Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as Tim Cook stepping down as Apple CEO 🍎
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to cash in on a $222B industry
🛠 How to create fundraising decks with Claude Design
🔋 From a metro ride to $350M ARR + more
🔍 $25B investment, Cursor round, Sam Altman + more
🍻 The ultimate product for all of us millennials
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x AutoDS: This week we've partnered with AutoDS 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:
Sign up for our free e-commerce Masterclass here
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Congrats to last week’s winner: Rob Nelson
Good luck!
🔧 Machine Maintenance as a Service
Firing on all cylinders
Source: Zane Hengsperger
The Problem: Every factory, warehouse, dairy farm, and bottling plant on earth runs on machines. And these machines break. A lot. US businesses spend $222 billion a year keeping these things alive - and the "system" for doing it is some combination of a manual from 1997 that's held together by duct tape and a 58-year-old technician named Gary. Meanwhile, robots are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, which means in five years there will be vastly more machines to maintain, and poor Gary needs to retire eventually. It’s time to create a modern platform for this sector. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A full-stack machine maintenance platform (part service company, part software, part parts marketplace) that owns the operational layer for every machine on a shop floor.
🛠️ Product:
Every machine a customer owns gets enrolled, QR-tagged, and put on a quarterly PM schedule. Sensors and camera-based predictive alerts flag failures before they happen, and operators get a full service history for their specific machine plus every other identical unit on the platform - so when a bearing fails the same way in three other facilities, you already know the fix.
Spare parts are one tap away from an in-app marketplace with next-day shipping, and an onboard AI chatbot that's been trained on the exact machine's docs, failure history, and tribal knowledge from the oldest techs on the network can walk any operator through a repair step by step.
Over time you build up a data moat by hiring the most senior techs in every category, send them in to do the work, document every repair, failure mode, and workaround in structured format, and feed it all back into the system.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $500-2,000/machine/year for the maintenance subscription, 15-20% markup on parts, and $10-25k/facility for the enterprise platform. Margin scales with route density.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by a Siemens, Honeywell, Rockwell or ABB once the data layer becomes load-bearing infrastructure for industrial AI. Target exit 6-10x ARR.
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🏪 Ecommerce Masterclass: From Zero to E-Commerce Founder in 45 minutes
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🎨 How to Create a Fundraising Deck with Claude Design
The Context: Since Anthropic Labs launched Claude Design last week, everyone’s been raving about the tool. It’s great at creating prototypes, but does an even better job at creating slide decks. I barely gave it anything and it kicked out a fundraising deck that genuinely looks great. Here's the exact workflow.
Step-by-step:
Go to Claude Design, attach your logo, and prompt it with: "Create a deck that is about the seed fundraise for a [INDUSTRY] company called [NAME]. Here is the outline of content: [paste your 10-12 slide outline]." Claude builds the first full version in under a minute.
Refine through conversation ("make slide 3 more data-heavy"), drop inline comments on specific elements, or use the custom sliders to tweak spacing, colour hierarchy and density. Every change updates the underlying design live and stays on-brand across every slide.
Once it clicks, export to Canva for final polish, download as PDF or PPTX for investors
✍️ How to Make AI Writing Actually Sound Like You
You're probably using AI to write emails, pitch decks, investor updates...and just about everything else. The problem? So is every other founder, and your readers can tell. Grammarly fixes that.
What it does:
Humanizer rewrites AI text to match your natural voice
Reader Reactions previews how your message lands before you hit send
Works across email, docs, and browser with zero tab switching
40M+ people use Grammarly and it’s 100% free to start.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: These guys nearly went bankrupt and pivoted 10 times before building a $350M ARR business. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: This screenshot from the “antiai” subreddit just went super viral. AI clearly has a branding problem…
💬 Prompt Drop: These 7 Claude prompts build your entire LinkedIn funnel end-to-end.
🆓 Founder Resource: This 30-minute workshop by the creator of Claude Code will teach you more about vibe coding than 100 YouTube videos ever could.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 3 months of Notion free for your team. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
💰 Amazon to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic as part of AI infrastructure deal.
🤫 Cursor is in talks to raise $2B+ at $50B valuation as enterprise growth surges.
🚀 a16z just launched MTS, their TBPN competitor. OpenAI won’t be happy…
🎯 Sam Altman broke down exactly how he decides to invest in a startup in under 10 minutes. Spoiler: it's mostly vibes (and a killer team).
❤️ Brian Armstrong published a short love letter to entrepreneurship. Screenshot it and read it on the hard days.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Avocado Probe
Do you spend a meaningful portion of your income buying avocados? Want to make sure you eat them at the perfect time?
Introducing AvoScan™, a probe you press into your avocado that reads internal density and texture, then tells you if it's ripe right now or exactly how many hours until peak guac.
AvoScan™ - Holy guacamole.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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