Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as often as Lovable hits ridiculous ARR milestones 📈
In today’s edition:
💡 A device for people who think better out loud
🛠 How to steal your competitor's ad playbook
🔋 How two McKinsey consultants built a unicorn factory + more
🔍 Replit launch , $1B Holdco, Nvidia agents + more
🍻 The drone that takes selfies for you
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Macbook Neo Giveaway: This week we're teaming up with Apollo to give one of our readers a free MacBook Neo to help them on their founder journey. In order to enter simply:
Check out Apollo
Reply to this email with what you'll use Apollo for
Happy building!
🎙️ Voice-First Personal Journal
Speak your mind
Source: Jack Raines, Investor at Slow Ventures, broke down the idea here
The Problem: Journaling is one of those habits everyone says they do but almost nobody actually does. At least that’s my justification for not doing. The reason? Typing feels like work and handwriting is slow. Meanwhile, you have your best ideas in the shower, on walks, and during commutes - moments where pulling out a notebook isn't an option. Voice memo apps exist, but they dump everything into an endless list of audio files nobody ever listens to again. And the AI-powered transcription apps? They can't resist "summarizing" or "organizing" your thoughts with an LLM, which defeats the entire purpose of journaling - capturing your authentic voice. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A dedicated physical device that converts your spoken words into beautifully formatted text entries, no AI interpretation, no cloud LLMs, just pure voice-to-text journaling.
🛠️ Product:
Pick it up and press the single button to start talking - your words appear on an e-ink screen in real time, auto-organized by date and tagged by the tone of your voice (calm, excited, frustrated) without changing a single word.
On-device transcription means your thoughts never leave the hardware - no WiFi required, no cloud processing, no company reading your 3am existential crisis entries.
Export to PDF, markdown, or sync to your notes app via USB when you're ready - your journal, your data, your choice.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Hardware at $149 retail (40% margin), plus optional $4.99/month premium for advanced search, mood analytics, and automatic chapter organization.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by Amazon (Kindle division), Remarkable, or a wellness brand looking for hardware. 3-5x revenue multiple on a $20M+ run rate.
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🎬 Tonight's Masterclass Was... INSANE
If you were there - you know. Apollo's James O'Sullivan just walked through exactly how to build an AI outbound machine from scratch using Apollo's AI Assistant.
The highlights:
How to find and target ideal customers with AI in minutes
Building email sequences that write themselves
Going from zero to a working outbound engine in one session
This was one of the best masterclasses we've ever hosted. It was too good not to share, so we've fast tracked the replay. You can view it here.
Oh, and get 2500 credits when you sign up for an annual plan.
🔍 The Competitor Ad Playbook Heist
The Context: Your competitors are spending thousands testing what messaging, offers, and formats actually convert. The good news? Meta's free Ad Library lets you see every ad they're currently running. Instead of guessing what works, you can reverse-engineer their entire paid strategy in about 20 minutes.
Step-by-step:
Head to facebook.com/ads/library, search your competitor's brand name, and filter by "All ads" to see everything they're running.
Sort by oldest first, then scroll to recent - anything that's been live for 3+ months is almost certainly converting (companies don't keep paying for ads that don't work).
Screenshot and tag the winners by offer angle, format, and copy style - build a swipe file of proven approaches.
Check back monthly and note any shifts in messaging - if they suddenly pivot their angle, they've likely found something better.
😤 Still Managing Your Cap Table in a Spreadsheet?
You've got 12 investors, 8 employees with options, and a term sheet landing in your inbox. The last thing you need is to spend your night updating a spreadsheet that no one trusts anyway.
Mantle fixes this:
Flat-rate pricing (no "success tax" as you scale)
AI reads your legal docs and drafts your cap table for you
One source of truth for founders, investors, and law firms
The free plan is genuinely free. Unlimited stakeholders, built-in doc signing, the works.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: Two McKinsey consultants turned a non-profit into a unicorn factory. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Dalton Caldwell's Standard Capital is offering companies to skip pre-seed and seed and go straight to Series A. Expect to see more of this!
💬 Prompt Drop: Prompt caching is the secret weapon behind every fast AI agent. This deep dive from Anthropic's Claude Code team breaks down the 5 lessons they learned optimizing cache hit rates at scale.
🆓 Founder Resource: Someone just built an App Store for Claude Code called SkillsMP. There are 200,000+ agent skills that teach your AI exactly how to write PPTX files, review PRs, deploy to cloud, analyze data and more.
💵 Founder Deal: Granola captures action summaries for every meeting. They're giving Half Baked readers 100% off their first month!
🔍 Founder Finds
🤑 Replit just raised $400M at a $9B valuation and launched Replit Agent 4 today. They’re cooking!
💰 Sequoia partner Ravi Gupta and former Meta Chief Revenue Officer John Hegeman are raising at least $1 billion for a new holding company
🟢 Nvidia is planning to launch NemoClaw, an open-source AI agent platform for enterprises to deploy AI agents across their workforce. The agent wars are heating up.
🤖 Anthropic recently launched Code Review for Claude Code - when a PR opens, Claude dispatches a team of agents to hunt for bugs. The future of code review is here.
📊 Olivia Moore from a16z recently shared the top 50 AI consumer websites. How many have you heard of?
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Selfie Drone
Tired of asking strangers to take your photo? Wish you had a personal photographer that fits on your wrist?
Introducing Nixie™, the world's first wearable selfie drone. With a flick of your wrist, it launches off like a tiny helicopter, flies in front of you, snaps a photo, and boomerangs back to your arm. It's basically a pet bird that takes Instagram photos.
Nixie™ - Wrist-launched ego boost.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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