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- Startup Ideas #443: Patient Sims, AI Courses...
Startup Ideas #443: Patient Sims, AI Courses...
Plus From $40K Failure to Building the Berkshire Hathaway of Apps
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as sought after as the iPhone Air 🍎
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 idea that’s just what the doctor ordered
📈 The product launch hinting at the future of learning
🛠️ Using AI to unearth startup ideas from Reddit
🤑 From $40K failure to building the Berkshire Hathaway of apps
🍻 The absolute best way to start your day
🧑⚕️ AI Patient Simulators
World of Wardcraft
Available domain: Medisim.co
The Problem: Medical school is hard. At least that’s what watching endless medical shows have taught me (shoutout Scrubs, best show ever). But recently I learned that medical students only get about 15 minutes of actual patient interaction per week during their first two years. But they need hundreds of hours of practice to develop proper bedside manner and diagnostic skills. Real patients are unpredictable, standardized patients cost $200+ per hour, and those creepy mannequins can only simulate so much. Meanwhile, 68% of medical students report feeling unprepared for real patient interactions when they start clinical rotations. It’s time to change that.
The Solution:
In a line: An AI-powered virtual patient platform for realistic, on-demand practice of diagnosing, treating, and communicating with virtual patients
Product:
Students interact with AI patients that have detailed medical histories, personalities, and symptoms that evolve based on the student's questions and treatment decisions.
The AI presents cases ranging from common colds to rare diseases, with symptoms that unfold naturally as students ask the right (or wrong) questions.
The platform provides instant feedback on communication skills, diagnostic accuracy, and treatment plans, with detailed explanations of what went well and what could improve.
Access to thousands of cases across all medical specialties, from emergency medicine to psychiatry, with new cases added regularly based on real medical data.
Business Model: Sell directly to medical schools. $50/student/month for access.
End Goal: Get acquired by a medical education company like Kaplan or Pearson at 8-12x revenue multiple.
4. Rate the idea |
🤑 Last Chance to Win $5K in Prizes
As you might have heard (since we keep mentioning it) we’ve teamed up with Shopify to run our Founder Lab accelerator.And today is your last chance to enter it.
Registering for the accelerator gets you loaded with bonuses: D2C playbooks, the $100M Idea Vault and $50 True Classic coupons.
Here’s how it works:
👉 You prove demand for your e-commerce product idea before this Sunday.
👉 Whoever makes the most progress walks away with $5,000 in prizes.
👉 Everyone gets access to our D2C playbooks, $100M Idea Vault and a $50 True Classic Coupon just for entering.
We’ll be announcing the winner in Monday’s edition. Good luck everyone!
Sign up for the accelerator today.
🎓 AI Courses are Reimagining Learning
The Trend: For years now we’ve all been paying hundreds for online courses that take weeks to complete…if we complete them at all (I know I don’t). But AI has just flipped the script with the launch of Oboe. The company, founded by Anchor's co-founders, lets you create a personalized course on literally anything with a single prompt. Want to learn quantum physics? Done in minutes. While Coursera and Udemy are still selling pre-recorded lectures from 2019, AI platforms are creating custom curricula that adapt to exactly what you want to learn, when you want to learn it. Just-in-time courses are the future.
Opportunities:
AI Course Quality Control: A service that evaluates and rates AI-generated courses for accuracy and effectiveness, becoming the "Rotten Tomatoes" of AI education.
Corporate AI Learning Integration: Help companies replace expensive training programs with AI-generated courses tailored to specific job roles and skill gaps.
🔍 Using AI to Unearth Startup Ideas from Reddit
The Tool: Reddit is a goldmine for startup ideas. Sure, it can be a chaotic hotbed of questionable takes and even more questionable memes. But buried in those threads are raw, unfiltered customer pain points. And with the right AI tools, you can surface these insights at scale and turn them into startup opportunities. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Go to Gumloop and find the "Reddit Insights Generator" template and customize your inputs
Enter parameters such as the Subreddit name (e.g., apps), topic of interest (e.g., mobile app for calorie tracking), and timeframe. Then click Run.
