Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as popular as unhinged Sam Altman memes on X right now 🤣
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In today’s edition:
💡 Building Airbnb Experiences for a new vertical
📈 SPACs are back baby
🛠 How to add backend infrastructure to Lovable apps
🤑 From a sick dog to a +$1B business
🍻 Welcome to the bleeding edge of sitting technology
🎽 Community-driven Fitness Platform
Fit happens
Available Domain: Weworkout.com
The Problem: Community-driven fitness is exploding. Running clubs, pickleball leagues, and yoga-in-the-park sessions are all thriving. But they’re fragmented. Most rely on messy group chats, clunky Facebook groups, or word-of-mouth to spread. Over 40% of adults in the U.S. say they’d work out more if they had a community to join, yet there’s no streamlined way to launch and monetize one. So why not create a platform for this? Think Airbnb Experiences, but for fitness. Or Classpass, but for communities. The comparisons are endless. Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
Create a marketplace that lets anyone create, host, and monetize their own fitness community, from run clubs to local sports leagues and everything in between.
An organizer signs up and creates their community page which is discoverable on the platform. The platform has built in scheduling for meetups, monetisation tools for organizers and social features like group chats, leaderboards, and progress tracking to keep members engaged.
You monetize by taking a transaction fee (10–15%) on any sales through the platform and eventually try to sell to a major fitness platform (ClassPass, MindBody, Strava) for a 7–10x revenue multiple.
Rate this idea:
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💰 Guess Who’s SPAC, SPAC Again.
The Trend: IPOs are back baby. After a two-year drought, blockbuster IPOs like Coreweave’s, Figma’s and Klarna’s show that capital markets are open. In fact, we’re so back that Chamath is trying to revive SPACs, those fast-track IPO vehicles that took off in 2020 and...eh…didn’t perform that well. Wall Street smells liquidity. We smell opportunity.
Opportunities:
AI IPO Predictor: An AI tool that scrapes filings, market sentiment, and financials to predict IPO pops (and flops).
IPO Simulation Education Tool: A platform where beginner investors can practice investing in IPOs with fake money before risking real capital.
🛠️ How to Add Backend Infrastructure to Lovable Apps
The Tool: Earlier this week, Lovable released Lovable Cloud, allowing users to add backend infrastructure to their apps just by prompting. Here’s how to use it.
Step-by-step:
Go to Lovable and prompt your app in the normal way.
Click the cloud icon in the menu bar and enable Lovable Cloud.
Prompt Lovable to add authentication, a database or any other backend infrastructure to your app
📦 The Easiest Way to Start your E-commerce Business in 2025
In our recent webinar with Ryan Bartlett, founder & CEO of True Classic (+$850M brand), we asked what he’d do if he were starting an e-commerce business today.
His answer? Dropshipping.
It’s the fastest way to test products, gain traction, and scale without big upfront costs. And the easiest way to start is with AutoDS. One-click imports, automated fulfillment, and trend-spotting tools are just some of the reasons why it's trusted by 8,000+ founders.
🐶 From a Sick Dog to a +$1B Business
The Idea: Brett Podolsky’s dog, Jada, was sick all the time. He tried everything…prescription kibble, medicines, but nothing worked. Then a vet suggested he try home-cooked meals. So Brett started cooking simple recipes in his Brooklyn kitchen, and suddenly Jada’s health turned around. Shocked at how dramatic the change was, he called up his college friend Jonathan Regev. The two realized the entire $30B+ pet food industry was built on processed pellets that weren’t actually healthy. If humans wanted fresh food, why wouldn’t dogs? That was idea for The Farmer’s Dog.
The Execution:
2014: Brett and Jonathan launch a scrappy MVP, cooking meals themselves in their apartments and hand-delivering them to customers in New York. They branded it “The Farmer’s Dog” to stand apart from corporate-sounding pet food names.
2016: Joined Techstars, gaining credibility and seed funding to scale beyond Brooklyn kitchens. Word-of-mouth and Instagram photos of freshly packed meals drove early sign-ups.
2017: Raised an $8.1M Series A led by Shasta Ventures. Built out a national direct-to-consumer subscription model with centralized kitchens.
2019: Expanded production with USDA-certified facilities, cementing “human-grade” food as their differentiator. Raised a $39M Series B led by Insight Partners.
2021: The DTC boom + pandemic pet adoption surge pushed revenue past $100M+. Raised $65M in Series D funding at a near-unicorn valuation.
2023: Quietly crossed unicorn status, valued at $1B+, making them one of the biggest fresh pet food brands in the U.S.
The lesson? Simple insights paired with obsessive execution can turn a home-cooked experiment into a billion-dollar brand.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: OpenAI just launched Sora 2, their video generation model.
🚀 Just Launched: Taya just launched an AI wearable in the jewelry space. Very cool.
📚 Must-Read: Check out the 25 hottest startups in the world as of Q4-25.
✖️ Trending Tweet: How to win, according to Elon Musk
💬 Founder Quote: “Constraints are the gifts that force creativity.” Jack Dorsey (Twitter & Square)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Portable Stool
Ever find yourself standing in line thinking "I wish I had brought my own chair"? Tired of subjecting your lower back to the pain of standing?
Introducing SitPack™ - the compact, personal stool that transforms you from a standing peasant into a seated aristocrat in 5 seconds flat. This Y-shaped throne fits in your backpack and supports up to 300 pounds. Nice.
SitPack™ - sit pack and relax.
Vote
🔦 Reader Spotlight: Meet Daniel, Jonathan & Mehdi
What are you building? Imagine an invisible AI assistant on every call, that’s Keyn. It listens, transcribes, records, and instantly surfaces the right knowledge or actions in real time.
How did you come up with the idea? After 10 years in sales, I realized GTM teams had no real-time support. Keyn was born to fill that gap and help teams perform better live.
How can Half Baked readers help? Cutting through noise is tough. If you book a quick demo or share Keyn with someone in GTM, you’ll help us show the value instantly.
Connect with Daniel, Jonathan & Mehdi: Daniel on LinkedIn | Jonathan on LinkedIn | Mehdi on LinkedIn
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
👋 That’s All Folks!
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