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- Startup Ideas #420: Family Photos, Swarm Intelligence...
Startup Ideas #420: Family Photos, Swarm Intelligence...
Plus From Side Project to a $270M Business
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as spicy as Elon and Sam Altman’s twitter feud 🌶️
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:
💡 Productizing a trending AI use case
📈 Why AI is taking its cues from nature
🛠️ Alex Hormozi’s “$100M offers” mega prompt
🤑 From side project to a $270M business
🍻 The best way to start your day
👪 Family Photo Widget
Kinstant memories
Available domain: Famgram.co
The Problem: Grok Imagine has taken over Twitter right now. It’s their image generation model, and most of the usage seems to be coming from people bringing old family photos to life on the platform. Beautiful. Which got me thinking…this has all the hallmark traits of a viral social app, right? Imagine it. A home screen widget where you and your family share new or old family photos, in real-time, with some AI flourish added to images like bringing old ones to life. Think of it as the family memory layer on your home screen. Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: A shared family home‑screen widget that brings old photos to life with tasteful AI animation, voice snippets, and reactions.
Product:
📲 Download the app, create a family, and invite relatives with a magic link. The widget starts rotating a few “starter” memories right away.
👪 One family widget is shared across all members, where anyone adds a photo or note and everyone’s widget updates. Members can heart/react, leave a short comment or 5‑sec voice reply.
🖼️ AI can also enhance and subtly animate scanned/old photos
🎉 The app assembles a mini reel for special occasions and surfaces it on the widgets.
Business Model: Ad supported model
End Goal: Potential acquirers include companies like Locket, Ancestry/MyHeritage, or maybe even Snap
Rate this idea: |
📞 How to book 5–10 qualified calls a week on LinkedIn
Here at Half Baked we're constantly looking for new advertisers to work with, who we mainly find through LinkedIn. Here's how Darragh (Half Baked's co-founder and all around great guy) uses Dripify to do this.
He builds a list of prospects and their LinkedIn URLs using LinkedIn's Sales Navigator
He creates a new campaign in Dripify, pastes in the list of prospects
We then use Dripify's pre-built lead generation sequence, fill in the blanks and launch the campaign
We let Dripify run on autopilot and watch our calendar fill up with calls.
Oh and pro tip - always connect with a short personal note (one sentence, zero pitch). Doing this increases our connection rate by more than 40%.
Start your free trial today and use the code HALFBAKED for a 10% discount, no credit card required.
🐝 Swarm Intelligence
The Trend: AI systems have long tried to mimic the action of the human brain. But now, AI systems are taking more inspiration from nature in the form of swarms. Swarm Intelligence (and Agent Swarms) occur where agents work together to solve complex problems without a central leader, like beehives or ant colonies. In AI, this means networks of smaller, specialized models or autonomous agents collaborating in real time. It’s decentralized, resilient, and increasingly applicable to robotics, logistics, cybersecurity, and decision-making systems. Badass.
Opportunities:
Collaborative AI Trading Bots: Multiple specialized agents that work together to trade assets, each focusing on a specific signal to outperform monolithic trading algorithms.
Swarm Cyber Defense Platform: Cybersecurity agents acting as “digital ants” patrolling networks, identifying and isolating threats collaboratively.
🏷️ Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers Mega Prompt On ChatGPT
The Tool: Alex Hormozi is the ultimate sales guy. He’s smart, charismatic and jacked, everything you expect in a sales guy. And when it comes to generating leads, creating offers and selling his advice is really, really good. And this prompt distills the advice from his book $100M Offers into a single prompt. Here’s how it works.
Step-by-step:
Go to ChatGPT or your favorite LLM
Enter this prompt and fill in the blanks at the bottom of the input
The output will give you feedback on the quality of your offer and
😵 Bad Passwords Kill Startups
As a founder, you're used to taking risks. But some risks just aren’t worth it - like leaving your company exposed to weak or reused passwords.
That's because just one leaked password can nuke your business. It’s not worth the risk.
That's why smart teams (and even dumb teams like ours) use 1Password, the industry leader in password management. It keeps your credentials safe, your team in sync, and your business protected.
Take big swings with your product, not with your security.
🔀 From Side Project to a $270M Business
The Idea: Jan Oberhauser (unrelated to the Bond villain, I assume) is a serial founder. He started in the film industry as a VFX artist, working on blockbusters like Maleficent and Happy Feet Two. But after some time in the VFX industry he decided to try his hand at becoming a founder…twice, starting showreel.tv and link.fish. But his big idea came in 2018 when he saw the need to create a tool to automate repetitive tasks, and existing solutions weren't sufficient. He worked on it part-time while working on his startup, and had a part-time job at the time too. This was the beginning of n8n (pronounced "n-eight-n").
The Execution:
2018: Jan began prototyping n8n in his spare time, testing with friends and early adopters in the developer community.
June 2019: The platform publicly launched on GitHub, quickly gaining traction thanks to being open-source and extensible.
Oct 2019: Product Hunt debut drives a wave of early users and GitHub stars.
2020: Secures seed funding from Sequoia Capital to accelerate development and grow the team.
Mar 2022: The company introduces “Fair-Code” licensing (Sustainable Use License) open for self-hosting, but with guardrails against pure reselling.
2023: Launches hosted n8n Cloud, adding a revenue stream while keeping the self-hosted option.
2025: N8n raises $60M Series B, valuation hits ~$270M, community exceeds 230,000 active users with thousands of integrations.
The takeaway? Being a great founder is not easy. Jan had to balance two startups and a part time job to become successful. Because anything worth having doesn’t come easy.
🔍️ Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: For the next 4 days v0 is free. Happy building!
🎁 Free Resource: This a16z partner uses these 10 AI tools in her stack
📚 Must-Read: In the age of AI, software creators, like content creators, will emerge as the industry’s non-professional creative class.
📚 Must-Read too: Hot off the presses - the ultimate guide for founders to start a lean, AI-native startup in 2025
💬 Founder Quote: “A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now.” Andrew Mason (Groupon)
🔦 Reader Spotlight
🪲 Recurse.ml: Jack Jackson is building software to catch bugs that tests miss (Just raised £2.5M in funding)
🎉 Cielo: Jai Lunkad is working on this platform facilitates intimate gatherings for individuals to connect over shared interests in San Francisco and New York City.
💡 Toksta: Sam Cassman is building a SaaS intelligence platform for B2B founders and marketers
📹 Widget.video: Omar Hasan is building a tool to help founders & marketers embed personalized video widgets to their landing pages
🗓️ Venngage: Eugene Woo is working on this AI-powered tool allows you to create stunning timelines effortlessly
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Man Cereal
Still pouring sugar flakes into your bowl like a child? Looking for a cereal brand that matches up to your manliness?
Introducing Man Cereal™, the only breakfast engineered for alpha-level gains. Packed with protein, spiked with creatine, keto-friendly, and so manly it practically comes with a beard comb. No added sugar. No BS. No tiny marshmallows shaped like unicorns.
Man Cereal™ - a high “brotein” way to start the day
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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