Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as Anthropic launching Sonnet 5 🆕
In today's edition:
💡 An idea inspired by a classic video game
🔋 Habit tracking, 5M impressions, $1.7B business + more
🔍 Slack employee, personalized ads, startup lessons + more
🍻 The only way you'll ever lift the World Cup
Let's goooo 🚀
P.S. On 7 July, we're running a free, invite-only 30-day programme for anyone with the itch to build. No idea or experience required. You'll get the tools, the playbooks and, for the ones we believe in, cash prizes to back what you create. Applications close 4 July.
Apply here to secure your spot
🏃♂️ Gamified AR Running App
Every street’s a level
Available Domain: Runjoy.app
👤 Source: I spent a few months this year training for a marathon (appendicitis put an end to that lol), spent a lot of time thinking about how to make running more fun (taking inspiration from Mario Kart of course). I would love someone to take this idea and run with it (pun not intended).
❌ Problem:
Running is the most popular workout on earth and also the most boring. Strava has 150M+ users, yet the median runner still quits within a year, because there's no opponent, no scoreboard, just you, a footpath, and a long podcast.
But exercise can be fun - Zwift turned indoor cycling into a video game with 1M+ subscribers, Zombies Run! had people sprinting from imaginary hordes, and Pokémon GO got millions to walk 10,000 steps to catch a Charizard. Now with smart glasses popping up everywhere, it seems like the perfect time to build a killer running app to make it more fun. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
An AR running game that turns your real streets into a playable arcade. Pick a route and the city fills with coins to grab, power-ups, checkpoints and rival runners, all floating on the actual pavement in front of you.
The mechanics stack up: collect coins on every split, hit boost gates for speed challenges, race ghost runners (your past self, a mate, a pro, a celebrity 5k), chase or dodge AR enemies, and clear daily quests and missions.
Coins and XP unlock skins, power-ups and tougher route challenges as you climb a global leaderboard.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: This is a bet on the hardware curve as much as the app, so back the right headset early and you can be a killer app on a new class of devices.
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🔥 You're Running a Business. You Shouldn't Be Reconciling Expenses
Between fundraising, hiring, and shipping - manually tracking who spent what is not a good use of your time. And a spreadsheet isn't an expense management system.
How BILL Spend & Expense fixes it:
Free software powered by a Visa business card - automate reports, set team budgets, see every transaction live
Customers save an average of $10k+ per month and 12 hours of finance admin
94% of users would recommend it to a friend
Right now, new customers get $500 back when they spend their first $500.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration: Someone built a beautiful little app that makes habit tracking weirdly satisfying. Go and have a look.
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: This guy grew one LinkedIn account from 0 to 5M impressions using just one post type. Here’s how.
🆓 Deal of the Day: Granola captures action summaries for every meeting. They're giving Half Baked readers 100% off their first month. Claim the deal.
💰 Money Shot: This founder went from crying on her lunch break to building a $1.7B business. Here's how.
P.S. Our Half Baked Founder Toolkit has playbooks, deals, exclusive offers and much more for founders looking to take action and start or scale their business. 100% free.
🚨 Skipping This Ad Could Cost You $1,000
Paying for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok separately? That's $100+ a month, roughly $1,200 a year.
Bluehost's AI All-Access Pack bundles all four from $20 a month. That's close to a grand a year you're handing over just for four logins.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Viktor isn't a chatbot, it's an AI employee that lives in your Slack, connects to 3,200+ tools, then actually does the work for you.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Brace yourselves…ultra-personalized ads are here. Do any of us really want this?
📚 Must-Read: This young engineer's 10 lessons from a year working at startups is well worth a read.
🎧️ Must-Listen: Rob Hallam failed five times before his sixth build hit $22K/mo. Now he's laid out the exact way he validates an idea before writing a line of code.
📺 Must-Watch: Stanford's CS153 Frontier Systems is the best AI series going. Lectures from Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella and Sam Altman, all on YouTube for free. I love the internet.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Tim Ferriss makes the counterintuitive case that big, unreasonable goals are actually easier to hit than realistic ones. Crazy, but true.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: World Cup Trophy Glass
Sick of watching the World Cup final with a sad, ordinary pint? Wish you could drink like a winner?
Introducing the WorldPint™, the beer glass moulded from the actual FIFA World Cup. Not available in Germany or the Netherlands…
WorldPint™ - drink it home.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks
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