Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as tense as Jensen Huang's interview with Dwarkesh Patel 😰
In today’s edition:
💡 A product inspired by a mega viral tweet
🛠 How to create a morning brief using Notion Agents
🔋 From a high school dropout to a $700M hoodie empire + more
🔍 Opus 4.7, Perplexity launch, $46M raise + more
🍻 A product for all the electrolyte aficionados out there
Let’s goooo 🚀
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Good luck!
💪 Sour Strips for Lifters
Sweet and power
Source: Half Baked Team
The Problem: DTC is back baby. Grüns just got acquired for >$1B, Huel too, and investors are warming up to consumer brands again - especially ones that take an existing behaviour and make it cleaner. So the other day when I read this super viral tweet (>12M views) that broke down the science of why serious weight lifters eat Sour Patch Kids or Haribo in between sets (apart from getting a nice sugar fix of course). The science checks out - fast carbs enter your bloodstream immediately, working muscles pull that glucose straight in, and you bypass the usual metabolic bottlenecks to stay fuelled mid-session. The problem? Haribo and Sour Patch Kids are loaded with artificial colours, flavours, and ingredients your body has zero use for. So why not create a healthier version? Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A premium, healthy sour strip brand that delivers the same glycemic response as sweets but with clean-label ingredients and precise macros
🛠️ Product:
The core formula swaps Haribo's glucose syrup and gelatine for dextrose and rice syrup (identical glycemic index, cleaner label) plus fruit pectin instead of gelatine - making it vegan, same chew texture.
Every 50g single-serve pouch delivers exactly 30g of fast-digesting carbs. The format makes carb intake precise and measurable - which matters to an audience that tracks every gram of protein they eat.
Colour comes from fruit and vegetable extracts, not Red 40. The ingredient label reads like food, not a chemistry set.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Check out the landing page | Get the landing page prompt
💼 Business Model: DTC at $2.50-3.00 per 50g pouch, subscription boxes of 20 pouches at $50/month. Wholesale to supplement retailers and gym front desks at 40% margin.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by a sports nutrition incumbent like Glanbia (Optimum Nutrition), MyProtein or a company like Unilever. Target exit 4-6x revenue once the brand owns the category.
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🔥 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 Create a Morning Brief Using Notion Agents
The Context: Notion's Custom Agents are fully autonomous AI teammates that run on a schedule with zero prompting. The Morning Brief agent scans your workspace, calendar, mail, and Slack every morning and delivers a single page telling you exactly what needs your attention. Set it up once, it runs forever.
Step-by-step:
Go to Notion's Agent Marketplace, install the Morning Brief template, and hit Edit to configure it. The logic is pre-built - you're just pointing it at your tools.
Connect your sources - Notion databases, Google Calendar, Notion Mail, Slack - and tell it in plain English what to prioritise: "Flag anything overdue, surface today's meetings, and pull the three most urgent open tasks."
Under Triggers, set it to Schedule, pick your time (7am works well), hit Activate, and you're done. Fresh brief, every morning, automatically.
📊 Are You Burning Too Much to Grow Too Little?
Most founders have a gut feel for their burn rate. Very few know how it actually compares to other VC-backed startups at the same stage. That gap is costing them.
Pilot analyzed 1,000 VC-backed startups so you don't have to guess:
Median burn-to-growth ratios have dropped by half as founders got leaner
Median time to profitability is 4.2 years - and 1 in 5 startups is already there
Startups with the best margins tended to hire more, not less
You can benchmark your own performance against the full dataset in 5 questions.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This guy dropped out of high school at 16, ran away from home, and went on to build a $700M business. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: A 100% AI generated podcast called "Best Stocks" just launched on Wall street. Agentic podcasts are here.
💬 Prompt Drop: Check out Anthropic's internal cheat code for getting perfect Claude outputs on the first try
🆓 Founder Resource: These are the top 30 MCP servers that make your claude 100x more powerful
💵 Founder Deal: When you upgrade to the Google AI Pro plan you can get 50% off YouTube Premium for a full year. Check it out.
🔍 Founder Finds
🤖 Anthropic just launched Claude Opus 4.7, their best model yet (of course they’d say that). We still want Mythos though…
🚀 Perplexity just released Personal Computer, a tool for secure orchestration across your local files, native apps, and browser
💰 Ulysses just raised a $46M Series A to build modular underwater robotic sharks. You read that right.
✂️ Ed Elson's article on The Clip Economy and how short-form clips are reshaping attention and media is a great read.
💳 Aaron Levie (Box founder) believes that agent-driven micropayments could create an entirely new business model for the internet.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Electrolyte Lollipops
Looking to jump on the electrolyte bandwagon? Wish your post-workout hydration came in a more enjoyable format?
Introducing Sukr™ - the world's first electrolyte lollipop. All the sodium, potassium and magnesium your body needs after a hard session, packaged in a lollipop you actually want to eat. Finally a product that makes your recovery routine feel less like medicine and more like a reward.
Sukr™ - Hydration that doesn't suck
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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