Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Yann LeCun leaving Meta to start his own company 👀
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In today’s edition:
💡 A new investment platform to get excited about
📈 The 97% cost reduction that AI companies need
🛠 Using Gemini to create super slick graphics
🤑 From 7 failed startup ideas to a $1B business
🍻 A product for the parents out there
🍔 Franchise Fractional Investment Platform
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Available Domain: Frinchise.com
The Problem: Everyone dreams of owning a piece of their favorite franchises, from the pizza place they love to their local gym. Franchises offer a proven playbook for success, with 92% still operating after five years, far outpacing independent businesses. Yet, for most people, this dream remains just that. The barrier to entry is a massive financial wall, since the average franchise requires an initial investment between $100,000 and $300,000, with a minimum of $50,000 in liquid cash just to be considered. So why not create a way for anyone to invest in a franchise of their choice with as little as $100? Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: A platform that allows anyone to fractionally invest in local franchises for as little as $100.
Product:
📱 Users download the app and browse a curated marketplace of local franchise investment opportunities, from coffee shops to fitness centers and fast food chains.
📈 They can review detailed information for each opportunity, including the brand’s history, financial projections, location analysis, and the full cost breakdown before making an investment.
💰 Users invest alongside their community to collectively fund a new local franchise, receiving a proportional equity stake in the specific business entity.
📊 Investors can track their portfolio’s performance, view quarterly reports, and receive passive income distributions directly through the platform as the business generates profit.
Prototyping:
Here’s the prompt we used to build it
Fork your own version of this app
Business Model: Charge a one-time 2-5% platform fee on the total capital raised for each franchise and a 1% annual management fee on assets under management.
End Goal: Sell to a major retail investment platform (like Robinhood, Public.com) or a real estate crowdfunding giant (like Fundrise) looking to expand into new alternative asset classes for a 5-10x revenue multiple.
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📉 AI's Margin Problem May Have a Solution
The Trend: Accel just released their 2025 Globalscape Report, a comprehensive analysis of how AI is changing the global economy. It’s full of fascinating insights, but the biggest takeaway for me was the comparison of the inference costs per 1m tokens from GPT 4 to GPT 5 Mini, which fell 97% in just 31 months (slide 32). This is huge, mainly because that emerging cohort of AI native companies are struggling badly with lower gross margins compared to traditional software (slide 31). That 97% drop shows that, over time, these companies could finally close the margin gap with traditional software and prove the long-term, sustainable value of being AI-native.
Opportunities:
AI Margin Intelligence Platform: A tool for AI-native startups to analyze their COGS in real-time, modeling pricing, usage, and efficiency trade-offs across models and architectures.
AI Cost Optimization Layer: Build a platform that continuously monitors inference costs across providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, etc.) and automatically routes requests to the cheapest or fastest option per use case.
🧑🎨 Using Gemini to Create Super Slick Graphics
The Tool: Over the last week or so, Quartr (a live earnings calls coverage platform) has been going super viral online, or at least its graphic design team has. That’s because they’ve been generating these cinematic, movie-poster style graphics for earnings calls. Here’s how to use Gemini to recreate them (or something similar at least).
Step-by-step:
Go to Gemini
Insert this mega prompt, replacing the name of the brand with the company you want to make it for
Tweak the image as needed
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✍️ From 7 Failed Startup Ideas to a $1B Business
The Idea: Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong have a shared passion for building things, forged at University of Pennsylvania and MIT hackathons. After a stint at Microsoft, Krish reconnected with Sam, who had moved to San Francisco with just $100 in his pocket, surviving on pizza and Soylent while chasing his startup dreams. After seven failed ideas, including a Bitcoin-powered food delivery app, they noticed a massive problem - valuable information from countless meetings was being lost the moment they ended. This was the spark for Fireflies.ai.
The Execution:
2016-2019: Krish and Sam started working together in 2016 and spent years building different products. Their MVP was the ultimate “do things that don’t scale” play, where they pretended to be an AI notetaker named "Fred." They would manually join meetings, silently take notes by hand, and email them to clients 10 minutes later. They did this for over 100 meetings, making just enough money to afford a tiny San Francisco living room for $750 a month.
October 2019: The hustle paid off. Fireflies raised a $5M seed round led by Canaan Partners, validating their vision.
January 2020: Just before the pandemic, they officially launched their automated AI voice assistant across all major video conferencing platforms. Talk about perfect timing.
May 2021: Riding the wave of remote work, Fireflies raised a $14M Series A led by Khosla Ventures, having grown to serve 2 million people across 200,000 organizations.
2023: The company became profitable, a rare feat for a venture-backed startup.
June 2025: Fireflies achieved unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation following a tender offer, and announced it was used by 75% of Fortune 500 companies.
Their story proves that the old adage “do things that don’t scale” is almost always the way. Once you prove the demand, then you can do things that do scale. This is the way.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: GPT-5.1 is out. Let’s see what that baby can do!
🎁 Free Resource: A new 70+ pages guide on Context Engineering, sessions and agent memory just dropped.
📚 Must-Read: Thinking about companies are machines for doing stuff.
✖️ Trending Tweet: This is every growth hack that got Gamma to $100M of ARR
💬 Founder Quote: “The things you’re naturally drawn to - those aren’t random. They’re clues to your future.” Ben Silberman (Pinterest)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Roof Rack Car Seat
Tired of your car's interior smelling like stale snacks and apple juice? Wish you could listen to your own music instead of the Frozen soundtrack for the 8,000th time?
Introducing The SkySeat™, the revolutionary (and probably illegal) child seat that attaches directly to your car's roof rack. You get precious silence and legroom back, while your child gets an immersive, 360-degree, high-velocity view of the world. Everybody wins!
The SkySeat™ - Less attitude, more altitude
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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