Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as hotly anticipated as OpenAI’s new model launching on Thursday 👀
In today's edition:
💡 An idea inspired by the world’s biggest business influencer
🔋 Silent wearables, self-running code, dollar lip gloss + more
🔍 Fear-setting, model bake-offs, a great divide + more
🍻 An idea to really wipe the slate clean
Let's goooo 🚀
💉 Med Spa Talent Marketplace
Needle little help?
Available Domain: Glowforce.com
👤 Source: Alex Hormozi (founder of Acquisition.com, $250M+ portfolio revenue) went on TBPN recently and said med spas are "in a completely supply-constrained environment, they just don't know it." He sees the owners every week. We see an idea here.
❌ Problem:
Med spas are booming. 11,500+ US locations, ~1,000 new ones opening every year, serving an aging population with more money than anyone else and a desire to look 30 forever.
But 40% of operators can't fill open roles, and every empty injector chair is roughly $300-500K/year in lost revenue. Hiring still happens in Facebook groups and Indeed listings. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A vetted talent marketplace where licensed injectors, NPs, and laser techs create profiles and med spas apply to them. Credentials auto-verified, salaries transparent, roles filled in days not months.
Locum mode as the wedge: travelling injectors pick up fractional shifts at understaffed spas. Locum tenens for aesthetics.
Then the real unlock: use the demand data to launch a Lambda School for aesthetics - 12-week courses converting burned-out hospital RNs ($75K) into injectors ($120K+), with spas pre-paying for graduates. Stop matching supply, start manufacturing it.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: Incredible Health hit a $1.65B valuation doing this for hospital nurses. Whoever owns injector supply when the med spa roll-up wave hits becomes the kingmaker. Sharp idea.
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🎤 Live in San Francisco? Want Real VC Eyes on Your Pitch?
Most founders never hear what a tier-one VC actually thinks of their pitch until they are already in the room raising. Rippling is fixing that.
On Tuesday 14th July at Corgi Cafe in San Francisco, early-stage founders get three minutes to pitch partners from Redpoint and Battery and walk out with candid feedback on positioning, story and vision.
Doors open at 6pm, pitches at 6:30. Space is limited.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration: A guy made an app where you rotate cells, isolate organelles, and compare 3D structures like a video game. This could be done in so many fields…
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: Here’s how to stop prompting your coding agent and start designing loops that run the work for you.
🆓 Playbook: Reddit is a fast and cheap way to validate an idea. This Reddit Operating Playbook 2026 shows you how to judge fit, pick communities, and do it right.
🎁 Deal of the Day: We love Slack at Half Baked and use it every day. New customers get 50% off Pro for three months.
🤑 Money Shot: A $200 makeup receipt made him sell lip gloss for a dollar, and everyone said it would fail. It's now a $4B public company. 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.
👀 80% of Your Team Is Using AI You Haven’t Approved
That is the Reco.ai stat, and it is probably true at your company too.
Devs.ai gives every team a governed workspace with full audit trails and IT approval built in, so shadow AI stops being a risk you are managing blind.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Why bet on one model when they can all pitch you? 21st.dev/ai takes your prompt and has every frontier model build the UI at once, so you compare real takes side by side.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Half of tech feels amplified by AI. The other half feels shaken by it. Lenny's 2026 survey says that single line divides the workforce more than anything else they measured, by a wide margin.
📚 Must-Read: Isaac Medeiros (founder of Mini Katana) wrote out his top business advice for a junior team member and posted the whole thing. Pure gold.
🎧️ Must-Listen: How do two people build a $1.4B company together? Blitzy's Brian Elliott gets specific on The Upstarts Podcast.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Tim Ferriss says his most powerful exercise isn't goal-setting, it's fear-setting: the monthly ritual behind his biggest wins. Here's the exact template.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Robotic Whiteboard Eraser
Tired of scrubbing dry-erase marker off a whiteboard like it's a crime scene? Wish your whiteboard could just clean itself?
Introducing WipeOut™, the world's first autonomous whiteboard eraser. This palm-sized bot suctions to any dry-erase surface and clears a full 6ft board in 40 seconds flat.
WipeOut™ - The writing’s off the wall.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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