Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Elon Musk’s $1T pay package getting approved 🤑
💸 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 for a huge retirement announcement
📈 Why “new media” is the talk of the town right now
🛠 How to successfully launch on Product Hunt
🤑 The $5B business making a comeback
🍻 Turning sleep into a content consumption experience
🔮 CopyTrader for Prediction Markets
Propheteering
Available Domain: Copymarket.com
The Problem: With Nancy Pelosi announcing her retirement from Congress, a generational run has come to an end. This is a Michael Jordan retiring from basketball or Roger Federer retiring from tennis level event. It’s that big. But not in politics, no…in trading. That’s because Nancy has an incredible stock trading record, so much so that the Pelosi Stock Tracker X account has amassed over 1M followers. Traders have made millions from copying her trades, which got me thinking about prediction markets. Who’s the Nancy Pelosi of prediction markets and why can’t we copy their trades today? Someone needs to make this. Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: A social copy-trading layer that lets you automatically mirror top predictors’ positions on leading prediction markets.
Product:
🔌 Connect your wallet/account, pick a vetted “Leader” profile with transparent P&L, accuracy, and risk metrics pulled from public/on-chain data (from Polymarket).
⚙️ Auto-mirror engine replicates the Leader’s trades proportionally in your account in near-real time, you can pause/unfollow anytime.
📊 Live dashboard shows open positions, realized P&L, category heatmaps, and Leader activity feed.
Prototyping:
Here’s the prompt we used to build it
Fork your own version of this app
Business Model: Subscription model ($10–$49/mo)
End Goal: Exit to a major broker/exchange with prediction rails at a 4–6× revenue multiple
Rate this idea:
🆓 Get $20 Worth of Free Credits for Lindy (Our Treat)
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🆕 The “New Media” Revolution is Live
The Trend: The media landscape is rapidly evolving. Luckily for us though the guys at TBPN helpfully pulled together a Media Market Map to help us understand the space better (and to annoy a lot of people by leaving them off their map of course). And right in the centre of the media map you have “New Media”, where companies are building their own audiences directly and bypassing legacy media altogether. This area is so important that a16z just launched their New Media Fellowship. As we’ve said before, distribution is everything these days.
Opportunities:
Personal Brand Incubator: A service that helps individuals build and monetize their personal brands through a structured program of content creation, audience growth, and product development.
Niche Media Conglomerate: A company that acquires and grows a portfolio of niche media brands (blogs, newsletters, podcasts) in various verticals, leveraging a centralized growth and monetization team.
🚀 How to Successfully Launch on Product Hunt
The Tool: Product Hunt just turned 12 years old. And with more products launching on the platform than ever before, standing out and successfully launching is super tough. Which is why we decided to pull together the ultimate guide to launching your product on Product Hunt. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Make sure your product is ready for the big stage.
Follow the pre-launch section from this guide to get ready to launch.
Launch, hopefully get #1 while you’re at it.
Follow the post launch guide afterwards to maximize the return from the launch
🤖 Turn AI into Your Income Engine
Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator? HubSpot's groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.
Inside you'll discover:
A curated collection of 200+ profitable opportunities spanning content creation, e-commerce, gaming, and emerging digital markets—each vetted for real-world potential
Step-by-step implementation guides designed for beginners, making AI accessible regardless of your technical background
Cutting-edge strategies aligned with current market trends, ensuring your ventures stay ahead of the curve
🚪 The $5B Business Making a Comeback
The Idea: Eric Wu, a serial entrepreneur with a background in real estate, found the process of selling a home to be time-consuming, uncertain, and filled with obstacles. Having already founded and sold two other real estate tech companies, Movity and RentAdvisor, Eric teamed up with Keith Rabois, JD Ross, and Ian Wong in 2014 to use technology and data to make instant cash offers on homes. This was the idea for Opendoor.
The Execution:
2014: Opendoor was founded in March and, after securing $9.95 million in a Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures in May, began operations.
2016: The company expanded its operations, demonstrating the scalability of its business model. In December, Opendoor raised $210 million in a Series D funding round.
2018: Opendoor's valuation reached $1 billion, a testament to strong investor confidence. The company also secured a massive $400 million in funding from the SoftBank Vision Fund.
2019: The company raised an additional $300 million in a funding round led by General Atlantic, pushing its enterprise valuation to $3.8 billion. That same year, Opendoor launched its own in-house mortgage business, Opendoor Home Loans.
2020: In a pivotal move, Opendoor went public in December through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) led by Chamath Palihapitiya. The deal valued Opendoor at $4.8 billion and provided the company with $1 billion in cash.
2022: Cracks began to appear. The Federal Reserve began aggressively hiking interest rates and Opendoor's model, which relied on quickly reselling homes, was caught off guard. The company reported staggering losses.
2023: The financial bleeding continued and Opendoor laid off 22% of its workforce (about 560 employees) in April. By the end of the year, Eric announced he was stepping down as CEO.
2025: Kaz Nejatian, a former executive at Shopify, stepped in as CEO in September 2025 and has breathed new life into the company. The comeback is on.
The lesson? You may think that once you get to a certain level, whether it’s making $10K per month or going public, that the work is finished. It isn’t. There’s always more to do, but that’s what’s so great about playing an infinite game.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Gemini Deep Research can now draw on context from your Gmail, Drive (including Docs, Slides, Sheets and PDFs) and Google Chat. Epic.
📚 Must-Read: Someone went to work for Cursor for 60 days. What they found there was fascinating.
📹 Must-Watch: Chris Sacca is probably the most interesting VC out there, always worth listening to.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Here’s a summary of what Tesla announced at the 2025 Shareholder Meeting. They’re cooking.
💬 Founder Quote: “Create value before you try and extract value.” Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: The Snooze Band
Spend all day glued to podcasts, playlists, and TikToks? Feel uneasy when you can actually hear your own thoughts at night?
Meet the Snooze Band™ - the smart eye mask with built-in headphones that lets you keep consuming content even while unconscious. Fall asleep to finance bros, wake up to true crime. Because silence isn’t golden, it’s terrifying.
Snooze Band™ - stream while you dream.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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