Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as hotly anticipated as everybody’s Spotify Wrapped dropping 🎧
In today’s edition:
💡 A product to secure the next generation of products
🛠 How to create studio quality product demos
🔋 Turning a hackathon project into a $10B business + more
🔍 Code red, $1B ARR, Brian Armstrong’s YC pitch + more
🍻 Bringing the office home with you
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 $1,000 Giveaway: We’re partnering with Warp this week to give away $1,000 to support one of you on your founder journey. To enter just:
Winner will be announced next Monday. Good luck!
🛡️ Penetration Testing for Vibe Coded Apps
The real vibe check
Available Domain: Vibesec.com
The Problem: Vibe coding is awesome. These AI tools can turn anyone into a builder, as we just saw firsthand with our Hackathon (winners announced tomorrow by the way, so stay tuned). But a lot of vibe coded apps have a big weakness…security. These AI-generated codebases frequently contain critical security vulnerabilities - SQL injection, exposed API keys, broken authentication, insecure direct object references, and missing rate limiting…all because the AI optimizes for functionality over security. Vibe coders need to make sure their products are secure. Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An automated penetration testing platform purpose-built for vibe-coded applications that scans AI-generated code and live deployments for security vulnerabilities
❓ Product:
Sign up with GitHub, connect your Cursor/Bolt project or paste a live URL, and the platform automatically detects your tech stack (React, Next.js, Supabase, Firebase, etc.) and initiates a comprehensive security scan within seconds.
The scan crawls your application for common vulnerabilities, checks for exposed environment variables, tests authentication flows, identifies insecure database rules etc.
For each vulnerability discovered, users get a one-click "Fix with AI" button that generates a pull request or provides copy-paste prompts and code snippets tailored to your exact stack, plus a "Verify Fix" re-scan to confirm the issue is resolved before you ship.
💼 Business Model: $10 per month subscription for continuous monitoring of a user’s apps.
⭐ End Goal: Sell to a security or devtools company at an 8–12x ARR multiple
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🔍 Get Up to Speed on Unfamiliar Code in Seconds With Warp
Founders are constantly jumping between features and fixes — often in parts of the codebase you didn’t write (or haven’t touched in months). Warp makes it easy to quickly understand unfamiliar code so you can move faster.
Connect Warp to GitHub: Link your repo so Warp’s agent can see your codebase and index it.
Ask Warp anything: Prompt it in natural language, e.g., “Explain where the onboarding flow code lives and how auth is handled.”
Warp works: It uses semantic search to find the right files — even if you don’t know the exact names — then reads and analyzes the code for you.
Get the explanation: Warp returns a clear summary. You can go further and ask it to debug, refactor, or even generate diffs based on what you learn.
📹 How to Create Studio Quality Product Demos
The Tool: So…you’ve built a great product, and now you want to show it off with a great video demo. But you don’t want to have to hire someone to edit together a cool demo video for you. Well, now you don’t have to. Here’s how you can do it yourself.
Step-by-step:
Write a short script explaining the benefits of your product, not just the features.
Go to Screen Studio to record yourself using your product. Screen Studio automatically zooms in on your mouse clicks and smoothes out the jerky movements, making it look professional instantly.
Don't like the sound of your own voice (which I can totally relate to)? Paste the script into ElevenLabs, pick a narrative voice, and download the audio.
Drag the audio into Screen Studio, align the clips, and export. You just saved $5,000 on an explainer video agency.
Check out Screen Studio (not affiliated, just a cool product)
❌ Break Up With Your Internet Provider. It's Not You, It's Them.
Bad internet is holding your business back. That’s why you need to switch to T-Mobile.
With T-Mobile, you get affordable business internet from the leader in 5G, with live 24/7/365 support whenever you need it.
Want to switch to fast, reliable business internet? Here’s what you do:
Go to this website
Enter your business address
Click “Check Availability”
That’s it. It takes 5 seconds to check, and it could be a game-changer for your business.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 The Money Shot: This duo turned a hackathon project into a $10B business. Full story here.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Vertical AI is really having a moment, particularly as Harvey AI just raised even more money. This is the game right now.
💬 Prompt Drop: Aaron Levie (Box founder) just dropped some sage wisdom on finding AI agent opportunities. We decided to turn it into this prompt.
🛠️ Tool tip: Google Workspace Studio just dropped, a place to design, manage, and share AI agents in Google Workspace. We’re fans.
💵 Deal of the Day: ElevenLabs is giving away 25 exclusive deals from top AI companies in the run up to Christmas. ‘Tis the season!
🔍 Founder Finds
🔴 OpenAI just issued a “code red” in response to Gemini. To quote Michael Scott: “how the turn tables”.
💰 Anthropic is planning on going public in 2026, meanwhile Claude Code just became the fastest product in history to reach $1B in ARR.
📹 Brian Armstrong’s original Coinbase pitch video from YC is required watching for any founder.
📖 Roy Lee’s post giving his case for virality is pretty thought provoking. Would be super ironic if the post didn’t go viral though…
📱 Nothing (the tech company) is going to raise a community investment round of $5M in the near future. Are you a buyer?
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Desk Fresheners
Love the sweet smell of office life? Wish your home office captured the same odors as your office (minus Karen’s questionable lunch choices)?
Introducing Desk Fresheners™, the little cardboard trees that dangle from your monitor and fill your workspace with that intoxicating "new office smell." Choose from scents like Fresh Printer Toner or Conference Room Coffee to bring that office ambiance right into your home.
Desk Fresheners™ - the sweet smell of success.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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See you soon,