring early users through Joshua’s audience.

  • Late 2022: Runna started to scale rapidly through Strava partnerships and race communities, amassing tens of thousands of users.

  • November 2022: The team closed a £2.25M seed round led by Eka Ventures.

  • November 2023: They raised another £5M in seed+ funding from JamJar Investments and others, bringing total funding to around £8m and scaled the app to hundreds of thousands of users.

  • April 2025: Runna was acquired by Strava to power its in-app training plans, while continuing to operate independently. The purchase price was not disclosed but has been estimated around £30M - £40M (roughly $50M).

All of which goes to prove that you need to start with proof, not perfection. Early stage founders get caught up in perfecting their product, when what you need to do is prove that people actually want it.

🐈 Catbrush

  • Ever wonder why your cat ignores you? Think maybe, just maybe, they’re craving a deeper connection?

  • Introducing FurPlay™, the only mouth-held catbrush that lets you “lick” your cat like one of their own. Finally, a way to say “I love you” in a way your cat fully understands.

  • FurPlay™, because nothing says intimacy like consensual interspecies grooming.

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🔍️ Founder Finds

👋 That’s All Folks!

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See you soon,

John and Darragh | The Half Baked Team

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