Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as dramatic as Mira Murati losing half her co-founders to OpenAI 🤯
In today’s edition:
💡 An app to help you get through a few books
🛠 How to create custom “skills” in Claude (no code required)
🔋 From debt collectors calling to $100M ARR + more
🔍 Sam Altman x OpenAI raise, LMArena, Cursor + more
🍻 Bringing a winter sport to the road
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 $1,000 Giveaway: This week at Half Baked we're teaming up with the team over at T-Mobile for Business to support one of you as you build your business. In order to enter simply:
Check out T-Mobile here
Reply to this email and tell us what you’re building!
Get after it!
📖 Speed Reading App
The read for speed
Available Domain: Speedread.com
The Problem: So, we're halfway through January and I gotta ask…how are those New Year's resolutions looking? Mine? Not so good. One of them for example was to read more books, 50 during 2026 in fact. But I’m struggling. Reading is slow (or maybe I’m just a slow reader), and audiobooks are great until I zone out for 5 minutes and have no idea what’s going on. I badly need a way to read faster and to eliminate distractions, and I may have stumbled upon the answer. Yesterday I came across a sick video showing how speed reading works - one word at a time, flashing at 300 WPM, with the key letter highlighted to anchor your eye. No scanning, no re-reading, no losing your place. Someone needs to turn this into an app. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A speed reading app that converts any book, article, or PDF into a one-word-at-a-time reader with adjustable WPM
🛠️ Product:
Select any book or article (or upload your own) and the app converts it into speed reading format. Pick your WPM (start at 300, work up to 600+), hit play, and watch words flash one at a time with the optimal recognition point highlighted.
Built-in progress tracking shows your reading stats, comprehension scores, and how many books you've finished. Gamify the journey to your target book number with streaks, milestones, and reading challenges.
Sync your Kindle library, Pocket saves, and browser articles. The app picks up exactly where you left off across all your devices.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Freemium - free tier with 30 mins/day of speed reading, $9.99/month for unlimited access plus Kindle sync and advanced analytics. Partner with publishers for direct book integration.
⭐ End Goal: Build the default reading interface for the information-overloaded generation. Exit to Kindle/Amazon/Audible, or an education platform (Coursera, Blinkist) at 6-10x revenue.
Rate this idea
📱 Switch Your Team to T-Mobile for Business
Switch your team's mobile plan to T-Mobile for Business and get 10 lines for just $15/mo,* now with a 5-year price guarantee (exclusions like taxes and fees apply).
From reliable connectivity to intelligent network performance, T-Mobile for Business delivers flexibility and seamless satellite coverage.
Switch to T-Mobile for Business - it's better over here.
🛠️ How to Create Custom Skills in Claude
The Context: Claude Skills are incredible. They’re reusable instruction packages that turn Claude into a specialist for your workflows, so instead of re-explaining your process every conversation, you write it once and Claude loads it automatically when relevant. Here’s how they work.
Step-by-step:
Describe your workflow to Claude. Tell it what you want it to create a skill for, whether that's your brand guidelines, how you write emails - it could be anything. Be specific about the steps and output format.
Ask Claude to create a skill. Say "Turn this into a skill I can reuse" and Claude will generate a SKILL.md file with the right structure and formatting.
Download the skill. Claude will give you a downloadable zip file containing your skill folder.
Upload to Claude. Go to Settings > Capabilities > Skills, click "Upload skill," and add your zip file. Claude will now use it automatically when you call the skill.
Give it a try!
🧑🎨 AI Makes Logos. Designers Make Brands.
AI gives you the average of a million logos. Great brands do the opposite - they make choices that feel inevitable in hindsight but required guts up front.
If you want a mark that actually means something - shaped by taste, tension, and a human who asks hard questions - you need a real designer. That's why serious founders use 99designs. Save $20 on a logo design contest through January 31st.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 The Money Shot: This company went from debt collectors calling to $100M ARR. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all launched healthcare AI products this week. The best medical diagnosis in the world is about to become a $20/month subscription. The age of near-free healthcare is coming.
💬 Prompt Drop: Here’s a cool list of 50+ Nano Banana Pro prompts to try.
🆓 Free Resource: The VC Corner just dropped a free Notion workspace with 58 founder templates + a database of 10,000+ investors. Grab it here.
💵 Deal of the Day: Get Notion's Business plan free for up to 6 months (save $12,000) with Notion for Startups.
🔍 Founder Finds
🧠 Sam Altman, OpenAI and others have just pumped $252M into Merge Labs, a new research lab focused on brain-computer interfaces.
💰 LMArena just raised $150M in a Series A to crowdsource AI model rankings. $1.7B valuation four months after launching. Insane.
🌐 Cursor left GPT-5.2 running for an entire week and it built an entire browser for them. 3M+ lines of code. Epic.
🤖 Sequoia says AGI is here, now with Pat Grady and Sonya Huang explaining why your 2030 roadmap just became your 2026 reality. It’s here.
📺 Anish Acharya from a16z believes that software is having its “YouTube moment”. Here’s why.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Electric Skis
Ever wish you could hit the slopes in the summer? Tired of waiting for winter to feel the wind in your face and the imminent threat of bodily harm beneath your feet?
Introducing Skwheels™, electric skis that let you shred asphalt like it's Aspen. Natural pivot, progressive tilt, and precise carving control - they’re like rollerblades, but with added danger.
Skwheels™ - ski ya later.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
Before you go just a few public service announcements:
Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you asap.
See you soon,