Startup Ideas #397: GitHub x Wealth, Labubu...

Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as hyped as Grok 4’s big release 📣 

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

Let’s goooo 🚀 

In today’s edition:

• 💡 Bringing GitHub’s most magical feature to another vertical

• 📈 Meet the creepiest, most viral toy in the world

• 🛠️ Using AI to check your website’s SEO rating

• 🤑 The $1 billion startup building DuoLingo on steroids

• 🍻 The ultimate phone accessory for a night out

🤑 GitHub Wealth Tracker

Less cache, more cash

The Problem: If you spend time on tech twitter it won’t be long until you get hit with a GitHub contributions chart. This is basically a way for developers to proudly share their daily commit streaks, showcasing 365 days of consistent (or inconsistent for some) productivity. But if programmers track their GitHub contributions in such detail, why don’t the rest of us do the same with our income or even our startup’s income? We think this could be the cornerstone feature for a financial management app for individuals and early stage founders. Here’s the full plan.

The Solution:

• In a line: A dashboard for individuals or early stage founders that tracks income or revenue in a GitHub-style contributions chart

• Product:

  • 🔗 A user signs up and securely links Stripe, PayPal, or bank accounts to the platform

  • 📅 Every day their income or revenue is plotted on a GitHub-style chart for them to track either privately or to share publicly if they want to

  • 🔍 Over time you could expand the product features to include revenue forecasting, KPIs, financial statement creation for businesses etc, using this as a viral hook to onboard users

  • 🛠️ Check out the demo here if you’re curious!

• Business Model: Free to use for individuals, add a paid plan for businesses to get access to more features

• End Goal: Become an acquisition target for fintech or SMB platforms (QuickBooks, Xero) at an 8–12× ARR multiple.

 💻️ From Remote Roots to Local Power: Introducing Remote PEO

When the world went remote overnight due to the pandemic, Remote emerged to help thousands of companies not just survive, but build stronger, global teams from anywhere.

As the world now shifts to hybrid and in-office models, Remote is evolving too.

Say hello to Remote PEO, a modern, all-in-one HR, payroll, and benefits solution for U.S. teams.

Built to compete with legacy PEO providers, Remote PEO delivers the compliance, support, and infrastructure growing companies need, without the headaches.

It integrates seamlessly with Remote’s global platform, enabling businesses to hire both locally and internationally, all in one place.

From your hometown to the world stage, Remote makes it easy to scale with confidence, without switching systems or sacrificing quality.

Learn more

🧸 Meet the Most Popular Toy in the World

The Trend: Say hello to Labubu. This mildly terrifying creature is apparently one of the most sought after toys in the world right now. How sought after? Well adult collectors are paying thousands and even six figures to get their hands on these toys. Interestingly, despite being around since 2015, the toy only recently became a viral sensation after a number of celebrities bought them (Rihanna, Kim Kardashian and Dua Lipa to name a few). And this has made the toy’s manufacturer, a Chinese company called PopMart, a lot of money. Around $700m last year to be exact. Yikes.

Opportunities:

• Masterworks for Collectible Toys: A platform that lets investors pool funds to buy, tokenize, and trade shares of famous toys like Labubu as alternative-asset investments.

• AI-Driven Price-Prediction App: Build a mobile/web app that ingests auction and resale data to forecast short-term price swings on Labubus and other collectibles

Get the full story.

🔗 Using AI to Check Your Website’s SEO Rating

The Tool: While the death of Google and SEO has long been foretold by people engagement farming on Twitter, the fact of the matter is that billions of people still use Google each and every day for search. So having an SEO-optimized website is still critically important to your business. Here’s how you can check your website’s SEO score.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Zapier Agents, find the SEO Analysis agent and click “Use Template” to open it up in Zapier (you can use this for free, very handy)

2. Click test the agent and then when the agent prompts you, type in the website domain you want the rating on. It will then ask for keywords to test against, which you can enter.

3. The agent then gives you a detailed breakdown of your site’s SEO performance and also give your site a score out of 10

Check it out

⏱️ It’s Never Too Early to Start

Dorm rooms. Middle school classrooms. Garage workbenches.

