Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as impressive as the Acquired Podcast’s insane ad rates 🤯
In today’s edition:
💡 The silent problem plaguing all websites
🛠 How to set up your second brain in 5 minutes
🔋 From weekend project to $7 billion in app revenue + more
🔍 SpaceX finances, $15M raise, $100M ARR + more
🍻 The coolest way to manage your lawn
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 “Ferndesk”
Good luck!
🖥️ Cross-Device Testing Tool
No device left behind
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: The other day I was chilling on my phone doing something super important (definitely not doom-scrolling) and randomly found myself on a big tech company’s website (who will remain nameless to spare their blushes). Guess what I saw? Lots of pretty odd formatting errors. Nothing too crazy, but enough for me to take notice. Which got me thinking…how often does this happen to others, given how many different devices all websites have to be rendered on. I mean there are over 24,000 distinct Android devices in active use today, and dev teams test on like 10 of them? So while your landing page looks perfect on your MacBook, it could be completely broken on the Samsung Galaxy A15 that 40 million people are actually using, ruining the UX at minimum and losing you sales at a maximum. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI monitoring tool that continuously tests your landing pages across thousands of virtual devices and browser combinations and spots problems as they appear
🛠️ Product:
Connect your domain in 60 seconds - no code required - and it immediately runs your pages through 5,000+ virtual device, browser, OS, and resolution combinations to show you exactly what real users are seeing.
AI vision models scan every render around the clock, flag broken layouts, hidden CTAs, and illegible text, then rank every issue by the real-world market share of that device - so you always know what to fix first.
The moment something breaks, PixelProof fires a Slack alert: "🚨 Your checkout page just broke on Android Chrome (affects 14% of your traffic) - here's the fix" - before a single customer notices.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: SaaS - Starter at $49/mo (5 pages, weekly scans, email alerts), Growth at $199/mo (unlimited pages, real-time monitoring, Slack/Zapier alerts, traffic-weighted prioritisation), Agency at $499/mo (multi-client dashboards, white-label reports).
⭐ End Goal: Acquisition by BrowserStack, Datadog, or a martech platform like HubSpot or Unbounce looking to add conversion protection to their suite. 8-12x ARR multiple likely.
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📅 The Help Center that Never Goes Out of Date
Create stunning, SEO and AI optimized help docs that stay up to date on autopilot with Ferndesk.
Their AI agent:
Writes your help docs
Takes annotated screenshots for you
Responds to your customers while you sleep
Use code HALFBAKED30 at checkout to get 30% off your first month with Ferndesk.
🧠 How to Set Up Your Second Brain in 5 Minutes
The Context: Most second brain projects die the same death - you start organized, maintenance piles up, and six months later you're back to scattered notes. The LLM Wiki pattern, popularised by Andrej Karpathy, fixes that by having an AI write and maintain your knowledge base for you. Your job is to add sources and ask good questions. Claude's job is everything else.
Step-by-step:
Download Obsidian (free) and create a vault - just a folder of markdown files that becomes your second brain. Then install Claude Code and point it at that folder.
Set up three things inside your vault:
/raw-sources/for content you want to add,/wiki/where Claude builds and maintains all your knowledge pages, and aCLAUDE.mdfile that tells Claude how your wiki is structured.Drop a file into
/raw-sources/, tell Claude to process it, and watch it update 10-15 wiki pages - summaries, concept pages, cross-references, all filed automatically.Once a week, run a lint pass asking Claude to find contradictions, orphan pages, and outdated claims. Your knowledge base stays healthy without you touching anything.
📵 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: This company went from a side project to powering over $7 billion in app revenue. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Venture funding in Q1-26 was over $300B, but four companies captured nearly 66% of all of that funding. Can you guess them all?
💬 Prompt Drop: These 7 Claude skills are well worth adding to your repertoire.
🆓 Founder Resource: Ramp just shared their framework for getting their entire company AI-pilled.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 30% off Grammarly Premium today as a Half Baked subscriber.
🔍 Founder Finds
🚀 SpaceX posted nearly $5 billion in losses in 2025, largely driven by xAI spending, according to The Information.
📱 Rork just raised a $15M seed round led by Left Lane Capital.
💬 AfterQuery just raised $30M at a $300M valuation and just passed the sacred $100M run rate. Ridiculous.
💡 Sam Altman shares what he'd tell his 20-year-old self. Worth a quick watch.
🐻 Drew Fallon just broke down how Grüns scaled to a $1.2B exit. Generational run.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Lawn Bubble
Tired of coming inside drenched in sweat after mowing your lawn? Wish cutting grass felt less like a trip to the Sahara and more like a cool Sunday drive?
Introducing Lawnge™, a ride-on lawnmower enclosed in a climate-controlled bubble so you can mow in 30-degree heat while sipping an iced coffee in peace. Leather seats optional.
Lawnge™ - A cut above the rest
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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