Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Elon losing his trial against OpenAI and Sam Altman 🤯
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea for the apparel industry
🛠 Stress testing any startup idea with Perplexity Deep Research
🔋 How $17K of credit card debt built a $5B empire + more
🔍 Anthropic acquisition, free software, app guide + more
🍻 An idea to get you into the swing of things
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x T-Mobile for Business: We're giving one lucky reader a $500 grant to build their startup, courtesy of T-Mobile. How to enter:
Fill out this 30-second form to enter
Reply to this email with the startup idea you'd spend the $500 building
Shoutout to last week’s winner: Lisa Ferguson
Good luck!
👗 Outfit-First Shopping App
Drip Feed
Source: Half Baked
The Problem: You may not be able to tell this from my writing, but I’m not a particularly stylish person (I mean, how could you, right?). My wardrobe is a mismatch of on sale items, random free t-shirts from events and the odd nice item that emerges once in a blue moon. That’s primarily because I, like most people, shop one item at a time, instead of shopping for outfits that actually work together. So what if you built an app around this whole concept? Here’s the idea.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A daily-drop shopping app that styles complete head-to-toe outfits across every brand, prioritising what's currently on sale within your budget and personal taste.
🛠️ Product:
You onboard with a 90-second swipe quiz (Tinder, but for outfits), enter your sizes, and set a monthly clothing budget. The AI builds a style profile from your swipes and starts curating immediately - no closet scan required.
Each morning you get 3 fresh head-to-toe outfits dropped to your phone, pulled from 200+ retailers (Zara, COS, Aritzia, Mango, Massimo Dutti, Ganni, all of it) and ranked by what's on sale in your size, in your budget. One tap adds the entire look to a unified cart that checks out across every brand at once.
Every purchase quietly trains the model on your real wardrobe, so future drops only suggest looks that pair with at least 3 things you already own. Your closet compounds instead of collecting orphans.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio demo | Remix this build
💼 Business Model: Affiliate revenue (8-15% per sale) across 200+ retailers via Skimlinks/Rakuten/Awin + Fitted Plus at €9.99/mo for unlimited daily drops, AR try-on, and a personal AI stylist chat. Brand-sponsored drops from emerging labels round it out.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Pinterest (which paid $300M for The Yes), Klarna, Shopify, or a fashion holding co like LVMH or Tapestry for $400M-$1.2B once daily active styling sessions cross 2M.
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📶 How to Cut Your Team's Phone Bill Without Cutting Corners
You're adding headcount. Every new hire means another line, another device, another bill. Most carriers punish you for scaling. T-Mobile for Business doesn't.
How it works:
10 lines for $200/mo on the CoreMobile plan, each additional line just $20
$150 bill credit per new line when you switch, no limit
5-Year Price Guarantee on talk, text, and 5G data
Bring your own devices, keep your numbers. US businesses only.
🧪 How to Stress Test Any Startup Idea in 6 Minutes Using Perplexity
The Context: Most founders "validate" a startup idea by Googling around for 20 minutes and concluding "yeah this could probably work" - which isn't validation, it's vibes. Perplexity's Deep Research mode runs a 5 minute autonomous research agent that pulls real market data, competitor analysis, and feasibility signals into a structured slide deck. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Open Perplexity and switch to Deep Research mode. It's free on the standard plan (you get 5 queries a day)
Paste this prompt with your idea plugged in, hit run, and walk away for 5-6 minutes.
Perplexity does the research and builds a full slide deck in the same run. Save the prompt somewhere you'll actually use it again.
🌍 How to Make Your First International Hire Without Setting Up a Legal Entity
You found the right person. They're based in Portugal. Setting up a local entity there costs $74k and takes months you don't have. Remote's Employer of Record means you skip all of that entirely.
How Remote EOR works:
Remote becomes the legal employer in their country - handling contracts, liability, and local compliance
You manage the day-to-day relationship; Remote owns the paperwork
Hire in 180+ countries and onboard in days, not quarters
No entity. No lawyers. No drama.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: How a 24-year-old college football player turned $17K of credit card debt into a $5B athletic empire. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Data shared in the FT shows that digital media may be the hidden driver of plunging birth rates.
💬 Prompt Drop: Thariq Shihipar, who’s building Claude Code at Anthropic, has been using this prompt a lot recently
🆓 Founder Resource: Benedict Evans just dropped his new 79-slide "AI Is Eating The World" deck. Super interesting deck.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 50% off Slack Pro for your first three months. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
💰 Anthropic just acquired Stainless, a leader in SDKs and MCP server tooling.
💸 Anthropic's Dario Amodei just told an audience that software is going to become cheap, "maybe essentially free." Good to know…
📱 Rork dropped the complete guide to scaling a mobile app to $50K+/month. Worth reading if you’re looking to ship an app.
🎤 Ben Horowitz’s “Nobody Cares” article is worth a 30 second read. Then back to work.
🦾 Figure’s AI robot just went up against a human in a package sorting contest. And in this titanic tussle between man and machine, man came out on top. You love to see it.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Baseball Bat Nightstand
Worried about things going bump in the night? Wish your bedside table doubled as your last line of defense?
Introducing BatStand™, the world's first nightstand that doubles as a bat and shield. It’s simple - you hear a bump in the night, you disassemble your nightstand and you’re ready to fight.
BatStand™ - Get com-bat ready instantly.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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See you soon,