Startup Ideas #409: Friend-powered Dating, YouTube PE...

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as often as big tech companies are launching new browsers 🌐 

If you want to read any previous editions of Half Baked, you can check them out on our website.

Let’s goooo 🚀 

In today’s edition:

• 💡 Solving the dating crisis, one recommendation at a time

• 📈 Why investors are interested in the YouTube space

• 🛠️ From idea to YouTube upload in 30 minutes

• 🤑 Turning parking tickets into a +$200M business

• 🍻 The ultimate, on the go, toilet accessory

💌 Friend-powered Dating App

Hyped, not swiped

The Problem: The Tea app drama has been absolutely wild. Lawsuits, hacks, doxxing, probably a murder (I stopped keeping track a few days ago). But beneath all the chaos is a deeper, more unsettling truth: gender dynamics right now are broken. There’s no baseline trust, no shared reality, and no agreed-upon playbook for how dating should even work anymore. That’s why it’s the perfect time to get creative with dating apps. Take Jake’s idea. He reckons that the next great dating app will require your friends to give testimonials about you, in order to close the delta between how you present on a dating app and how your friends perceive you. Good call Jake. Here’s how it would work.

The Solution:

• In a line: A dating app where your friends build your profile through testimonials, candid questions, and behind-the-scenes photos.

• Product:

  • 📲 Download the app and choose 3 friends to “vouch” for you, no bios or prompt answers needed from you.

  • 🗣️ The app texts your friends random, rotating questions (e.g., “What’s their most underrated trait?”), and adds the responses directly to your profile. You can’t edit or even see them.

  • 📸 Friends can also send in a photo that only becomes visible after a match, like a secret bonus round.

  • 🔁 Profiles evolve over time as friends answer new questions, keeping things dynamic and conversation-worthy.

• Business Model: Freemium model with free core features and a paid tier that unlocks things like priority matching, extra friend slots, or “backstage passes” (early view of secret photos).

• End Goal: Sell to a dating giant like Match Group or Bumble looking to future-proof with more authentic, viral formats

📦️ Tariffs Got You Tense? Take Back Control With Direct Shipping and Tariff Deferment

Recent tariffs have majorly delayed the selling season for DTC brands that waited for the tariff cuts or ran out of inventory.

And for the next 90 days, tariffs have been reduced, but this might not be enough time to get inventory where you need it, plus, you’re still dealing with a 30% tariff.

Portless is here to help. While competitors' inventory sits on a boat for 60-90 days, you could be:

• Restocking best-sellers in 3-5 days

• Freeing up more working capital

• Paying tariffs only after customers pay you

• Turn 6-week delays into 6-day deliveries directly from China.

Portless lets you take back control of your inventory and start leveraging tariff deferment today.

Contact Portless today.

📹 PE-Backed YouTube Channels

The Trend: I’m a YouTube addict. There I’ve said it. And I bet a lot of you are too. And while we all associate YouTube with the scrappy, one-man band, creator type, YouTube is getting more and more corporate every year. So much so that private equity houses are getting involved in the YouTube space now through buying or investing in channels. Veritasium. Fireship. The Game Theorists. All of these channels and many more are either partially or fully owned by private equity houses. How do I know? Because I watched a YouTube video on it of course…

Opportunities:

• YouTube Channel Marketplace: Think Acquire.com but for YouTube channels. Help creators sell their channels when they burn out, and help investors or media groups buy turnkey audiences.

• YouTube Roll-Up-as-a-Service: Launch a new-age media company that buys niche educational channels (coding, science, history) and bundles them under one parent brand with shared ad sales, content ops, and merch infrastructure.

📽️ From Idea to YouTube Upload in 30 Minutes

The Tool: YouTube can be a great channel to grow your business. But now you can make YouTube videos using just two tools, Grok 4 and Gling AI. Here’s how.

Step-by-step:

1. Get your video idea with Grok 4 using this prompt:

   “Give me 5 viral YouTube video ideas in the [your niche] niche. Each one should be curiosity-driven, highly clickable, and under 10 minutes.”

