Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as lucrative as Ilya Sutskever's $7B OpenAI stake 🤯
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to save our bank accounts from ourselves
🛠 How to generate AI videos using Kling 2.6
🔋 From Stanford dropouts to a $7B delivery empire in 5 years + more
🔍 OpenAI Daybreak, Thinking Machines, Google launch + more
🍻 A product that really takes our breath away
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 our masterclass with Lindy
Reply to this email with the word “Lindy”
Good luck!
🪙 Savings Companion App
Penny for your thoughts
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: Saving money is super, super hard. How often have we all said something like "my bank account is crying" after a weekend away or an Amazon buying binge? The average American has $1,200 in savings, 60% live paycheck to paycheck, and Mint had 25M users before getting shut down because nobody actually changed their behaviour. But what if your bank account actually could cry? Tamagotchi got 90s kids running home to feed a digital chicken. Duolingo turned grammar guilt into a $20B company with a passive-aggressive owl. So what if you tied your savings rate to a little AI character who lived or died by it, like a Tamagotchi for your bank account? Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An app that connects your bank account to an AI character whose health depends on your spending and saving habits
🛠️ Product:
Connect your bank via Plaid, set a monthly savings target, and pick your AI friend from a roster of distinct personalities.
Open the app and you get a clear breakdown of where your money is going - your spending by category, your savings rate, and how you're tracking against your goal for the month. It's the budgeting dashboard you'd build for yourself, just actually usable.
Your AI friend lives at the top of the app and their health is your at-a-glance status. Crushing your goal and they're thriving, glowing, sending you celebratory voice notes. Slipping and they look tired, anxious, and start sending you concerned check-ins. The number tells you how you're doing. The friend tells you how you're feeling about it.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Free with one default friend. Pro at $9.99/mo unlocks the full personality roster, voice cloning, and partner sharing.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by Chime, SoFi, Robinhood, Acorns, or a neobank looking for a Gen-Z growth engine. Target exit 8-12x ARR.
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🧰 Superhuman. Calendly. Granola. Fyxer. Why Pay for All Four?
Most professionals stitch together multiple different products to manage email, calendar, and meetings. Each does one thing. None of them talk to each other.
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 see:
How one AI assistant can replace your entire admin stack
A live demo on how Flo uses Lindy personally
The exact setup that gives professionals 2+ hours back every day
45 mins. Free. Wednesday at 6pm BST / 1pm EST / 10am PST.
🎬 How to Generate AI Videos Using Kling 2.6
The Context: If you've frequented social media in the last few days you've almost certainly seen one of those AI fancam videos - the ones where someone "accidentally" gets caught on the jumbotron at a Korean baseball game no clue why Korea specifically, but it is). They've gone super viral and all of them are entirely AI-generated. Here's how to make one (or any AI video) yourself.
Step-by-step:
Open ChatGPT, upload a clean reference photo of yourself, and use Image 2.0 to generate a realistic broadcast still. Prompt it for the setting, the camera feel (live broadcast handheld, compression noise, motion blur, realistic skin texture), and critically - tell it NOT to beautify, smooth, or stylize.
Drop that image into Kling 2.6 as the first frame and write a video prompt with a sports-broadcast feel. Keep movements small and natural - a glance at the field, a subtle smile, a casual sip of a drink.
Generate, download, and post to TikTok or Reels with a deadpan caption like "did I just get caught on camera at the game?" Wait for the views to roll in.
⚡ 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.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: These two Stanford dropouts built a $7B 10-minute grocery empire in 5 years. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: In case you ever wondered why everyone's wearing wired earphones now, this is why. Could be a cool business idea in this space.
💬 Prompt Drop: With this /goal mega prompt for Codex you can literally get your AI agents to work for hours without manual intervention. Epic.
🆓 Founder Resource: Ruben Hassid just dropped a Claude cheat sheet covering every keyboard shortcut, hidden feature, and power-user trick. Worth saving.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 50% off Slack Pro for your first three months. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛡️ OpenAI just launched Daybreak, AI agents for finding vulnerabilities and validating fixes inside code.
🧠 Mira Murati's Thinking Machines just unveiled interaction models, a new class of model trained on real-time interaction. I was wondering what they were up to…
💻 Google just launched the Googlebook, a new laptop with AI at the core.
📱 Will just dropped his updated Lazymaxxers Guide to $10K MRR - the full playbook for taking an iOS app from $0 to $10K MRR with just ads, a paywall, and a nap. Interesting read.
💰 This Reddit user built 65 apps and is now making $4,200/month. The "lots of small bets" playbook is an interesting one.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Breath Analyzer
Ever worry that your breath is a little whiffy? Wish there was a way to know for sure?
Introducing BreathCheck™, the pocket-sized digital device that analyses your breath and rates it from "minty fresh" to "biological weapon". No more awkwardly cupping your hand and having a sniff.
BreathCheck™ - A breath of fresh air.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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