Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as under wraps as OpenAI's mystery gadget with Jony Ive 🎁
In today’s edition:
💡 Jumping on a booming EdTech trend
🛠 Using AI to ensure your brand can be seen (by AI)
🔋 Turning paper menus into a $7.3B exit + more
🔍 $480M raise, first customer playbook, tell-all podcast + more
🍻 A product no one should “wine” about…
Let’s goooo 🚀
💻 MacBook Giveaway: We’re teaming up with Wispr Flow (the incredible voice dictation product) this week to give away a MacBook (instead of the $1,000) to one of our readers. All you need to do to enter is:
Download Wispr Flow for free (if you’re already a user, let us know)
Reply to this email with what you’re building right now
Shoutout to last week’s winner Shawn Stevens - check your inbox Shawn!
Good luck this week!
🎒 AI Operating System for Homeschooling
A teaching moment
Available domain: Homested.co
The Problem: Homeschooling is having a moment. In the US alone, the number of homeschooled kids has nearly doubled since 2019, with over 5 million students now learning at home. But here's the catch: most parents who'd love to homeschool their kids don't because they're terrified they'll mess it up. They're not teachers. They don't have a curriculum. They're juggling work, errands, and the existential dread of being solely responsible for whether their kid learns long division. Meanwhile, the "resources" out there are a mess - scattered PDFs, random YouTube videos, Facebook groups with more fighting than advice. Parents need structure, not chaos. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI-powered operating system that gives parents everything they need to homeschool confidently
🛠️ Product:
Parents onboard by entering their child's age, learning style, and their own weekly availability. The AI generates a state-compliant curriculum with daily lesson plans, automatically adjusting around work schedules, appointments, and family commitments.
Each day, parents get a simple dashboard showing exactly what to teach, with lesson materials, videos, and activities ready to go. The AI tracks progress, flags gaps, and suggests adjustments - like a co-teacher who actually knows what they're doing.
Families can connect with local homeschool pods for group activities, field trips, and skill-sharing. Need someone to teach your kid piano while you cover their kid's math? The platform matches you up.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $29/month per student for full curriculum access and AI features. Premium tier at $79/month adds pod matching, progress reports for college applications, and live tutor access.
⭐ End Goal: Acquisition by an EdTech player (Outschool, IXL, Khan Academy) at 8-12x ARR as the infrastructure layer for the modern homeschool movement.
Rate this idea
📈 What would you do with 7 extra hours a week?
That's what Wispr Flow users save on average. For founders, that's a full extra day every month to build, sell, or think.
The math:
4x faster than typing
Works across Mac, Windows, and iPhone
Learns your vocabulary, tone, and shortcuts over time
Time is your scarcest resource. Stop spending it on typing.
151 Half Baked readers have downloaded Wispr so far!
🔍 How to Audit Your Brand's AI Visibility
The Context: SEO used to be the whole game - rank on Google, win the traffic. But now your customers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude for recommendations instead. If AI can't find or cite your brand, you're invisible to a growing chunk of your market. This prompt helps you audit how AI search systems actually see your website - and what to fix. Here’s how it works.
Step-by-step:
Open ChatGPT (or your preferred AI) and paste in this prompt, replacing [Website] with your actual URL.
Review the AI's analysis of your site's discoverability across ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, Claude, and Google AI Overviews.
Follow the step-by-step recommendations to fix gaps - the prompt returns specific, actionable changes with exact locations and reasons.
Get the prompt and get more customers today!
📱 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.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 The Money Shot: These guys turned paper menus into a $7.3B exit. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Davos is happening as we speak, and there’s a lot of talk about AI and jobs this week. This is the defining trend of our time.
💬 Prompt Drop: Here are 20 AI Prompts every Solopreneur should be using for marketing, growth, productivity & more…
🆓 Free Resource: Y Combinator’s request for startups is a great resource to find ideas that need to be tackled.
💵 Deal of the Day: Get $20 off any design on 99Designs until the 31st of January. Learn more.
🔍 Founder Finds
🤑 Humans&, a ‘human-centric’ AI startup founded by Anthropic, xAI, Google alums, just raised a $480M seed round. SEED round. Woah.
🐝 Tyler Denk, CEO of Beehiiv (a future unicorn), just shared the exact playbook they used to get their first customers. Every founder needs to read this.
🎙️ Sulaiman Ghori did a tell-all podcast interview about xAI's internal culture - and now he's no longer at the company. Ouch…
🧑💻 Michael Truell, Cursor’s CEO, just shared 8 tips for mastering AI coding agents. Very cool.
🇪🇺 Ursula Von Der Leyen has just announced that EU-inc and the Investment Union will become a reality. Great for all European founders out there!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Smart Wine Bottle
Enjoy the odd glass of wine with dinner? Ever wish your bottle did more than just... hold wine?
Introducing WineFi™, the $200 WiFi-enabled wine bottle with a built-in touchscreen. It keeps wine fresh for 30 days, shows tasting notes and food pairings, and lets you reorder directly from the bottle. Just don't forget to charge it.
WineFi™ - Making pour decisions.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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See you soon,