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- Startup Ideas #407: Superhuman for X, Micro PE...
Startup Ideas #407: Superhuman for X, Micro PE...
Plus Bootstrapping to a $100K Exit
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Sydney Sweeney sending American Eagle’s stock soaring 🦅
If you want to read any previous editions of Half Baked, you can check them out on our website.
Let’s goooo 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 Bringing super efficiency to outdated technology
📈 Something micro that’s becoming a big deal
🛠️ How to use AI to create brand assets
🤑 Bootstrapping to a $100K Exit
🍻 The ultimate way to improve your grip strength
🗨️ Superhuman for Texting
Reply and conquer
Available Domain: Supertexts.co
The Problem: Between iMessage, WhatsApp and plenty of other texting apps, we’re all drowning in messages. It’s no wonder that the average smartphone user gets more than 60 notifications a day and spends over 3 hours daily on messaging apps alone. Yet replying still feels manual, messy, and mentally exhausting - especially for founders, execs, and salespeople who live in their messaging apps (if you know, you know). We have Superhuman for email, it’s time to build the same for texting. Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: The fastest, smartest way to reply to text messages across all platforms in one clean interface.
Product:
📲 Start by downloading the app which securely connects to SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, and more via API/notifications permissions
🪄 AI analyzes messages and categorizes them based on message type (personal, work) etc. and priority
🔁 Other features include smart reply suggestions, muting/ignoring spam texts and everything else to get to “messages zero“
Business Model: $15/month subscription with a 14-day free trial (similar to Superhuman pricing)
End Goal: Sell to a productivity suite (e.g. Notion, Slack) for a 10x ARR multiple
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📦️ Tariffs Got You Tense? Take Back Control With Direct Shipping and Tariff Deferment
Recent tariffs have majorly delayed the selling season for DTC brands that waited for the tariff cuts or ran out of inventory.
And for the next 90 days, tariffs have been reduced, but this might not be enough time to get inventory where you need it, plus, you’re still dealing with a 30% tariff.
Portless is here to help. While competitors' inventory sits on a boat for 60-90 days, you could be:
Restocking best-sellers in 3-5 days
Freeing up more working capital
Paying tariffs only after customers pay you
Turn 6-week delays into 6-day deliveries directly from China.
Portless lets you take back control of your inventory and start leveraging tariff deferment today.
🤏 Why Micro PE is Getting Bigger
The Trend: Big returns are often hiding in small businesses. That’s why so many investors are going the “micro PE”or “micro private equity” route. It's essentially the application of traditional private equity strategies to smaller companies, typically those doing $1-15M in annual revenue, $500K-$3M in annual profits and are often family-owned or founder-led. Combine these businesses with efficiency gains from AI and this can be a hugely lucrative strategy.
Opportunities:
Micro PE-as-a-Service platform: A marketplace where accredited investors can co-invest in small business acquisitions led by experienced operators (think AngelList but for Main Street takeovers).
Micro PE Operator Bootcamp: An education platform for aspiring acquisition entrepreneurs, teaching them sourcing, deal structuring, SBA lending, and turnaround tactics.
🎨 How to Use AI to Create Brand Assets
The Tool: A lot of being an early-stage founder comes down to being a good designer. You need to design a brand, ads, maybe even product mockups. Well this tool can help you make epic designs. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Go to Lovart.ai and create your account (they have a free plan so you can try it out)
Give a detailed prompt for whatever you want it to make for you, or use a community creation as your starting point
Pick your favorite design and go from there
🎟️ Win a free ticket to INBOUND 2025 ($1,399 Value)
Tech conferences can be transformative for startups. But as a founder, you have to be strategic with your time, energy and capital.
That’s why we've teamed up with HubSpot for Startups to give away two free tickets to INBOUND 2025, HubSpot's globally renowned sales and marketing conference, to our readers.
With speakers like Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic), Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot co-founder), Colin Jost (Comedian and writer) and many more, this is not to be missed.
🎓 Bootstrapping to a $100k Exit
The Idea: Back in 2021, Jed Caluag quit his job as a programmer at Chess.com to go all-in on YouTube. He had 100k subs at the time and was vlogging about the creator and software engineering life. But when he left his 9–5, he wnated to add a new dimension to his content. So he decided to build a product in public, giving him exciting content and a great story to tell his audience. He eventually settled on the idea of building “Ratemyprofessor“, but for dorm rooms. Sounds exactly like something we’d come up with. This was the beginning of Ratemydorm.
The Execution:
Late 2021: Jed started building RateMyDorm solo, coding it from scratch. He documented the process on YouTube while mixing in LA vlogs with his creator roommates.
May 2022: After 5 months of coding RateMyDorm officially launched.
2022–2024: Jed shifted his focus to YouTube full-time in NYC, occasionally mentioning RateMyDorm in his videos. With no monetization and minimal growth, it stayed a side project.
Mid-2024: Feeling ready to move on, Jed started looking for a new home for the site.
2024 Exit: RateMyDorm is acquired for $100K in a mix of cash and equity by David Park and Jenn Ai, ending the “building in public” chapter on a high note.
The lesson? While everyone out here is trying to build +$100M businesses, you can go a different path, building smaller tools that can still lead to life-changing outcomes.
🔍️ Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Microsoft just launched GitSpark, their AI app builder inside Copilot
🎁 Free Resource: Microsoft has an 18-episode series called "Generative AI for Beginners” in case anyone’s interested
📚 Must-Read: How to pitch your startup idea to the Accel team
🎙️Must-Listen: Theo Von interviewing Sam Altman is the crossover we never knew we needed
💬 Founder Quote: “The best ideas are just on the verge of being bad ideas” Patrick Collison, Stripe
🔦 Reader Spotlight
🍴Forkfull: Daniel Chiappetta actually built our Github for Recipes idea. What a legend!
🚀 Mudra: Emiliano Rivero is working on a generative engine optimization platform helps startups get referenced by AI models. Launching in a few days…
📅 Penk: Hieu Nguyen is working on this all-in-one productivity app that revolutionizes daily planning
📈 F2Insights: Landon Elscott is working on a job search CRM to organize your job applications
🎣 ScamIQ: Brian Farra is building a smart guide to spotting and avoiding scams.
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Pen Weights
Looking to improve your grip strength? Want to turn every time you write into an opportunity to train?
Introducing the Grip Reaper™, the world’s first pen with weighted ends to improve your grip strength. With mini dumbbells on each end, it’s perfect for anyone who wants to write love letters and crush walnuts barehanded.
Grip Reaper™ - write it out, work it out
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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