Startup Ideas #381: Prompt-based Social, Chronic Disease...

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as often as TikTok’s US ban gets extended 🤣 

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In today’s edition:

• 💡 Stealing an idea directly from Sam Altman (sorry Sam)

• 📈 The app category that’s growing super fast

• 🛠️ The best tool for taking meeting notes

• 🤑 Turning cartoons into a $64M exit

• 🍻 A car accessory that’ll save you thousands

📲 Prompt-Based Social Media Platform

Prompt & Circumstance

The Opportunity: We’re all well aware of the problems with social media. Endless scrolling, attention spans getting decimated yada yada we’ve heard it all before. In fact, algorithmic feeds will likely go down in history as the first large-scale AI misalignment problem humanity faces (but certainly not the last). It’s pretty clear that we need new types of social networks to be built, which is where Sam Altman comes in. Sam appeared on his brother’s podcast yesterday (well worth a listen) and during the pod (around 28 mins in) he shared an idea for a new type of social media platform that’s basically ChatGPT meets TikTok. Here’s what he has in mind.

The Solution:

• In a line: A social media app where you prompt exactly what you want to see and your feed shows you just that content

• Product:

  • 📲 Download the app and create a quick profile (or log in anonymously to test it out).

  • 🗣️ Type or speak a prompt like “Show me feel-good dog videos” or “Give me fitness related content to inspire me to go to the gym”

  • 🧠 The app uses a combination of semantic search, LLMs, and trending content sources to build a custom feed in real-time of other users’ content.

  • 🔄 Users can then like, share or comment on videos as normal, as well as share prompts with one another.

• Business Model: Free app, monetize through ads.

• End Goal: Sell to a major social platform (e.g. Snap, ByteDance, Reddit) as a next-gen discovery engine for a 6–8x revenue multiple.

Learn more

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🫀 Chronic Disease Management Apps

The Trend: With chronic conditions like hypertension on the rise, millions are turning to mobile tools for daily monitoring, often as a substitute for expensive or inaccessible care. Take blood pressure management for example and the recent uptick in search traffic for “free blood pressure apps”. While these kinds of apps have existed for years, by layering AI insights on top of the data collected by the app, you can build products that are 10x better than the incumbents.

Opportunities:

• White-labeled Blood Pressure Tracking for Insurance Providers: Offer a branded app that helps insurers reduce claims by encouraging healthier habits.

• Blood Pressure x Food Diary App: Let users log meals and see how diet affects their BP over time, great for personalized diet coaching upsell.

✍️ Using AI to Effortlessly Take Meeting Notes

The Tool: Meetings are a pain. So from my perspective any tool that takes the pain out of meetings, and specifically taking meeting notes, is something I will throw money at. And Granola is a super cool tool that does exactly that. (This isn’t sponsored by the way, we just actually love this tool). Here’s how it works.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Granola.ai and download their Mac app (sorry Windows users). You get 25 free meetings per month on their free trial. Nice.

2. Set up Granola and when a meeting starts a simple notepad opens up and you take notes during the meeting as usual. No notetaker needs to join the call which is nice.

3. Once the meeting is over Granola analyzes the transcript and beefs up your notes using AI like magic.

Check out Granola

📈 Stanford StartX Company - Future Cardia - is redefining heart health

In the $5B+ cardiac monitoring market, this scrappy innovator is taking on MedTech giants.

With an implantable device already tested in 39 real patients and backed by 60,000+ hours of cardiac data.

Accelerated by Stanford StartX and incubated at J&J’s JLABS, Future Cardia has already raised $14M. And now investors have a chance to get in early.

Own a piece of the future of cardiac care today.

Learn More

🎨 Turning Cartoons into a $64M Exit

Jacob “Ba” Blackstock isn’t your typical tech founder. He’s not a coder, he didn’t go to Stanford and isn’t a product of Silicon Valley. In fact, Jacob is a cartoonist. And back in 2007 he wanted to give everyone the tools to tell stories visually, without needing artistic skills. So he teamed up with Jesse Brown and together they built a DIY comic creation tool that let users build cartoon avatars of themselves and drop them into comic strips. This was the beginning of Bitstrips.

The Execution:

• 2007: Bitstrips officially launches. It’s mostly used on Facebook and in schools. Teachers love it. So do teens. It’s quirky and expressive.

• 2012: Bitstrips raises $3 million to scale up and goes viral on Facebook. By July 2013 Bitstrips had 10M unique users on Facebook. But over time the team noticed that people weren't using Bitstrips to make comics, they were making faces and stickers instead. It was time to pivot.

• 2014: The team launched a spinoff app called Bitmoji, a personal emoji keyboard that lets users create and share avatars of themselves. The app quickly exploded in popularity, especially with younger users.

• 2015: Bitstrips raised another $8 million, this time from Kleiner Perkins and Horizons Ventures, and doubled down on Bitmoji as the core product.

• March 2016: After growing Bitmoji to millions of users Snapchat acquired the business for $64 million. It became deeply integrated into Snapchat’s ecosystem and today is a defining feature of the app.

All of which shows that sometimes your breakout hit is hiding inside your original idea. Bitmoji wasn’t the plan, it was a pivot based on user behavior. So when users don’t do what you expected with your product, pay close attention. That’s usually where the real business is.

💺 Roof Seats

• Ever looked at your car and wondered if your roof is going to waste?

• Introducing the Roof Rider™, the world’s most exhilarating and probably illegal way to extend your car’s seating capacity. Simply strap it to your roof, buckle up your bravest friend, and enjoy 360° panoramic terror.

• Roof Rider™ – because legroom is overrated when you’ve got skyroom.

Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

🔍️ Founder Finds

• 🚨 Raise Alert: Polar, a platform to help developers build one-person unicorns, has raised $10m in a seed round.

• ✖️ Trending Tweet: George Hotz throwing shade at AI unicorns is all over Twitter today… (2 min clip)

• 🎁 Free Resource: This library of top performing emails is super helpful

• 💬 Founder Quote: "You don’t learn by thinking. You learn by doing." Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google

👋 That’s All Folks!

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See you soon,

John and Darragh | The Half Baked Team