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Startup Ideas #434: Gifting CRM, Regenerative Medicine...
Plus From Google Forms to a +$1B Business
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as xAI suing an engineer for taking secrets to OpenAI 😱
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In today’s edition:
💡 Helping brands to better understand a major marketing channel
📈 The frontier in medicine that AI is helping to breach
🛠️ How to use AI to build agents in n8n
🤑 From Google forms to a +$1B business
🍻 A product you’re lucky to be hearing about it
🎁 Influencer Gifting CRM
More gifting, less grifting
Available domain: Seedstack.co
The Problem: Influencers get gifted (or “seeded”) a lot of free stuff. We all see it. #sponsored. #ad. #gift. Meanwhile the rest of us are #jealous, because who doesn’t like getting free stuff, right? But for brands, this is an important acquisition channel. But interestingly, when it comes to tracking the actual ROI on this gifting, it’s a black hole for brands. 56% of marketers still run seeding on spreadsheets, and 65% admit they’ll send product even if a creator didn’t post about it the last time. Yikes. It’s time to give brands the power to understand if their generosity is actually generating a return. Here’s how.
The Solution:
In a line: A CRM that manages creator gifting end-to-end and ties unboxings and posts to measurable revenue.
Product:
🚀 A brand signs ups, connects their e-commerce store to the platform and creates a list of all of the creators that they’re sending products to
📦 They auto-collect addresses with one-click “magic link” forms, generate labels, track delivery, and manage SKUs/COGS that they’re sending out.
🔎 The platform then auto-detects posts across IG/TikTok/YouTube to ensure the product has been featured and logs impressions and any other relevant performance data
Business Model: SaaS tiers ($199–$999/mo depending on usage)
End Goal: Strategic sale to e-commerce/CRM players (Shopify/Klaviyo) at 7–10× ARR if growth and retention metrics are strong.
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😵 Bad Passwords Kill Startups
As a founder, you're used to taking risks. But some risks just aren’t worth it - like leaving your company exposed to weak or reused passwords.
That's because just one leaked password can nuke your business. It’s not worth the risk.
That's why smart teams (and even dumb teams like ours) use 1Password, the industry leader in password management. It keeps your credentials safe, your team in sync, and your business protected.
Take big swings with your product, not with your security.
🧬 Regenerative Medicine x AI
The Trend: Historically, medicine has always been about treating symptoms. But now, with regenerative medicine, we’re starting to actually repair the body. Regenerative medicine, using stem cells, tissue engineering, and gene editing, aims to regrow organs, reverse aging damage, and heal injuries once thought permanent. And unsurprisingly, progress is accelerating in the space. Recently, for example, OpenAI and Retro used a custom AI model to make cellular reprogramming into stem cells ~50× better, faster, and safer (great thread on it here). The future is super exciting man.
Opportunities:
Sports Recovery Pods: Create treatment centers that offer regenerative therapies for athletes’ chronic injuries.
Virtual Regeneration Monitoring: Wearables and apps that track biomarkers and healing outcomes after regenerative treatments.
🔀 How to Use AI to Build Agents in n8n
The Tool: Automation tools like n8n are gaining huge traction right now, helping people to build workflows to automate huge portions of their jobs. But it’s hard to know where to begin. So here’s how you can use ChatGPT to start creating your own workflow automations in n8n.
Step-by-step:
Open up ChatGPT
Paste in this mega prompt and describe what you want the agent to do
Chat GPT will return the n8n nodes, triggers, error handling etc.
Follow the steps in n8n
🗄️ Compliance Made Simple for Startups
Achieving SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, or even ISO 42001 compliance can feel overwhelming. But Vanta makes it painless.
Trusted by 12,000+ companies, Vanta automates up to 90% of the compliance process, offers real-time monitoring, and streamlines audits so you can get certified in weeks, not months.
And we've teamed up with Vanta to offer a collection of resources for startups, including step-by-step compliance checklists and case studies from fast-growing startups. It's an incredible resource.
👗 From Google Forms to a +$1B Business
Back in 2010, Katrina Lake was a Harvard Business School student who hated the hassle of shopping. Online stores were overwhelming, brick-and-mortar ones were inconvenient, and personal stylists were a luxury she couldn’t afford. She wondered… how could you 10x the shopping experience? Like what if data science could pair with human stylists to deliver curated outfits directly to your door? That was the spark for Stitch Fix.
The Execution:
2011: Katrina tested the MVP out of her Cambridge apartment. Customers filled out style profiles on Google Forms, she hand-picked items from boutiques for them, and shipped them to their doors.
2012: Originally called Rack Habit, the company rebranded as Stitch Fix. Katrina recruited Netflix’s Head of Data Science, Eric Colson, to build out algorithms that would supercharge personalization. They raised a $750K seed round from Lightspeed that year.
2013: Closed a $12M Series A from Benchmark. Scaled fulfillment centers and grew the stylist network to thousands. Growth was almost entirely through word of mouth, powered by customers posting their “Fix” unboxings.
2014–2016: Expanded into men’s, maternity, and plus-size clothing. Raised $75m across Series B and C rounds, using the funds to build warehouses across the U.S. to handle the logistical beast of shipping + returns. By 2016, Stitch Fix had 2M active clients.
2017: IPO’d on the Nasdaq, becoming one of the first female-founded, female-CEO-led tech companies to go public. Opened with at a $1.6B valuation.
2020–2021: Revenue crossed $2B+ with nearly 4m active users. Performance has softened since then, but the company is still worth >$500M.
The lesson? You don’t need much to get started in business, even if your idea is hugely ambitious. Katrina started with a simple Google Form. You can start simple and over time grow into your big vision. But you have to start somewhere.
🔍️ Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Check out these 6 critical prompts for using GPT-5 to code
📰 Headline: Cracks are starting to form in Meta’s Scale AI partnership
📚 Must-Read: Blake Scholl’s (Boom Supersonic Founder) take on burnout is a great read
✖️ Trending Tweet: There are only two tools worth learning right now, LangGraph and n8n. This tweet explains them both
💬 Founder Quote: "The best ideas are the ones people laugh at initially, but then can’t stop thinking about." Marc Lore (Jet.com, Diapers.com)
🔦 Reader Spotlight
🧬 Amino: Ryan is building an app that helps you scan and track supplements so you know exactly what you're putting in your body.
🖥️ Coderacket: Nathaniel is building a lightweight authentication and session management app.
📰 Beyond Bay St.: Imran is building a newsletter that shares a curated list of Chief of Staff and Strategy & Operations roles at leading startups and high-growth companies across the U.S. and Canada.
🎓 Studyweave: Matthew is building a flash card app that aims to allow you to create good flashcards quickly.
👨💻 ASCENDynamics NFP: Marcin is building an open-source collaboration platform for nonprofits, mutual aid groups, and cooperative startups.
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Earwax Headphones
Ever wonder if your earwax is secretly drowning out Beyoncé? Wish your headphones doubled as personal janitors for your auditory canals?
Introducing Earsuds™ - the world’s first headphones that cleans your ear canals while you listen. Crystal-clear sound in, waxy grime out. It’s so effective, critics are literally waxing lyrical about it.
Earsuds™ - less earwax, more ear-worms.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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