Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as OpenAI dropping ChatGPT Images 2.0 🖼️
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea inspired by a Silicon Valley legend
🛠 Using the Kano Model to prioritise product features with Claude
🔋 Using TikTok to build a +$100M app + more
🔍 Tim Apple, $40M raise, Sam Altman blog + more
🍻 An innovation in headwear like you’ve never seen before
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
Reply to this email with which device we should send you
Good luck!
🧬 Consumer Genome Sequencing Service
DNAyyyyy
Source: Patrick Collison
The Problem: When Patrick Collison, the co-founder of Stripe and Silicon Valley legend, posts…the world pays attention. And the other day Patrick posted about the best thing he’s ever done for his health. It came from pointing a coding agent at his own genome, which flagged a 30x higher-than-average predisposition to melanoma among many other things (as a fellow pale Irishman, I can relate to the melanoma predisposition…). You might think this cost him thousands to do, but it actually only cost a few hundred dollars. Whole-genome sequencing itself now costs under $200, down from $100M in 2001. This is preventative medicine that should be democratized to everybody, not just founders who know how to point a coding agent at a VCF file. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A vertically-integrated D2C service that ships you a saliva kit, sequences your whole genome, and unleashes a team of AI agents on your DNA to tell you what's going on and what to do about it.
🛠️ Product:
A user orders a saliva test kit and their genome gets sequenced at a partner CLIA-certified lab within 4-6 weeks. No VCF files, no third-party uploads, your data lives in one place with deletion on demand.
Once your data lands, a swarm of specialized AI agents goes to work. A Cancer Risk agent scans BRCA and TP53. A Pharmacogenomics agent profiles CYP2D6 for drug risks. Each reads the latest literature on your specific variants and writes its section of a unified, prioritized action report.
The report is a living artifact, not a PDF. Ask it "should I worry about this SSRI my doctor prescribed?" and it checks your genome and returns cited answers. Every flagged risk routes to a partner dermatologist, cardiologist, or telehealth service.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $499 one-time fee covering the kit, lab sequencing, and full AI report with lifetime agent access. Referral fees on partner clinicians and telehealth services.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by a payer (UnitedHealth, CVS/Aetna), consumer health giant (Function Health, Hims, Oura), or sequencing incumbent (Illumina). Target exit 10-15x revenue.
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🛒 You Don't Need to Know Ecommerce to Start an Ecommerce Business
The hard part of launching a Shopify store used to be everything before the selling. BuildYourStore from AutoDS eliminates the setup. AutoDS eliminates the operations. Together, they handle the whole thing.
Why founders are joining this week's masterclass:
Walk away with a live, niche store built by AI and ready to take orders
Learn how AutoDS sources winning products and fulfils every order automatically
Free to start on both platforms - no inventory, no warehouse, no guesswork
Spots are limited. This one is worth your time.
🎯 Using the Kano Model to Prioritise Your Product Features
The Context: Knowing what features to build in a product is really, really hard. The Kano Model fixes that. It sorts features into three buckets: basic needs (expected), performance needs (more is better), and delighters (unexpected, disproportionate satisfaction). Here's how to use the Kano model to pick what features to build.
Step-by-step:
Dump your current feature list and your planned roadmap into Claude and ask it to categorise each feature as a basic need, performance need, or delighter based on your category's maturity.
For each category, ask Claude to surface features you're over-investing in. A "basic need" that already works fine is a sunk opportunity - every extra hour there is an hour not spent on delighters. Get Claude to score each feature on effort vs. category and flag anything in the "high effort, basic need" corner for the chopping block.
Brainstorm delighters with Claude by feeding it recent user interview transcripts, support tickets, and churn reasons. Ask it to propose 10 delighters nobody in your category has shipped yet, ranked by the "disproportionate satisfaction" test. Pick the top 2 and put them at the top of the next sprint.
🔥 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.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: Three Cambridge grads used TikTok to raise $22M for their app. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: A wave of security issues is hitting AI-generated apps and platforms. Turns out "vibe coded" and "production ready" are not the same thing. Audit your stack people.
💬 Prompt Drop: This Claude prompt runs a deep security audit across your codebase. See above line for why you should probably run this…
🆓 Founder Resource: This Perplexity Comet Masterclass for Beginners, a full free course on using Perplexity's browser agent for research, outreach, and workflow automation is pretty cool.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 3 months of Notion for Business free for your team. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
🍎 Tim Apple Cook’s 15-year stint as Apple CEO is one for the history books. Here are some of the highlights.
🧠 NeoCognition, an AI research lab, just raised a $40M seed to build agents that learn like humans
📝 Sam Altman just resurfaced his classic post on what he wishes someone had told him earlier in his career. Required reading if you haven't, required re-reading if you have.
🚀 Tobi Lütke believes that entrepreneurship is the most future-proof job. We fully agree.
🧠 Oliver Habryka makes a spicy claim that there are only four skills worth mastering: design, technical, management, and physical. Quite an outlook on life…
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Mind Reading Beanie
Are you a regular beanie wearer? Ever wish your beanie could read your thoughts?
Introducing ThinkCap™, a toasty wool beanie stuffed with 80,000 EEG sensors that decodes your inner monologue at 30 words per minute and types it straight into Slack.
ThinkCap™ - Put your thinking cap on.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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