Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas hotter than Intel’s stock right now 🔥
In today’s edition:
💡 Solving the biggest crisis of the vibe coding era
🛠 How to build a "second brain" in Notion in minutes
🔋 How a bootstrapped business became a $9B behemoth + more
🔍 Google investment, Cursor, PG + more
🍻 Bringing a fresh idea to the table
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:
Register for AutoDS here
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Good luck!
🔒 Security Software for Vibe Coded Apps
Pass the vibe check
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: Everybody’s been talking about security lately. Anthropic’s super secret, super powerful model exposed thousands of critical vulnerabilities across the web…and ironically got breached itself. Vercel had a big security incident. Just look at this guy who built a super viral app to mess up your emails with AI to make them not seem AI generated, like the anti-grammarly (shoutout Grammarly, great sponsor)…that app had a big security flaw in it too. Security, particularly among vibe-coded apps, clearly needs a lot of work. And while there are some startups in this space, it’s growing so rapidly that tnow is the perfect time to build in this space. Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution: A platform that carries out AI-powered security audits for vibe-coded apps, with humans in the loop for extra verification
🛠️ Product:
Connect your Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit or any other project and the platform scans your code and live endpoints for the 30 most common vibe-coded vulnerabilities: exposed keys, missing RLS, broken auth, open CORS, MCP misconfigurations
AI does 80% of the work in under 5 minutes. A human security engineer reviews anything ambiguous and writes the report in plain English with fixes you can paste back into Cursor
Pass the audit and you get a public Vibe Check badge for your landing page, Product Hunt launch, or Chrome Web Store listing
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💰 Business Model: Free for a one-time AI-only scan, basic badge, 10 vulnerability checks. Paid tier (€49–99/month) for continuous monitoring. Also earn revenue through aggregating vulnerability data which gets licensed.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by a developer security incumbent (Snyk, GitHub Advanced Security, Cloudflare) as their vibe-coder wedge, or roll up with an AI liability insurer into the trust layer for the AI app economy.
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🤖 How to Launch an Online Store Without Building One
Most people assume starting an ecommerce business means weeks of setup. BuildYourStore from AutoDS cuts store creation down to 2 minutes. AutoDS handles everything that comes after.
Here's how it works:
Choose a niche and BuildYourStore from AutoDS instantly generates a fully designed, ready-to-sell Shopify store
AutoDS connects your store to 30+ suppliers and a marketplace of 500M+ products
Fulfilled by AutoDS handles every order automatically - you never touch the logistics
Free to start on both platforms. Takes about 2 minutes to launch.
Get started with BuildYourStore today.
🧠 How to Build a "Second Brain" in Notion in Minutes
The Context: Most founders have their notes scattered across Apple Notes, tasks in Todoist, bookmarks in 47 open tabs, and projects living rent-free in their heads. The "Second Brain" is a single Notion system that pulls it all into one place. Here's how to build one.
Step-by-step:
Build your Projects database first - this is the hub everything else connects to. Add properties for Status (Not started / Active / On hold / Done), Priority, and Deadline. Counterintuitive, but if you start with Tasks you'll spend the next hour rebuilding relations. Projects first, always.
Create three more databases - Tasks, Notes, and Resources - and give each one a "Project" relation property that points back to the Projects database. This is the move that turns Notion from a fancy note app into an actual system - now every task, note, and link can belong to a project and show up automatically on that project's page.
Build a Dashboard page with linked database views - tasks due this week, active projects, notes from the last 7 days, and a quick-capture area for resources. Then create a Project template that auto-includes filtered views of its own tasks, notes, and resources. Add one task to one project and watch it appear in three places at once.
💰 How to Get $500 Back From Your Business Card
Spend $500 on the BILL Divvy Card and get $500 back as a statement credit. No annual fees. Free expense management software included. Here's how simple it is:
How it works:
Employees spend, you get notified instantly
Required info is captured at point of purchase - no receipt chasing
Review, approve, and sync transactions in one place
Credit lines from $1k to $5M. Flexible rewards on every dollar. And $500 waiting when you spend your first $500.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This founder couldn't afford an email tool for his startup, so he built one and turned it into a $9B business. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: The AI investment cycle is accelerating, with global data center CapEx projected to reach $5.2 trillion by 2030, according to McKinsey.
💬 Prompt Drop: This article walks you through how to give Claude perfect memory across sessions.
🆓 Founder Resource: YC startups use this playbook to add $2M+ ARR in 3 months.
💵 Founder Deal: Get a 45-day free trial of Wispr Flow on us, our most used AI tool at Half Baked.
🔍 Founder Finds
💰 Google will invest up to $40B in Anthropic in cash and compute deal. Another day, another mega deal…
⌨️ Fortune’s article on Cursor’s 25-year-old billionaire CEO is a great read. What a guy.
💡 Paul Graham believes that the most underpriced opportunity today is in non-AI ideas. Some food for thought…
🤖 Oro just shared an article on why the agent economy will be 10,000x bigger than we think. That sounds pretty big…
🌬️ This guy (allegedly) made $34k by hacking Polymarket with a hair dryer. What a legend (allegedly).
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Smart Ping Pong
Love playing ping-pong, but wish it was a bit more exciting? What if you could combine it with your love of gaming?
Introducing BitPong™, a ping-pong table with real-time ball tracking, LED projections, and games built into the device. You can play space invaders, battleships or if the device switches off…good old fashioned beer pong.
BitPong™ - It’s on like Donkey Pong.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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