Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as eye-watering as SpaceX's $60B deal with Cursor 🤯
In today’s edition:
💡 A digital product we’ll all eventually need
🛠 How to create multiple ad variants using ChatGPT Images 2.0
🔋 From MIT dorm to a $60B Elon offer in 4 years + more
🔍 OpenAI launch, Mythos leak, Google research + more
🍻 A product to get you your five-a-day
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!
⚰️ Digital Estate Vault
Death, taxes, and two-factor auth
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: A loved one dies. Somewhere in their email is the password to the family photos from the last 15 years, the Bitcoin they bought on a whim in 2017, the Spotify account still charging their card, and the Netflix login half the family uses every night. You have the death certificate, the laptop, and absolutely no way in. The average person now dies with 100+ online accounts and their family is locked out of every single one. Consumer "digital afterlife" apps (Everplans, SafeBeyond) have been kicking around for years, but nobody has really solved this problem. The whole category is waiting for someone to shake things up. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A white-label digital vault that estate firms embed into their client service - they own the relationship and the death verification, we own the tech
🛠️ Product:
The firm sends the client a branded setup link and they spend 30 minutes loading in passwords, crypto keys, cloud docs, subscriptions, and naming a beneficiary for each one. The firm gets a dashboard showing exactly who's vaulted what across their whole book, so they can chase the stragglers at annual review.
When the client dies, the firm verifies it the way they already do (death certificate, probate) and releases each asset to the person the client named. No forged documents, no algorithmic disputes, no grieving family fighting a chatbot at 2am. The firm stays in charge and the beneficiaries get a clean, encrypted handover.
Built-in estate tax reporting - the vault tracks the value of every digital asset in real time (crypto holdings, domain portfolios, monetised accounts) and spits out a ready-to-file summary for probate. Saves the firm hours of manual valuation work and catches assets the family would have missed entirely.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $499/mo per firm for 25 clients, $1,499/mo for 100, custom enterprise above.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by a will-writing platform (Farewill, Trust & Will), life insurer (L&G, Aviva), or wealth platform. B2B SaaS to regulated professionals trades at 8-12x revenue.
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🛒 He Built an $800M eCommerce Company. Here's What He'd Do Today.
Last year we had Ryan Bartlett, founder of True Classic, on a Half Baked Masterclass. We asked him: if you were starting from scratch today, what would you do?
His answer: start a dropshipping store. That's exactly what tomorrow's masterclass is about.
Join us live where we'll show how:
BuildYourStore from AutoDS creates a fully optimised, ready-to-sell Shopify store in under 2 minutes
AutoDS then connects you to 500M+ products and automates your entire order fulfilment
Free to start - no inventory, no upfront costs, no technical skills needed
If an $800M founder says this is how he'd start over, it's probably worth 45 minutes of your time.
📸 How to Create Multiple Ad Variants Using ChatGPT Images 2.0
The Context: ChatGPT Images 2.0 shipped yesterday and it's the first image model that can really render text properly - no more melted letters on your images. It’s particularly good at generating different ad variants. Here’s how you can use it to create different ads to try.
Step-by-step:
Go to ChatGPT and put on Thinking mode
Prompt ChatGPT with something like "Generate 4 Meta ad variants for [product]. Same brand style across all 4. Vary the hook, headline, and visual angle. Square 1:1. Include the product and a short CTA."
Drop all 4 into a Meta Advantage+ campaign as separate creatives with a small $50-100 daily budget. Let the algorithm pick the winner within 48-72 hours, then scale spend on the top 1-2.
🔥 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: This company went from an MIT dorm to a $60B Elon offer in 4 years. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Deezer says 44% of all music uploaded to its platform is now AI-generated. AI music detection-and-watermarking is about to become really important.
💬 Prompt Drop: This self-audit prompt can help you to detox your Claude skills.
🆓 Founder Resource: Adam Robinson breaks down "How to Launch an AI Company From 0 Today (And Scale to $1M+)". The bootstrapped operator's playbook for 2026.
💵 Founder Deal: Get a 45-day free trial of Wispr Flow on us, our most used AI tool at Half Baked.
🔍 Founder Finds
🚀 OpenAI just launched workspace agents in ChatGPT - shared agents that can handle complex tasks and long-running workflows across tools and teams.
🤦 Anthropic's Mythos model has been accessed by a small group of unauthorized users. Yikes…
🧠 Google just launched Deep Research and Deep Research Max via the Gemini API - autonomous research agents that combine web data with your proprietary sources via MCP.
⌨️ Meta will start recording employees’ keystrokes and use it to train its AI models. Classic Zuck.
🎧 Someone just paid $100K so we could all listen to this podcast with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. We should probably watch, I guess…
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Vegetable Pouch
Sick of eating boring salads? Wish you could get your daily greens without the inconvenience of chewing, swallowing, or even looking at a vegetable?
Introducing VegPouch™, a pouch you tuck under your lip that slow-releases spinach, kale, and broccoli extract straight into your bloodstream. Because life's too short to wash lettuce.
VegPouch™ - Tuck in.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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