Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Bill Ackman’s epic Halloween costume 🎃
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Let’s get into it 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea inspired by a product we love
📈 How Nike are rewiring our brains through our feet
🛠 How to create custom skills with Claude
🤑 The $500M overnight success (a decade in the making)
🍻 The perfect product for people on the road a lot
👦 Bolt.new for Kids
Appy building
Available Domain: Kidbilt.co
The Problem: Kids love making things. They make up games, make up stories, but most of all, they love making messes. But when it comes to building digital things (apps, games, and websites), they’re stuck with tools that are either too simple to be satisfying or too complex to be usable. Scratch feels like baby steps, but code looks like hieroglyphics. Today’s 10-year-olds are growing up surrounded by generative AI that can make anything, except, apparently, a space where they can safely make something of their own. It’s time to change that. Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: A safe, chat-to-build app studio for kids aged 6–14 that turns ideas into shareable web/mobile apps
Product:
🧒 A child signs up (alongside a teacher or parent) and is guided through a fun, interactive tutorial on how to talk to the AI builder.
💡 They describe the app or game they want to build, like “a game where a unicorn jumps over rainbows to collect stars.” The AI asks clarifying questions and guides the child through the build.
🚀 The child can instantly play their game, share it with friends and family via a unique link, and even publish it to a kid-friendly app store.
🧑🏫 As they build, the platform highlights key coding concepts (loops, variables, etc.) in a simple, visual way.
Business Model: A freemium model with a limited number of free projects, then a subscription for unlimited projects and advanced features.
End Goal: Sell to a major EdTech company (like Chegg, Coursera, or Kahoot!) for a 10-15x revenue multiple.
Rate this idea:
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Price Guarantee: Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. $300 back via virtual prepaid card; allow 14 weeks from rebate submission. See full terms on website.
🧠 Nike is Using Your Feet to Rewire Your Brain
The Trend: Nike has just taken a big step forward into the future of footwear. The company just launched the Nike Mind 001 mule and Mind 002 sneakers, shoes designed to help athletes lock in their mindset before and after competitions. How, you ask? Apparently the shoes use 22 independent foam nodes in the soles which activate key sensory areas of the brain via underfoot stimulation (never thought I’d be writing the words “underfoot stimulation” in this newsletter, yet here we are). This could be the beginning of a fascinating new category of footwear. For me though, I’m still waiting on my automatic lace up shoes from Back to the Future…
Opportunities:
Smart Meditation & Yoga Mats: A business could develop a line of mats with integrated pressure sensors and haptic feedback nodes, using similar technology to these shoes.
Sensory-Enhanced Infant Sleep Aids: Crib mattresses or sleep sacks that employ gentle, calming vibrations to soothe infants and improve sleep quality, applying the same sensory integration principles.
⚙️ How to Create Custom Skills with Claude
The Tool: A few weeks ago Anthropic launched Claude Skills, sets of instructions that tell Claude how to complete a task, such as generating a report, a presentation or a coding task in a repeatable way that’s customized to you. Some are even saying they’re a bigger innovation than MCP. So…here’s how to use them.
Step-by-step:
Go to Claude and ask it to create a specific Skill e.g. “Please help me to create a blog writing skill”
Give some examples of similar blog posts you want to write and answer any other questions Claude throws at you
When you want to write a blog, simply give Claude the title of the post and ask it to use the blog writing skill when writing the post.
⚒️ Using Lindy to Give Your Marketing Team Superpowers
What if your entire marketing workflow ran itself? With Lindy, it does. Lindy’s AI agents do both, research markets, analyze data, and generate creative that converts, all 100% automatically.
How it works:
Go to Lindy.ai and install their AI CMO agents - the Research Agent, Analysis Agent and Creative Agent
Once you’re in, follow each agent’s prompts, starting with the Research Agent
Sit back and relax while your marketing campaign comes together
Check out the full tutorial and claim $20 worth of free credits.
🤖 The $500M Overnight Success (A Decade in the Making)
The Idea: Bernt Bornich has always been obsessed with robots. And after working in autonomous driving and AI research, he realized the real problem wasn’t about looks - it was about movement. Industrial robots were fast but rigid, humans were slow but adaptable. But what if a robot could move, sense, and react like a person? That thought became the seed for 1X Technologies.
The Execution:
2014: Founded in Moss, Norway, under the name Halodi Robotics, Bernt began developing a humanoid robot capable of natural, full-body motion using custom-built actuators - a radically different approach from typical stiff robotic arms.
2017: The company unveiled EVE, a first-generation humanoid robot, demonstrating early progress in bipedal locomotion and manipulation.
2023: Closed a $23.5M Series A led by OpenAI’s Startup Fund, making it one of the few robotics investments from OpenAI. Rebranded to 1X, moving away from a “robotics company” to an “embodied AI company.”
January 2024: 1X secured an additional $100 million in a Series B funding round, with notable participation from EQT Ventures. This substantial funding was aimed at scaling the production of its second-generation android, NEO.
October 2025: 1X unveiled NEO, which took the world by storm (we spoke about it in yesterday’s newsletter you may remember)
The lesson? You have to be willing to play the long game in business. Bernt and his team spent years and years building, waiting for their moment in the sun. Theirs eventually came. So if you keep going, your moment will come too.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Cursor launched Cursor 2.0 this week, which is all about bringing agents into your IDE. Very cool.
📚 Must-Read: Why we all must take weird ideas seriously. This one hits close to home for us!
🎙️ Must-Listen: Elon Musk just went on all-in, worth a listen.
✖️ Trending Tweet: This chart on the long-term performance of stocks vs housing (from the WSJ) is pretty incredible.
💬 Founder Quote: “The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.” Naval
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Pillow Steering Wheel Cover
Ever find yourself needing to nap in your car? Or just wish you could catch some Z’s while waiting in traffic?
Introducing CloudCover™, the revolutionary steering wheel cover that's also a plush pillow. Crafted from premium memory foam, it transforms any parking spot or traffic jam into a five-star nap destination, so you can drift off to sleep in seconds.
CloudCover™ - when being “asleep at the wheel” is exactly what you want.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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