Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as fresh as Anthropic dropping Opus 4.8 🆕
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to bring textbooks into the AI era
🛠 How to do 6 months of competitive research in minutes
🔋 From $0 to a $15m ARR in just 10 weeks + more
🔍 Meta subscriptions, ClickHouse IPO, $3bn windfall + more
🍻 The carry-on you can literally carry on
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📚 Interactive Textbook Development Platform
Turning over a new leaf
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: So I was scrolling X the other day and came across this awesome idea - an engineer created a 680-page interactive book on data structures and algorithms, complete with live code, visualizations, and embedded quizzes to really bring the material to life. This is super cool if, like me, you have the attention span of a hummingbird and you find books (particularly textbooks) pretty intimidating. Think about all the textbooks you had to buy in college, collecting dust on your shelf, barely opened, costing you a few hundred dollars a pop. Why can’t all books be interactive? The big publishers are sitting on billions of dollars of backlist IP still shipped as glorified PDFs, while learners quietly defect to YouTube and Khan Academy. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI-native platform that converts textbooks and non-fiction books into rich interactive reading experiences for authors and publishers.
🛠️ Product:
Authors and publishers upload a manuscript or existing book and the platform's AI parses every chapter to flag passages that'd benefit from interactivity - a physics derivation gets a draggable simulation, a code snippet gets a live REPL, a historical chapter becomes a scrubbable timeline. The author approves what makes the cut.
A growing library of interactive components handles the heavy lifting - live code editors, 3D models, narrated audio, embedded quizzes that adapt to the reader, and an AI tutor trained specifically on the book's own content.
Books ship as a hosted reading experience across web and mobile, with publisher-branded skins, granular reader analytics (so authors finally see what people actually skip), and one-click LMS integrations for universities adopting the book on their courses.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this build
💼 Business Model: 15-20% rev share on books sold through the platform, $50-200/mo SaaS for indie authors self-publishing, and per-title enterprise licensing ($10-50k) for the big publishers retrofitting older books.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Pearson, McGraw Hill, Wiley, or Cengage scrambling to defend their textbook moats - or by Coursera, Duolingo or Khan Academy bolting on a publishing arm. Target exit 12-18x ARR.
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⚖️ One Compliance Mistake in the Wrong Country Could Cost Your Company $42,000
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🔍 How to Do 6 Months of Competitive Research in Minutes Using NotebookLM
The Context: Competitive research usually means weeks of trawling websites until your brain turns to soup. One founder compressed six months of it into a single weekend before his Series A - and closed in three weeks. Here's how.
Step-by-step:
Create a NotebookLM and upload everything publicly available on your top 5-7 competitors. Think pitch decks, annual reports, founder interviews, Glassdoor reviews, job postings. Then ask: "What are the three strategic bets each company has made that their public messaging doesn't acknowledge?"
Start a second notebook and load every bit of investor criticism in your space. VC posts, public post-mortems, failed fundraise interviews. Ask: "What are the 5 most common reasons investors passed on companies in this category, and what evidence shows we've solved each one?"
Restructure your pitch around what comes back. The objection that kills most Series A pitches isn't a surprise - it's sitting in a public blog post. NotebookLM will find it. You just have to ask.
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🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: Two ex-Meta engineers built the wrong AI agent for two years. Then moved it into Slack and hit a $15M run rate in 10 weeks. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: The CEOs of Stripe and Replit say now is the best time in history to start a company. This is why.
💬 Prompt Drop: These 7 prompts can completely overhaul your LinkedIn profile. Worth a look.
🆓 Founder Resource: a16z's Joe Schmidt makes the case that the AI app layer isn't dead, so long as you build off the "Yellow Brick Road." Definitely worth checking out.
💵 Founder Deal: Wispr Flow is the most-used AI tool at Half Baked. Get a 45-day free trial on us.
🔍 Founder Finds
💰 Anthropic just raised $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation.
📈 ClickHouse has tripled its annualized revenue to $250M and is charting a path to IPO at a $15B valuation. A 60x+ multiple on a company under five years old is wild.
🧠 Trajectory, a new startup from researchers across DeepMind, Apple, Meta, and OpenAI, just raised a $15M seed to build a continual learning platform for companies.
💸 Yasmin Razavi turned a $75M check into a $3B windfall thanks to Anthropic. Nice for some I guess…
🟠 Garry Tan just revealed the real reason YC works, and why it isn't the capital. A super interesting read for founders.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Wearable Luggage
Tired of paying $45 to check a bag that’s basically three t-shirts and a charger? Wish you could just wear your entire suitcase through the airport?
Introducing WearDrobe™, the world's first wearable wardrobe. It’s a fully waterproof travel coat with 16 hidden pockets that hold up to 14lbs of clothes and even converts into a duffel bag. No airline can charge you for wearing a coat (not even Ryanair).
WearDrobe™ - Pack light. Wear heavy.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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