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- Startup Ideas #425: Cognitive Fitness, TRE...
Startup Ideas #425: Cognitive Fitness, TRE...
Plus Building a $9M ARR Business in 8 Months
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as Chamath making a big SPAC comeback 👀
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:
💡 Helping people to flex their pre-frontal cortex
📈 Why TRE is getting big right now
🛠️ How to generate business ideas using AI
🤑 Building a $9M ARR business in 8 months
🍻 Solving the biggest problem with movies today
🧠 Cognitive Fitness Tracker
Flex your cortex
Available domain: Synapps.co
The Problem: Brain training apps have been around for many, many years. I mean who among us didn’t spend hours playing Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training game on the Nintendo DS growing up? Just me? Ok fine. But there’s a broader problem with many of these “brain training apps.” They don’t really work. A Nature study of 11,000 participants found no improvement in general cognition from brain games, and Lumosity was fined $50M for deceptive claims about their game preventing cognitive decline. The reality? You just get better at the games themselves through training. Meanwhile, the real levers of cognitive health, like sleep, nutrition, exercise, continuous learning, are overlooked. We don’t need more puzzles, we need a system that connects daily habits to brain health. Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: A cognitive fitness tracker that measures your brain age and guides you toward lifestyle changes proven to actually keep it young.
Product:
📲 Sign up, take a quick evidence-based brain age test (reaction time, attention, memory) to get your baseline score.
🧠 Your “Brain Age Gap” (how old your brain acts vs your real age) becomes your key health metric.
🥗 Instead of games, you get nudges to sleep better, eat smarter, exercise, and learn new skills, all of which are shown to reduce brain aging.
🎯 Gamified progress with streaks, milestones, and “age reversals” when your habits measurably improve your brain score.
Business Model: Free baseline tests, $9.99/month for personalized coaching, data insights, and integrations with wearables.
End Goal: Position as the “WHOOP for your brain.” Potential acquirers include Headspace, Calm, WHOOP or Oura, at an 4–8x ARR multiple.
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13 Million People Are Losing Weight With This App’s Scientific Method
Losing weight is hard, we all know it. But what if we told you there was a new approach that doesn't involve medication or strict diets?
Simple is a clinically proven weight loss tool that empowers users to achieve significant results through their app.
Their science-based method uses features like habit trackers, fasting schedules, and a personal coach to achieve lasting results. So far, they’ve helped 13 million users lose millions of pounds.
🧘 Trauma Release Exercises
The Trend: Recently a particular exercise video has blown up across X and YouTube. It involves lying down, touching your feet together and spreading your legs apart for a few minutes. The result? Your legs start shaking uncontrollably and you feel super calm, kinda like hitting a factory reset button on yourself. It’s pretty wild. It’s known as a trauma release exercise, and it’s part of the wider “somatic healing” trend, the idea that trauma, stress, and emotional pain are stored physically in the body and movement can help alleviate them. Hey, we’re all a little stressed these days, so anything that can help we’re willing to try…
Opportunities:
Calm for TRE: An app that guides users through trauma release exercises with personalization
TRE Retreats: Destination wellness retreats focused entirely on TRE alongside yoga and sound baths.
🗣️ How to Generate Business Ideas Using AI
The Tool: AI is great at riffing on business ideas (trust us, we know). Here’s how you can set up AI to become your business idea consultant.
Step-by-step:
Go to your LLM of choice (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini)
Type in this mega prompt
After you’ve added this, ask your LLM a question e.g. “Give me 3 AI-focused businesses I can launch solo in 30 days”
Go back and forth until you get an idea you want to work on
Get the prompt
🗄️ Compliance Made Simple for Startups
Achieving SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, or even ISO 42001 compliance can feel overwhelming. But Vanta makes it painless.
Trusted by 12,000+ companies, Vanta automates up to 90% of the compliance process, offers real-time monitoring, and streamlines audits so you can get certified in weeks, not months.
And we've teamed up with Vanta to offer a collection of resources for startups, including step-by-step compliance checklists and case studies from fast-growing startups. It's an incredible resource.
📧 Building a $9M ARR Business in 8 Months
The Idea: The agency to startup founder path is well worn. Andrew Wilkinson famously did it. And that’s how Richard and Archie Hollingsworth did it too. Because back in 2017 these brothers decided to launch a fractional executive assistant agency, which they scaled over the next few years. Then, when ChatGPT dropped, the penny dropped too. They realised they could take their EA expertise and turn it into an AI product. That was the idea for Fyxer AI.
The Execution:
2017: Richard and Archie launched their EA agency, Fyxer. They bootstrapped it to £5M ARR, logging hundreds of thousands of hours of EA workflows.
Oct 2023: The brothers decided to team up with Matthew Ffrench (not a typo) to launch Fyxer AI, an AI-powered executive assistant designed to automate email management, calendar scheduling, and more.
Late 2023: Joined the elite HF0 residency in San Francisco, spent three months building a lean MVP focused on inbox management, smart replies, and meeting notes.
Oct 2024: They officially launched. The product clicked instantly with executive teams drowning in email chaos.
Dec 2024: Hit $1M ARR in just two months. Growth was driven by sharp positioning (“an AI that executes, not just chats”) and obsessive integrations with Gmail, Outlook, Slack, and CRMs.
Mar 2025: They raised a $10M Series A at a $60M valuation, backed by Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, Marc Benioff, Lenny Rachitsky, and even F1 champ Nico Rosberg.
May 2025: The product reached $9M ARR, processing 50k+ inboxes and drafting over a million replies for clients like Starbucks, TikTok, AT&T, and Siemens. Not bad.
The takeaway? The first business you start likely won’t be your last. It’s all about starting something, and as you go the path forward will reveal itself.
🔍️ Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Elkar, this AI analyst for Excel and Google Sheets, looks very promising
🚨 Raise Alert: Eight Sleep has just raised $100M, I really want one
📚 Must-Read: Mercury’s insights on how 1,500 early stage startups are raising, spending and hiring is fascinating
🎁 Free Resource: This prompting guide for Lovable is sick
💬 Founder Quote: “Most great things are built incrementally, step by step, rather than in one big moment.” Patrick Collison (Stripe)
🔦 Reader Spotlight
🤝 demonstro: Eric Wiegand is building a platform where sales reps from different companies swap warm introductions.
📹 TL;DW: David Zirinsky is building a YouTube video summarizer.
🚘 GarageMeet: David Garcia Jeronimo is building a web platform for auto repair shops
🤖 Kaizen Agent: Yuto Suzuki is working on an AI debugging engineer for LLM apps and AI agents
👩⚖️ LegalLift.ai: Robert Linares is building a SaaS that helps parents stay organized for custody and divorce cases while giving attorneys clear, structured client records and insight.
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Movie Pee Break App
Ever accidentally chugged your soda during a movie? Scared of going to the bathroom in case you miss a big plot point?
Meet RunPee™, the app that tells you exactly when to sneak out and drain the tank without missing anything important. It even gives you a quick recap, so you’ll know what happened while you were busy with, uh, a different stream.
RunPee™ - because the only thing you should hold during a movie is popcorn, not your bladder.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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