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- Startup Ideas #445: MidJourney for X, ChatGPT Usage...
Startup Ideas #445: MidJourney for X, ChatGPT Usage...
Plus The Father-Son Duo Who Built a $2B Business
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as the US actually finding a buyer for TikTok 👀
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 prompt-based design to a new niche
📈 What everyone is really using ChatGPT for
🛠️ How to get AI to understand your business
🤑 The father-son duo who built a $2B business
🍻 Some tabletop tech to 10x your dining experience
🔤 MidJourney for Fonts
Letter it rip
Available Domain: Fontjourney.ai
The Problem: Last week, Apple rolled out their new iPhone lineup for 2026. And while the new iPhone Air did its best to distract everyone from the fact that Apple is miles behind on AI, one unexpected flashpoint stole the show: the chunky pro font they used. Some people loved it. Others despised it. Which makes sense, because fonts aren’t just decoration. Typography is design. The right typeface elevates everything, the wrong one can ruin it instantly (which is why using Comic Sans is a war crime under the Geneva Convention as we know). But using new fonts is a pain. Hunting them down, checking licenses, downloading, installing. What if, instead of searching endlessly, designers could just make the exact font they need in seconds? Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: An AI platform that generates custom fonts from natural language prompts, giving designers unlimited typography options in seconds.
Product:
💬 Designers type requests like "Create a bold, futuristic font for a tech startup" or "Generate an elegant serif inspired by 1920s Art Deco posters."
🎨 The AI generates multiple font variations from each prompt, allowing users to iterate and refine until they find the perfect match.
📝 Generated fonts include complete alphabets, numbers, punctuation, and special characters, ready for download for immediate use.
💾 All generated fonts come with full commercial usage rights, eliminating licensing headaches and legal concerns.
Business Model: Freemium + credits to generate/iterate
End Goal: Potential acquisition by Adobe to integrate into Creative Suite, or by design platforms like Canva or Figma, at 12-18x revenue multiple
Rate this idea: |
📦️ From Chaos to Clarity: A 90-Day Plan to Win BFCM 2025
Feeling the pressure of BFCM prep? You can’t afford last-minute scrambles this peak season.
Triple Whale’s Ultimate BFCM Prep Guide helps you tackle the holidays confidently with benchmarks from 10K+ ad accounts, proven insights from H1 2025, and AI-driven workflows.
Did we mention you even get a 90-day BFCM readiness checklist?
Save time, cut guesswork, and set up your most profitable BFCM yet — with strategies built to scale efficiently, no matter your team size.
❓How People are Really Using ChatGPT
The Trend: More than 750M people use ChatGPT each week, but what is everyone actually using it for? Well OpenAI just released a 64 page paper outlining exactly that. The top use cases? Writing help (28.1%), practical life advice (28.3%), and basic information lookup (21.3%). Meanwhile, computer programming accounts for just 4.2% of usage amazingly. But for us this chart is a goldmine of startup ideas. Each bar is a billion-dollar wedge if you build the right verticalized AI product.
Opportunities:
Mixpanel-for-AI: A Mixpanel-for-AI that helps founders see what their users are actually doing with their AI tools
AI Wrapper Studio → A no-code tool that lets anyone turn a common use case (like “fix my email tone”) into a micro-product with its own interface.
🧠 How to Get AI to Understand your Business
The Tool: We share a ton of AI prompts to help you run your business. But unless AI fully understands what your business actually does and what you want to achieve, you can’t fully unlock the insights AI has to offer. Here’s how you can get AI to understand your business.
Step-by-step:
Go to your favorite LLM
Insert this epic prompt and answer the questions it spits back at you.
Once complete you can use AI for any other task you want completed in your business like creating cold email sequences, writing sales scripts or anything else really
✍️ Start Writing Online in 2025 (Free Masterclass)
Writing and sharing your ides online is one of the highest leverage activities you can possibly do. Trust us…we’re speaking from experience here.
That’s why we’ve teamed up with our friends Dickie Bush & Nicolas Cole (over 600k followers combined) to invite you to their FREE live masterclass on Thursday, Sept 18th at 9 AM PST.
In 90 minutes, you’ll discover:
The biggest benefits of writing & sharing your ideas online (from helping 10,000+ writers).
The best platforms to start writing online in 2025 (so you can accelerate your audience growth).
How to generate your first 30 content ideas (so you can finally get started building an audience of loyal readers).
By the end, you’ll have the foundation to become a prolific digital writer and start monetizing your knowledge. Spots are limited, save yours now!
👨👦 The Father-Son Duo Who Built a $2B Business
The Idea: Thanks to his investment banker father Walter, Jeff Cruttenden has been investing since age 11. But while investing was second nature to Jeff, he noticed how hard it was for his peers. They couldn't scrape together lump sums, were discouraged by expensive commissions, and felt overwhelmed choosing from thousands of investment options. Jeff wondered, "Why do we make it so hard for Americans to invest when it's so important to their well-being?" So he decided to fix it, coming up with an elegant solution…rounding up everyday purchases and automatically invest the spare change. This was the beginning of Acorns.
The Execution:
2012: Jeff and Walter teamed up with Mark Dru and Jason Martell to found the business, developed prototype for spare change investing.
2014: Launched the mobile app August 26 for iOS and Android, partnered with Nobel Laureate Dr. Harry Markowitz for portfolio optimization.
2015: Reached 1 million users within first year, raised $23M Series C to fuel explosive growth among millennials.
2016: Raised $35M Series D, expanded features beyond roundups to direct investing and retirement accounts.
2021: Announced SPAC merger with Pioneer Merger Corp, reached 8+ million users.
2022: Raised $300M Series F at $1.9B valuation, became a unicorn serving millions who were previously left out of investing.
2025: Still private, but the business plans to go public in the near future.
The lesson? Sometimes the biggest opportunities hide in the most obvious problems. Jeff's college dorm observation that investing was "too hard" for regular people became a $1.9B solution that democratized wealth building for millions.
🔍️ Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Every.to has just launched Monologue, their smart voice dictation app for Mac. Very cool.
🚨 Raise Alert: Figure just raised $1B at a $39B valuation. The robots are coming…
📚 Must-Read: OpenAI is making some big changes to protect their teenage users.
✖️ Trending Tweet: AI is impacting the way we think. Here’s how.
💬 Founder Quote: “Your job as a founder is not to be right, it’s to make progress.” Michael Seibel (Twitch, YC)
🔦 Reader Spotlight: Meet Erik
What are you building? Hi, I’m Erik, and I’m building Web UI, a platform-agnostic web-component framework that strips away boilerplate so developers can focus on clean HTML-driven interfaces.
How did you come up with the idea? Honestly, I got frustrated. None of the existing UI frameworks met my standards for quality or developer experience, so I decided to build my own.
Biggest challenge right now? Exposure. The hardest part is getting Web UI in front of other developers who might actually benefit from it.
How can Half Baked readers help? Simple: check out the docs, try it on a side project, and share your feedback.
Connect with Erik: Erik on LinkedIn
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Smart Salt Shaker
Ever felt like your dinner just wasn’t… connected enough? Wonder why your condiments don’t have Bluetooth yet?
Introducing the Smalt™, the world’s first smart salt shaker with app control, mood lighting, and Alexa integration. Because nothing says “fine dining” like asking Jeff Bezos’ robot to add salt to your fries.
Smalt™ - your new flavorite gadget
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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