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- Startup Ideas #396: Prophet Center, AI Ads...
Startup Ideas #396: Prophet Center, AI Ads...
Plus Turning a Widget into a +$50M Business
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as OpenAI launching a browser to challenge Google 🔀
If you want to read any previous editions of Half Baked, you can on our website.
Let’s goooo 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea we predict will be a huge success
📈 The ad trend that’s just gone mega viral
🛠️ Tom Bilyeu’s secret to finding business ideas
🤑 Turning a widget into a +$50M business
🍻 A condiment so good you’ll be dying to try it
🔮 Prediction Markets Newsletter
Profit like it’s hot
Available domain: ProphetCenter.com
The Opportunity: Prediction markets are exploding right now, both in volume and cultural relevance. Polymarket alone handled $109M in trades in June 2024, and platforms like Manifold are onboarding thousands of forecasters weekly. But while betting is 24/7, coverage isn’t. Traders, forecasters, and curious speculators are missing why odds are shifting and what moves to pay attention to. This is a nascent but fast growing industry in need of a big media player. You can become exactly that. Here’s how.
The Solution:
In a line: A daily email briefing covering the biggest swings, smartest bets, and hidden gems across prediction markets.
Product:
📩 Readers sign up and get a sharp, skimmable newsletter every weekday morning
📊 Each issue highlights 3–5 major prediction market movements, what caused them, and where the alpha might be
🔍 Includes odds snapshots, weird emerging markets (aliens, celebrity drama, crypto ETFs), and deep dives into particular markets too
🔗 You can of course use Beehiiv to start your newsletter (we’re big fans)
Business Model: Free newsletter, sell ads then build tools for this audience over time
End Goal: Sell to a prediction platform (like Polymarket, Kalshi, or Manifold) or a media brand (like Barstool) as a content plus distribution asset, aiming for a 5-10x revenue multiple.
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🍕 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.
📺 AI-generated Ads
The Trend: Whop, the “make money app”, made waves this week by launching their “New mission: get rich” ad, which has more than 1.5m views on X as of the time of writing. It’s a fully AI generated ad in the form of a GTA parody (that’s right, we got Whop GTA before GTA 6, go figure.) In the ad all the characters are all online entrepreneurs, with some nice easter eggs for all of us in the space. It’s an amazing ad and for me points very clearly to the future of advertising…fully AI generated ads.
Opportunities:
AI Ad Testing Platform: A tool that generates and A/B tests dozens of ad variations (copy + visuals) across platforms, then auto-optimizes based on performance.
Trend Hijacker for Ads: A platform that uses real-time social trends (via X, TikTok, Reddit) to spin up timely, reactive AI-generated ads so brands can instantly hop on memes, news, or viral content.
💡 Tom Bilyeu’s Method for Finding Validated Business Ideas
The Method: Tom Bilyeu, the founder of Quest Nutrition which sold for $1B, is going all in on AI right now (welcome to the club Tom). And he recently shared a cool method he uses to find real problems people are desperate to solve to spark business ideas. Here’s the breakdown.
Step-by-step:
Go to ChatGPT (or your LLM of choice) and enter the first prompt (we put all 4 prompts here for you)
Enter the prompts one-by-one, getting feedback on each one, and once you’re happy with a response move onto the next prompt
Repeat this until you finish all 4 prompts
🖥️ Every Founder Needs a Personal Website
Why? Because your ideas, story, and vision shouldn’t live in scattered tweets and old pitch decks. A personal site is your digital HQ, whether you're raising money, hiring, or just sharing your thinking. Squarespace makes it effortless.
Build it once. Own it forever.
Get 10% off with code HALFBAKED (along with your 14 day free trial).
❤️ Turning a Widget into a +$50M Business
The Idea: Back in 2022 Matt Moss, a USC student and iOS developer, wanted a fun way to stay connected with his girlfriend while they were long-distance. So he had an idea - why not create a widget that showed a live photo from his girlfriend, right on his homescreen. No feeds, no filters, just a moment. He called it Locket.
The Execution:
January 1, 2022: Matt posted a casual TikTok demoing Locket. It exploded overnight. The app went viral, hitting 1 million downloads in just a week. All from one video.
January 2022: Locket became the #1 app on the App Store in the US. No ad budget. No press. Just raw word of mouth and TikTok.
Early 2022: Matt joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch to turn Locket from side project into startup.
Mid 2022: He raised $12.5M in seed funding led by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other notable angels. At the time, the app had surpassed 20 million downloads.
2023: Locket expanded beyond photos to include notes and video, while experimenting with monetization via premium features.
2024: Despite competition from BeReal and others, Locket has maintained a loyal user base by staying dead simple and focused on close relationships.
In the end, one action can completely change your life. Matt made a single TikTok and it changed the course of his life. You could be a single action away from changing your life too.
🔍️ Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Perplexity has just launched an agentic web browser called Comet. Super cool.
🎁 Free Resource: HubSpot is still giving away Perplexity Pro to our readers for free. Get it while it’s hot!
📰 Headline: Linda Yaccerino has just stepped down as CEO of Twitter, the latest in a long line of Twitter CEOs to leave the job.
📚 Must-Read: This article, “Agency Is Eating the World”, is a fantastic read. In today’s world agency is more important than anything else.
💬 Founder Quote: “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do”. Stewart Butterfield, Slack Founder
🔦 Reader Spotlight
🎙️ BS Meter - Tyler Cooper is using AI to fact-check podcasts in real time as you listen.
🌐 GoBrunch - Richard Lowenthal is building a virtual platform with customizable rooms for meetings, events, and communities.
🤖 Dahlia - Luke Wagner is creating a personal assistant that manages tasks, emails, and more using simple commands.
📝 NeuralSplit - NeuralSplit is building a tool that auto-generates and split-tests website copy to boost conversions.
📰 LetterAtlas - Jake Peterson is building a newsletter curation, management, and summarization platform.
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Bacon in a Bottle
Ever looked at a strip of bacon and thought, “this would be better if it came out of a bottle”?
Introducing Squeez Bacon™, the portable pork solution for people who love bacon but hate cooking. It’s real bacon, mechanically “enhanced” into a smooth, shelf-stable goo. Spread it on toast, squeeze it on your dinner, or just mainline it straight from the tube. We’re not here to judge.
Squeez Bacon™ - meat the future.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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