Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as valuable as Elon Musk's $1T pay packet 💰
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea for the 100M Americans who can't sleep
🛠 How to reverse-engineer your competitor's social strategy with Perplexity Computer
🔋 From cold email to a $1.5B unicorn in 3 years + more
🔍 Anthropic at $900B, SquareMind raise, SoftBank robotics + more
🍻 An idea that has car thieves looking up
Let’s goooo 🚀
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Good luck!
😴 CBT-I Therapist Network
Rest assured
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: I'm insanely jealous of good sleepers. The kind who put their head on the pillow at 10:47pm and are gone by 10:48. I'm not one of those people, and judging by the numbers, neither are the 100M Americans with chronic or acute insomnia - a $100B drag on the US economy. There are countless treatments out there - Ambien, melatonin gummies, mouth tape, magnesium, the works. But the most effective treatment for sleep is actually therapy. Both the American College of Physicians and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommend CBT-I (a 6-8 session protocol) as the first-line treatment ahead of every sleep drug on the shelf - 70% remission rates, drug-free, and it's covered by insurance for 90% of Americans. It's time to make this treatment available to more Americans. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A virtual marketplace exclusively for CBT-I-certified therapists. Insurance-credentialed, in-network with the major payers, full six-week protocol delivered virtually.
🛠️ Product:
New users take the Insomnia Severity Index in under 90 seconds, get matched to a licensed CBT-I therapist in their state who's in-network with their insurance, and book their first session within 48 hours. From there it's six structured sessions across 6-8 weeks following the standard protocol (sleep restriction, stimulus control, cognitive restructuring).
On the therapist side, the platform handles the unsexy stuff - credentialing, insurance billing, EHR, scheduling, and no-show fees. Clinicians plug in, see patients, earn 2-3x what hospital sleep clinics pay, and use AI-assisted chart notes from session transcripts to cut admin by 60%.
Over time, the company could launch its own training arm - putting licensed therapists, sleep psychologists, and PhDs through accredited CBT-I certification, then funnelling them straight onto the platform.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Take 25-30% of insurance reimbursement per session ($150-220 per CBT session, you keep $40-65). $99/session cash-pay for the uninsured.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by a behavioral health platform (Headway, Spring Health, Lyra) or a sleep-tech leader like Big Health (Sleepio) or Hims. Target exit 5-8x revenue.
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📊 How to Reverse-Engineer Your Competitor's Social Strategy with Perplexity Computer
Source: Ole Lehmann
The Context: It’s always worth keeping tabs on what your competitors are up to. With Perplexity Computer you can reverse-engineer your competitor’s social media strategies in a few minutes. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Open Perplexity Computer and drop in this prompt: "Analyze the last 7 days of posts on X for [competitor handles]. Check engagement, bookmark-to-like ratios, hooks, storytelling, and product placement. Find winning formats, losing formats, and gaps." Add as many handles as you want.
Sub-agents run in parallel and a few minutes later you get a full doc: top posts, content mix, hook breakdown, product placement. The two things to actually look at - bookmark-to-like ratio (people saving = the real value signal) and gap analysis (what nobody's covering = blue ocean).
Connect Gmail and have Perplexity send the same report every Monday. Always-on competitor intel without lifting a finger.
Give it a try!
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🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: These guys went from a cold email to a $1.5B AI unicorn in 3 years. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Japan is trialling a new drug that regrows human teeth, potentially ending dentures and implants forever. Regenerative medicine is coming and there's a whole adjacent stack of founder opportunities here.
💬 Prompt Drop: These 20 Claude prompts turn a $20 subscription into a personal assistant, editor, coach, and analyst.
🆓 Founder Resource: Untapped VC just released a bunch of requests for AI startups. We pulled them all together into a single doc for you.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 50% off your first three months of Slack Pro. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
📰 Anthropic is reportedly eyeing a new funding round at a $900B+ valuation, which would make it worth more than OpenAI. What are the rest of us even doing…
💰 SquareMind just raised $18M to build a robot that scans your entire body and tracks every mole over time. As a pasty Irish guy, this is great news.
🤖 SoftBank is creating a robotics company that builds data centers - and is already eyeing a $100B IPO. Masa never sleeps.
🧬 Claude Mythos Preview just correctly solved 30% of a set of 23 complex, "unsolvable" bioinformatics problems, per Anthropic. Curing cancer is genuinely on the table now.
💡 Sam Altman believes that “idea guys” are about to have their revenge. We tend to agree, Sam…
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Car Bodyguard
Tired of waking up to find your car keyed, scratched, or missing entirely? Wish your Tesla had its own personal bodyguard but, you know, on a budget?
Introducing the Drone Ranger™, the world's first autonomous drone bodyguard for your car. This tiny quadcopter hovers above your vehicle whenever you park it, recording everything in glorious 4K. Detects intruders with infrared, blasts a deafening alarm at would-be thieves, and can be fitted with a mini gatling gun for an extra few bucks.
Drone Ranger™ - Hover and out.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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