Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as hotly anticipated as the Artemis crew splashing down tomorrow 🌓
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea inspired by an AI legend
🛠 How to build your first AI agent with Claude
🔋 How two 25-year-olds built a $300M AI company + more
🔍 OpenAI, forecast, Grüns acquired, Harvey's growth playbook + more
🍻 A product that’ll brighten up your day
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x Ferndesk: This week we've partnered with Ferndesk to offer one Half Baked reader a new MacBook Neo to support them on their founder journey. To be considered, just:
Check out Ferndesk here
Reply to this email with the word “Wilson”
Good luck!
🔬 Bloomberg Terminal for Science Breakthroughs
Lab-solutely essential
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: I've just started reading The Infinity Machine (the new biography about the life of Demis Hassabis), and it’s fair to say…he’s an impressive dude. At heart he’s a scientist, like Newton or Turing, and his main goal in life is to use AI to advance scientific discovery. So it’s no surprise that he believes we're on the precipice of an explosion of scientific discovery. AI is compressing decades of drug discovery and materials science into years, and the 4 million papers published annually is about to go vertical. Which got me thinking: how on earth are companies going to keep up with all of this change? It’s time to build a tool to help them achieve that. Here’s what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A Bloomberg-style scientific intelligence platform that monitors every major journal globally and surfaces cross-field breakthroughs for organisations that compete on scientific knowledge.
🛠️ Product:
A pharma company, hedge fund, or consulting firm connects their focus areas and the platform maps the entire global research landscape against their strategic priorities 24/7.
Every morning, decision-makers get a tailored intelligence briefing - their sector's top developments plus a "Cross-Field Spark" flagging breakthroughs from adjacent disciplines that could impact their portfolio, pipeline, or clients before anyone else catches on
Deep-dive mode lets teams query the entire scientific literature like a conversation - surfacing sources, contradictions, and open questions automatically, so a VP of Strategy at a pharma company can get the answer to "what does the latest GLP-1 research mean for our pipeline?" in minutes.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $50k-$500k/year enterprise contracts with pharma companies, hedge funds, and consulting firms.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Bloomberg, Elsevier, Springer Nature, or a major pharma like Pfizer or AstraZeneca. Target exit $500M-$2B at 8-12x ARR.
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🤖 The Help Center that Never Goes Out of Date
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Their AI agent:
Writes your help docs
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🤖 How to Build Your First Agent with Claude
The Context: Claude's just released “Managed Agents” and it’s surprisingly easy to spin up your first AI agent - no deep technical knowledge required. Here's the fastest path from zero to a deployed agent in minutes.
Step-by-step:
Head to Claude Console and click into Quickstart under Managed Agents - it walks you through everything you need to get set up.
Define what you want your agent to do, or pick one of the pre-built templates to get started faster. The clearer the job description, the better your agent performs.
Work with Claude directly inside the Console to refine your agent's behaviour, test it against real inputs, and deploy when you're happy.
📵 Tired of Boring Business News?
The Hustle is your answer. They deliver snappy, unconventional business news for people who hate business news, plus free guides on making money with AI, starting side hustles, and more.
Join 1.5M entrepreneurs and aspiring founders who read them every day.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: Two guys met at a middle school hackathon, won Elon Musk's tunnel boring competition, then built a $300M business together. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: OpenAI acquired TBPN. HubSpot acquired StarterStory and Futurepedia. Not a bad time to start a media company me thinks…
💬 Prompt Drop: Tom Bilyeu (+$1B founder) recently shared the 3 ways AI fails founders, and exactly how to fix each one.
🆓 Founder Resource: Austen Allred’s Complete OpenClaw Mastery Course is 26 pages of free gold.
💵 Founder Deal: Granola captures action summaries for every meeting. They're giving Half Baked readers 100% off their first month!
🔍 Founder Finds
📈 OpenAI is forecasting advertising revenues to hit $102 billion by 2030, according to The Information. We all need to buy a lot of stuff for them to hit that number…
🐻 Grüns, the greens gummy brand, was just acquired by Unilever for $1.2B. DTC acquisitions are on fire right now.
🤑 Perplexity just launched the Billion Dollar Build, an 8-week competition where teams will use Perplexity Computer to build a company with a path to $1B. Super cool!
⚖️ Harvey just released the growth tactics behind going from $0 to $200M ARR in 36 months. If you're building in vertical AI, check it out.
😮 Greg Isenberg just laid out the clearest path to a $10M+ software exit in 2 years with AI and agents). Here’s what he’s thinking
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Robot Lamp
Wish your lamp could do more than just light a room? Wish it took on more responsibility at home?
Introducing Tasklamp™, the world's first smart lamp that does much more than just emitting light. It follows you as you read and takes care of household tasks around your home like laundry folding. Incredible.
Tasklamp™ - Watt more could you want?
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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