That’s where these businesses began:

• Healthy Roots Dolls - now in Target, backed by Procter & Gamble

• Royalty Soaps - a soap empire with nearly 1M YouTube subs

• Bearbottom - an ethical menswear brand that’s donated 700K+ meals

• Mo’s Bows - a handmade bowtie brand started at age 9, now seen on Shark Tank

Some of these founders stayed in school. Others dropped out. Some raised capital. Others bootstrapped. But they all used Shopify to build something real.

Start your store with a 3-day free trial, then it’s just $1/month for your first 3 months.

Get started

🗣️ The $1 Billion Startup Building Duolingo on Steroids

Connor Zwick (right) and Andrew Hsu are incredibly talented guys. In high school Connor built FlashCards+, a flash card studying app that had 5 million users by the time he got to Harvard. Meanwhile, Andrew had 3 Bachelors degrees and had already been accepted into Stanford to start his PhD by age 16. But when the two were offered the Thiel Fellowship, they dropped out of Harvard and Stanford respectively. And this is where they met…and the magic began. They became obsessed with AI and built an entire speech recognition system that not only understood what people were saying, but also their accents. They knew they could turn this into a killer language learning app. This was the beginning of Speak.

The Execution:

• September 2016: The guys closed a seed round despite zero revenue and only earning $18 from three users on the day they launched. Hardly an instant success.

• 2018: After years of struggling to find PMF they niched down hugely, focussing exclusively on the South Korean market. They repositioned the value proposition to “speak more English in your first 20 minutes”. PMF clicked and growth skyrocketed.

• 2020: They raised a seed round of $11M from the JAM Fund and Justin Mateen

• 2022: Speak became the #1 education app in South Korea with 3 million users and began scaling into 40+ markets, including the US and Japan. They raised $27M that year in a round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund.

• 2024: Speak surpassed 10M total users and raised a $78 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation.

• Today: Speak operates across dozens of countries, is still independent, and is on track to profitability.

The lesson? Even the best products have failed launches. The key is to relentlessly focus on a single niche, and once you hit PMF, go for it.

🔍️ Founder Finds

• 🛠️ AI Tool: Higgsfield Soul ID allows users to create fully personalized, consistent characters. Very cool!

• 🎁 Free Resource: Anthropic’s Claude 4 prompt engineering best practices guide is worth a quick read (if you’re a Claude fan).

• 📚 Must-Read: Check out the 25 hottest tech startups in the world right now. Incredible list.

• 🏷️ Founder Discount: Early-stage founders get 1 year free of Framer’s Launch Plan (worth $900) by mentioning "Half Baked" in the partner field. T&Cs apply.

• 💬 Founder Quote: “Find the pain and serve the painkiller.” Keith Rabois, early investor & operator at PayPal, LinkedIn, and YouTube

🔦 Reader Spotlight

• 🗓️ Social Rails - Matt is simplifying social media content creation, scheduling, and analytics across platforms.

• 📝 Start Writing - Matt Rutherford is making daily journaling easy with a 3-minute micro-writing app.

• 📚 Hardcover - Adam Fortuna is building a book-loving community with tracking via web, app, and API.

• 🚀 LeadBuckets - Nathan Denholm is helping devs generate leads by scoring sites and creating mockups based on performance.

• 🛠️ Plugin Studio - Michael Rogers is letting users build WordPress plugins with plain English, no code needed.

P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!

🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Phone Case Lighter

• Enjoy the occasional cigarette or cigar? Sick of asking strangers for a light because yours isn’t working?

• Introducing the Phone Case Lighter™. This ultra-durable case not only protects your phone from harm, but also houses a flamethrower-grade lighter. Perfect for lighting cigarettes, cigars, anything you want.

• Phone Case Lighter™ – it’s hot stuff.

Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

👋 That’s All Folks!

Before you go just a few public service announcements:

• Have an idea you want feedback on? DM me to discuss it or book in for Office Hours here.

• Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you asap.

See you soon,

John and Darragh | The Half Baked Team