You get a subreddit summary, real examples with context, and sentiment data showing if the market is excited, frustrated, or indifferent
Analyze patterns to find ideas worth building
🐳 Scale Fast, Save Time, and Make This BFCM Your Most Profitable Yet
The AI-Powered Playbook for Your Best BFCM Yet.
AI is transforming how top brands plan, optimize, and scale during BFCM. Those who put it to work will react quicker, optimize smarter, and ultimately, unlock more revenue.
Triple Whale’s Ultimate BFCM Prep Guide combines benchmarks, proven insights, and AI-driven workflows to equip every team — from lean startups to scaled operations — with a clear advantage.
Turn this BFCM into your biggest win yet.
🥄 From $40K Failure to Building the Berkshire Hathaway of Apps
The Idea: Back in 2013, Luca Ferrari and Matteo Danieli had just experienced their first startup failure, when their business Evertale was shuttered. With just $40,000 left from their startup, they decided to approach their second act differently. Rather than building a new product from scratch and hoping for product-market fit, they would acquire digital products that already had proven demand but had "substantial untapped potential." They teamed up with Francesco Patarnello, Luca Querella, and Tomasz Greber to build the Berkshire Hathaway of mobile apps. This was the beginning of Bending Spoons.
The Execution:
2013: The team founded Bending Spoons in Copenhagen
2014-2020: Bootstrapped growth, profitable from day one, used over $500M in debt financing instead of venture capital to fund acquisitions over time.
2021: Acquired Remini AI photo enhancer, rewrote entire codebase, grew to 90M monthly users with $10/week subscriptions.
2022: Raised first equity round of $340M with Ryan Reynolds as investor, used the funds to acquire Evernote (who were doing $100M ARR at the time)
2023: Turned Evernote profitable by laying off 250 employees, doubling subscription prices, complete backend rewrite. Ruthless.
2024: Raised $155M at $2.5B valuation, acquired Meetup social platform.
2025: Acquired WeTransfer, announced $1.38B all-cash acquisition of Vimeo.
The lesson? You don’t always have to start from zero. There are an infinite number of ways to win, this is just another way.
🔍️ Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: The UAE just randomly dropped the world’s fastest open-source AI reasoning model? Say what?
🚨 Raise Alert: Higgsfield has just raised a $50M Series A
📹 Must-Watch: Here’s a complete guide to vibe coding with Claude Code and Codex (GPT-5 High).
📚 Must-Read: We’re huge fans of The Pint newsletter, where they break down business and politics news with memes. Check it out!
💬 Founder Quote: “You don’t need a big team to do big things.” Patrick Collison (Stripe)
🔦 Reader Spotlight: Meet Owen Dechow
What are you building? I’m Owen, and currently building Herd Genetics, a web app that lets students run virtual breeding programs. It’s designed to make teaching animal genetics easier by simulating traits, recessives, and inbreeding coefficients.
How did you come up with the idea? Teaching genetics has always been complicated. Real reproduction cycles take too long to show inheritance. Then a professor at Penn State asked me if I could simulate the process, and that idea stuck.
Biggest challenge right now? The science part is solved. The challenge is turning this into something sustainable. Herd Genetics works and is being used, but without a business model, covering server costs is tough.
How can Half Baked readers help? If you know a high school biology teacher or a college professor, please share this with them. Herd Genetics is already being used at Penn State and Cornell, and I’d love to see more classrooms benefit from it.
Connect with Owen: Owen on LinkedIn
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Caffeinated Soap
Not able to function before your morning coffee? Don’t have the energy to get up and actually make your morning coffee??
Introducing Shower Shock™ - caffeinated soap that delivers 12 shots of espresso worth of caffeine directly through your pores. Finally, you can get clean and caffeinated simultaneously.
Shower Shock™ - foam sweet foam.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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