Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as hotly anticipated as America’s 250th birthday (Happy 4th everyone) 🇺🇸
In today's edition:
💡 A billion-dollar idea sparked by a $100k tweet
🔋 Building Jarvis, from $3K → $625M + more
🔍 Meta launch, net zero miss + more
🍻 An idea that's a little hard to swallow
Let's goooo 🚀
P.S. On 7 July, we're running a free, invite-only 30-day program 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 tomorrow!
BTW we just sent out some acceptance emails for the program so check your inboxes (and spam folders). Any problems just reply here and we’ll sort it out!
🛩️ Hardware Challenge Platform
Prize and grind
👤 Source: Blake Scholl (founder/CEO of Boom Supersonic, the company behind XB-1, the first privately built jet to break the sound barrier) inspired this one with his $100k prize for the first amateur-built RC plane to exceed Mach 1.
❌ Problem:
Yesterday, a college student posted a pic of a 500mph turbojet RC plane he built in his dorm. Within hours, Boom's CEO put up $100k for the first amateur to break Mach 1, a stranger asked to co-sponsor $50k, and someone added $25k for a no-sonic-boom variant. All improvised over quote-tweets, with rules "coming next week."
Kaggle turned this exact energy into a platform for data science - millions of engineers competing on company-sponsored challenges - and sold to Google. Hardware has nothing equivalent, even though it really should. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
A competition platform where hard-tech companies put up cash prizes for technical challenges, and the world's garage engineers race to win them.
A company posts the ask, the prize, and the rules - then other companies, institutions, and even individuals can pile into the prize pool, turning one CEO's $100k tweet into a $500k purse.
Challenges can run multi-stage, with teams unlocking funding as they hit technical milestones - so the best builders get backed along the way instead of funding a Mach 1 attempt out of pocket.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡The Half Baked Take: This is pretty similar to our Hiring Contests idea we shared recently. Still worth sharing. Really interesting space that seems to be picking up some steam.
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🤖 The AI Assistant That Runs Your Inbox While You Run Your Company
Founders lose hours a week to admin that isn't the job: triaging email, chasing follow-ups, prepping for calls, wrangling calendars. Lindy takes it off your plate entirely.
It triages and replies to email in your voice, preps you before every meeting, records and summarizes calls, then sends the follow-ups so nothing slips. Text it from iMessage like you'd text a co-founder.
Hundreds of integrations, no setup slog, 2+ hours back every day.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration: Joan Li just shipped an app that identifies any flower you find and turns it into a collectible sticker. 200+ downloads in the first 3 days of soft launch. Proof of how far a simple idea plus AI tools can go.
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: You can build your own voice-controlled Jarvis in under 20 minutes. Riley Brown breaks down exactly how.
🆓 Playbook: Here’s a no-nonsense guide to master Claude Fable 5. Most people are using a fraction of what it can do.
🤑 Money Shot: This guy started with $3K and turned it into a $625M shoe empire. 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.
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🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠 AI Tool: Meta just quietly dropped a new AI app called Pocket that lets anyone build and share mini games from a text prompt. Pretty cool actually.
📈 Trends with Benefits: The world's biggest tech companies are quietly falling behind on their net zero targets, and it all comes down to one thing they didn't see coming.
📚 Must-Read: Alex Hormozi reckons "mental toughness" is actually four skills you can measure and train. Most people are failing at one without knowing which. Here's how to spot yours.
📺 Must-Watch: What if the Founding Fathers had Gmail? Google Workspace has the answer, and it's the best thing you'll watch before the 4th. Happy Birthday America 🇺🇸
✖️ Trending Tweet: We're all rushing toward some future that'll feel great once we get there. Sahil Bloom reckons that future is a mirage, and the good old days are the ordinary Tuesday you're skimming right past. Read it, then go enjoy today.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Vitamin Claw Machine
Keep forgetting to take your vitamins? Wish popping a fish oil felt less like a chore and more like a night out at the arcade?
Introducing Grabscription™, the world's first desktop claw machine that turns your morning supplement stack into a carnival. Load the tank with your supplements then work the joystick to grab your daily dose.
Grabscription™ - Claw and order
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks
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