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- Startup Ideas #364: Grip Training, AI Rollups...
Startup Ideas #364: Grip Training, AI Rollups...
Plus From $0 to $40m ARR in 5 Months
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as OnlyFans being sold for $8bn? 👀
PSA: If you’re working on an idea we previously shared in the newsletter, we want to help you out. Fill out this form so we know what you’re building!
Let’s goooo 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea we’re holding onto tightly
📈 The latest strategy VCs are exploring (spoiler: it involves AI)
🛠️ Google’s ultimate guide to get the most out of AI
🤑 From $0 to $40m ARR in 5 months
🍻 The ultimate product for professionals
🤝 Smart Grip Strength Trainer
Get a grip
Available domain: Grippling.com
The Problem: Last week, we talked about the rising interest in grip strength since it’s such a powerful indicator of overall health, with a 2023 study showing that grip strength is more predictive of cardiovascular disease than blood pressure. Meanwhile, 1 in 3 people over 65 suffer from a fall-related injury, often tied to poor strength and balance. Despite this, there’s no fun, measurable, or habit-forming way to improve grip strength at home. Which is why it’s time to create one.
The Solution:
In a line: A smart, connected grip strength trainer that makes training grip strength addictive, measurable, and social.
Product:
🧠 A user purchases the device and downloads the accompanying app.
🤌 The device takes a baseline for the user’s grip force and endurance and is then given a personalized routine based on their performance, recovery levels or any injuries they have suffered
🎮 Workouts are gamified including mini-games, daily challenges, and leaderboards to make squeezing engaging.
Business Model: Direct-to-consumer hardware + app for premium analytics, coaching, and content.
End Goal: Exit to a fitness hardware company (like Peloton, WHOOP, or Tonal) or a health tech roll-up, at a 4–6x revenue multiple.
Rate this idea: |
📧 Boring Marketing Delivers BIG Results
The Pitch: With marketing, you want predictability. So predictable, it’s almost boring. That’s why Omnisend is a marketer’s dream.
The Details:
In 2023, for every $1 spent on Omnisend’s email & SMS marketing, merchants made $73 back.
From popups to newsletters to abandoned cart recovery, 125,000+ e-commerce brands use Omnisend to grow their revenue while keeping costs low.
Use code HALFBAKED10 & get 10% off your first 3 months.
🤖 AI Rollups
The Trend: AI is changing the way VCs are investing. Historically VCs have funded early stage startups exclusively. But today many are acquiring mature businesses, such as call centers, accounting firms, and other professional service firms, and optimizing them with artificial intelligence to serve more customers through automation. It’s like private equity with a splash of AI, and this investment approach is only going to get more widespread in the coming months and years.
Opportunities:
LLM Efficiency Tracker for Acquired Businesses: A platform that tracks time saved, cost reduced, and productivity gains from AI tools post-acquisition.
AI Rollup Marketplace: A marketplace of boring businesses pre-scored for AI upgrade potential.
✍️ Google’s 68 Page Guide to Prompting
The Tool: One of the biggest unlocks for your career or business right now is to learn how to prompt. To that end Google has pulled together a tactical breakdown of how to write better AI prompts in gemini which is worth checking out.
Step-by-step:
Go to this link and download the guide (it’s free)
Pick 1 tool you use every day (Docs, Gmail, Sheets, Slides, etc.) and try just one of the prompt styles from the guide with Gemini inside that tool.
Start building your own prompt library and become an AI power user.
💳️ Tackle your credit card debt by paying 0% interest…
Did you know some credit cards could actually help you get out of debt faster? Yes, it sounds crazy. But it’s true.
The secret: Find a card with a “0% intro APR" period for balance transfers. Then, transfer your debt balance and pay it down as much as possible during the intro period. No interest means you could pay off the debt faster.
Check out a list of cards you can use to do this.
⚡️ From $0 to $40m ARR in 5 Months
The Idea:
Eric Simons (right) and Albert Pai, two childhood friends, have always shared a passion for web development. Which is why they co-founded StackBlitz, a browser-based coding platform back in 2017 that showed early promise. But by late 2023, StackBlitz was struggling to stay afloat. Limited revenue. Slow growth. But Eric, who was no stranger to scrappy persistence (he once lived in AOL’s HQ as a broke 19-year-old founder), wasn’t done yet. So the team decided to try something new…
The Execution:
The Insight:
In mid-2024, after seeing the capabilities of Anthropic’s new Sonnet 3.5 model, the duo wondered if you could build and deploy full-stack apps by just talking to your browser? No setup, no terminals, just prompts. They quickly hacked together a prototype inside StackBlitz and branded it Bolt.new, an AI-native IDE in your browser.
The Launch:
They quietly launched in October 2024 with a simple message: “Prompt. Run. Ship.” The demo went viral among developers and product teams on X and Hacker News. Users couldn’t believe it. Functional apps, real-time, all in-browser.
Growth & Traction:
Bolt.new hit $4M in ARR within its first month. Word-of-mouth from impressed users, constant product demos on Twitter, and community engagement via StackBlitz’s existing audience helped it snowball.
Investment:
Although the full funding history isn’t public, Bolt.new's traction attracted serious attention. Top-tier VCs circled, and within months of launch, Bolt was reportedly valued at hundreds of millions, with speculation of a nine-figure investment round closing in early 2025.
The Result:
As of March 2025, Bolt.new had scaled to $40M ARR. It's now considered one of the hottest AI-native dev platforms on the planet.
The Lesson: Today’s technological advancements in AI are making new, unimaginable products possible. Keep up with what’s changing and you could have a breakthrough moment too.
👔 The Sleep Suit
Tired of choosing between power suits and power naps? Are you the type of person who can close deals with your eyes closed?
Introducing The Sleep Suit™, the world's first business-casual sleepwear. With its breathable pinstripes and optional cufflink-printed sleeves, you’ll look sharp even while drooling on your pillow.
The Sleep Suit™ – because you should never rest on your professional image.
Vote
🔍️ Founder Finds
🚨 Raise Alert: Optura, a startup building an AI-powered operating system to help healthcare organizations manage tasks and optimize clinical workflows, has raised $6.5 million in seed funding.
🛠️ AI Tool: v0, the popular vibe coding platform, has released an API which now means you can use it within Cursor
🎙️Must-Listen: Jony Ive was in the news recently. He did a great interview with Patrick Collison 2 weeks ago, worth a listen!
✖️ Trending Tweet: A Doctor with no coding experience built a fully functioning app for his clinic in 5 days on Replit. Anyone can build software in 2025.
💬 Quote of the Week: “You only have to do a few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong” - Warren Buffett
👋 That’s All Folks!
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