Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas spicier than OpenAI’s investors leaked opinions on the company 🌶
In today’s edition:
💡 Using AI to unlock mentorship for all
🛠 How to find app ideas using Perplexity Computer
🔋 Hitting $40M ARR in 6 months + more
🔍 Opus 4.7, Amazon acquisition, Colossus article + more
🍻 A wearable for all the dog owners out there
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x BILL: This week we've partnered with BILL to offer one Half Baked reader a new MacBook Neo, Mac Mini or Airpods Max to support them on their founder journey. To be considered, just:
Check out BILL here (it really helps us out)
Reply to this email with which device we should send you!
Good luck!
🧠 Historical Figure Mentorship Platform
Dead Useful
Source: Michael Girdley
The Problem: There’s a lot going on in the tech world right now. But one headline that really caught my eye was the fact that Meta is in the process of building an AI clone of Mark Zuckerberg. Why, you ask? (I think one Zuckerberg is more than enough for the world…) Well it’s so employees of all levels can get direct feedback and mentorship from Zuck himself. Which got us (and Michael Girdley) thinking…why not unlock some of history’s greatest minds for all of us to learn from? The best mentors we could ever want - Steve Jobs, Marcus Aurelius, Marie Curie, Feynman, da Vinci - could all be brought to life in this way. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI mentorship platform where users get coached 1-on-1 by historically accurate AI versions of the world's greatest minds
🛠️ Product:
You pick your mentor (Jobs for product vision, Buffett for investing, Aurelius for mental resilience, Feynman for learning anything fast) and complete a 10-minute onboarding that captures your goals, current challenges, business stage, and personality type
Every session is a live conversation, not a video - you bring a real problem ("I'm about to fire my co-founder, what do I do?") and your mentor responds in character, drawing on their documented philosophy and known decisions while tailoring the advice to your specific situation.
The platform tracks your progress, holds you accountable to commitments made in past sessions, and surfaces relevant moments from the genius's life when they faced something similar
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $99/month for one mentor, $149/month for unlimited access to the full genius library.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Masterclass or a similar company (this could complement their offering well)
Rate this idea
🔥 You're Running a Business. You Shouldn't Be Reconciling Expenses.
Between fundraising, hiring, and shipping - manually tracking who spent what is not a good use of your time. And a spreadsheet isn't an expense management system.
How BILL Spend & Expense fixes it:
Free software powered by a Visa business card - automate reports, set team budgets, see every transaction live
Customers save an average of $10k+ per month and 12 hours of finance admin
94% of users would recommend it to a friend
Right now, new customers get $500 back when they spend their first $500.
💻 How to Find App Ideas Using Perplexity Computer
The Context: Most founders waste weeks manually scrolling X, TikTok, and the App Store hunting for the next app opportunity. Instead, one indie builder used a single Perplexity Computer prompt to uncover a $500K/month app market nobody was building for - in one session. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Open Perplexity Computer and paste in this prompt which browses X for indie builders sharing real revenue data, pulls App Store ratings and Sensor Tower estimates, and flags markets where competitors are stale or missing obvious features.
It then cross-checks every category against TikTok, filtering out any idea that can't be demonstrated in 15 seconds - because if it can't go viral, your CAC will kill you.
What comes back is a ranked shortlist scored on virality, build difficulty, revenue potential, and competition gap - with a deep dive on the top 3.
🤖 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.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This company went from $0 to $40M ARR in 6 months. Here's exactly how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Agentic parenting is the new trend everyone is talking about in tech right now. Agents really are coming for everything…
💬 Prompt Drop: Check out these 20 powerful agentic skills for Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini.
🆓 Founder Resource: Here’s how you can run a 25-person company using just four AI agents.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 30% off Grammarly premium to help you become a world-class writer. Get it here.
🔍 Founder Finds
📢 Anthropic is preparing to launch its next flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4.7, along with a new AI-powered tool for designing websites, according to The Information
🛰️ Amazon just acquired Globalstar to support its long-term vision for Amazon Leo, the company's satellite connectivity play.
📖 Colossus just wrote a piece on the most profitable startup per employee on earth. An incredible story.
👨💻 A Google engineer automated 80% of his own job using Claude Code, and shared the exact system he built to do it.
🚢 Riley Walz just shipped Spotify Wrapped but for your taxes. Epic idea.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: WHOOP for Dogs
Ever worry about your dog’s health? Wish you knew exactly how your furry friend’s health was at any moment?
Introducing WHOOF™ - the smart health wearable that clips to your dog's tail and tracks their heart rate, temperature, activity, sleep, and calories burned in real-time.
WHOOF™ - Fur real fitness
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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