Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas more explosive than a Blue Origin rocket launch 💥
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea inspired by a viral launch
🛠 How to build an AI council with Claude
🔋 From $0 to $1M ARR in 117 days as a solo founder + more
🔍 Claude Mythos, $59M raise, Oura Ring 5 + more
🍻 Putting a new face on some ancient tech
Let’s goooo 🚀
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🧹 Crowdsourced Robotics Training Data
The Reel Deal
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: You've probably seen the Shift launch video by now. It’s a genius concept - this startup sends a cleaner to clean your apartment in NYC for free, in exchange for the cleaner recording first-person video of them doing the cleaning. Why? Because robotics companies are dying to get their hands on great training data, and will pay a lot to get it. But this concept got me thinking…why pay operators to do chores in strangers' apartments when 130 million people are already doing the work, for free, every single day? Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A marketplace where people agree to complete real-world tasks around their home or neighborhood, film themselves doing these tasks, and get paid for the footage.
🛠️ Product:
Open the app and browse a live task board - indoor jobs (loading the dishwasher, folding laundry, assembling IKEA) and outdoor ones (mowing a lawn, washing the car, fixing a fence, hauling bins, helping a neighbor shift a couch). Claim what fits your week and a camera ships to your door the next day.
Wear it while you knock out the task, upload the footage, and get paid via instant deposit - $20-50 for a standard 30-minute job, up to $200 for complex repairs or hard-to-capture scenarios.
Labs post bounties straight into the marketplace ("500 hours of someone unloading groceries in the rain", "200 clips of a garage being organized with a toddler underfoot") and contributors race to fill them - you're earning for the data, not subsidising a cleaning service you never asked for.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio demo | Remix this build
💼 Business Model: Labs pay $5-15 per labelled minute, contributors earn $0.50-1.50. The 60-70% gross margin covers ops, camera amortization, and verification.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by a training data company hungry for this specific type of data.
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📊 How to Replace Three Payroll Providers With One Platform
If you've got employees in multiple countries, chances are you've got multiple payroll providers too - each with their own portal, their own support team, and their own way of doing things. There's a cleaner setup.
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🏛️ How to Build an AI Council With Claude
The Context: Ask Claude "should I launch this?" and it finds five reasons yes. Ask "is this a bad idea?" and it finds five reasons no - it's reading your framing and telling you what you want to hear. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy's fix is the "LLM Council", which you can run inside Claude with sub-agents.
Step-by-step:
Grab the skill here and drop it into your Skills in Claude Code or Cowork (Customize > Skills > Add skill - remember to paste the name and description separately).
Type "council this" followed by your question, giving it as much context as you can. The richer the input, the sharper the output.
The skill scans your workspace for context, spawns all 5 advisors in parallel, runs the anonymous peer review, and produces a chairman synthesis with a clear recommendation and one concrete next step.
You get a visual HTML report you can scan in 60 seconds, plus a full markdown transcript if you want to dig into the reasoning later.
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🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This guy went from $0 to $1M ARR in just 117 days as a solo founder. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: “Tokenmaxxing” panic is sweeping tech right now. Uber reportedly burned through its entire $3.4B AI budget for 2026 in four months, and Amazon has scrapped its internal AI leaderboard as compute costs spiralled. Oops…
💬 Prompt Drop: Harvard built a $200K paywall around business education. Here's the prompt that gives you the same education for free (according to Tom Bilyeu).
🆓 Founder Resource: This article on how to design using AI (the Builder's Guide) is really, really great.
💵 Founder Deal: Granola captures action summaries for every meeting. They're giving Half Baked readers 100% off their first month. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
🤖 Anthropic says it will roll out Claude Mythos "in the coming weeks" despite growing fears over the model's cyber capabilities. That should be fun…
🌍 Reactor just raised $59M in a Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to scale its real-time generative AI video platform for developers.
💍 Oura unveiled the Ring 5 with a thinner, lighter design starting at $399. Time to throw out the WHOOP?
🧠 Larry Ellison argues AI is rapidly commoditizing because most models train on the same public internet, meaning the real edge is now access to exclusive, proprietary datasets. He’s dead right.
💳 Visa just invested in Replit to power agentic payments for developers.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Sundial Wristwatch
Tired of your smartwatch dying by 2pm? Wish telling the time felt more... ancient?
Introducing SunDial™, the world's first wrist-mounted sundial. A tiny gnomon casts a shadow across a dial on your forearm, giving you the time with zero charging, zero notifications, and a roughly 40-minute margin of error.
SunDial™ - You’ve got time on your hands.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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