It’s Monday. Coffee's hot, ideas are cold

Starting this week, we've got a business hiding inside every overbooked restaurant in the world.

In Todays Edition, TL;DR

💡 A marketplace where restaurant reservations trade like tickets

The Problem: Getting a table at a hot restaurant has become a blood sport. People set midnight alarms for Resy drops like they're buying Taylor Swift tickets. And because any market with high demand and limited supply eventually produces a black market.

The Solution: Users list reservations they can't use. Set an Ask price. Buyers browse available tables, see the last transaction price for that restaurant and time slot, and either meet the ask or submit a bid. When they match, the reservation transfers.

The Business Model:

Some napkin note math here,

500 transactions/week at $150 average, 12% take = $10,800/week in revenue. That's before a single restaurant pays a subscription.

The Exit: A startup like this could get acquired by OpenTable: 25 years in reservations and still can't solve no shows or scalping or Stubhub: Already normalized secondary ticket markets. Restaurant reservations are the obvious next category.

🧰 The Tech Stack:

want the full build? ReadMe

You Need To Manufacture Supply Before You Launch
A marketplace with no listings is a ghost town. Every major city has a dining subreddit or Facebook group where people post things like,

"anyone want my Nobu reservation Saturday?" for free.

These are your first sellers. Get in those communities before launch and give them a place to actually get paid.

Also find the people who already have access. Hotel concierges, restaurant regulars, hospitality workers. They sit on reservations they can't use. They're already in the dining communities. They become your first power sellers.

Getting Restaurants: Start in one city. Sign 10 restaurant partners before you launch publicly. A focused marketplace beats a nationwide ghost town every time.

The pitch to restaurants is one sentence: you get 25% of every resale on your tables, you control which slots are eligible, and you can pull out anytime.

Marketing on a Budget
Start with micro influencers. For example, Jack’s Dining Room with 2M+ followers whose audience actually trusts his takes. now they dont have to be this big, maybe a few thousand followers. Pay them $200 to list a real reservation and document the experience. More credible than any ad you could run.

This is more guerrilla marketing, but I think in person marketing stunts are making a swing again. Try slapping small stickers near the front of hot restaurants. Clean, minimal, slightly cryptic. "Couldn't get a table? QR CODE”. Lamp posts, bathroom mirrors in nearby bars. You're reaching exactly the person who just got turned away.

A recipe app that remembers what you actually liked.

I found this app called ReciMe. Millions of users, $60 a year, saves recipes from Instagram, TikTok, and anywhere else into one organized place. The market is enormous — projected to hit $14 billion by 2033. Proof that people will pay to solve the recipe chaos problem.

The Problem: ReciMe is a storage product, not a memory product. You save 400 recipes and now you have a different version of the same problem. Everything is in one place and you still don't know what to cook tonight.

The Solution: Build the layer on top. Every recipe you cook gets a one tap rating. Over time the app builds a taste profile. It knows you always rate pasta five stars and abandon grain bowls halfway through. Open it on a Thursday night and it shows you six recipes that match what you actually eat, filtered by what's in your fridge, how much time you have, and what you've already cooked this week.

The Pricing Model:

Free tier: rate up to 20 recipes, basic recommendations
$4.99 per month for full taste profile, fridge-based filtering, and weekly meal suggestions
Grocery delivery affiliate revenue (Instacart, Amazon Fresh) on every recipe card — the second revenue stream ReciMe hasn't built

Jensen Huang just made the most bullish case for AI we've heard yet. On the All-In Podcast. Watch it.

Mark Cuban said something worth paying attention to:

AI agents are going to rip through every small and mid size business in the country. None of those owners will know how to build them.

His advice: learn Claude. Learn agentic workflows. Learn how any of this works. Then walk into those businesses and help them. They have money. They have problems. They just don't have anyone who knows what you know.

Farmers are replacing fences with AI powered cow collars.

Costs just $5–$8 per cow/month

Solar powered smart collar tracks health, location, activity. Farmer draws a virtual fence on an app. Collar beeps/vibrates if cows cross the boundary.

No physical fences = huge cost savings. Already used on 700,000 cows globally. Now raising at a $2B valuation. Farming just went wireless

Meta is reportedly cutting 20% of its staff around 15,000 people while planning to spend $135 billion on AI this year. Read Here

Alright, that’s a wrap for this week.

Restaurant reservation marketplace, a smarter recipe app, AI cows, and a spreadsheet that does your launch distribution homework for you.

Ship something this week. We'll talk Friday.