Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as widely popular as the World Cup opener ⚽
In today's edition:
💡 An idea taking inspiration from a viral Korean app
🔋 Claude videos, 15 YC rules, a $500M OpenAI exit + more
🔍 Compound models, PG essay, pest-killing robots + more
🍻 A brew you can really chew
Let's goooo 🚀
P.S: Welcome to the new Half Baked brand. We’ve grown up a bit, and decided to say farewell to our beloved unicorn mascot. Reply to this with any feedback on the new brand, we’ll read through every email.
📹 Micro-Vlogging App
Hour Story
Available Domain: Heydayapp.com
👤 Source: Alex Olim, founder and CEO of Plutus Media, recently tweeted about a super viral app in Korea (#3 in the Korean app store).
❌ Problem:
Social media is incredibly inauthentic, we’re all well aware of this. That’s why products like BeReal (peaked at 73.5m users and sold to Voodoo for €500m) have captured the imagination of so many people.
So as people want more authentic experiences (particularly with all the AI slop flooding platforms these days) why not take inspiration from a viral Korean app and build a social platform that’s just for you and your close friends? Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
An app that captures your day in 5-second hourly bursts and auto-edits yours and your friend’s footage into a daily vlog that you can all watch
Every hour the app pings you, you tap, and film 5 seconds of what you’re doing at that moment. Then at midnight it stitches every clip into a scored, captioned montage of your actual day.
You and up to 10 friends can all have your days edited together to create a montage, turning your group chat into a reality show.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡The Half Baked Take: This is a perfect example of a “geo-arbitrage“ startup idea strategy - find a product working in one country, then launch it in another geography. Simple.
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🛠 Want to Build Today’s Idea? Here’s Your $20 AI Stack
Say you decide to build today's idea. You'll need to research the market, build the landing page, code the prototype, draft the launch tweet. Luckily, AI can help with all of that.
Trouble is, different models are better at different tasks, and subscribing to all of them is a bit like subscribing to every streaming service... it adds up fast.
Bluehost's AI All-Access Pack puts ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok in one dashboard from $20 a month. One login, four brains, $80 a month back in the business.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: How to Create Videos Using Claude with HyperFrames
Connect HyperFrames as a connector in Claude (Settings → Connectors, HeyGen account required)
Ask any question, then tell Claude to turn the answer into a video, and HyperFrames composes the captions, motion and voiceover and renders it for you.
🧠 Idea Inspiration: This app allows people to send messages to each other by virtual carrier pigeon. Simple, genius and it’s printing cash right now.
🆓 Playbook: A YC founder just broke down the playbook he followed to get from 0 to 2,200 paying customers in under a year.
🤑 Money Shot: This company rebranded, re-founded, and got acquired by OpenAI for $500M inside 10 months. Here's how.
P.S. Our Half Baked Founder Toolkit has playbooks, deals, exclusive offers and much more for founders looking to take action and start or scale their business. 100% free.
🎁 Small Business Month: Get $1,500 Back for Switching to SuperMobile
It's Small Business Month, and T-Mobile for Business is putting $100 back per line in founders' pockets.
Activate 15+ voice lines on SuperMobile, pocket $1,500+ in bill credits, and get unlimited premium data plus a 5-Year Price Guarantee. No contest, no lottery, just money back for switching.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Jasper from Founder's GTM built a full outreach campaign using Apollo and Claude in twelve minutes flat. This is how he did it.
📈 Trends with Benefits: OpenRouter just launched the smartest “compound model“ in the world, achieving Fable-level intelligence at half the price. This is how compound models work.
📚 Must-Read: Paul Graham just dropped an essay on how to earn a billion dollars, which only comes down to two numbers in the end. Absolute required reading.
🎧️ Must-Listen: The latest BG2 episode is a cracking listen on the SpaceX IPO, why "Elon Web Services" is so important, and where the AI compute race goes next.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Satya Nadella’s thought piece on frontier models went super duper viral yesterday. This is what all of the fuss was about.
🧬 Science Corner: UC San Diego and Google are trying to give retired smartphones a second life as low-carbon cloud computers. The lengths we’ll go to get compute…
🔮 Future Tech: Tric Robotics recently unveiled their badass autonomous tractors that drive through farm fields at night and kill pests with UV light instead of using pesticides. A genius idea that could change farming forever.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Beer Gummies
Trying to cut down on your drinking? Wish you could get the rush of a cold brew, but in candy format?
Introducing Gummy Beers™, gummy bears that taste exactly like legally safe knock-offs of your favorite beers (beer companies love lawsuits as we know). These are brews you can chew.
Gummy Beers™ - Chew Responsibly.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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