Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as fiery as Ryan Cohen's viral CNBC interview 🔥
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to optimise your dog's lifespan
🛠 How to build cinematic landing pages with AI
🔋 How a teenager built a $2B car empire from his garage + more
🔍 Claude launch, ElevenLabs milestone, Coinbase cuts + more
🍻 A product that lets you do your bit for the AI revolution
Let’s goooo 🚀
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🐶 Function Health for Pets
Nose your numbers
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: Full disclosure - we've been chatting to the team at Function Health for a few weeks now about an ad deal. It's a cool product and frankly I want to get a good discount code for all of us (stay tuned for that). But all of this got me thinking…why isn't there a similar product for pets? Americans dropped over $150 billion on their pets last year, more than the GDP of Hungary, but most owners still find out their dog has kidney disease when it's way too late. Routine vet bloodwork runs $150-250 a pop, isn't covered by 90% of pet insurance policies, and when you do pay it, the results arrive as a paper printout your vet has two minutes to explain. It's not good enough. There are 85 million dogs and 60 million cats in the US whose owners would gladly pay for a service like this. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A subscription bloodwork membership for pets. Twice-yearly panels, an AI dashboard scored against breed-and-age baselines, and on-call vets to walk you through every result.
🛠️ Product:
Sign up, get matched to one of 4,000+ partner vet clinics in your zip or book a $40 mobile blood draw. Two full panels per year, with a senior-pet booster every 4 months for dogs over 7
Results land in a dashboard scored against breed-specific baselines (a 9-year-old Bernese is not a 2-year-old beagle), with markers ranked by urgency, plain-English explainers, and a longitudinal "Healthspan Score" that tracks decline curves over the pet's lifetime
Users have access to a 24/7 vet chat to interpret results, suggest diet and supplement changes, and auto-refer to a local clinic if anything looks off. Add-ons for cancer screening, allergy panels, and gut microbiome testing
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the Google AI Studio demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $299/year per pet for 2 panels + dashboard + telehealth, with a 30% multi-pet discount. $99 senior booster panel, $49 advanced cancer screen, $79 allergy add-on. B2B white-label for pet insurers and breed clubs.
⭐ End Goal: $300-800M acquisition by Mars Petcare (already owns Banfield + IDEXX-adjacent), Chewy (CarePlus play), or a pet insurance carrier like Trupanion, Lemonade, or Pumpkin looking to bolt preventive care onto policies. Roughly 5-7x revenue if it gets priced anything like Function did.
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⚡ You're Running HR Across Four Tools. That's Four Times the Things That Can Go Wrong.
Siloed HR data means payroll errors, compliance gaps, and way too many hours spent reconciling spreadsheets. As your team grows globally, this only gets worse.
Why founders are switching to Remote:
One platform replaces your EOR, payroll, HRIS, and contractor tools
Your entire workforce - employees and contractors - visible in one place
No more data living in three systems with nobody knowing which one's right
Simple, secure, and built to scale with you.
🎬 How to Build a Cinematic Landing Page with AI
The Context: The highest-converting landing pages in 2026 - Linear, Vercel, Cluely, Cursor - all share the same DNA: full-bleed video, glassmorphism, animated metrics, and motion-driven sections that hook visitors in seconds. It used to take a designer and a Framer subscription to pull off. Now you can ship one in under an hour with the right prompt and a code generation tool. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Pick your build tool. Google AI Studio and Lovable are the easiest if you're non-technical, while Claude Code gives you the cleanest output if you're comfortable in the terminal.
In your prompt, describe each section and how it should move, then point it at the right libraries: React and Tailwind for the build, Framer Motion for the animations, and Lucide for clean icons. Drop in any background videos you want to use (Pexels, Coverr, or AI-generated via Sora or Veo all work).
Paste your prompt into your tool of choice and watch your page get built. Check out this example prompt you can steal as a starting point - it ships a complete cinematic landing page with hero, metrics, features, and CTA sections.
Get the example prompt
🎁 Small Business Month: $1,500 Back for Switching to SuperMobile
It's Small Business Month, and T-Mobile for Business is putting $100 back per line into founders' pockets when they activate 15+ voice lines on SuperMobile. No contest, no lottery, just credit back for switching.
What you get:
$1,500+ in bill credits on SuperMobile activation
Unlimited premium data, Threat Protect, and satellite coverage
5-Year Price Guarantee with no annual contracts
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: A teenager built a $2B car empire from his garage. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Anthropic and OpenAI have both rolled out new initiatives this week to help enterprises deploy AI agents inside their organizations. The enterprise adoption slog begins…
💬 Prompt Drop: This custom prompt from Marc Andreessen is pretty great.
🆓 Founder Resource: Andrej Karpathy just dropped a free, 3-hour LLM masterclass - the most comprehensive AI education that exists anywhere, at any price.
💵 Founder Deal: Granola captures action summaries for every meeting. They're giving Half Baked readers 100% off their first month.
🔍 Founder Finds
🤖 Anthropic just launched 10 ready-to-run Claude agent templates for financial services - covering pitchbooks, valuation reviews, KYC, and month-end close.
💰 ElevenLabs just crossed $500M ARR and welcomed a star-studded new investor list: BlackRock, Wellington, Nvidia, Santander, Jamie Foxx, and Eva Longoria. Ok then…
💀 Coinbase is cutting 14% of staff, with Brian Armstrong citing AI productivity gains as a key factor. Another data point in the AI-driven layoff trend.
🎙️ Brian Chesky sat down with Patrick O'Shaughnessy for one of his best interviews yet - covering Airbnb's reinvention, why most CEOs are bad managers, and his obsession with founder mode. Required listening.
🤝 Deel just acquired Sastrify, its 14th acquisition. Founder Alex Bouaziz broke down their full M&A playbook in the thread, a masterclass in how modern startups are using acquisitions as a growth lever.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Home Data Center
AI compute shortage keeping you up at night? Looking to do your bit for the AI cause?
Introducing DataWall™, a Powerwall-sized GPU rack that bolts to the side of your house, pulls AI workloads from the cloud, and pays you in compute credits while gently roasting your siding. Doubles as a winter heater for the dog kennel and an effective deterrent for door-to-door salesmen.
DataWall™ - Rack to the future.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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