Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Apple paying Google $1B per year for Gemini to power Siri 👀
💸 Weekly Giveaway: This week we’re teaming up with the wonderful folks over at Lindy to give away $1,000 to one of our readers. To enter all you need to do is:
Go to this link and check out Lindy (it’s a great tool, we use it ourselves)
Reply to this email with the word “Lindy“
Winner will be announced next Monday 💸
Let’s get into it 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 Taking inspiration from a product we’re all familiar with
📈 Where Anthropic is winning the AI race
🛠 Creating a full slide deck in seconds with Gemini
🤑 From a chance meeting to a $2.1B exit
🍻 The perfect product to get you in the Christmas spirit
💰 Product Hunt for Investment Rounds
Cash me if you can
Available Domain: Fundfeed.com
The Problem: Early-stage fundraising is really, really hard. You spend weeks and months DMing investors, networking, only to get hit with no after no. It’s a lot like Tinder actually when you think about it (for me at least). So it’s no surprise that according to DocSend 70% of early-stage founders report that fundraising takes more than 6 months. Meanwhile, thousands of investors scroll Twitter or Product Hunt every day, actively looking for the next big thing but never seeing deal flow early enough. There’s a mismatch here that needs to be fixed. Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: A public launchpad where startups "drop" their live investment rounds, and investors can book intros, follow deals, and discover trending raises.
Product:
🚀 Founders upload their round with details like valuation, amount raising, traction metrics, and pitch deck.
🔥 Investors browse a feed of active raises, filter by stage, industry, or geography, and follow rounds they’re interested in.
💬 Verified investors can request an intro, and founders can accept or reject with context.
📈 Rounds with the most follows, views, or intros bubble up the leaderboard - turning fundraising into a launch moment.
Prototyping:
Business Model: Free to browse, charge Founders for premium placements (featured rounds) and Investors to become verified Investors.
End Goal: Sell to AngelList or Crunchbase for a 5–10x revenue multiple.
Rate this idea:
🤖 The Simplest Way to Create and Launch AI Agents and Apps
You know that AI can help you automate your work, but you just don't know how to get started.
With Lindy, you can build AI agents and apps in minutes simply by describing what you want in plain English.
From inbound lead qualification to AI-powered customer support and full-blown apps, Lindy has hundreds of agents that are ready to work for you 24/7/365.
Stop doing repetitive tasks manually. Let Lindy automate workflows, save time, and grow your business.
🏢 Anthropic is Winning the Enterprise War
The Trend: While ChatGPT still reigns supreme with consumers, Anthropic is quietly winning over the enterprise world. So much so that Anthropic has recently overtaken OpenAI in enterprise LLM API market share and just yesterday details were shared by the Information on Anthropic’s projected $70 Billion revenue and $17 Billion in cash flow in 2028. Insane numbers. Interestingly this is starting to look like a familiar tech rivalry. Could OpenAI become the Apple of the AI era, dominating the consumer experience - while Anthropic plays the Microsoft role, powering the enterprise backbone? Only time will tell.
Opportunities:
Enterprise Model Cost-optimization SaaS: Target organizations using Anthropic‐style APIs to reduce compute/inference cost, fine-tune usage, provide billing transparency.
AI Model Benchmarking for Enterprises: For organizations choosing between Anthropic, OpenAI, etc, provide comparison reporting on cost, speed, accuracy, ROI.
📊 Creating a Full Slide Deck in Seconds with Gemini
The Tool: As a founder, you’re constantly making slide decks. Pitch decks. Investor decks. Sales decks. Well now you can ask Gemini to create a presentation for you with a single prompt. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Go to Gemini
In Gemini add a reference document or link to a relevant website and give some details on what deck you want to create, what you want it to look like etc.
Format your deck as needed in Google Slides.
💯 Unlock Your Next Income Stream: 100 Side Hustles for Ambitious Founders
In a world where financial freedom feels like a distant dream, ambitious founders are building wealth on their own terms. And HubSpot is here to help by offering:
A curated database of 100 proven side hustles (that actually work)
Each idea comes with required startup costs, time investment, and potential earnings
Exclusive insights from founders who've turned side gigs into 6-figure empires
Detailed skill requirements so you can match your talents to the right opportunity
Don't let another month slip by watching others build their empire. Your next income stream is hiding in our database, waiting to be discovered.
✈️ From a Chance Meeting to a $2.1B Exit
The Idea: Back in the early 2000s Steve Hafner, a co-founder of Orbitz (an early online travel agency), noticed a glaring inefficiency in his business. 70% of users would find the flight they wanted on Orbitz, then leave to book directly with the airline. He quickly realised there was an opportunity to build a single, clean interface that searched all the airlines at once and gave travelers the ability to book their flights. Then in late 2003, a chance meeting over gin and tonics at Legal Sea Foods in Harvard Square brought him together with Paul English, a serial entrepreneur and tech guru who had just sold his company to Intuit. Within an hour, they shook hands on a 50/50 partnership. Kayak was born.
The Execution:
2004: Steve and Paul founded the company in January, initially named "Travel Search Company, Inc." They each put in $1 million to get started. By August, they settled on the name Kayak, buying the domain for $30,000.
2005: The Kayak.com website launched to the public in February. Their MVP was a simple, clean interface - a stark contrast to the cluttered travel sites of the time. They started by scraping data and quickly struck a deal with ITA Software for flight results, focusing on being a “thin UI layer” on top of existing technology.
2007: After a few years of scrappy growth and clever marketing (like using their deal with Orbitz to leverage direct deals with airlines), Kayak raised a massive $196 million funding round to fuel its expansion.
2012: Kayak went public in July, with its stock price jumping nearly 30% on the first day of trading. Just a few months later, in November, Priceline (now Booking Holdings) announced its intention to acquire the company.
2013: The acquisition was completed in May for a final price of $2.1 billion. Kayak, however, continued to operate as an independent brand, a testament to the strength of the company and culture they had built.
All of which goes to prove that sometimes innovation isn’t inventing something new, it’s simplifying what already exists. Because sometimes being the best layer on top is more valuable than building the entire stack.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Cartesia is a cool tool for creating AI voice agents for your startup.
📚 Must-Read: This piece (Thoughts by a non-economist on AI and economics) comes recommended from Sam Altman. Super interesting.
📹 Must-Watch: Roy Lee (Cluely CEO) on why going viral is necessary in this day and age.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Here's what actually happens when you go all-in on a startup (from a YC founder).
💬 Founder Quote: "It’s not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.” Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathaway)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: KFC Firelog
Since spooky season is over, are you hoping to get into the holiday spirit? Looking to combine your love of Christmas with your love of fried chicken?
Introducing the KFC Firelog™, the revolutionary way to bring the Colonel's signature scent to your home this Christmas. This log is crafted from 100% recycled materials and infused with the authentic aroma of KFC's secret recipe, making your home smell like a fried chicken paradise.
KFC Firelog™ - original recipe Christmas.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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