Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as wholesome as spending Thanksgiving dinner with your loved ones 🦃
In today’s edition:
💡 A product for the forgotten fitness fanatics out there
🔋 Investment data, web design, verbalized sampling, free Gemini
🍻 A product you’ll be needing today around dinner time
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💸 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!
🏋️ Weight Training Wearables Need a Big Upgrade
Fitness wearables have exploded in popularity in recent years. Whoops, Fitbits, there are countless fitness trackers out there that track your steps, heart rate, everything to do with your cardiovascular health. But what about the gym bros out there, the forgotten group of the fitness tracker world? Apparently 62% of them still use pen and paper to record their exercises, and 100% of them have most of their leg day pages completely blank.
But gym bro jokes aside, strength training is so important for our health. Strength training promotes longevity by increasing muscle mass, which boosts metabolism and reduces the risk of age-related decline, fractures, and chronic diseases. But if weight training is so important, why does it feel like weight training tech is trapped in the stone, or maybe more aptly, the “iron” age? It’s time to create a wearable for the lifters out there.
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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👉 See if your business qualifies (it takes 5 seconds).
💪 Liftband: Whoop for Weight Training
Raising the bar
Available Domain: Liftband.com
💡 The Idea: A wearable band that tracks bar velocity, rep quality, and muscular strain specifically optimized for compound lifts and progressive overload training.
❓ Product:
A user purchases the wrist band, syncs it to the mobile app, and completes an onboarding assessment where they log their current maxes and training goals (strength, hypertrophy, or power)
During workouts, the device uses accelerometers and gyroscopes to track bar velocity on each rep, while also monitoring time under tension for hypertrophy-focused training. Users can also attach a separate sensor to their barbells/dumbbells for more accurate tracking.
Post-workout, the app provides a recovery score based on strain patterns, predicts when specific muscle groups are ready to train again, and suggests periodization adjustments (deload weeks, intensity changes).
🧑💻 Prototyping
Check out the landing page we built on Bolt.new
Here’s the code for the landing page
Fork your own version of the landing page
💼 Business Model: $199 for the device, or whoop business model of free device + monthly subscription.
⭐ End Goal: Sell to established fitness wearable companies (Garmin, Polar) or a fitness app (MyFitnessPal, Strong) for an 8–12x revenue multiple.
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🔋 Founder Fuel
📈 Trends with Benefits: It feels like everyone’s building AI software companies today, but this investment data from Carta tells a different story. Super interesting.
🤖 AI Tutorial: You can build incredibly beautiful websites using Replit Design Mode and Gemini 3. Watch the tutorial (and get the prompts) here.
💬 Prompt Drop: Stanford researchers just discovered a new prompting technique called “Verbalized Sampling” that increases an LLM's creativity by 1.5-2x. Check it out.
🆓 Deal of the Day: Students can get Gemini’s Pro Plan free for an entire year. See terms.
🤑 The Money Shot: This founder pivoted his business overnight because of a junior employee’s gaming habit. Now it does $50M/yr. Here’s the full story.
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🔍 Founder Finds
😬 HSBC built out a model to see if OpenAI can actually pay for all the compute it's contracted. The answer may not surprise you…
📱 This guy built an app that forces you to do 10 push ups every time you want to open tiktok or instagram. Genius.
📹 Elon Musk shares how viral marketing built Paypal into $63B company
🥄 Bending Spoons (the Berkshire of tech) is an utterly fascinating company. Here’s the most comprehensive deep-dive on the company ever done.
🗣️ "Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” Steve Jobs
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Smart Belt
Planning on eating your bodyweight in food this Thanksgiving? Need a belt to keep up with your expanding waistline?
Introducing the WaistWatch™, the smart belt that tracks every millimeter of your waistline and adjusts your belt tightness accordingly. It’s so effective it can even handle Thanksgiving dinner - no more top button undoing.
WaistWatch™ - loosen up.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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