Startup Ideas #374: Aerial Aid, Floor Beds...

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as hotly anticipated as WWDC 2025 kicking off 🍎 

If you want to read any previous editions of Half Baked, you can on our website.

Let’s goooo 🚀 

In today’s edition:

• 💡 An aerial innovation that could save lives

• 📈 A Japanese trend that’s just gone super viral

• 🛠️ Prompt engineering tips from an OpenAI co-founder

• 🤑 Building a $500m business in 6 months

• 🍻 A coffee innovation that nobody’s asked for

🚑️ Ambulance Drones

Winging it

The Problem: Drones are having a bit of a moment, with Walmart just announcing a massive drone delivery expansion. But while using drones to deliver parcels is great, why not get drones to deliver life saving equipment? When someone suffers a cardiac arrest, stroke, or anaphylactic shock, time is the difference between life and death. Survival rates drop by 7–10% for every minute without emergency care. But in many urban areas, ambulance response times exceed 8 minutes, and in rural regions, they can double. Every second counts. So why not create a fleet of drones to ensure urgent care arrives at the scene in seconds?

The Solution:

• In a line: Autonomous drones that deliver emergency medical supplies, like AEDs, EpiPens, and naloxone, faster than ambulances can arrive.

• Product:

  • 📞 In case of an emergency a user dials 911 and explains the nature of the emergency

  • 🚁 A lightweight, GPS-guided drone is dispatched from a local storage depot and flies directly to the scene to deliver items like AEDs, EpiPens, Narcan, or trauma kits which can then be administered by whoever is at the scene (assuming they have appropriate medical training).

  • 🔐 The drone’s medical supply box only unlocks when an authorized code is input which is given by the operator, ensuring supplies aren't misused or stolen.

• Business Model: Large contracts with municipalities to cover specific high density regions

• End Goal: Sell to a medical device giant (e.g. Philips, Medtronic) or a public safety tech platform (e.g. Axon) for a 10–15x revenue multiple

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🛏️ Japanese Floor Beds

The Trend: Japanese floor beds are quietly becoming the next sleep trend…and not just in Japan. Inspired by traditional futons, these low-profile beds promote airflow, support natural spine alignment, and bring a grounded, calming vibe to the bedroom. Equal parts wellness tool and design statement, they’re catching on with biohackers, minimalists, and anyone ready to ditch bulky bed frames in favor of something simpler. Very cool trend.

Opportunities:

• Travel Futon Brand: Lightweight, rollable floor beds for campers, digital nomads, or minimalists who want to sleep grounded anywhere.

• Sleep Posture Coaching App: Pairs with Japanese floor bed users to improve posture, sleep tracking, and morning stretching routines.

Check them out

🤖 The Anatomy of a Perfect Prompt

The Tool: Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, knows quite a lot about prompting. And according to him this is the best way to prompt OpenAI’s models (01 in this case but it works well for others too). Let’s break it down.

Step-by-step:

1. Set out the goal of what you want to achieve

2. Give the format in which you want the response to be returned

3. Give the model proactive warnings where you think it could slip up

4. Finally, simply context dump any other information that you think could be relevant

Check it out

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🎵 Building a $500m Business in 6 Months

The Idea: Back in 2023 Michael Shulman, Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho, and Keenan Freyberg all worked together at Kensho, an AI startup focused on financial analysis. With backgrounds across quantum physics, machine learning, and music, the guys saw an incredible opportunity to bring AI to the music world. So they started experimenting with audio models on the side until one day, they realized the same tech they used to understand speech could be flipped…to generate music. This was the beginning of Suno.

The Execution:

• The MVP: Their first version was raw but magical: a simple interface where you type a prompt and it outputs a full original song. No vocals, no polish, just proof that AI could string together melody, rhythm, and emotion. They used internal compute and off-the-shelf models at first, layering in custom tweaks to get vocals and lyrics aligned.

• The Launch: Suno launched in December 2023 with a web app and an integration inside Microsoft Copilot. Early adopters? TikTok creators, indie musicians, and curious technologists. The virality came fast. People weren’t just impressed, they were hooked on the idea of making a song in seconds.

• Growth & Traction: Their initial hook was perfect: “make a song in 30 seconds” and the team drove virality by encouraging their users to post their AI-generated songs, which created a loop of curiosity. Suno also released frequent model updates (v2, v3) that showed tangible improvements in quality, keeping users engaged and the press intrigued.

• Investment: By May 2024, Suno had raised $125 million in a Series B led by Lightspeed, with participation from Matrix Partners and angels like Nat Friedman. At the time, their valuation hit $500 million, and their ARR was reportedly $45 million. This was just 6 months after launching. Incredible.

• The Result: Suno became the breakout AI music company. Despite a major copyright lawsuit from the RIAA in mid-2024, their tech and traction made them the undisputed leader in generative music - with artists, creators, and hobbyists turning to Suno as their new studio.

The Lesson: Creative tools win when they feel like magic. So if you’re building tools for creatives, build magic.

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🔍️ Founder Finds

• 🚨 Raise Alert: So it turns out pickle beer is a real thing, and this pickle beer company is raising $1.6m ($450k already raised)

• 📚 Must-Read: In case the economy goes south, you need to read PG’s essay “Why You Should Start a Startup in a Bad Economy”.

• 📈 Growth Hack: A simple idea that makes Gillette $60M/yr (1 min read)

• 💬 Founder Quote: “Entrepreneurship is a personal growth engine disguised as a business pursuit.” James Clear

👋 That’s All Folks!

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See you soon,

John and Darragh | The Half Baked Team