Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as EA apparently getting acquired? ⁉
Let’s get into it 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 Forget prediction markets, let’s talk opinion markets
📈 Why the vibes are off right now
🛠 How to validate your startup idea quickly
🤑 How a huge pivot saved a future unicorn
🍻 Saving expensive tech from an early death
⚔️ Great Debate Newsletter
Duelly noted
Available Domain: Greatdebate.co
The Problem: Prediction markets are having a bit of a moment, so much so that both Kalshi and Polymarket were mentioned on South Park this week. But while everyone’s talking about prediction markets, I’ve been thinking a lot about opinion markets. Because we all have strong opinions, right? About silly things, like pineapple’s place on pizza (it has none) or more serious topics that really matter. So…can you build a business around people’s strongly held views? We think so. Here’s how.
The Solution:
Launch a daily newsletter that presents both sides of trending issues in a short, sharp, and entertaining way, as presented by experts.
A reader signs up and gets a daily issue covering one hot topic (politics, business, tech), experts present both sides and readers vote on the most convincing side.
Rate this idea:
🚀 Building Compliance Into Early-Stage Growth
Compliance doesn’t have to kill innovation.
On Sept 30th (11am BST), join Vanta’s free webinar Secure from the Start with experts Tevin and Tom from Robin AI & Pavlov.
Learn how to kickstart SOC 2, ISO 27001 & GDPR readiness without friction, turn compliance into a growth weapon for sales + fundraising, and build a rock-solid security foundation that earns trust in competitive markets.
Founder-tested strategies, practical tools, and zero fluff.
👀 Why the Vibes are not Immaculate
The Trend: Sam Altman recently mentioned that he’s starting to take the “dead Internet theory”, a belief that AI and bot-generated content has surpassed the human-generated internet, very seriously. Fast forward to today and Meta has just accelerated us towards this dead internet by launching Vibes, a short-form video feed of purely AI “content”…aka…AI slop. It turns out Meta’s SuperIntelligence Labs has just become Meta’s SlopIntelligence Labs. Sigh.
Opportunities:
Humans-Only Social Platform: A social network where AI-generated users and content is explicitly banned.
SlopFilter (AI Content Blocker): A browser extension/feed filter that detects and removes AI-generated content in real-time.
⏩ How to Validate Your Startup Idea Quickly
The Tool: Our readers are awesome. Take Dan, who reached out to us because he built a tool called Green Light Disco that helps founders to validate their business ideas. Where Lovable or Bolt is great for building ideas you’re solid on, this product is about figuring out if a Half Baked idea is worth pursuing at all. Here’s how you can use it.
Step-by-step:
Go to the site, share your idea and brand voice and the site instantly generates a test-ready website
Hit publish, choose your test duration and drive some traffic to your site.
At the end of the test you receive your performance score and customized recommendations to either refine or fully launch your idea.
🏅Win BFCM With AI That Knows Ecommerce (& 50 Prompts!)
This BFCM, generic AI isn’t enough. That’s why Triple Whale built 50 ecommerce-specific prompts designed to turn raw data into real growth.
Inside you’ll find prompts to help you:
✅ Analyze past campaign performance to uncover what actually drove results
🎨 Optimize creative + campaigns with data-backed insights
🛒 Maximize acquisition, retention, and LTV across channels
📦 Forecast demand and streamline inventory
⚡ Boost site conversion rates with targeted optimization
Plus, see how to automate it all with Triple Whale's Moby Agents, the first AI agents built for your entire brand.
🗣️ How a Huge Pivot Saved a Future Unicorn
The Idea: Tanay Kothari is a prodigious talent. He started coding at 10 and built one of the world’s first voice assistants at age 11…which went super viral for good measure. His inspiration? He wanted to build a real-life JARVIS, Tony Stark’s AI assistant from Iron Man, something we all wanted growing up. Fast forward through 50+ app launches and founding FeatherX (an e-commerce personalization platform), and Tanay teamed up with Sahaj Garg to build hardware that converted neural signals into speech. This was the beginning of Wispr Flow.
The Execution:
2021: The team built first prototype of their wearable that converted neural signals into speech. Raised initial funding and hired a world-class neuroscience + Machine Learning team.
2022–2023: Grew the team to 40 employees. Their device worked, but there was no consumer market for it.
July 2024: After a pivotal board meeting, the team pivoted hard. They cut headcount from 40 to 5 in a single day and put their full focus on building Flow, a software-only dictation platform.
Oct 2024: They blitzed a six-week sprint to launch Flow. Their launch drew in millions of views, hit #1 on Product Hunt. Wispr was reborn as a consumer software company.
Early 2025: Product-Market Fit achieved. 20% paid conversion (vs. 3–4% industry norm). Organic growth >90% month-over-month. Expanded the team again with confidence.
2025: Raised a $30M Series A funding round from Menlo Ventures. And they’re just getting started.
The lesson? Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come from scaling back your ambitions. Tanay learned that building something people need today beats building something they might want tomorrow.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: VEED just released the world’s first-ever AI talking video model.
📰 Headline: OpenAI just released GDPval, a new evaluation that measures model performance on real-world tasks.
📚 Must-Read: Could AI spell the end of thinking?
📹 Must-Watch: Joe Lonsdale is always worth listening to. Super smart guy.
💬 Founder Quote: “It’s easier to do something 100% than 98%.” Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: AirPod Parachutes
Tired of your AirPods falling out of your ears? Worried you’ll have to shell out a small fortune if one hits the ground at the wrong time?
Introducing Airchutes™, tiny parachutes that protect your AirPods. They deploy mid-fall, ensuring your AirPods drift gracefully to safety instead of smashing onto the ground.
Airchutes™ - when the only drop you’re thinking about is the beat dropping.
Vote
🔦 Reader Spotlight: Meet Vaughn
What are you building? I’m building Kindled Spirit, a Chrome extension that shows personalized Bible verses with themes, backgrounds, and translations.
How did you come up with the idea? It hit me when I realized I was too busy for daily Bible reading, so I built a way for scripture to meet me where I spend the most time, my browser.
How can Half Baked readers help? The hardest part is spreading awareness and finding early users who will shape how Kindled Spirit grows. So if you’re interested, check it out!
Connect with Vaughn: Vaughn on LinkedIn
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
👋 That’s All Folks!
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