2. Write the full video script in seconds. Here’s a prompt:

   “Write a viral YouTube script in the style of [MrBeast, MKBHD, etc.]. Make the hook irresistible in the first 10 seconds. Add cliffhangers, loops, and a CTA at the end. Target niche: [your niche]. Length: [3–5 minutes].”

3. Record yourself reading the script or use Eleven Labs to get AI to read it for you (which you can then pair with stock footage or footage created by AI)

4. Upload the footage to Gling AI and edit the video like a doc

5. Export & post your video

🪄 Magically Create AI Video Documentation with AI

Tired of writing training materials, how-to-guides or other internal docs that rarely get read?

Meet Guidde, the AI tool that turns your workflow into a step-by-step video guide in seconds. Here's how:

1. Download the Chrome extension and hit record before doing a task

2. Guidde creates a video tutorial and adds voiceover, highlights clicks, and creates chapters

3. Share the guide instantly with your team

Perfect for onboarding, support, training and more. Join 100,000+ users already saving 12+ hours a week.

Learn more about Guidde

🅿️ Turning Parking Tickets into a +$200M Business

The Idea: At 18, Josh Browder was racking up parking tickets left and right while studying at Stanford. Frustrated by the bureaucratic maze and high legal fees required to contest them, he figured there had to be a better way. So, like any self-respecting Gen Z hacker, he built one. Josh taught himself how to code and created a bot that helped people appeal their parking tickets, all for free. This was the beginning of DoNotPay.

The Execution:

• 2015: Josh launches the first version of DoNotPay, a chatbot that helps users contest parking tickets in London and New York. The MVP saves users over $4 million in fines in its first year.

• 2017: The site expands beyond parking tickets into services like claiming compensation for delayed flights and canceling gym memberships. Essentially, small legal tasks with big annoyance factors.

• 2018: He raises $1.1M in seed funding from investors like Greylock and Founders Fund.

• 2020: Launches a full app with over 100 legal services, from suing robocallers to canceling subscriptions to filing small claims lawsuits. Gains media traction as the “Robin Hood of the internet.”

• 2022: Hits over 150,000 paying subscribers. Growth driven by viral Twitter posts from Josh showcasing cheeky legal hacks (e.g., suing Equifax for $500 with two taps).

• 2023: Attempts to use DoNotPay’s AI to argue a real court case via earpiece gets blocked, but the PR stunt earns massive attention. Raises $10M Series A, valuing the company at $210M.

• 2024–2025: Expands aggressively into B2C subscription tools, builds an API for enterprise, and launches "LegalGPT" powered services.

Josh’s journey proves that it’s better to start narrow, to stay focused on a single user and then to widen your aperture. You can’t be all things to all men on on day one, but you can on day one thousand.

🔍️ Founder Finds

• 🛠️ AI Tool: Shortcut, the first superhuman excel agent, is live

• 📹 Must-Watch: Alex Hormozi’s launch event for his next book will be sick, check it out

• 📚 Must-Read: The “Max MRR” metric predicts revenue plateaus

• 📰 Headline: Tesla signs $16.5B deal with Samsung to make AI chips

• 💬 Founder Quote: “Lots of people are smarter than you. You just have to be more persistent.” Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO)

🔦 Reader Spotlight

• 🧭 FounderSignal: Abdul Mateen is making idea validation as easy as clicking a button. Literally.

• 🔍 Meridian: Alex Dees is giving marketers a massive edge in the search game.

• 📊 Venngage: Eugene Woo built a tool that turns messy data into something beautiful in seconds.

• 📝 submit.ninja: Miles Kettering is rethinking how startups collect feedback with a simple, powerful tool.

• 💬 TicketPing: Ravi Ojha is building support software especially for founders

P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!

🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Portable Bidet

• We’ve all been there - you’re out and about, use the bathroom and wish you had a bidet with you. Well now you can.

• Introducing Squirtle™, the world’s first attachment that turns any water bottle into a bidet. Just attach it to your bottle, aim, and blastoise your backside into bliss.

• Squirtle™ - the hydro pump that’s super effective

Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

👋 That’s All Folks!

Before you go just a few public service announcements:

• Have an idea you want feedback on? DM me to discuss it or book in for Office Hours here.

• Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you asap.

See you soon,

John and Darragh | The Half Baked Team