Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as hotly anticipated as the New York City mayor election results 👀
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Let’s get into it 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 A product a YC Partner wants someone to build
📈 The movie sequel that could be playing out right now
🛠 Using AI to estimate the market size of a business idea
🤑 From $0 to $8B in 3 Years
🍻 The perfect device for laundry day
👂 AI-Powered Earphones
The AI eara
Available Domain: Echolabs.ai
The Opportunity: Everyone’s talking about what the next big consumer device will be. Jony Ive and OpenAI are cooking something up. Elon Musk believes we’ll all be using lightweight edge nodes optimized for AI inference, whatever that means. Zuck is going all in on the AR glasses form factor and you better believe that Apple won’t give up their crown without a fight. And now David Lieb, YC Partner and founder of Bump (acquired by Google), has laid out his vision for an AI product he wants someone to build. This is what he has in mind.
The Solution:
In a line: AI-powered earphones with wide-angle cameras and always-on AI, providing proactive and reactive AI assistance.
Product:
🎧 A user pairs the AI-powered earbuds with their smartphone, which provides the primary compute and connectivity.
📸 The wide-angle cameras provide visual context to the AI, allowing it to understand the user's environment and offer relevant information or assistance.
🧠 The always-on voice assistant can distinguish the user's voice from other sounds, and can be engaged reactively with a wake word or proactively offer suggestions based on the context.
🔋 The device leverages the phone for heavy processing, preserving the earbuds' battery for all-day use, while a custom charging case provides multiple recharges on the go.
Prototype:
💻 Check out the landing page we built on Bolt.new
💬 Get the prompt we used to build the landing page
🧑💻 Take your own version of the landing page
Business Model: One-time hardware purchase
End Goal: Sell to a major tech company like Apple, Google, or Amazon for a 2-3x revenue multiple, or a strategic acquisition by a company like Meta to integrate with their AR/VR ecosystem.
Rate this idea:
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📉 Is The Big Short 2 Happening Right Now?
The Trend: 2008 feels like forever ago. But today, a lot of traders are starting to feel some déjà vu. That’s because recent data shows the delinquency rate on Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS) for offices is now over a full percentage point above the post-2008 Financial Crisis. Sure the CMBS market is much smaller than the mortgage-backed security market, but it’s still a $1T market. Meanwhile, the press is widely reporting that Michael Burry’s 13F shows he’s betting heavily against AI darlings like Palantir and Nvidia, even if he’s calling it fake news himself. It’s hard to know what to believe right now, but I reckon Michael Lewis and Adam McKay could be looking at another big payday pretty soon…
Opportunities:
Pop-Up and Short-Term Retail Space Leasing: A platform that connects landlords of vacant retail spaces with businesses looking for short-term leases for pop-up shops, events, or seasonal stores.
Fractional CRE Investing Platform: A platform allowing small investors to buy fractional ownership in distressed real estate portfolios.
📊 Using AI to Estimate the Market Size of a Business Idea
The Tool: Market size is hugely important when validating startup ideas. Here’s how you can use AI to figure it out.
Step-by-step:
Go to Perplexity (or another model of your choice)
Use this prompt:
“You’re an analyst at McKinsey. Estimate TAM, SAM, and SOM for [business idea]. Use real data sources (links included) and show reasoning step-by-step. Format as: Summary → Calculations → Citations.”
Compare market sizes across different ideas and use that to inform your decision
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🧑⚖️ From $0 to $8B in 3 Years
The Idea: When Gabe Pereyra, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, showed his friend Winston Weinberg, a securities and antitrust litigator at O'Melveny & Myers, OpenAI’s GPT-3 API, Winston’s brain nearly exploded. At the time Winston was drowning in repetitive legal work (redlining, drafting, and case research) and knew that the pair could team up to build the perfect lawyer…one that worked tirelessly, never slept, and could instantly process millions of documents. Think Harvey Specter, but better. That was the beginning Harvey AI (yes, they named the business after a TV show character. Love that).
The Execution:
2022: The pair started prototyping using OpenAI’s GPT-3 API. They built a scrappy MVP that could draft NDAs and review contracts for basic errors. Within weeks, lawyers at top firms were testing it.
November 2022: They got accepted into the Y Combinator Winter ‘23 batch, attracting early attention from major law firms for its potential to automate grunt work.
March 2023: Harvey announced a $5M seed round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund - one of the earliest official partnerships with OpenAI.
2023: The company quietly piloted its product with over 15 global law firms, including PwC Legal, which later rolled it out to thousands of lawyers worldwide.
April 2024: Harvey raised a $21M Series A led by Sequoia Capital, bringing total funding to over $26M.
2025: Harvey has blasted past $100M ARR and just raised $150M at an $8B valuation from a16z.
The lesson? Domain expertise is a great foundation for a business. If you can combine domain expertise with a new shift in technology, you can build an incredible business, just like Winston and Gabe have.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Perplexity recently launched AI-Powered patent search (and probably killed a few startups in the process).
📱 Cool App: Wabi is a social app store where you can instantly see what apps your friends are creating, loving, and remixing. Very cool concept.
📚 Must-Read: Here are 36 things that are keeping Greg Isenberg up at night.
✖️ Trending Tweet: This is the TikTok growth marketing strategy every Gen Z founder is using right now.
💬 Founder Quote: “Marketing is a tax you pay for not making your product remarkable” Kevin Hale (YC Partner).
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Robotic Laundry Folder
Sick of having to endlessly fold your laundry? Too impatient to wait for an iRobot style robot to hit the market that’s not remote operated (I’m looking at you 1X)?
Meet FoldiMate™, the automatic garment-folding and ironing machine that does what your kids, spouse, and inner motivation never will. It does what the dishwasher did for dishes, it’s just a little bigger…
FoldiMate™ - turning laundry day into laundry yay.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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