7 bizarrely good startups that the internet has not caught up to yet

Why does it matter? The best brand moats being built right now aren't selling better tech — they're selling escape from it.

The consensus checklist for a fundable startup — clear market, obvious need, universal approval — is exactly the filter that misses the next Airbnb. Shaan runs through seven real companies and a few ideas that barely exist yet, and together they sketch where consumer spending is quietly pooling.

• Unanimous investor approval is a red flag, not a green light • Wellness businesses sell state change, not fitness — and "state" will be the defining consumer word of the next decade • "Return to the physical" is a real product category, and brand is its only moat • Physical media — from newsletters to bathhouses — is staging a comeback that isn't a nostalgia blip

If 100% of the room nods, you're about to waste three years of your life

The safest-sounding startup idea in the room is the one most likely to fail. "If you say an idea and everybody in the room nods," Shaan says, "run away." The ideas that became companies sounded broken upfront — Airbnb's pitch was basically "who would let strangers sleep on their couch?" Uber's was "you're just going to let some random guy drive you to your destination?" The skeptics aren't the obstacle. They're the signal.

"All the great ideas sound a little crazy up front," Shaan says. The game isn't to avoid crazy — it's to tell the good crazy from the bad. And the fact that everyone thinks it's bad? Usually the best evidence you're onto something real. Stop pitching to collect nods. Find the people who think it's insane — their reaction is your real validation.

Soul Cycle isn't selling fitness — it's selling a state change, and 'state' is about to become the most important word in consumer

The body drags the mind — and whoever figures out how to sell that reliably is building the most durable consumer brand of the next decade. Shaan's thesis, buried halfway through: "State is going to become a very important word over the next 10 years." Not mood. Not mindset. State. "The easiest way to manage and control state is not to think your way there, but to use the body." Hot, cold, breath, music, eucalyptus — it works fast and it works reliably.

This reframes the whole fitness category. "You could argue CrossFit, Barry's, Soul Cycle are not ideal workouts," Shaan says. The form is bad, the strength gains are questionable. None of that matters. "You're in a dark room with a bunch of other people. It's a communal experience. The music is pumping." You go for the shift in how you feel. The workout is incidental.

Cat GPT sold $800K of Bluetooth rotary phones in five months — the moat is the brand, not the hardware

In 2023, a creator named Cat GPT (her Instagram handle) floated an idea for a retro Bluetooth landline. Nobody bit. Two years later she relaunched — used ChatGPT to navigate FCC approval, posted a TikTok that just said "I brought back landlines," and sold $800,000 of the thing in five months. She's tracking $5M in 2026.

Shaan's read: "The moat is not the technology right now. The moat is not the product. The moat is the brand." Sam pushes the frame further — if the brand expands beyond one SKU, the right question is "am I really just selling a landline or am I selling a return to the physical?" That's a whole category: retro landlines, phone jails, dumb alarm clocks, handheld GPS. Every feature your smartphone has is a potential undoing. Build the beautiful, branded physical version that undoes it.

95 to 98% of people are addicted to their phones — and nobody's built the nicotine patch yet

Sam's estimate is blunt: "I really don't know anybody who's not addicted to their phone. It seems like there's a 95 to 98% addiction rate." Multiple startups are circling the same problem — dum.co sells a $25 flip phone that forwards calls from your iPhone; Brick physically locks apps; Flow, from the teenager who built and sold a calorie-tracking app for an estimated $20-30M, is an alarm clock that won't stop beeping until you physically get out of bed and tap it. Shaan bought the dum.co phone the morning of this recording.

Sam frames the real question: "The problem is so real. Total agreement on the problem. And then the question is, which of these solutions is going to be the one?" The winner won't be decided by features. It'll be decided by who tells the best "reclaim your brain" story.

Cold plunge hit $100M DTC with no retail — hyperbaric chambers are the next category in the sequence

Cold plunge reached $100M direct-to-consumer with zero retail presence. Saunas went from gym-only to at-home brands doing hundreds of millions in revenue. Red light therapy made the same trip. The pipeline from "medical or elite use" to "gym staple" to "thing you buy for your house" has repeated itself often enough to be a template, not a coincidence.

Shaan's call: hyperbaric chambers are next. "Just like it happened for saunas and cold tubs and red light, it's going to happen for hyperbaric chambers." The visual is distinct enough to be a flex worth posting — same way a cold plunge tub in your garage became a discipline signal. The main headwind is regulatory: it's technically a medical device, pressurized oxygen in an enclosed space. That friction didn't stop the previous categories. Whoever cracks the aesthetic and the story first owns the category.

500,000 HVAC jobs are going unfilled — and a Meta Quest headset is the most efficient way to fill them

Interplay Learning in Austin has built hundreds of hours of HVAC, solar, plumbing, and electrical VR training. You can get certified as a technician entirely through the headset — no expensive equipment, no injury risk, fully repeatable. Skill Very does welding and painting the same way. Risk-free practice, gamified enough that people actually want to do it.

Sam's friend runs an HVAC company with its own internal "Hoffman University" — a months-long onboarding program in a real facility. "There's a huge need for this," Sam says after seeing it firsthand. The important thing Shaan flags: the customer here isn't really the trainee. It's the employer. They have proven budget, a desperate hiring problem, and a direct financial incentive to cut training time. The VR layer is the highest-leverage place in the whole stack to build.

The NYT's no-news games product is $60M ARR — a crossing guard is making $14K/month with the same logic

A million paying subscribers. $5 a month. No news, no op-eds — just crosswords, Wordle, and Connections. The New York Times games product is $60M ARR and barely gets mentioned in the same breath as the paper.

Zoom way out: a crossing guard named Christine with no notable platform mails a physical newsletter about her job and clears tens of thousands of dollars a month. Shaan's take on the format: "The jankier the better. If it looks like it's on printed paper that's stapled together in a manila folder, I think you can make some really cool products that way." Deliberately limited scope. No ads. No breaking news. Physical delivery. The Funday Press — all games, no headlines — is an early-stage bet on the same thesis. The proof of concept is already there at scale.

Barstool called the Cleveland Schvitz the hottest reservation in the country — $165 a head, steam plus steak

Barstool named it the hottest reservation in the country this winter, and the format is almost comically simple: a 98-year-old Jewish bathhouse, Russian-style steam, cold plunge, massages, T-bone steaks, cocktails. $165 covers all of it. The Schvitz was male-only for decades; they opened co-ed days and the phones won't stop ringing.

Sam's frame: "It's the new going out. It replaces the bar, restaurant, spa, or nightclub for an outing." Six friends book a Saturday — alternate steam and cold for a couple hours, get massages, sit down for steak. That's one ticket, one reservation, multiple spending occasions bundled into a single ritual. No individual venue — not the bar, not the spa, not the steakhouse — can touch the pricing power of selling all three at once. Millennials and Gen Z are finding it through social media with almost no marketing from the Schvitz itself.

The incumbents built the attention economy — which means they're the last ones who'll dismantle it

Apple, Meta, and the New York Times are the best-positioned companies in the world to build everything in this episode. None of them will do it well. Their entire business models depend on the loop they'd be dismantling. That gap doesn't close on its own — and the brands that move into it now, with real aesthetics and a coherent story, will be very hard to displace when the mainstream finally catches up. The window is open because the people with the most resources have the most to lose by walking through it.

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Topics: startups, hardware, wellness, consumer behavior, dumb phones, VR training, blue collar, physical products, anti-digital, prediction markets, biotech, content business, state management, product design