Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as unexpected as Banksy getting unmasked 🤐
In today’s edition:
💡 An innovation in the $10B online learning market
🛠 How to run Claude Code locally (100% free & fully private)
🔋 From a Vancouver bedroom to Raising +$70M + more
🔍 OpenAI sued, Manus launch, Travis interview + more
🍻 A product for the most productive room in your house
Let’s goooo 🚀
🤝 Half Baked x Airwallex: This week we've partnered with Airwallex to offer one Half Baked reader a complimentary expert call on Intro.co with any founder you like (worth up to a thousand dollars).
To be considered, just:
Register for our Masterclass with Airwallex later this week
Reply to this email “CFO”
Congrats to Evan Muscat who won last week’s competition!
Good luck!
👨🎓 AI Simulations for Course Providers
Course correcting
Source: Inspired by Austin Way at Alpha School
The Problem: Schools, EdTech companies, and test prep firms can spend thousands launching a new course before they have any idea if the content actually works. They launch, retention craters, and they scramble to fix content that real students have already given up on. The obvious fix though - A/B testing on actual learners - is slow and expensive. It’s a bit like pharmaceutical companies giving out experimental drugs to patients and seeing what happens…not a great idea. EdTech companies do exactly that, every single quarter, and call it a product launch. Small open-source models like Qwen, Phi, and Gemma are now cheap enough to run thousands of AI agents simultaneously for under $100 a run - meaning the cost curve just crossed the point where synthetic student testing is commercially viable. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A B2B simulation platform that lets edtech companies, school districts, and test prep firms stress-test any curriculum against thousands of synthetic AI students
🛠️ Product:
Upload your curriculum (PDFs, SCORM files, video transcripts), define your target learner profile - age, prior knowledge level, attention span - and the platform spins up matching synthetic cohorts that work through the material autonomously.
Synthetic students flag confusion points, fail assessments, drop off at friction points, and generate a "curriculum health score" with gap analysis mapped to exact content sections - the equivalent of a clinical trial readout, but for your course.
Iterate the curriculum directly in the platform and re-run the cohort - see score improvements in hours rather than months, with before/after comparison reports showing exactly which changes moved the needle.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $2,000/month for edtech startups (up to 5 curriculum runs/month), enterprise contracts for school districts and large platforms.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Instructure (Canvas) or Pearson at a 5-8x ARR exit.
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💰 How Founders Are Turning AI Into a CFO-Level Copilot
Quick question - do you actually know your runway right now? Most founders don't. They know the numbers their accountant sends them, but not the ones that actually matter - cashflow, burn rate, runway.
This Wednesday, we're going live for The AI CFO Masterclass. Here's what we're covering:
How AI can do the job of a CFO without the six-figure salary
How to go from zero to a working financial model in under 10 minutes
A cashflow forecast that tells you your runway to the nearest week
📅 This Wednesday at 5PM GMT | 1PM ET | 10AM PT
Register here
Powered by Airwallex.
🖥️ How to Run Claude Code Locally (100% Free & Fully Private)
The Context: You can run Claude Code entirely on your own machine using local open-source models - no API costs, no data sent to the cloud, zero tracking. The trick is pointing Claude Code at Ollama, a local model runner, instead of Anthropic's servers. This four-step setup works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Step-by-step:
Install Ollama - it runs quietly in the background and hosts your local AI model. Then pull a coding-focused model:
ollama run qwen2.5-coder:7bfor most machines, orqwen3-coder:30bif you have a high-performance setup.Install Claude Code. On Mac/Linux:
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash. On Windows:irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex. Verify it worked withclaude --version.Point Claude at your local Ollama instance instead of Anthropic's servers: set
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="http://localhost:11434"andANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="ollama". AddCLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1to disable telemetry entirely.Navigate to any project folder and launch:
claude --model qwen2.5-coder:7b. Claude will read your files, modify code, and run terminal commands entirely on your machine - no API calls, no cloud, no cost.
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🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: These guys went from a bedroom in Vancouver to raising $70M. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: A tech guy in Australia designed a custom mRNA cancer vaccine for his rescue dog using ChatGPT and AlphaFold. This is the promise of AI.
💬 Prompt Drop: These 5 Claude prompts can replace a full mobile dev team. What a time to be a builder.
🆓 Founder Resource: Claude Superpowers, a skill framework for Claude Code, forces a structured pipeline before any work gets done. Super helpful.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 12 months of ElevenLabs free with their startup grant program - perfect for founders building voice AI products.
🔍 Founder Finds
🧑⚖️ OpenAI is getting sued by the dictionary. Well, two dictionaries, actually…Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, who are alleging “massive copyright infringement.”
🚀 Manus just launched My Computer, an AI agent on your local machine.
🔥 Travis Kalanick was just interviewed on TBPN, and the interview is pure founder energy. If you're building anything, this one is required viewing.
🤔 Chamath Palihapitiya just wrote a piece on the "Collapse of Terminal Value". It’s a little unsettling but worth 10 minutes of your time.
🧠 Marc Andreessen just broke down the personality type that builds empires. A fascinating take!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Smart Toilet Roll Holder
Ever wished your bathroom time was more productive? Sick of your phone dying mid-scroll when you need it most?
Introducing the LooScroll™, the world's first smart toilet roll holder with a built-in iPhone charging dock. Slot your phone in, handle your business, and emerge with a full battery and an empty…eh, you get it.
LooScroll™ - Relief. Recharge. Repeat
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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