Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as epic as OpenAI offering to invest in every current YC startup 🤯
In today’s edition:
💡 A "billion-dollar idea from a founder that exited for $250M
🛠 How to build native Android apps in Google AI Studio
🔋 From a door-turned-desk to a $10.2B exit + more
🔍 Meta layoffs, Google I/O, self-improving companies + more
🍻 A product for all the bug haters out there
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
Good luck!
📚 AI-Native Course Generation Platform
The Main Course
Source: Ankur Nagpal, founder of Teachable
The Problem: It feels like every company on earth has shipped their own AI website builder over the last few months: Shopify, Figma, HubSpot…The Vatican, probably? But here's the thing: a lot more people earn a living from teaching and selling information than from selling software. Ankur Nagpal - the guy who built Teachable into a $250M exit - clocked this recently, and he's dead right. He reckons whoever builds the Lovable or Replit for digital products is going to become a billionaire, and it's hard to disagree. Launching your first course, cohort, or coaching program still takes weeks of curriculum design, video filming, workbook formatting, drip email writing, and sales page agonising - which is wild given AI can now do 90% of that in an afternoon. Here's the idea.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A generative AI platform that turns a creator's expertise into a complete, sellable course in one sitting, not one quarter.
🛠️ Product:
Drop in your raw material - podcast transcripts, YouTube videos, social posts, voice notes, even old PDFs - and tell the AI who you're teaching and what you want to charge. It returns a fully scoped, module-by-module course outline that you keep refining in a Lovable-style chat panel until it's exactly right.
Every asset gets generated alongside it in your voice - video scripts you can read to camera (or feed straight to an AI avatar), downloadable workbooks, quizzes, a 14-day onboarding drip, sales page copy, lead magnets, and a full launch plan.
One-click publishing pushes the finished product into Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, Skool, or a hosted storefront.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this build
💼 Business Model: Freemium with generation limits, $99–299/mo for Pro creators, and a 5% rev-share option that aligns incentives once the sales agent is doing the closing.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Kajabi, Teachable (poetic, given Ankur built it), Thinkific, Skool, or ConvertKit looking to own the "AI course business in a box" category. Target exit at 10–15x ARR.
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🔒 How to Give Your Team Faster and Safer Mobile Access
Your CFO's phone has banking access. Your sales team's phones have your CRM. Every device is a door into your business, and most SMBs leave them wide open. SuperMobile helps make sure those doors close to unwanted guests.
What's Included:
Threat Protect, for simple, always-on protection
Nationwide Network Slice keeps your critical apps prioritized
Unlimited premium data on America's Best Network
No annual contracts. 5-Year Price Guarantee on your monthly price. US only.
🤖 How to Build Native Android Apps in Google AI Studio
The Context: Until this week, shipping a native Android app meant downloading Android Studio, wrestling with Kotlin, and configuring Gradle until you quietly questioned your life choices. As of Google I/O 2026, you can do the whole thing from a browser tab - production-quality Kotlin code, an in-browser emulator, and a one-click push to the Play Store's internal test track. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Head to ai.studio.google.com, hit the Build tab, and select "Build an Android app." Describe what you want in plain English and AI Studio scaffolds a working Kotlin + Jetpack Compose project for you - no SDKs or local environment required.
Iterate in the chat panel while the embedded Android Emulator updates in real time. Ask for new screens, integrate hardware sensors like GPS, Bluetooth, and NFC, and watch every change render in the browser preview before you commit a single line of code.
Install the app directly to your physical Android device via the built-in ADB connection, then connect your Google Play Developer account to push to the Internal Test Track with a single click - real users on real devices in minutes.
✍️ 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: Three Danish friends turned an old door propped on sawhorses into a $10.2 billion customer service empire. Here's how they did it.
📈 Trends with Benefits: We’re about to enter the "third wave" of American philanthropy because of AI. Here's what that means and why it’s so important.
💬 Prompt Drop: This super simple prompt generates premium-looking app logos in 10 seconds by matching the visual style of icons you already love. Super cool.
🆓 Founder Resource: Matt Gittleson vibecoded a B2C app and exited for $375K in 6 months. He breaks down exactly how he did it.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 50% off the first three months of Slack Pro. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
💔 Meta just laid off 8,000 employees as the company repositions itself for the artificial intelligence era. Our hearts go out to anyone affected.
🚀 Google dropped a fire hose of announcements at I/O 2026's developer keynote. They have a lot going on right now…
🎙️ YC's Tom Blomfield broke down how to build a self-improving, AI-native company in a recent batch talk. Super important talk.
🧑💻 Leopard Racer put together a banger on how to start a one-person business in 2026 with AI. Required reading if you wanna go solo.
🎓 Patrick Collison's advice for people in their 20s: "Work at a place with high standards." Probably the most underrated career advice ever written.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Bug Gun
Tired of swatting flies and missing every single time? Wish bug control was a little more exciting?
Introducing Bug-A-Salt™, a pump-action shotgun that fires regular table salt at houseflies, mosquitoes, and any other bugs you’re looking to take out. It’s locked, loaded, and lightly seasoned.
Bug-A-Salt™ - a salt and battery.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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