Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as impressive as both Elon Musk and OpenAI being worth $500B 🤑
Let’s get into it 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 Opening up VC opportunities to everyone
📈 Why consumer hardware is having a moment
🛠 Get 100 nano banana prompts for free
🤑 Turning down $100M to build a +$230B business
🍻 An incredible product for your kitchen
🔍 Distributed VC Scout Marketplace
Laying pipeline
Available Domain: Scoutpoint.co
The Problem: Sequoia. a16z. Legendary Ventures. Many VC firms have invested heavily in their scout programs, recognizing them as a way to widen their funnel, tap into operator networks, and spot outlier founders earlier. But while these programs have scaled, they remain closed networks. Invite-only, only for the select few. But what about the rest of us? So many of us out there have cracked engineer friends who should get funded or know startups that are gonna smash it. It’s time to give everyone their shot to be a VC scout. Here’s how.
The Solution:
A marketplace where anyone can submit vetted startup leads to thesis-matched VCs and get paid when the intro is accepted.
New users create a “scout” profile, run through a quick KYC/verification process and then start to submit leads via structured forms (sector, stage, traction, deck link etc.). Funds meawhile publish “open mandates” (what they want to invest in) and set bounties for intros.
The end goal here would be to sell to a business like AngelList.
Rate this idea:
🚀 Expect more from your CRM with monday.com
Your CRM should do more than just hold contacts. It should help you move faster and close more and more deals.
Monday Sales CRM gives founders the power and flexibility they need to win deals. You can easily create real-time dashboards, send mass emails, generate quotes and invoices, and build custom pipelines, speeding up your sales process.
This isn’t just another CRM. It’s the one designed to fuel growth.
🔌 AI Hardware Just Got Personal
The Trend: While everyone's been obsessing over AI software lately, consumer hardware startups have been cooking. There’s been a wave of new AI consumer devices from companies like Meadow, Taya and of course Friend. This isn't just putting ChatGPT in a gadget, it's purpose-built hardware designed around AI capabilities. And as foundation models improve, so too will these devices. Exciting times.
Opportunities:
AI Hardware Review Site: A site specifically for discovering and comparing AI-powered consumer devices, with reviews focused on AI performance rather than traditional specs.
Personal AI Device Orchestration: Software that helps all your AI-powered devices work together seamlessly, creating a unified personal AI ecosystem across wearables, home devices, and mobile gadgets.
🍌 Get 100 Free Nano Banana Prompts for Your Workflows
The Tool: Nano Banana is the best image generation model on the market right now. No question. It’s fast, accurate and there are endless use cases for the tool. And this GitHub repo has more than 100 high quality examples of images you can generate in Nano Banana, along with the prompts so you can generate these images yourself. Here’s how it works.
Step-by-step:
Go to the repo and search through the 100 prompts
Find the use case you want to use and copy the prompt from the repo
Copy into Nano Banana and generate the image you want to see
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📱 Turning down $100m to Build a +$230B Business
The Idea: In 2012, Adam Foroughi, a serial founder who’d already built and sold a couple of startups, spotted a gap. Mobile apps were exploding, but developers had no easy way to acquire users profitably. Ads were either clunky or too expensive, and the mobile ad ecosystem was a bit of a mess. Adam’s insight was simple: what if you built a platform that helped apps find the right users at the right time, while making it dead simple for developers to scale? He teamed up with Andrew Karam and John Krystynak, and AppLovin was born.
The Execution:
2012: MVP launched, an ad platform focused on performance-based mobile advertising. Early traction came from scrappy developer outreach and showing that small indie apps could grow without burning cash.
2013: Bootstrapped growth. AppLovin quietly scaled to tens of millions in revenue without taking VC money, rare in adtech.
2014: Reached profitability. Turned down a $100m acquisition offer from Opera, signaling their ambition to play bigger.
2016: Silver Lake invested $1.4B in a majority stake deal, giving AppLovin rocket fuel and validating it as a major adtech player.
2018–2019: Expanded from pure adtech into owning and publishing mobile games, vertical integration that gave them both supply and demand.
April 2021: IPO’d at a $24B valuation, one of the biggest adtech listings ever.
2022–2023: AppLovin became a dominant force in mobile gaming + marketing, often compared to the “AWS of mobile growth.”
AppLovin proves you don’t need flashy funding rounds or hype to build a juggernaut. They bootstrapped in the early days, focused on real revenue, and only took money when it made them stronger. Because sometimes the best growth hack is actually being profitable.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Mosaic, an agentic video editor, just launched. Cool product.
🚨 Raise Alert: This 18 year old high school dropout from Kazakhstan just raised $6 million after doing Y Combinator. Kids these days man…
🚀 Just Launched: Thinking Machines FINALLY launched their first product, Tinker. About time Mira.
📚 Must-Read: This founder documented his journey through YC…twice, in 2012 and 2025. A fascinating read.
💬 Founder Quote: "Every problem has a solution. You just have to be creative enough to find it.” Travis Kalanick (Uber and CSS)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Smart Chopping Board
Ever look at your cutting board and think "this needs more features"? Wish it was more than just a piece of wood?
Introducing ChopBox™ - the world's first smart cutting board. It weighs your food, sharpens your knives, kills germs, sets timers, and probably judges your cooking skills. It's like having a Swiss Army knife, but flat and made of sustainable bamboo.
ChopBox™ - it’s cutting edge.
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🔦 Reader Spotlight: Meet Wail
What are you building? I’m building Today in AI, a media company educating founders on AI startups, with 90k+ followers on IG & TikTok and 2k newsletter subscribers.
How did you come up with the idea? I was hooked on My First Million. The hosts built 9-figure newsletter businesses, and I thought, why not do the same around AI startups?
How can Half Baked readers help? Lead magnets are my biggest gap. What has worked best for you? I’d also love strategies for scaling subs through partnerships and paid media.
Connect with Wail: Wail on LinkedIn
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
👋 That’s All Folks!
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