Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as Jensen saying we’ve basically hit AGI 🤯
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea inspired by a media empire founder
🛠 How to let Claude take over your computer
🔋 Turning 6 months of insomnia into a £58M supplement empire + more
🔍 Hark launch, Sora dead, Amazon acquisition + more
🍻 Eating less never looked so good
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x BILL.com: This week we've partnered with BILL to offer one Half Baked reader a new Macbook Neo. To be considered, just:
Check out BILL here (this really helps us out)
Reply to this email with what you’ll build on your brand new Neo!
Good luck!
🧑🏫 IRL AI Tutor Marketplace
Model citizens
Source: Half Baked team (inspired by Austin Rief)
The Problem: Keeping up with AI these days is completely impossible (trust me, I’m doing my best here…). New products drop weekly, Anthropic drop new features every 20 minutes, and by the time you've finished watching a 10 minute YouTube tutorial the content is out of date. And no-one is feeling more left behind than founders. Most busy founders and executives want to use AI to its full potential but they're stuck doom-scrolling X trying to piece together what matters. Last month, Austin Rief (co-founder of Morning Brew) publicly posted that he was looking for someone NYC-based to come sit next to him and show him how people are actually using AI today. If the co-founder of a $75M media company can't figure out where to turn, everyone else is struggling too. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A marketplace connecting busy professionals with vetted IRL AI tutors who come to you and show you exactly how to use AI in your specific workflow.
🛠️ Product:
Sign up, describe your role and what you want to get better at (writing, coding, finance, ops), and get matched with a local AI tutor who specialises in your use case - they come to your office or home and work through it live with you.
Sessions are structured around your actual work - tutors don't teach generic ChatGPT tips, they plug directly into your tools, your docs, your stack, and build real workflows you'll use the next day.
Tutors are rated after every session and the best ones build a subscriber base - recurring weekly "AI office hours" packages for executives who want to stay current as the landscape keeps shifting.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Take 20% commission on tutor bookings. Sessions priced at $150-400/hour depending on tutor tier and location. Corporate packages for teams at $2K-5K/month.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, or a staffing platform looking to own the AI upskilling market. 8-15x revenue multiple.
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Plus, when you take a BILL demo, you get a $100 Apple gift card as a thank you for your time.
🖥️ How to Control Your Computer Remotely with Claude
With Dispatch and Computer Use, Claude can now take over your mouse and keyboard to complete tasks directly on your Mac - opening apps, navigating your browser, filling in spreadsheets, anything you'd normally do yourself...even from your phone. Here's how to set it up.
Step-by-step:
Download the latest Claude Desktop (claude.com/download) and the Claude mobile app on your phone - you need both.
Open Cowork on either device, click Dispatch in the left panel, then hit Get started and follow the setup flow.
In Claude Desktop, go to Settings > General and turn on the Computer Use toggle.
From your phone, describe any task, like "export my pitch deck as a PDF and attach it to my 3pm meeting" and Claude will handle it on your Mac while you get on with your day. Epic.
📊 Managing Equity Shouldn't Drain Your Runway
Most cap table tools are built for lawyers. Mantle is built for founders - free software with everything you actually need to manage equity without the headache.
How to get started:
Sign up free and dump your legal docs in a folder - Mantle's AI helps build your cap table for you
Issue option grants, model scenarios, and track vesting in minutes
Give every stakeholder (investors, employees, advisors) their own access - no more back-and-forth
P.S. The free plan includes unlimited stakeholders. No credit card required.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This guy turned 6 months of insomnia into a £58M supplement empire. Here’s how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Apple’s app store is drowning in submissions right now. More than 550k apps were submitted just last year, the highest number in a decade. It’s getting harder to stand out.
💬 Prompt Drop: Check out the top 20 Claude prompts for SEO. Worth bookmarking.
🆓 Founder Resource: This is a great guide to vibecode & scale an app to $10M ARR
💵 Founder Deal: Get 45 days of Wispr Flow free, our most used AI tool at Half Baked.
🔍 Founder Finds
🚀 Figure founder Brett Adcock just launched Hark, a new artificial intelligence lab building the most advanced, personal intelligence in the world.
🪦 OpenAI just killed Sora, their AI video app, probably because they were burning so much cash on it (billions).
🤖 Amazon has acquired Fauna Robotics, a New York-based humanoid robot startup. The robot wars are coming…
🤑 Doss just raised $55M for AI-powered inventory management that plugs directly into enterprise ERP systems. The unsexy B2B infrastructure play printing money again.
🍺 Matt Cortland recently launched the Guinndex, where he used an AI agent to call over 1,000 pubs to confirm the price of a Guinness. AGI (Artificial Guinness Intelligence) confirmed.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Weight-Loss Glasses
Trying to get shredded for summer? Wish every meal felt like a feast without actually eating more?
Introducing EyeFull™, the world's first weight-loss glasses that use patented optical illusion lenses to make every plate of food appear 50% bigger, tricking your brain into feeling satisfied on half the portions. Beach body here we come.
EyeFull™ - Eyenough is eyenough.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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