Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Apple choosing Google’s Gemini to power Apple Intelligence going forward (sorry Sam A) 🧠
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea about financial advice that’s definitely not financial advice
🛠 Using AI to hire 10x talent
🔋 Turning a discontinued product into a $50M business + more
🔍 OpenAI acquisition, Cowork launch, Google x Shopify + more
🍻 A product to turn you into a culinary pro
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 $1,000 Giveaway: This week at Half Baked we’re teaming up with the team over at T-Mobile for Business to support one of you as you build your business. In order to enter simply:
Go to this link and fill out the form on the page
Reply to this email with a screenshot that the form has been submitted. In your email tell us what you’re building so we know we can help!
Shoutout to last week’s winner Eden Meeks…check your inbox 👀
Good luck and get after it this week!
💵 AI Financial Advisor
Semper fi(nance)
Available Domain: Supernormal.ai
The Problem: As the philosopher Notorious B.I.G. once said: “mo’ money, mo’ problems”. Well for people with a lot of money, managing it is a real problem. Traditional financial advisors charge 1-2% annual fees (costing investors hundreds of thousands over a lifetime) to give cookie-cutter advice and underperform the S&P. Meanwhile, the rest of us struggle to be given the time of day by a financial advisor since we don’t have much for them to manage. Sure, robo-advisors go some way to solving this, but they lack true personalization and can't handle complex financial situations like tax optimization, estate planning, or holistic wealth management. It’s time to do for financial advice what Robinhood did for stock trading. Here’s how.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A full-stack, AI-native wealth strategist that brings billionaire-style playbooks to ordinary investors.
🛠️ Product:
Sign up in 60 seconds by connecting your bank accounts, investment accounts, credit cards, and loans through secure Plaid integration. AI instantly analyzes your complete financial picture including income, expenses, debts, assets, and spending patterns to create a personalized financial profile and risk assessment.
Receive a comprehensive financial plan with AI-generated investment portfolio recommendations (ETF allocation across stocks/bonds/alternatives), tax-loss harvesting strategies, debt payoff optimization, retirement projections, and actionable insights delivered through an intuitive dashboard.
Chat with your AI advisor anytime to ask questions like "Should I buy a house or keep renting?" or "What's the tax impact of selling these stocks?" - the AI provides detailed explanations with scenario modeling and personalized recommendations that factor in your unique goals, risk tolerance, and financial situation.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Freemium model with basic AI advice free forever, premium tier ($10-20/month) for advanced features like tax optimization and estate planning. The platform also earns interchange fees on integrated high-yield savings accounts and revenue sharing with brokerage partners for investment products.
⭐ End Goal: Exit to a major fintech player (Betterment, Wealthfront, Robinhood, Chime, SoFi) or a traditional financial institution (Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard) desperate for AI differentiation, targeting a 10-15x revenue multiple.
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📱Switch to SuperMobile from T-Mobile. Get iPhone 17 Pro on us.
SuperMobile from T-Mobile gives your business what it needs: unlimited premium data on America’s largest 5G network, intelligent network performance, and a 5-year price guarantee.*
Plus if you switch to SuperMobile right now, you can get a free iPhone 17 Pro (with a qualifying plan) to run your business.
The best business plan on the best network.
*5-year price guarantee excludes taxes & fees. Full terms at T-Mobile.com
👤 Using AI to Hire 10x Talent
The Tool: Great founders spend most of their time hiring. That’s because they know that finding the best talent in the world gives them the best chance at success. So whether you’re hiring right now or will be in the future, here’s how you can turn AI into a recruitment consultant.
Step-by-step:
Go to Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude…pick your poison
Copy this prompt into your LLM and fill out the square brackets for the role you’re hiring for
You will receive a sourcing strategy, evaluation framework, outreach message, negotiation scripts and a closing tactics
📱In Case You Missed It…
Last time we mention it today, we promise. But T-Mobile have been a huge support to us - helping us give away thousands of dollars to Half Baked readers building real businesses.
Now they're helping YOU scale. Switch to SuperMobile and get an iPhone 17 Pro on them (with a qualifying plan). Unlimited premium data on America's largest 5G network, plus a 5-year price guarantee.*
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 The Money Shot: These founders took a product their company killed and turned it into a $50M business. Here’s how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Coding surprised everyone on the upside by becoming one of the strongest AI application verticals to date. Here’s why Excel is probably next.
💬 Prompt Drop: Use this prompt to create your own Executive AI Assistant to make sure you get your to-do list done.
🆓 Free Resource: The founder’s institute “Complete Startup Prompt Library” is a great resource for dozens of prompts for founders.
💵 Deal of the Day: Get up to $350,000 in Cloud credits through the Google for Startups Cloud Program. Details here.
🔍 Founder Finds
🤝 OpenAI has just acquired Torch Health for a reported $100M to help build ChatGPT Health into the best AI tool in the world for health and wellness.
🚀 Anthropic just launched Cowork, letting non-technical users complete tasks in the same way developers use Claude Code. Huge.
🛒 Google, Shopify and other e-commerce giants have teamed up to launch the Universal Commerce Protocol, a new open standard for agents to talk to each other across every step of the shopping journey. This is big.
🏥 Tobi Lutke, Shopify’s founder, just showed off how he developed his own software in minutes to read his MRI scans. This is the future of software.
➕ Neel Somani just submitted a proof for Erdos Problem #397 that was generated by GPT 5.2 Pro and formalized with Harmonic, a seminal moment for AI.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Smart Pan
Can't cook to save your life? Tired of serving your dinner guests charcoal-crusted chicken with a raw center?
Introducing Pantelligent™, the world's first smart frying pan that connects to your phone via Bluetooth to tell you exactly when to flip, when to lower the heat, and when to just give up and order take-out.
Pantelligent™ - no need to pan-ic.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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