Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as SpaceX rebranding to SpaceXAI 🚀
In today's edition:
💡 An idea directly from an $80M founder
🔋 Home health, $50K websites, 120M app + more
🔍 Reading app, +40 founders, career advice + more
🍻 An idea that needs to be rained in
Let's goooo 🚀
P.S: Our Start program is kicking off tomorrow. Not had your welcome email? Reply to this one and we'll get you set up.
🕹️ Game Crowdfunding Platform
Game of Loans
Available Domain: Spawnsor.gg
👤 Source: Maor Shlomo (founder of Base44, which he sold to Wix for $80M just six months after launching) tweeted that we should all team up behind a GoFundMe for an open-source Age of Empires II that works on Macs. Why not expand the concept?
❌ Problem:
If you’re a gamer, then you’re counting down the days to the release of GTA 6. And you’re not alone…gaming is a $190B industry, bigger than Hollywood and the music industry combined ($34B and $29B).
And it's about to get even bigger. AI is going to empower a new generation of game developers to turn their half baked (nice) game ideas into real titles…and in order to do that, they’re going to need some funding. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A crowdfunding platform built for games - fund new indie titles, revive dead classics, or bring old favourites to new platforms.
Funds release in milestones as builds actually ship (playable demo → beta → launch), with backers voting to unlock each tranche - so you're funding a game, not a trailer and a Discord server.
Anyone can start a demand page ("AoE2 native on Mac: 12,000 pledges, $410K committed") that turns raw fan demand into a licensing offer that publishers can accept. Pure found money for IP owners.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: Games-only crowdfunding has been tried before, but that was when shipping a game took a studio and years. AI tools have collapsed the cost of building, so small raises can now actually deliver. Time to play.
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🗨 Your AI Can Now Talk Directly to Omnisend
Most "AI for marketing" tools do one thing: summarize data you already had to dig up yourself. Omnisend does something different.
Connect it to ChatGPT or Claude, and your AI can read your live Omnisend account, find the gap in your campaigns, and draft the fix right there.
Ask your ChatGPT or Claude things like "What drove revenue this week?" and it'll do it using your real, live data. No exports, no tab-switching, no copy-pasting. Just ask.
Don’t forget:
150,000+ brands run on Omnisend;
Up to 35% smaller bill for the same power;
Omnisend does migration for you for free.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration: Packy McCormick tested his own house and found it was quietly making him dumber. The home health audit business is buried in that thread, an idea we broke down a while back.
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: This 16-minute tutorial on how to create $50,000 cinematic websites (step by step) with Claude Fable 5 is insanely great.
🆓 Playbook: This outbounding strategy increased a founder’s reply rate by 36X over traditional cold email. Here’s how it works.
🤑 Money Shot: 120 million people love this travel app. It makes 90% of its money somewhere else entirely. 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.
🎁 Small Business Month: Get $1,500 Back for Switching to SuperMobile
It's Small Business Month, and T-Mobile for Business is putting $100 back per line in founders' pockets.
Activate 15+ voice lines on SuperMobile, pocket $1,500+ in bill credits, and get unlimited premium data plus a 5-Year Price Guarantee. No contest, no lottery, just money back for switching.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Summio is an AI iPhone reading app that turns books, YouTube videos, long articles, and PDFs into structured editorial summaries you can chat with.
📈 Trends with Benefits: AI has levelled the playing field between young and old, and the 40-year-old founder is back. The reason young founders should be worried is right here.
📚 Must-Read: When someone who's worked at OpenAI, DeepMind and Stanford drops career advice for the AI age, you read it. Phil Chen's take on the skills that'll actually matter this decade has to be read.
📺 Must-Watch: Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo built a $1.3B company on one rule. This is that rule.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Dan Koe reckons the most profitable skill of the 21st century isn't AI, coding or marketing. It's one meta-skill that quietly multiplies every other skill you'll ever learn.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Autonomous Umbrella
Tired of holding a stick over your head like a medieval peasant every time it drizzles? Wish your umbrella could work all by itself?
Introducing Hoverbrella™, the world's first fully autonomous flying umbrella. It locks onto your skull via GPS and hovers overhead, keeping you bone-dry while both hands stay free.
Hoverbrella™ - Reign or shine.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks
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