Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as exciting as Anthropic launching Claude Opus 4.5 (this model is a BEAST at coding) 🤯
We’re testing out a slightly different newsletter format this week. The same (mostly) great content, just in a more digestible format. Let us know what you think!
In today’s edition:
💡 Solving the biggest problem with academic papers
🔋 Embryo selection, YouTube Infographics, A 2x unicorn founder + more
🍻 The ultimate companion for anyone on the golf course
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Weekly Giveaway: This week we’re teaming up with T-Mobile for Business to give away $1,000 to help one of you on your founder journey. In order to enter just:
Click here and see if your business qualifies for their new internet offer (takes 5 seconds)
Reply to this email with either “Yes“ or “No“.
Winner will be announced next Monday!
😴 Humanity’s Smartest Ideas are Fighting for Attention
We humans (and by “we” I mean people much smarter than me) produce around 3 million academic papers each year. And among these papers is some of the most cutting edge work happening anywhere in the world. But academic papers have a big problem that we’re all very aware of. They’re a snooze-fest to read.
The average research paper takes 23 minutes to read and uses language so complex they may as well be written in a foreign language. For example, Google just dropped "Attention is all you need (V2)”, a paper that solves one of AI’s biggest problems. But am I gonna sit down and actually read it? Nope.
How is content packaged this way meant to compete with scrolling on TikTok or streaming the latest breakout Netflix show? It’s time to make academic papers more interactive, engaging and accessible to us regular folk.
Here's what we're thinking.
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Running a business means dealing with constant uncertainty. But one thing you can control is your internet provider.
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🎓 Forcite: Interactive Academic Paper Learning Platform
Enter the citegeist
Available Domain: Forcite.com
💡 The Idea: An AI-powered platform that transforms dense academic papers into interactive learning experiences with videos, quizzes, simulations, and plain-language explanations.
🛠 Product:
A user signs up, gives details on areas they’re interested in and can browse a library of pre-converted papers recommended to them across disciplines, or can upload a PDF of a paper they want converted into an interactive learning experience.
For each paper on the platform, AI creates digestible sections with layered explanations (beginner/intermediate/expert modes), auto-generates visual diagrams, an interactive simulation to explain the paper, and also creates custom quizzes and flashcards so the user can test themselves on the learnings.
There are also community features where users can comment on papers, share them with others etc.
🧑💻 Prototyping
Here’s the prompt we used to build it
Fork your own version of this app
💼 Business Model: Freemium, up to 1 free paper per month, then $9.99/month for unlimited access with revenue share for paper authors.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by a major education technology companies (Chegg, Pearson, McGraw-Hill) for 8-12x revenue multiple.
Rate this idea
🔋 Founder Fuel
📈 Trends with Benefits: Embryo selection is a hot topic right now on the back of Nucleus Genomics’ provocative “have a better baby” NYC subway campaign. Full trend analysis here.
🤖 AI Tutorial: You can now turn any YouTube video into an infographic using Nano Banana Pro in Gemini. Here’s how.
💬 Prompt Drop: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini…all of these models respond better to very specific prompting techniques. Here are some best practices for prompting in Gemini 3 specifically.
🔋 Deal of the Day: We’ve just dropped 10 codes for 3 months of free Bolt.new into this sheet. Go go go!
🤑 The Money Shot: This founder basically built the same unicorn…twice. That’s just showing off if you ask me. Full story here.
🔮 She called Bitcoin and Tesla Early... Hear What's Next.
Over 25,000 people will attend the Finimize Modern Investor Summit on December 2nd to 3rd. Join them – and world-class speakers – to explore the trends shaping wealth creation: AI, Big Tech, digital assets, and long-term investing.
Headliners Cathie Wood (CIO, ARK Invest) and Chris Hughes (Facebook cofounder) join 20+ expert speakers revealing how today’s biggest trends are shaping the future of wealth.
Attend online or in person in London.
🔍 Founder Finds
📱Sam Altman has just dropped more details on OpenAI’s forthcoming hardware device. Color me intrigued…
💰 Revolut has just been valued at $75B in a recent secondary share sale. Big win for European tech!
🛠️ Andrej Karpathy just vibe coded an LLM Council App over the weekend. Wonder if he wants a job at Half Baked?
📖 Simon Taylor just dropped a post on how AI is Rewiring the Economy. It’s a must-read article.
❓Chamath’s short post contrasting “Move Fast and Break Things” vs “Move Slow and Forge Things” is worth a read.
🍌 Google has just written a Complete Developer Tutorial for Nano Banana Pro. Devs are gonna go bananas over this (sorry, couldn’t resist).
💬 ”The future arrives unevenly, startups just learn to stand where it lands first.” Andrew Ng
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Drone Caddie
Tired of lugging your golf clubs around the course like a chump? Or ever wanted a caddie who doesn’t judge your fourth mulligan of the hole?
Meet Drone Caddie™, your hovering, emotionless golf companion. It carries your clubs, tracks your shots, and never sighs when you pick the wrong iron again.
Drone Caddie™ - an unfair-way advantage
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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