Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as the Stranger Things finale (fans are pretty divided on it) 👀
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea we had to share on New Years
🛠 Using verbalized sampling to improve LLM outputs
🔋 How a late night infomercial led to 1 billion downloads + more
🔍 Adam Mosseri, Sam Altman, cloning Typeform + more
🍻 Upgrading a trendy healthcare protocol immeasurably
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 $1,000 Giveaway: We’re teaming up with Squarespace to give away $1,000 to one of our readers who take action this week. To enter all you have to do is:
Check out Squarespace
Build a one-page website on Squarespace (could be your personal website, a landing page, anything to move you forward) this week
Reply to this email (or any email this week) with what you’ve built
More details later in the email. Good luck!
✅ Habit Gating App
Quid Pro Scroll
Available Domain: HabitGate.com
The Problem: It’s officially 2026, and you probably started your morning today in one of two ways…waking up terribly hungover from last night’s festivities, or cracking open your freshly downloaded habit tracker app to hit the ground running in 2026. Well if so, you’re not alone. Installs for health and fitness apps, including habit trackers, are around 40% higher in January compared to other months. But they all function the same way - make a list of habits, tick them off as you do until after a few weeks we lose our motivation. But why not combine habit tracking with something we all want…screen time. It’s time to take the habit tracker to the next level. Here’s how.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A habit tracking app that lets you to unlock screen time for your most addictive apps by completing habits like exercising, reading and meditating, as verified by third party apps or wearables.
🛠️ Product:
You download the app and select the apps you want to gate (Instagram, TikTok, games, YouTube, etc.). Then set your habits you want to complete, connecting to devices, wearables or other apps (via API) to track when you complete a habit (e.g connect to Strava for running data, the Calm app for meditation etc.)
Throughout the day, as you complete your habits, you unlock screen time you can use for Instagram, TikTok, Youtube etc. In case of an emergency, you can pay for access to an app e.g. $1 for 5 mins of Instagram time.
The app tracks your streaks, shows you how much time you've earned vs. wasted, and gamifies progress with levels, achievements, and weekly reports.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Freemium model - free for basic habit tracking + 2 gated apps, $9.99/month premium for unlimited gated apps, advanced integrations etc. Also earn from users paying to access apps.
⭐ End Goal: Sell to a company in this space or a related vertical (like Noom) for a 10-15x revenue multiple (high multiple since the value is in the acquired users).
Rate this idea
⏩ Progress Over Polish
Forget perfect. This week, we're rewarding done.
We're teaming up with Squarespace to give away $1,000 to someone who chooses action over overthinking.
The Challenge:
Ship a one-page website on Squarespace.
Your startup landing page, personal site, passion project—doesn't matter. Just make it real.
Reply to this email (or another email this week) with the live link.
The scrappiest wins $1,000.
Submit by Sunday night at Midnight PT. Must be built using Squarespace.
Check out Squarespace today and use code HALFBAKED10 to get 10% off any plan!
🗨️ Using Verbalized Sampling to Improve LLM Outputs
The Context: We’re all using LLMs to run our businesses, but most of us aren’t using them to their full potential. That’s because all models go through “post-training alignment” where they’re encouraged to favor a narrow set of predictable, safe responses to questions. However, as Stanford researchers have recently discovered, “verbalized sampling” can be used to unlock other, creative responses from LLMs they learned during pre-training, boosting LLM's creativity by 1.6-2x. Here’s how it works.
Step-by-step:
Go to your LLM of choice
Instead of prompting "Tell me a joke" (which triggers the aligned personality), you prompt something like: "Generate 5 responses with their corresponding probabilities. Tell me a joke.”
The LLM will then tap into its full pre-trained knowledge rather than defaulting to the most reinforced answer and share multiple responses.
🤖 Start learning AI in 2026
AI won't take over the world. People who know how to use AI will.
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🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 The Money Shot: A late-night infomercials about knives inspired one of the most successful apps of all time (> 1 Billion downloads). Here’s how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: The real winners of the vibe coding revolution? The domain registrars. Check this out.
💬 Prompt Drop: Here’s a complete guide to prompting Suno if you want/need to make AI music for your business.
🆓 Free Resource: Ankur Nagpal pulled together his 2025 Guide To Paying Less In Taxes. Who doesn’t want to pay less taxes, right?
💵 Deal of the Day: Eligible university students can get one free year of Cursor Pro.
🔍 Founder Finds
🖼️ Adam Mosseri (Head of Instagram) just wrote 1,240 words on how AI will affect Instagram creators and social media. Here’s what he’s thinking.
📹 Sam Altman literally explained why most startups fail in just 16 minutes.
🧑💻 Ben Tossell, founder of Ben’s Bites, just wrote a great piece on he codes with agents, without being 'technical'.
🤖 Nader Dabit used Claude Opus 4.5 to clone TypeForm in like an hour. It’s so over.
📕 Carta pulled together a comprehensive dive into the 2025 startup market. Download it here if you’re interested!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Tanning Saunas
Have you hopped on the sauna trend? Wish it could do more for you that just make you sweat?
Introducing the Sunna™, the world's first dual-action sauna that roasts you from the inside AND the outside. Step into our patented UV-infused cedar chambers and emerge looking like you just returned from a sun holiday. It’s worth the cancer risk to look this good!
Sunna™ - glow hard or go home.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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