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- Startup Ideas #438: Airbnb for X, SLMs...
Startup Ideas #438: Airbnb for X, SLMs...
Plus Bootstrapping a Hardware Startup to $100M ARR
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as Elon Musk’s new $1TN pay package 😱
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:
💡 A classic “Airbnb for X“ idea
📈 Where LLMs fall short, SLMs thrive
🛠️ Tom Bilyeu’s prompts to determine product-market fit
🤑 Bootstrapping a hardware startup to $100M ARR
🍻 The ultimate experience for your kids
🎾 Airbnb for Private Courts
Net gains
Available domain: Courtable.co
The Problem: It's 7PM on a Tuesday, and you decide to play tennis. Neat. But the public courts are booked solid, the country club has a 6-month waiting list, and the local indoor court charges like $80 an hour. Meanwhile, your neighbor's pristine tennis court sits empty 90% of the time because they only play on weekends. This scenario plays out millions of times across America, where there are over 270,000 tennis courts alone, many privately owned and severely underutilized. It's a classic supply and demand mismatch that's crying out for a platform solution. So let’s build that solution.
The Solution:
In a line: A platform where homeowners can rent out their private sports courts (tennis, basketball, pickleball) to local players by the hour.
Product:
🏠 Homeowners list their courts with photos, availability, pricing, and amenities (lighting, equipment, parking).
📅 Players can search by location, sport, and time slot, then book and pay instantly through the app.
🛡️ Background checks, insurance coverage, and a rating system ensure both parties feel secure about the arrangement.
💰 Dynamic pricing suggestions help owners maximize revenue while
Business Model: 15% fee on each booking (split between host and guest).
End Goal: Become the go-to platform for private court rentals. Potential acquisition by a fitness platform like ClassPass
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📹️ We’re interviewing a 9 Figure Founder…
At Half Baked, our mission is to inspire and educate the next generation of founders. And what better way to do that than to learn from one of the best founders in the e-commerce space?
That’s why next Monday, September 8th, we’re teaming up with Shopify to do an exclusive fireside chat with Ryan Bartlett, the founder of True Classics.
Ryan scaled a simple idea (better-fitting, affordable t-shirts) into a powerhouse brand doing 9 figures in revenue and valued at over $850M. Ryan will share hard-won lessons on scaling DTC, building a loyal community, and teach you exactly how he would start an e-commerce business in 2025.
This one is not to be missed.
🤏 Small Language Models
The Trend: We’ve all heard of Large Language Models. Which got me thinking…do Small Language Models exist? It turns out they do, and they’re super cool. Today, most AI agents run every task (no matter how simple) through massive LLMs like GPT-4 or Claude. But per NVIDIA’s researchers, that’s wasteful, unnecessary, and about to change. That’s where Small Language Models (SLMs) come in. These are models that fit on consumer hardware and run with low latency. They’re fast, cheap, and are key to scalable agentic AI.
Opportunities:
SLM App Store: A marketplace for downloadable SLM-powered agents (like mobile apps in the 2008 App Store era).
Agent Cost Optimizer: SaaS for companies running fleets of AI agents. It benchmarks tasks and routes them through the cheapest capable model (SLM vs LLM) in real-time to cut costs by 50–80%.
❓Tom Bilyeu’s Prompts to Determine Product-Market Fit
The Tool: Sometimes it’s tricky to know whether or not you’ve hit product-market fit with your product. But Tom Bilyeu (Quest Nutrition founder) has created a process to use AI to try and determine this. Here’s how to do it.
Step-by-step:
Open up ChatGPT
Paste in the 5 prompts listed here and fill in the blanks with details about your business
Use the output to determine your PMF level
🗄️ 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.
🎙️Bootstrapping a Hardware Startup to $100M ARR
The Idea: Back in 2021, serial entrepreneur Nathan Xu noticed something odd. Google's Live Transcribe feature had over a billion downloads, proving massive demand for voice-to-text tools, yet no one had built a truly great hardware device for this. Xu saw a $100 million opportunity hiding in plain sight. This was the beginning of Plaud.
The Execution:
2021: Nathan founded Plaud and began working on prototypes of products using his savings.
2023: Plaud launched a highly successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, raising over $1.1 million from more than 7,500 backers.
June 2023: Released their flagship Plaud Note, an AI-native recorder that wirelessly captures, transcribes, and summarizes audio content. It quickly becomes a viral hit, generating nearly $6 million in pre-sales and attracting 35,000 paying members.
Late 2024: Plaud AI reaches a major milestone, with its annualized revenue hitting an impressive $100 million (and is profitable). They achieve this without any external venture capital funding, a rare feat in the AI startup world.
2025: The company expands its product line with the launch of the Plaud Note Pro and the Plaud NotePin. Plaud sells over 1M devices.
The lesson? Plaud's success demonstrates that you don't always need millions in venture capital to build a profitable and rapidly scaling business. By prioritizing a strong, simple product you can achieve remarkable success.
🔍️ Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: You can now branch conversations in ChatGPT. About time!
🎁 Headline: Stripe just launched Tempo, a blockchain designed for payments. This feels like a big deal.
📹 Must-Watch: This homeless 22-year-old built a $1.5M AI app.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Nikita Bier (X’s Head of Product) just shared exactly how to grow on the platform.
💬 Founder Quote: “The real competition is inertia.” Alex Rampell (a16z, TrialPay)
🔦 Reader Spotlight: Meet Harrison and Agree
What are you building? We’re Harrison and Agree, and together we’re building Flowglad. It’s the easiest way to make internet money for AI builders. Set up your product’s payments and billing in seconds. 100% open source.
How did you come up with the idea? We kept seeing talented founders stall at monetization, including on our last company which we got to $2m ARR in <1yr. After dozens of interviews, we built a drop-in control panel to make pricing and payouts simple and transparent.
Biggest challenge right now? Awareness and trust. Many teams think payments is a weekend project, then lose weeks to edge cases.
How can Half Baked readers help? Use Flowglad to a test product and tell us what felt rough. Share it with an AI founder, or join our Discord to request the components you need.
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Vehicle Zoo
Do you have a vehicle-obsessed toddler in your life? Still dragging them to see some boring lions and tigers at the zoo?
Introducing VehicleZoo™ - the family-friendly experience where you can watch bulldozers in their natural habitat, observe cement mixers…mixing, and feed friendly garbage trucks. Complete with educational placards of course.
VehicleZoo™ - because some kids prefer dump trucks to Dumbo.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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