Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as magical as Cash App launching a tap-to-pay wand 🪄
In today's edition:
💡 A product every YouTuber needs in their life
🔋 Shopify x Manus, $60M playbook + more
🔍️ Messaging app, tech game show + more
🍻 The ultimate solution to the junk mail problem
Let’s goooo 🚀
📉 Video Retention Prediction Platform
Watch and Learn
👤 Source: After seeing two young YouTubers crush it at the box office with Backrooms and Obsession, I’ve been thinking a lot about tools for supporting YouTubers.
❌ Problem:
If you’re a YouTuber, your entire livelihood is defined by one number: retention. If viewers bail in the first few seconds of watching your video, it’s gonna be a flop. So while creators pour days into an edit, they do so without knowing whether it’ll hold attention or not.
Here’s the cruel part - YouTube hands you a gorgeous 100-point graph showing exactly where everyone dropped off... but only after you publish, when there’s nothing left to fix. It’s time to fix that. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A pre-publish retention predictor that scores any unpublished video and draws its drop-off curve before you ever hit upload.
Creators connect their channel so the model learns from their own real retention data plus a pooled set of thousands of videos, then it watches each new draft and forecasts where viewers will leave and why.
It provides feedback for creators, like "move the payoff to 0:04, cut the dead four seconds at 0:12", and every video that publishes feeds its real curve back in to sharpen the next call.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
🧠 Our Take: The moat here isn’t really the model, it’s the pile of retention data you get from creators who use the platform. That’s the beauty of this.
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🔒 How to Add Enterprise Security to Every Phone on Your Team
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 closes them by default.
What's included:
Threat Protect built into every line, no separate subscription
Nationwide Network Slice keeps your critical apps prioritized
Unlimited premium data on America's best 5G network
No annual contracts. 5-Year Price Guarantee on your monthly price. US only.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: How to Run a Whole Shopify Store From a Single Chat Using Manus
Manus and Shopify have just teamed up, so now you can spin up a fully working Shopify store in minutes without ever leaving the chat. Here's how:
Tell Manus what you sell and who it's for, and it spins up a Shopify development store from scratch: branding, product pages and a working cart.
Switch on the Shopify connector, drop in a spreadsheet of products and a folder of photos, and it writes every listing straight into your store.
Point it at your live sales data and it surfaces your slowest movers, repeat buyers and hero collections, then generates the ad creatives to act on them.
🆓 Playbook: Lukas Pakter lays out the exact strategy that took his activewear brand from $1M to $60M+ (pure sauce).
🤑 Money Shot: This 18-year-old built a billion-dollar payments platform. Here’s how.
🤖 Build Autonomous Superagents with Base44
Create your own personal AI agent with Base44 Superagents.
Connect tools, automate tasks, and get updates automatically - no coding needed.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Franz is a super cool app that combines all of your messaging apps (WhatsApp, Signal, Instagram DMs…all of them) in one window on your desktop.
📚 Must-Read: Anthropic is using its own models to improve Claude, a possible path to recursive self-improvement, or AI autonomously building a more capable successor. This is big.
🎧️ Must-Listen: Founders Fund has launched a game show where they get tech leaders to play Mafia, with Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, Bryan Johnson and more facing off on camera. Peak Silicon Valley.
✖️ Trending Tweet: This tweet from Matthew Prince sharing his two worst VC stories is absolutely incredible (and slightly horrifying)…
🧬 Science Corner: Scientists from Columbia University have precisely edited human embryo genes for the first time. I’m sure this won’t be a controversial story…
🍻 Drunk Business Idea: Junk Mail Incinerator
Do you hate junk mail as much as Palmer Luckey does? Wish there was a more satisfying way to deal with it than the recycling bin?
Introducing PostMortem™, the world's first letterbox-mounted micro-incinerator that burns junk mail the moment it lands. It uses AI (what doesn’t these days) to detect glossy paper, promotional fonts, and copy like "YOU MAY HAVE WON" with 94% accuracy, incinerating offending material at 600°C before it ever touches your hallway floor.
PostMortem™ - Delivered. Destroyed. Done.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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