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Startup Ideas #414: Strava for X, DeFAI...
Plus From Surfer to Building a $40B Empire
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as valuable as Elon Musk’s new $29B pay package 👀
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:
💡 An app built for the fastest growing sport in the world
📈 Why AI + crypto could be a lethal combo
🛠️ How to get AI to write like a human
🤑 From surfer to building a $40B empire
🍻 The ultimate product for on the go greatness
🎾 Strava for Padel
That’s a padellin’
Available domain: Padeljoy.ai
The Problem: Pickleball. Love it or hate it (not unlike pickles actually), it’s taken the US by storm over the last few years. But while the US has been focused on pickleball, padel has slowly taken over the rest of the world. Padel is basically pickleball’s cooler, younger brother. It’s fast-paced, social and today is the fastest growing racket sport in the world. So given this sport’s cult-like following why not take cues from another sport with a cult-like following (running) and build an app for this space. Here’s what we have in mind.
The Solution:
In a line: A mobile app that tracks padel matches, performance, and social stats, similar to Strava
Product:
📲 Users download the app, create a profile, and link their club or add friends to start logging matches.
🏆 The app provides analytics on your game and lets you see local, club, or friend rankings to add a social, competitive layer.
📢 Users can share their wins, streaks, and highlights to friends or social media
🎾 Users can also pair up with others for matches to increase the amount they play
Business Model: Freemium app with a premium subscription for advanced analytics, plus club partnerships for leaderboards and event hosting.
End Goal: Sell to a tennis brand (Wilson, Babolat) at a 7–10x ARR multiple.
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🖥️ How to Use Framer to Validate Your Startup Idea
Startup ideas are exciting (we would know), but execution starts with validation. Here's how to use Framer to test if your idea has real demand (Using a past Half Baked idea as an example, “Peloton for Pickleball”):
Brand it: Give your product a name and a visual identity
Mock it up: Design a few simple visuals or product mockups.
Build fast: Use Framer to create a slick, responsive landing page. No code needed.
Drive traffic: Run ads to the page and see how many sign-ups or pre-orders you get
🪙 Why DeFAI is Here to Stay
The Trend: Crypto has historically been accused of being a “solution in search of a problem”. Well the advent of AI may mean it’s crypto’s time to shine. Take DeFAI (Decentralized Finance + Artificial Intelligence), the fusion of DeFi protocols with AI-powered decision-making. This combination allows for autonomous agents that can trade, lend, and optimize yield in real-time, all without human intervention. Even beyond DeFAI, Balaji Srinivasan believes that AI and crypto are perfect partners. Since AI is probabilistic, while crypto is deterministic, he believes that crypto can constrain AI. Super interesting concept.
Opportunities:
Autonomous Yield Farming Bots: Fully AI-driven bots that optimize yield across multiple DeFi protocols.
DeFAI Hedge Fund: A decentralized, AI-managed hedge fund where contributors pool assets and AI executes strategies.
✍️ How To Get AI To Write Like a Human
The Tool: We’re all using AI to write these days. We get AI to draft job specs, blog posts, even apology texts (you know you have). But getting AI to write like a human is tricky. AI writing leaves breadcrumbs that lead us back to the AI source. So here’s a prompt you can use to make AI write more like a human.
Step-by-step:
Go your LLM of choice (we’ll stick with ChatGPT)
Paste in this prompt to ChatGPT, either in chat or in your ChatGPT settings
Start prompting your AI to write
📦️ 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.
🏄 From Surfer to Building a $40B Empire
The Idea: Guillaume Pousaz wasn’t supposed to be a founder. The Swiss surfer-turned-fintech founder was once on track to become an investment banker, but life had other plans when his father fell ill and he dropped out of his master’s program. This led Guillaume to working in California at International Payment Consultants, where he got a front-row seat to the messy, fragmented world of online payments. Merchants trying to sell across borders were hitting walls with fraud, slow settlements, and endless middlemen. Guillaume saw an opportunity: build a single, sleek platform that handled the chaos for them. This was the spark that ignited Checkout.com.
The Execution:
2009: Guillaume launched Opus Payments in Singapore to help Asian merchants accept payments from Europe and the U.S., a scrappy, bootstrapped MVP held together by banking partnerships and persistence.
2012: They rebranded to Checkout.com and shifted focus to becoming a unified global payments API, inspired by Stripe’s developer-first model but targeting cross-border, enterprise-scale merchants.
2014-2018: Checkout quietly grew through word-of-mouth and direct sales to high-growth tech companies. No flashy marketing, just obsessing over acceptance rates and reliability.
2019: Checkout landed a $230M Series A led by Insight Partners and DST Global at a $2B valuation, one of Europe’s largest Series A rounds ever.
2020: The e-commerce boom hit and Checkout.com started processing payments for Netflix, Coinbase, and Klarna, and raising $150M Series B at a $5.5B valuation that year,
2022: A $1B Series D pegs the company at $40B, briefly making it Europe’s most valuable fintech.
Today: Fintech valuations have compressed, but Checkout.com remains a key global player processing trillions in payments annually.
In the end Guillaume’s story proves that amazing outcomes, like becoming the founder of a multi-billion dollar fintech, comes from doing unsexy things, like mastering the plumbing of online payments. That’s what it takes to win.
🔍️ Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: xAI has officially rolled out Grok Imagine, their image and video generator, to all X Premium users on the Grok app
📰 Headline: This company wants to be the Android operating system of humanoid robots. Epic.
📚 Must-Read: Balaji’s short piece “10 thoughts on AI” is pure signal and needs to be read.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Sam Altman believes we’re entering the “fast fashion era of SaaS”. He’s not wrong.
💬 Founder Quote: “The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” Thomas Edison, Founder of GE
🔦 Reader Spotlight
🛠️ Berrry: Vlad Grichina has built a platform where you can launch full web apps, just by tweeting.
🤝 MutualGro: Mikel Farrell is helping founders grow through smart, authentic collabs. No ads, no BS.
📚 LinguaLoop: Anthony Hien Vu is using story-based AI to make vocab and grammar actually stick for language learners.
🛠️ UXBurner: UXBurner is an AI-powered tool to help designers get fast, actionable UI feedback and grow faster.
📚 CraftQL: Doyin Olarewaju is teaching AI through hands-on, no-code courses built for curious non-techies. Like Duolingo for the AI world.
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Seasoning Keychains
Find yourself stuck eating bland meals on the go? Looking to inject a little more spice into your life?
Introducing the Trek’n Eat™, the keychain that keeps your favorite spices locked and loaded. Salt, chili flakes, cinnamon, you can bring any spice you want with you.
Trek’n Eat™ – never be caught flavorless again.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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