Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as China blocking Meta’s $2B acquisition of Manus 👀
In today’s edition:
💡 Using AI to breathe new life into LEGO
🛠 How to create motion graphic videos with ChatGPT
🔋 The 24-year-old dropout who pivoted twice to build a $1.4B business + more
🔍 OpenAI partnership, Perplexity playbook, SpaceX documentary + more
🍻 A workout that flushes the excuses away
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x T-Mobile: This week we've partnered with T-Mobile for Business to offer one Half Baked reader a new MacBook Neo to support them on their founder journey. To be considered, just:
Go to T-Mobile and complete the sales request form
Reply to this email with a screenshot of the thank you form from the T-Mobile website
Shoutout to last week’s winner Kevin Bravo
Good luck!
🧱 Custom LEGO Kit Generator
LEGOOOO
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: The world feels more divided than ever. Wars are being waged, AI is coming for our jobs. But in this crazy world there’s one thing we can all agree on… that LEGO is awesome. No toy has stood the test of time quite like those little plastic bricks, outlasting Beanie Babies, Tamagotchis, and every other fad your parents wasted money on. But building exactly what you want has always been a pain. Want to recreate your dog as a LEGO sculpture? Good luck. But as is the way with everything these days, AI has changed the game. As this tweet demonstrated, ChatGPT Images 2.0 can generate a full buildable LEGO set with BrickLink part IDs baked in, meaning anyone can design anything they want and get the bricks to build it. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI-powered app where you upload a photo or describe what you want to create a LEGO model of, AI generates a buildable brick model, and the company ships the kit with instructions in a week.
🛠️ Product:
A user snaps a photo or types a prompt in plain English for what they want to build. A LEGO brick version of the design is rendered in the app which the user can edit until they’re happy.
The user hits order and the kit lands on their doorstep in 7 days with all the bricks and printed instructions on how to complete the build. Simple
The app also contains a public feed with remixing built-in. Users can browse what others have made, fork a build, tweak it and ship it. Top weekly creations get featured and earn the original creator a 10% cut on every remix order. UGC flywheel for free, community baked in from day one. Nice.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the Google AI Studio demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Pay based on the complexity of the design. $129 entry tier (~500 bricks), $189 standard (~1,000), $249 premium (2,500 bricks plus baseplate and display case).
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Shutterfly, Vistaprint, or Etsy to lean into the gift side of the business. Target exit 4-6x revenue.
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📞 How to Cut Your Team's Phone Bill Without Cutting Corners
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🎬 How to Create Motion Graphic Videos with ChatGPT
The Context: Motion graphic videos are all the rage right now…mainly because all of a sudden you can make them with AI using ChatGPT and Remotion. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Download Codex (OpenAI’s specialized AI coding agent and software engineering tool), install it onto your machine and create a new folder called remotion videos
Go to plugins, type in Remotion and add this plugin to your Codex
Type your prompt including @remotion in it to create your video e.g. “Use @remotion to create a video of white text on a black background that says Half Baked”
🤖 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
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🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This 24-year-old Stanford dropout built a $1.4B bank by pivoting twice (thanks to Kanye West). Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: The hottest job of the next five years is going to be the agent operator, per Aaron Levie (CEO of Box).
💬 Prompt Drop: This article runs through the anatomy of a perfect Claude skill
🆓 Founder Resource: PG’s essay on “frighteningly ambitious startup ideas” is a great resource for any aspiring founder out there.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 50% off your first three months of Slack Pro. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
📣 OpenAI has announced it will no longer pay a revenue share to Microsoft amid changes to their strategic partnership. Their relationship is clearly on the rocks…
📈 Perplexity just added $150M in ARR in 30 days, pushing them past $450M annualized. Here’s the full growth playbook for how they grew the business.
🚀 SpaceX just released this mini documentary on Starship, the most powerful moving object ever made. Serious inspiration.
🧠 Brad Gerstner sat down with Sunny Madra at Stanford to break down the economics of the AI supercycle. Pretty wild that this is free.
📬 Growth in Reverse - want to grow your email list? Join 30 Days of Growth and get 30 proven tips from 30 successful founders on how to grow and optimize your list, totally free.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Gains of Thrones
Struggling to get to the gym? What if every trip to the bathroom doubled as a workout?
Introducing Iron Throne™, the world's first commode-mounted resistance system. Pulleys clip to the cistern for bicep curls, foot stirrups slot under the bowl for hamstring work, and the patented TP-Bar™ doubles as a grip strengthener AND a toilet roll holder.
Iron Throne™ - Throne and Tone.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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