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- Startup Ideas #384: Newsreels, Social Simulations...
Startup Ideas #384: Newsreels, Social Simulations...
Plus Turning a Sandwich into a $100m Exit in 3 Years
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as shocking as a Google spin out suing OpenAI, Sam Altman and Jony Ive 😱
If you want to read any previous editions of Half Baked, you can on our website.
Let’s goooo 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 Jumping on the “TikTokification of everything” trend
📈 The tech helping users optimize their social posts
🛠️ How to build mobile apps using plain english
🤑 Turning a sandwich into a $100m exit in 3 years
🍻 Giving sweet treats an extra kick
📰 Vertical Video News App
Keeping it reel
Available domain: Briefreel.com
The Problem: Every single app has a “TikTok” style video feed these days. Spotify, LinkedIn…at this point I’m waiting for my banking app to introduce one. That’s because young people are consuming a lot of short form content. But do you know what they’re not watching? News. According to Pew Research, only 5% of U.S. adults under 30 say they often get news from traditional TV. Meanwhile, TikTok has naturally become a top news source for Gen Z. Yet it’s cluttered with misinformation, AI slop and brain-rotting content. So why not add just one more TikTok style vertical video platform to the world, in the name of keeping young people informed? Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: A TikTok-style news app serving short, verified, and visually engaging news videos for Gen Z.
Product:
📱 Download the app, sign in with Google or Apple and choose the topics you care about (e.g. climate, sports, tech, global affairs) or the country you want to get news from
🎥 Scroll a vertical feed of 30–90 second news clips, crafted by journalists, verified creators, or licensed partners.
🧠 Swipe right for deeper breakdowns of the stories
🚨 Get push alerts for breaking news stories
Business Model: Ad-supported business
End Goal: Sell to a news outlet like Morning Brew who are looking to strengthen their engagement with a younger audience
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👥 Social Simulation Software
The Trend: Social simulation software. It sounds like something out of Black Mirror, but in reality it’s something that solves a pretty fundamental problem a lot of us face…knowing what to post on social media. Many products like Viral Predictor or Testfeed.ai have emerged which run simulations on how audiences react to tweets or emails, all before you hit publish. It's like having a crystal ball for virality. Very cool.
Opportunities:
Audience Emulator for Newsletters: A SaaS tool that lets creators "test" subject lines, intros, and calls-to-action by simulating engagement from different persona types (e.g., finance bro, indie hacker, mom of three, crypto degen).
Multi-Platform Post Optimizer: A tool that simulates how a single piece of content (text, image, video) will perform across multiple platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube Shorts), adapting tone, format, and length for each.
📱Using AI to Create Mobile Apps using Plain English
The Tool: Thanks to AI, the distance between idea and action has never been shorter. Take mobile app creation for example, Back in the day it took a team of developers to build a mobile app. Today though, with a platform like Rork, you can build a fully fledged mobile app just by prompting. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Go to Rork and sign up using your Google account
Give a detailed prompt of the app you want to build (you get 5 free messages per day so you can try for free)
Test the app on your phone by scanning the QR code
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🦐 From $0 to a $90m Exit in 2 Years
The Idea: Back in 2012 Shawn Tsao had two major problems. The first? Well his company was in trouble. He had founded a company called Munch on Me (not sure about that name there Shawn…), a daily deals site for food, with his friends Richard Din, Tony (Shi) Li and Andy Zhang. Despite getting into YC though the company wasn’t doing too well. In fact, they only had $10 in their bank account at one point. So they decided to give it a few more months to see if they find a new business idea worth pursuing. But what was the second problem Shawn had you ask? Hunger. One day during a brainstorming session Shawn craved a sandwich, but his favorite sandwich shop was too far away for him to go to. This was the team’s lightbulb moment. They decided to pivot and built the “Uber for food” (before UberEats was a thing of course). This was the beginning of Caviar.
The Execution:
2012: The team launched Caviar in San Francisco with a hacked-together MVP. Early traction came from signing up trendy, high-quality restaurants and manually delivering orders themselves.
2013: Paul Buchheit (the creator of Gmail) became their first angel investor with a $50K check after hearing a one-liner pitch: “We deliver from restaurants that don’t normally deliver.” The Winklevoss twins were also big early investors.
2014: The team raised a $15m Series A funding from Tiger Global, enabling expansion to other major cities including New York and Chicago.
July 2014: Caviar was acquired by Square for $100M. The team joined Square to continue scaling Caviar under their umbrella.
2014–2019: Caviar expanded to 11 markets and refined its premium delivery model, carving a niche for upscale restaurant delivery.
August 2019: Caviar was sold by Square to DoorDash for $410M in cash and stock, marking a major consolidation in the food delivery space.
The lesson? Start scrappy, solve a real problem, and lean into what makes you different.
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🔍️ Founder Finds
🚨 Raise Alert: Cluely, Silicon Valley’s most controversial startup that helps ‘cheat on everything,’ raises $15M from a16z
📰 Headline: The self-driving car market is heating up with Tesla launching Robotaxi rides in Austin, Texas
🛠️ AI Tool: We found a super cool tool which uses AI to generate short form videos in different formats. Will test it out ourselves.
📹 Must-Watch: Alexandr Wang’s Scale AI was just valued at $29B. Here’s an interview with him from a few days ago. Smart dude.
💬 Founder Quote: "Your first 100 users are your co-founders." - Garry Tan, Y Combinator CEO
👥 From the Community
Have a startup idea you’re thinking about pursuing? Or are you already building a startup and want it mentioned in this newsletter? If so then fill out this form or book in for Office Hours here. Your call.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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