Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as often as Forbes 30 Under 30 Founders end up in prison 👮
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In today’s edition:
💡 Bringing some AI flair to your wedding day
📈 The next evolution of e-commerce is here
🛠 How to use AI to create viral twitter threads
🤑 From viral tweet to a $2.8M raise
🍻 The wearable that’s shockingly effective
💒 AI Wedding Photo Sharing App
Snapily Ever After
The Problem: Wedding photos hit different. Everyone looks great, is having a great time and is hopefully a little buzzed. That’s why weddings guests take an average of 150 photos each, but 73% of those photos never get shared with the couple or other guests. The bride and groom end up with a handful of professional shots while hundreds of candid moments from different perspectives sit trapped on individual phones. Everyone ends up with a fragmented view of an amazing experience in their lives. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
An AI-powered app that lets wedding guests instantly upload, share, and collaboratively edit photos from the big day using AI.
Guests download the app using a unique wedding code provided by the couple, creating an instant private photo-sharing network for the event.
Throughout the wedding, guests upload photos in real-time, AI puts them into albums and users can even edit the photos using AI in real time.
Rate this idea:
🤑 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.
🛍️ Agentic Commerce is Here
The Trend: The next evolution of e-commerce is here…brought to you by OpenAI. That’s right, OpenAI just launched instant checkout and their agentic commerce protocol which allows direct, in-chat purchases from Etsy and Shopify merchants. This is the beginning of the shift from conversational AI, used as a search or information tool, to transactional AI driving conversion events. Time to buy even more stuff. Yay!
Opportunities:
AI Shopping Agent Optimization Agency: A new type of digital marketing agency focused on optimizing product listings and brand messaging for discovery and selection by AI shopping agents.
Agentic Commerce Analytics Platform: A SaaS platform providing analytics on how AI agents are discovering and purchasing products, helping brands understand this new sales channel.
✖️ How to Use AI to Create Viral Twitter Threads
The Tool: A viral tweet can completely change the course of your business, for better (hopefully) or for worse if you’re Vercel’s CEO. Here’s how you can use AI to craft viral tweets (or technically viral “posts on X” I guess).
Step-by-step:
Go to your LLM of choice and use this Business Overview Prompt to give it context on your business (if you haven’t before)
Enter this prompt
Tweak the copy and post your tweets when you’re ready.
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.
📱 From Viral Tweet to a $2.8M Raise
The Idea: Levan Kvirkvelia and Daniel Dhawan were sleeping on floors and maxing out credit cards when their third startup was about to die. The 25-year-old serial entrepreneurs had burned through the cash from their previous business, an AI website builder, but competitor Lovable launched first and went super viral. With $15,000 each in credit card debt and Daniel literally sleeping on a mattress at a friend's apartment, they made a last ditch pivot: instead of competing with Lovable on web development, they'd tackle something 10x harder that nobody had solved - AI-powered mobile app creation. This was the beginning of Rork.
The Execution:
February 12, 2025: Launched Rork with a tweet, an AI platform that builds complete mobile apps from simple text descriptions, targeting the untapped mobile development market.
February 24, 2025: Investor Matt Shumer posted a viral tweet calling Rork game-changing, gaining 1M+ views and saying it "blows Bolt out of the water."
15 minutes later: Austen Allred invested $100,000 after seeing the viral tweet, followed by $350,000 more commitments that same day from Founders Inc. and Hustle Fund.
March-April 2025: Closed a $2.8M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz's Speedrun program, with backers including Elizabeth Yin, ChapterOne, and Expo founders.
May 2025: Hit $550,000 ARR just two months after the viral tweet, proving that mobile app creation was the missing piece in the AI coding revolution.
The lesson? Share what you’re building with the world. Don’t hide what you’re building, get out there and share it.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Nothing just launched an AI tool for building mini apps using prompts.
📰 Headline: OpenAI is just launched their TikTok competitor. Hook the AI slop straight to my veins.
🚨 Raise Alert: Vibe-coding startup Anything nabs a $100M valuation.
📚 Must-Read: The State of Adventure Capital (it’s like 286 slides, but worth a skim)
💬 Founder Quote: “Don’t worry about being right, worry about being less wrong every day.” Katrina Lake (Stitch Fix)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Shock Clock
Trying to break those bad habits of yours? Still convincing yourself that all that TikTok scrolling is “research”?
Meet the Shock Clock™, the wearable that replaces self-control with mild electrocution. It vibrates, it zaps, it shocks…basically it’s negative reinforcement chic. Think of it as a Fitbit, if your Fitbit openly hated you.
Shock Clock™ - delivering shocking results.
Vote
🔦 Reader Spotlight: Meet Fred
What are you building? I’m building a browser extension that instantly decodes food labels and recipes on any website. Backed by science, so healthy eating feels effortless.
How did you come up with the idea? It started with my own grocery runs. I’d stand in the aisle decoding ingredient lists and nutrition labels just to figure out if something was actually healthy.
How can Half Baked readers help? I’m trying to figure out how to do B2C marketing without burning through a mountain of cash. If you have any experience, reach out!
Connect with Fred: Fred on LinkedIn
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
👋 That’s All Folks!
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