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Startup Ideas #408: Mythbusting, Retro Tech...
Plus The Teenager Taking on Meta
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as shocking as the Tea app getting hacked 😱
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 back a classic show, but in a new form factor
📈 Why old tech is getting a new lease of life
🛠️ Using JSON prompting to get more consistent AI outputs
🤑 Meet the teenager taking on Meta
🍻 The next big thing in drone tech just dropped.
🗞️ Mythbusting Newsletter
Live and let lie
Available domain: Mythinformed.co
The Opportunity: In today’s world we’re constantly fighting against misinformation. X has community notes. Facebook has fact-checkers. Reddit has bullying. But the original pioneers of misinformation are not these huge tech companies, it’s two guys. Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, better known as the MythBusters. If you’re a millennial you definitely remember watching this show, it was amazing. The premise was simple - two guys would test out common myths to see if they were true or not. Which got us thinking, why not reboot the concept but in a newsletter format? Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: A daily newsletter that debunks one common myth and explains how it became a myth
Product:
📩 You spin up the newsletter (via Beehiiv of course) and get people to subscribe
🔍 Each issue focuses on 1 common myth belief e.g. “Do we really only use 10% of our brain?”, and breaks it down with expert quotes, sources, and TL;DR verdicts
😂 Content tone is fun, irreverent, meme-y, and highly shareable
Business Model: Monetize through native newsletter ads
End Goal: Sell to a media brand as a niche vertical for a 5x revenue
Rate this idea: |
🪄 Magically Create AI Video Documentation with AI
Tired of writing training materials, how-to-guides or other internal docs that rarely get read?
Meet Guidde, the AI tool that turns your workflow into a step-by-step video guide in seconds. Here's how:
Download the Chrome extension and hit record before doing a task
Guidde creates a video tutorial and adds voiceover, highlights clicks, and creates chapters
Share the guide instantly with your team
Perfect for onboarding, support, training and more. Join 100,000+ users already saving 12+ hours a week.
💾 The Retro Tech Comeback
The Trend: Wired earphones. Flip phones. Point-and-shoot cameras. Retrotech has made a resurgence in recent months. Take Casey Neistat, who’s now the Chief Storyteller at ModRetro, a business that’s selling world's first pixel-accurate GameBoy®. He believes there’s a desire to have something that has some sense of identity attached to it, and that's why we're seeing Gen Z types looking for older tech that reflects more of who they are. I think he’s onto something.
Opportunities:
Retro Gadget Resale Platform: A curated marketplace for refurbished retro tech, like Walkmans, Game Boys, flip phones, and early iPods, restored and ready to use, targeting Gen Z.
Nostalgia Tech Café Chain: A coffee shop/experience space where people can use functioning retro gadgets while sipping on lattes (great for cities or college towns).
⌨️ Using JSON Prompting to Get More Consistent AI Outputs
The Tool: AI is good at a lot of things, but being consistent isn’t really one of them. That’s why so many people have started to use “JSON Prompting” (JavaScript Object Notation) to make AI’s output exponentially more consistent. Here’s how it works.
Step-by-step:
Go to your LLM of choice (we don’t judge)
Get a quick primer on how JSON prompting works here with some examples to test
Start using JSON prompting in your own workflows
🤖 Get The Ultimate A.l. & Bot Checklist
A.I. has leveled the playing field like never before, empowering small businesses to achieve what once could only be done by major corporations.
But how do you know what tools you should focus on? That's where BotBuilders comes in.
BotBuilders is here to support you, providing the ultimate checklist to help you level up and harness A.I. to monetize your business:
Expand your business and allow you to do more
Improve the quality and quantity of your outputs
Save your precious time for higher value (and more enjoyable) activities
👓 The Teenager Taking on Meta
The Idea: At 13, most kids are glued to Fortnite. Not Eddy Xu. At that age he was building a robotics company out of his garage. He also built and sold an ed-tech platform and today is building a company to compete with Meta (after hacking one of their devices). And he’s achieved all of this by the ripe old age of…18. This is his story.
The Execution:
2021 : At age 13 Eddy launched a robotics education business from his garage. It was scrappy and lean, growing to $120k in revenue while outperforming well-funded competitors.
2024: At age 16 he built and sold an ed-tech startup for ~$135k. Grew the platform through clever hacks like a $275 influencer spend that drove 5M+ views.
Early 2025: While studying at Columbia, Eddy hacked the Ray-Ban × Meta glasses to create AI-powered chess-cheating glasses. The stunt went super viral.
Mid 2025: He launched a tweet simulation platform with a 24-hour “build + sell” marathon, making $30k on day one. He went on to turn down a $1.4M funding offer at a $10M valuation, wanting to chase something even bigger.
Today: He’s building an ai glasses startup, putting AI glasses on Chinese factory workers to create training data for robots in the future. It’s like Scale AI meets Meta (the acquisition makes sense now, Zuck is trying to take on Eddy…of course)
Eddy is a future great of Silicon Valley, there’s no doubt. He’s betting on himself, has strong conviction around his actions and doesn’t care what others think of him. We could all afford to be a bit more like Eddy.
🔍️ Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Google’s new tool for building mini AI apps, called Opal, has just entered public beta
🎁 Free Resource: Beehiiv recently released a website which showcases other websites that are designed well. One of them could look pretty familiar…
📚 Must-Read: Vercel’s blog post explaining what MCP is needs to be read
✖️ Trending Tweet: Sahil Bloom shares the single most important human trait for success
💬 Founder Quote: “Don’t worry about failure. Worry about boredom.” Noah Kagan, founder of AppSumo
🔦 Reader Spotlight
📧 Catch-All Verifier: Ariful Asif is tackling one of cold email’s biggest pain points: verifying sketchy addresses without trashing your sender rep.
🧑🎓 MagicBoard: Dhruv Chadha is helping parents raise independent kids, with an AI smartboard that builds habits while buying back time.
🎧 With Audio: With Audio turns any ebook or doc into a synced audio experience, perfect for founders who don’t have time to sit and read.
🎨 Creyate: Ismael Khalil built the fastest way to generate pro-grade ad creatives, no designer, no delays, just ship.
🏡 MortgageTrim: Manny Meneses found a way to cut mortgage payments without refinancing.
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Blimp Drones
Are you a drone aficionado? Looking to expand your collection beyond another boring DJI drone?
Meet the Zepploon™, the world’s first drone–blimp hybrid. It’s slow. It’s silent. It’s got the turning radius of a cruise ship. Oh, and don’t worry, it’s mostly fireproof.
The Zepploon™ - blazing a new trail in the drone space
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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