Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as valuable as an OpenAI secondary sale (wow) 💸
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to make your watch a little smarter
🛠 How to create a slick logo for free
🔋 From $90M acquisition offer to bankruptcy in 3 weeks + more
🔍 OpenAI Deployment Co, Cowboy Space, Tobi's shop floor + more
🍻 A product that some might find a little hard to swallow
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x Lindy: This week we've partnered with Lindy to offer one Half Baked reader a brand new MacBook Neo to power their founder journey. To enter, just:
Sign up for a 7 day free trial of Lindy here (perfect prep for our masterclass with them later this week)
Reply to this email with a screenshot of your Lindy account
Shoutout to last week's winner Robert Lawrence.
Good luck!
⌚ Smart Strap for Dumb Watches
Stealth health
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: I've mentioned in past editions that I wear a Whoop. I like it - but it's not without its flaws. The hardware's pricey, the $30/month membership is annoying, the data is locked in Whoop's app with zero export options, and if I want to wear a proper watch alongside it, I end up looking like a guy with serious commitment issues. Last week, Google launched the Fitbit Air - a $99 screenless biometric tracker pitched squarely at eating Whoop's lunch. When I first saw it, my brain went straight to: "that just looks like a watch strap." Which begs the obvious question - why can't any watch strap be a smart fitness device? Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A small biometric sensor pod you can attach to the bottom of a traditional watch strap, turning your everyday Rolex, Omega, or Casio into a fitness tracker
🛠️ Product:
A slim, magnetically-secured sensor pod can be attached to the underside of a watch strap - invisible when worn, picking up HR, HRV, SpO2, skin temperature, and sleep from the underside of the wrist.
The pod pairs with the companion app to deliver the standard Whoop/Oura-style strain, recovery, sleep, and stress scores. 7-day battery and it charges through a wireless charging puck.
Users own all of their data - full export to CSV, JSON, or Apple Health / Google Fit in a single tap. No subscription wall either.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $99 for a pod
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Garmin (extending into the watch enthusiast market), Whoop (which already lives without a screen), or a luxury watch group like Richemont or LVMH looking to add quiet health tracking to their brands. Target exit 6-10x ARR.
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🌊 You Didn't Start a Company to Live in Your Inbox
Triaging emails. Scheduling calls. Prepping meetings. Chasing follow-ups. None of this is the work you signed up for.
That's why we've teamed up with Lindy to run a Masterclass which shows you how to build a world-class AI executive assistant.
Together with Flo Crivello, Founder and CEO of Lindy, you'll learn:
Why traditional productivity tools just add to the chaos
How to actually delegate the work, not just speed it up
How to set up Lindy as your personal AI executive assistant
This Wednesday, May 13th. 6pm BST / 1pm EST / 10am PST.
📐 How to Create a Slick Logo for Free
The Context: Designing a really cool logo is still surprisingly hard these days. Most free logo makers are poor, and even the top AI models aren't particularly good at designing logos either, spitting out generic shapes with your business name slapped on top. Luckily we found this cool free tool you can use to design a slick logo yourself using the same geometric grid technique behind iconic marks like Apple, Twitter, BMW, and Pepsi (ignore my example). Here's how.
Step-by-step:
Head to logolattice.com and pick your grid - square for clean, tech-style marks, or isometric for 3D and architectural feels.
Start with simple shapes (circles, squares, triangles, lines) and snap them to the grid intersections. The grid does your proportions for you, which is the secret behind why iconic geometric logos look so balanced.
Layer shapes, overlap them, and play with negative space until your mark emerges.
Export your mark, drop it on a clean background in Canva or Figma, and you've got a brand identity that looks like a designer charged you $5k for it.
🗺️ How to Hire, Pay, and Manage a Global Team From One Platform
Most founders scaling internationally end up with three separate tools for payroll, a different one for HR, another for contractor management - and nobody talking to each other. There's a cleaner way.
How Remote brings it all together:
One platform to hire employees and contractors in 180+ countries, compliantly
Unified payroll across every country you operate in - no switching between providers
All your HR data, contracts, and reporting in a single login
The HR and payroll engine for growing teams. No patchwork required.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This fintech founder was 3 weeks away from a $90M acquisition. Then everything collapsed. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: You’ve heard of meta prompting…well Garry Tan just dropped a long thread on Meta-Meta-Prompting. It’s getting hard to keep up here.
💬 Prompt Drop: Karpathy's 4 CLAUDE.md rules cut Claude mistakes from 41% to 11%. Worth a read for all the devs out there.
🆓 Founder Resource: Anthropic's Thariq Shihipar just made the case for asking Claude for HTML outputs instead of markdown, with a gallery of 20 examples that will change how you brief your AI tools.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 3 months of Notion free for your team. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
🤖 OpenAI officially launched its Deployment Company, a dedicated arm focused on helping enterprises to…you guessed it…deploy AI in their companies.
🤠 Cowboy Space has just raised $275M to build rockets to put data centers in orbit around Earth. Great name, great mission.
🏭 Tobi Lütke has a great take on why founders should be learning on the shop floor - inside the actual work - rather than running their company from 30,000ft.
🧠 Colossus just dropped a profile of Cognition founder Scott Wu - on building Devin, his math olympiad gold medals, and what's left for humans in an age of AGI.
⏳ Justin Skycak’s piece on the most expensive mistake founders make is well worth a read.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: All-in-one Pill
Afflicted by a few illnesses right now? Wish you could just take one thing to cover all your bases?
Introducing MegaPill™, the pill that’s just all the other pills rolled up into one. We grind up blood pressure meds, statins, diabetes tablets, antidepressants, allergy pills, and whatever else you can think of and compress it all into a single tablet.
MegaPill™ - Side effects may include…death.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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