- Half Baked
- Posts
- Startup Ideas #386: Landing Pages, Protein Coffee...
Startup Ideas #386: Landing Pages, Protein Coffee...
Plus The College Kids who Built a $150m App
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising Apple trying to acquire Perplexity? 🤔
If you want to read any previous editions of Half Baked, you can on our website.
Let’s goooo 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 Taking the guesswork out of landing pages
📈 The “proteinification“ of everything continues
🛠️ OpenAI’s guide to building agents
🤑 The college kids who built a $150m app
🍻 The ultimate tool to increase your screen-time
🖱️ Landing Page Simulator
Scroll with the punches
Available domain: Testflyte.ai
The Problem: Building landing pages is part science, part guesswork, part crying because of how low your conversion rates are. Just how low? Well according to Unbounce, the average landing page conversion rate is just 4.02%. But what about all of that A/B testing we do you ask? Well unfortunately, 90% of A/B tests fail to produce significant improvements. But what if you could lean in to the wisdom of the crowd and get thousands of users to test your landing page before you get a single visitor? Well with AI, you can. Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: AI-simulated user testing for your landing page, before a single visitor lands
Product:
🧪 Upload your Figma design, live URL, or HTML export to begin testing instantly.
👻 AI simulates 1,000s of realistic user journeys including scroll behavior, click hotspots, rage clicks, and drop-offs.
🧠 It generates a predictive conversion score with suggested UX tweaks, CTA repositioning, and copy edits.
📈 Heatmaps, click maps, and user path flows are all generated without needing real traffic or users.
Business Model: Freemium model with paid tiers for usage limits, team features, and deeper analysis.
End Goal: Acquisition by a product analytics giant like Hotjar, Amplitude, or Adobe at a 10–20x revenue multiple.
Rate this idea: |
👀 Unlock sales success
Pipedrive is the CRM that empowers you to take control of your sales process and close more deals, faster.
With an intuitive interface, powerful automation, and real-time pipeline tracking, it’s built to help sales teams focus on what they do best - selling.
No clutter, no confusion, just results.
Sign up today to get an extended 30-day free trial + 20% off your first year.
Protein Coffee
The Trend: The great “proteinification” is upon us. Protein cereal. Protein water. Protein beer (yes really). If a food can have extra protein added to it, somebody’s done it. Why? Well because of the so-called “protein premium”. This is where brands can add a nice mark-up to their products (30% - 50%) by throwing in a few extra grams of protein. Simple. And coffee is the latest product that’s undergone this treatment. But it turns out people like it.
Opportunities:
Macro-Friendly Café of the Future: A DTC brand and physical space that reinvents café culture for fitness-obsessed prosumers.
LMNT for Protein: A single-serve, flavorless powder or liquid that instantly dissolves into hot or cold coffee, giving it 5–10g of protein without altering the taste or texture.
🤖 OpenAI’s Practical Guide to Building AI Agents
The Tool: 2025 will go down in history as the year of the AI agent. But while most of the world still doesn’t really know what an AI agent is, almost nobody knows how to actually build one. Which is where OpenAI comes in. They pulled together a 34 page guide on how to build agents. Here’s how you can get it.
Step-by-step:
Go to this link (it’s a PDF)
Read the aforementioned PDF
Invent AGI, maybe? This step is optional
Pro Tip: If you’re short on time, feed the PDF into ChatGPT to get a summary of it!
⏱️ It’s Never Too Early to Start
Dorm rooms. Middle school classrooms. Garage workbenches.
That’s where these businesses began:
Healthy Roots Dolls - now in Target, backed by Procter & Gamble
Royalty Soaps - a soap empire with nearly 1M YouTube subs
Bearbottom - an ethical menswear brand that’s donated 700K+ meals
Mo’s Bows - a handmade bowtie brand started at age 9, now seen on Shark Tank
Some of these founders stayed in school. Others dropped out. Some raised capital. Others bootstrapped. But they all used Shopify to build something real.
Start your store with a 3-day free trial, then it’s just $1/month for your first 3 months.
📅 The College Kids who Built a $150m App
The Idea: Back in October 2015 Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut was just like any other high school. Except for one major difference. The entire student body was hooked on an app built by Dylan Diamond (right). Dylan had created a simple schedule-sharing web app so he and his friends could meet up more. Simple right? Well Dylan graduated from Staples in 2017 and then enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied engineering and business alongside working for Tesla as their youngest full time employee. While in college he met Max Baron (Diamond and Baron are killer surnames right?) who was himself running a full-time social media consultancy while at college. Over coffee on Penn’s campus, Dylan showed Max his calendar app, which he’d subsequently turned in a mobile app. Max was floored and the pair decided to go all in on the idea. Together. This was the beginning of Saturn.
The Execution:
2019: The pair dropped out of college and closed a $9 million seed round from TQ Ventures, General Catalyst and Ashton Kutcher, propelling their pre-revenue company to a $40 million valuation
2020: The team focused on growth inside high schools, targeting entire grade levels and creating FOMO with limited invites and school-specific communities.
2021: The team raised a $35 million Series A from General Catalyst, Insight Partners and other investors, including Bezos Expeditions and Marc Benioff. At this point, the app is spreading virally through student reps and social influence.
2023: The app saw explosive growth and reached fourth overall in Apple's App Store and second on the Social Networking charts
2025: Saturn just got acquired by Snap for a reported $150m a few days ago. Not a bad exit for the guys.
The lesson? In today’s world age is irrelevant. No matter your age you can achieve great things, you just have to try.
👃 Nose Stylus
Find yourself wanting to use your phone but your hands are full? Like wanting scroll TikTok in the bath or read an article while elbow-deep in a burrito?
Meet the NoseNav™, the hands-free, face-mounted stylus that turns your schnoz into a precision touchscreen tool. Perfect for lazy browsing, hands-free messaging and just generally getting in more screen-time.
NoseNav™, let your nose do the picking.
Vote
🔍️ Founder Finds
🚨 Raise Alert: Kalshi, a prediction marketplace, has raised $185 million at a $2 billion valuation
📹 Must-Watch: OpenAI has a podcast now. Here’s the first episode (feat Sam Altman).
📚 Must-Read: This post covering the valuation multiples of 37 unicorns is fascinating (multiples range from 4x - 600x revenue)
✖️ Trending Tweet: This is a great guide to prompting VEO 3 using JSON prompting
💬 Founder Quote: "Being a founder is like signing up to get punched in the face every day and asking for more." — Eoghan McCabe, Intercom
❓Mystery Link: Our mystery link of the day (come on, you know you want to press it)
👥 From the Community
Josiah ([email protected]) is looking for a co-founder for his newsletter business (an idea we previously shared). Drop him an email if you’re interested!
Luke Knight is building a newsletter for investors called Quick Pitch, worth checking out!
P.S DM or email me if you want your product featured here in future editions!
👋 That’s All Folks!
Before you go just a few public service announcements:
Also we’d love to know what you thought of today's newsletter to help us improve:
What did you think of today's edition? |
See you soon,
Reply