Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as impressive as Cerebras’ IPO today 🤑
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to make video editing 10x faster
🛠 Building your own JARVIS inside Obsidian with Claude Code
🔋 How a broken laser pointer built a $30B empire + more
🔍 $20 hearing aid, Canva x Claude, App Store hack + more
🍻 Blurring the line between breakfast and dinner
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!
🎙️ Voice-First Video Feedback
Talk the talk
Source: Half Baked Team
The Problem: A few years ago, before we started Half Baked, our first baby step into the world of content was actually starting a YouTube channel… this YouTube channel to be precise. It was a lot of fun, but one part of running a YouTube channel, or indeed producing any video content, is the pain of going through a video edit. Anyone who's ever sent feedback to a video editor knows the drill. You sit there with a Google Doc or Frame.io and painstakingly type "at 2:34 the transition is too fast" or "at 4:01 the music is way too loud". It's brutal. But in recent months there's been a huge shift towards voice-first AI tools, most notably Wispr Flow (who we talk about a lot). Why? Because they genuinely improve your productivity 2-3x. So why not take this approach to building a video editing feedback tool? Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A voice-first video feedback tool where you talk and draw your notes while watching a cut, and your editor gets a perfectly timestamped transcript with on-screen annotations.
🛠️ Product:
The editor uploads their cut and sends the client a link - no app to download, no logins, no faff. The client opens it in their browser, hits play, and just starts talking out loud about what they want changed, while the tool transcribes their feedback and pins each comment to the exact frame on screen.
The user can pause, scrub back, and draw directly on the video using their cursor - circle a face that needs colour grading, draw an arrow at a logo placement, mark a section they want cut. Every voice note, sketch, and timestamp gets bundled into a clean feedback timeline the editor can scrub through next to their working file.
Over time the tool could evolve into an agentic video editing platform where AI agents carry out the edits themselves, turning the product into something closer to Cursor for video.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio demo | Remix this build
💼 Business Model: Free tier capped at 3 projects/mo. $25/mo Pro plan for individual editors (unlimited projects, AI summarisation), $99/mo team plan for agencies and production studios.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by Adobe (slotted into Premiere/Frame.io), Descript, Vimeo, or Canva. Target exit 8-12x ARR.
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📱 Your AI Assistant, Now Just a Text Away
You're stuck in a meeting and remember you need to reschedule with a client. You're walking to lunch and want a summary of yesterday's call. Most tools mean opening your laptop. Lindy means a text.
How it works:
Text Lindy from iMessage to reschedule meetings, draft emails, or kick off research
It learns your voice so replies sound like you wrote them
Hundreds of integrations so it acts across your entire stack
The interface is whatever's in your hand. All Half Baked subscribers get a 7 day free trial plus 30% off a Lindy annual plan.
🤖 How to Build a JARVIS Inside Obsidian With Claude Code
The Context: Obsidian stores every note as plain markdown, which means Claude Code can read, connect, and write across your entire vault. Set it up right and you've got a second brain that surfaces ideas, drafts briefs, and writes in your voice. Here's how.
Step-by-step:
Build your vault with folders organised by note type, not topic - separate buckets for observations, reactions, patterns, questions, and numbers. This is the unlock: notes that would never meet under a topic-based system collide automatically, and Claude finds connections you'd miss manually.
Drop a detailed
CLAUDE.mdat the root of your vault. Tell it who you are, your folder structure, your voice, your hard rules, and its main jobs. The more specific this file, the smarter your JARVIS gets.Build reusable skills as markdown files - one to process the inbox, one to run weekly connection sessions, one to turn connections into briefs, and one to write finished content in your voice. Each becomes a one-line trigger for a full workflow.
Run a 20 minute daily ritual: dump raw captures into your inbox, process them, ask Claude to find connections with the last 14 days, then brief whichever one surprised you most. You'll have a piece ready to write before you've opened a single social app.
✍️ How to Make AI Writing Actually Sound Like You
You're probably using AI to write emails, pitch decks, investor updates... and just about everything else. The problem? So is every other founder, and your readers can tell. Grammarly fixes that.
What it does:
Humanizer rewrites AI text to match your natural voice
Reader Reactions previews how your message lands before you hit send
Works across email, docs, and browser with zero tab switching
40M+ people use Grammarly Premium and Half Baked readers get 30% off premium for a limited time only.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This guy turned a weekend coding project into a $30B online empire. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Bilal Zuberi posted a reminder every founder should pin to the wall…that the "hot" theme of the year is almost never where the most valuable company gets built.
💬 Prompt Drop: Sarvesh Shrivastava's SEO competitor audit prompt is great - feed it your URL plus 3 competitors and get back keyword gaps, content gaps and on-page issues.
🆓 Founder Resource: Juan breaks down the 4 patterns behind 20M+ impressions via product launches in his How to do 1M impressions on X article.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 3 months of Notion Business & AI for free. Claim the deal (you must have a business email address).
🔍 Founder Finds
🦻 Amano Labs reinvented the hearing aid by studying the human ear - $20 vs the industry standard $4,700. That's a 235x price collapse on a category that's barely changed in decades. This is what tech is all about.
🎨 Canva is now integrated into Claude for Small Business. Business owners can spin up full campaigns straight from chat. Distribution play of the year.
🤖 Notion just turned its workspace into a hub for AI agents - the new Developer Platform lets agents read, write, and act inside your docs. The workspace is becoming the operating system.
💰 Khosla Ventures is betting $10M on Ian Crosby, whose last startup Bench Accounting famously imploded in 2024. This is his second go at building an automated bookkeeping business.
📱 Nikita Bier just revealed a recent App Store hack, where he incorporated his company as "Tap Get Inc" so the App Store would display "Tap Get" next to the Get button. Genius.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Cereal Killers
Tired of cereal that tastes like dessert? Ever wished your breakfast bowl could fight back?
Introducing Cereal Killers™, the world's first all-savoury cereal lineup. Cheeseburger Bites, New York Pizza O's, and Buffalo Wing Puffs - all served in cold whole milk because we hate you.
Cereal Killers™ - Snap, crackle, slop.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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