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- Startup Ideas #450: AI Assembly, ARR Ramp...
Startup Ideas #450: AI Assembly, ARR Ramp...
Plus How a Beach Conversation Birthed a $10B Business
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Stripe’s brand new (but divisive) logo 💳️
We’ve made today’s newsletter a little shorter than usual, let us know what you think.
Let’s get into it 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 Turning vague instructions into beautiful tutorials
📈 AI startups are growing ARR fast. Really fast.
🛠️ How to validate your app idea using Perplexity.
🤑 How a beach conversation birthed a $10B business.
🍻 Taking cleaning appliances down to another level.
🪑 Assembly Videos as a Service
Screw that
The Problem: Few things test a person’s patience (or a couple’s relationship) quite like assembling flat-pack furniture. It’s frustrating, time-consuming, and often ends in arguments. Surveys show 63% of consumers struggle with assembly instructions, and nearly 20% of returns happen because people simply give up. Black-and-white diagrams and cryptic manuals aren’t cutting it anymore. Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
Create an AI platform that converts furniture assembly manuals into step-by-step video tutorials for retailers and consumers.
Retailers upload a PDF manual, AI parses the diagrams and text and generates a realistic, 3D step-by-step video tutorial.
Over time, you could use an AR overlay mode to see where everything goes in real time during assembly, potentially with some smart glasses in the mix.
Rate this idea: |
🗄️ 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.
📈 AI Startups are the Fastest Growing in History
The Trend: We all know AI startups are growing fast right now. But they’re growing scarily fast. The median enterprise AI startup now hits $2M ARR in 12 months or less, a 2x increase from pre-AI. So the conventional growth path of "Triple, triple, double, double” is being thrown out the window (at least according to this guy). You have to grow faster than ever to make it in the AI age.
Opportunities:
AI Revenue-Based Financing Fund: Since AI startups are hitting $2M ARR faster, you can underwrite growth earlier with revenue-based financing.
AI M&A Fast-Track: Marketplace for early AI startups ($1–5M ARR) to get acquired quickly by incumbents. Think Acquire.com for AI infra/tools.
📱 How to Validate Your App Idea Using Perplexity
The Tool: Peanut butter and jelly. Netflix and chilling. All iconic duos. The newest iconic duo to add to the list? Perplexity and TikTok. That’s because you can use Perplexity and TikTok to validate your consumer app idea in seconds. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Come up with a list of consumer app ideas (we’ve shared a few before, just sayin’)
Go to Perplexity and ask how many views hashtags related to your app have gotten in the past year.
Find hashtags which have gotten more than 300 million views in the last year.
Choose the app idea with the most views.
🤑 Close Deals Faster with monday CRM
Running a startup means every deal counts, and you can’t afford to waste time wrestling with a clunky CRM. monday.com CRM gives founders a simple, powerful way to stay on top of their sales:
🚀 Automate follow-ups so you never drop the ball
📊 Build custom pipelines that scale with your vision
📬 Send mass emails and track every reply in one place
Less time wasting, more momentum, more success.
🏖️ How a Beach Conversation Birthed a $10B Business
The Idea: Back in 2006, three developers were sitting on a beach. No, this isn’t the start of a joke, it’s what Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami, and Giora Kaplan were up to. And like all developers do on holiday, the trio were building a website for their next startup idea. But when they saw how hard it was to build one they shelved their idea completely and decided to build their own website builder. They started Wix.
The Execution:
2006: Founded Wix in Tel Aviv with $3.6M in seed funding. Started building drag-and-drop website creation platform.
2008 - 2009: Launched Flash Editor and raised Series A ($5M) and Series B ($3.5M). Flash was cutting-edge technology at the time. Reached 1 million users in 2009.
2012: Made critical pivot when Flash collapsed, halted everything to rebuild on HTML5. Risky but essential move that saved the company.
2013: IPO’d on the NASDAQ at $16.50/share, raising $127M at a $750M valuation
2016: Launched the first AI website builder, ahead of the AI boom.
2025: Now serving 200+ million users across 190 countries with $1.7B+ total revenue
The lesson? Go to the beach with your mates, have a few beers and talk about your problems. It could be the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey.
🔍️ Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Here’s a cool tool to do deep research on anyone.
🎁 Free Resource: Google just dropped a 64-page guide on how to build AI Agents. Happy reading!
✖️ Trending Tweet: Here’s everything that new founders get wrong in their elevator pitch
🚀 Product Launch: Meta just released a dating app to combat “swipe fatigue”. Interesting move from Zuck!
💬 Founder Quote: “Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.” Caterina Fake (Flickr)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Roombaba
Ever notice your Roomba looking a little… grimy? Ever wonder who cleans the cleaner?
Meet the Roombaba™, the world’s first Roomba for your Roomba. This miniature sidekick perches on top of your hardworking robo-vac, buffing and dusting its plastic shell to give it the clean it deserves.
Roombaba™ - it’s vacuum cleaners all the way down.
Vote
🔦 Reader Spotlight: Meet Sergei
What are you building? I’m Sergei, and I’m building Novikoins, a gamified platform for internal communications teams. I spent over a decade working in internal communications, so I decided to solve the main pain points in this space myself.
What stage are you at? Right now, I’m testing, adding products, and cleaning up the UI. I poured most of my time into the backend and logic first.
How can Half Baked readers help? Honestly, the biggest help would be testing. Sign up, play with it, and even spin up a small tester community!
Connect with Sergei: Personal Website | Sergei on LinkedIn
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
👋 That’s All Folks!
Before you go:
What did you think of today's edition? |
See you soon,
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