Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as exhilarating as watching a humanoid robot do a full 8-hour shift 🤖
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea for all the puzzle lovers out there
🛠 A guide to /goal for non-technical founders
🔋 From $0 to $445M run rate + more
🔍 Altman's compute play, Anduril $5B, Chamath primer + more
🍻 The robot uprising starts today
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 your Lindy free trial here
Reply to this email with the word "Lindy"
Good luck!
🧩 Daily Puzzle Drop App
Piece Out
Source: Half Baked Team
The Problem: Everybody loves a good puzzle. Wordle, Connections, trying to figure out why your boss is in a bad mood for no apparent reason. But what most people don't realise is puzzles are big business. Take Wordle: a software engineer builds a little word game for his wife during COVID, a few months later sells it to The New York Times for over a million dollars. And puzzles have been so good to the NYT that people now joke it's a games company that also happens to publish a newspaper. Which got us thinking. A new Wordle or Connections every day is cool. But what if instead you could play an entirely new puzzle concept every single day? In 2026, AI makes that possible. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A daily puzzle drop app. One genuinely great new puzzle every day, free to play, designed to be the thing you open right after you've finished Wordle.
🛠️ Product:
Players open the app and get one new puzzle a day, free, 3-7 minutes long, with everyone playing the same puzzle on the same day so the watercooler effect stays intact. Every puzzle is a different format so you never quite know what you're walking into.
Behind the scenes, a small in-house design team produces the daily slate to a guaranteed quality bar. Over time, a curated indie program opens up - featured designers get a release-day slot, full credit, and a revenue share - so the platform becomes both a daily ritual and the place where the next Wordle gets discovered.
The killer wedge is the embeddable widget. Newsletters, news sites, and apps can drop the daily puzzle into their product as an engagement driver, splitting revenue with the platform.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio demo | Remix this build
💼 Business Model: $6/mo or $48/yr consumer subscription for back catalog access, plus B2B embed licensing to newsletters and media properties on a rev-share.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by NYT Games or a major competitor as the indie creator layer for daily puzzles. Target exit 5-8x ARR.
Rate this idea
🎬 In Case You Missed It: The AI Productivity Masterclass
Earlier this evening Flo Crivello, Founder and CEO of Lindy, showed founders and operators how to delegate their entire admin load to a single AI assistant. The replay is live now.
The big moments from the session:
The text-it-from-iMessage demo that broke the chat
The exact stack to replace Superhuman, Calendly, and Granola
Flo's three workflows every founder should delegate this week
All Half Baked subscribers get a 7-day free trial plus 30% off a Lindy annual plan.
🎯 How to Use /goal in Codex and Claude Code
The Context: /goal is the most talked-about feature in AI right now. It's a command in Codex and Claude Code that keeps the LLM working towards your stated outcome until it's actually done, checking itself after every step. Basically autopilot for big, messy AI jobs - which means you never have to type "keep going" again.
Step-by-step:
Open up Codex, Claude Code, or Hermes and type /goal followed by what you want done.
Use /goal for the long, multi-step jobs - building a full landing page, migrating 80 blog posts, processing a month of support tickets. Skip it for one-shot prompts like "write me a tweet."
Once you hit run…walk away. The AI works the whole job in the background, self-checking after each step until it's done. Close your laptop, go for a walk, come back to a finished result.
Give it a try!
🤖 How to Launch an Online Store Without Building One
Most people assume starting an e-commerce 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 instantly generates a fully designed, ready-to-sell Shopify store
AutoDS connects your store to 30+ suppliers and a marketplace of 500M+ products
Fulfilled by AutoDS handles every order automatically, so you never touch the logistics
Free to start on both platforms. Takes about 2 minutes to launch.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This company went from $1M ARR in September 2024 to a $445M run rate today. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: The businesses getting the most out of AI right now aren't tech companies, believe it or not. It’s these companies instead.
💬 Prompt Drop: These 128 hand-written Claude Skills across 12 packs are worth saving to your swipe file.
🆓 Founder Resource: Here’s a tactical guide to cutting your AI coding bill by 80%. Perfect for anyone watching their Anthropic/OpenAI spend climb (like us).
💵 Founder Deal: Granola captures action summaries for every meeting. They're giving Half Baked readers 100% off their first month.
🔍 Founder Finds
💰 Sam Altman is reportedly starting a new compute company he'll raise capital for, with OpenAI as the majority shareholder. The art of the deal, eh?
🛡️ Anduril just raised $5B at a $61B valuation, doubling in under a year. Palmer Luckey showing us how nominative determinism is a thing…
🧠 Chamath Palihapitiya just dropped a primer on the agentic AI economy, worth a read to get the framing for where capital is rotating into next.
🖱️ Google DeepMind is reimagining the mouse pointer with AI, letting users direct Gemini on their screens with motion, speech, and natural shorthand. The 50-year-old interface might finally be getting its biggest update.
📊 Sam Altman’s shareholdings in some of the companies he’s invested in were just disclosed in the ongoing trial against Musk. Man he’s rich…
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Armor Suit
Want to spice up your commute to work? Wish there was a way you could just step over traffic?
Introducing Mechalodon™, the personal mech suit you can hop into for the school run, the grocery haul, or your next HOA showdown. Comes with a built-in coffee dispenser and the ability to crush anything in its path.
Mechalodon™ - This one's got legs.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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