Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as OpenAI launching a $230 keyboard ⌨️
In today's edition:
💡 An idea inspired by a failed YC startup
⛽️ E-commerce ideas, personal branding, $10M after cancer + more
🔍 CleanShot X, new unicorn, mosquito assassins + more
🍻 An idea to make you earn your screen time
Let's goooo 🚀
🍻 Group Blind Date App
Three’s Company
Available Domain: Tablesix.app
👤 Source: Oscar Hong recently posted that he loves the idea for Grouper, the YC W12 startup, but only wants to be a user of it rather than the founder. So he's offering the full rebuild plan, the tech specs, the tokens, calls to walk a non-technical founder through an MVP, and to be the first paying customer. We'd take that deal.
❌ Problem:
The swipe era is winding down. Tinder's monthly actives were down 7% year-on-year in March, Bumble's paying users fell 21%, and Match's own CEO reckons Gen Z wants to connect, just not in a way that feels like a job interview. Yahoo Finance
Grouper had this solved back in 2012: three friends, three strangers, first round pre-paid, no profiles. It hit 20 cities and 400 partner bars before shutting in 2016, killed by the 25-person ops team it took to match everyone by hand. That team is now a prompt. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
Grouper rebuilt with an AI concierge sitting exactly where the ops team used to: two trios of friends, one bar, no photos, no profiles.
You and two mates pick a night, an agent matches your trio against another on vibe rather than headshots, books the table, pre-pays the opening round and drops the address an hour before you go.
Then it stretches past dating into the bigger market: trios new to a city, founder trios, run-club trios, with partner bars happily paying for six people who stay for three more rounds.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: Oscar's post is a spec, a token budget and a pre-sold first customer before you've written a line of code. Most seed rounds start with less.
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🤖 What Drives Your Marketing This Month? Just Ask
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⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration: We broke down 5 of the best e-commerce ideas we’ve ever shared in the newsletter here. (Same as yesterday, just with the right link today…)
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: Check out this guide on building a personal brand that outperforms your CV.
🆓 Playbook: This is the playbook Greg Isenberg would use to make $10M with AI agents.
🤑 Money Shot: This founder turned four failed startups, 18 months stuck at $2k/month, and cancer into a $10M/year business with 5 million users. 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.
🤖 Give Your Busywork To An Agent That Actually Knows Your Business
Agent Builder lets you design custom AI agents trained on your company's own data and processes, wired straight into Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce or Jira.
It is the task offloading you have wanted, minus the security headache of another random login.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: CleanShot X replaces the Mac screenshot tool, and about four other apps while it's at it. Capture, annotate, record, share. Simple as.
💰 Funding Secured: Fora just raised $60m at a $1bn valuation for a platform that turns anyone into a travel agent. Sick.
📚 Must-Read: AI was meant to replace labour, it did the opposite. This is why 80% of tokens do nothing (per this article). Worth the read.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Xiaoyin Qu believes that Thinking Machines will make more money than Anthropic. Here’s why.
🧬 Science Corner: Someone built a drone that hunts and kills insects mid-flight. The endgame is eradicating mosquitoes entirely. Fine by us.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Kettlebell Phone Lock
Tired of doom-scrolling when you should be swinging? Wish your phone was held hostage until you'd earned it back?
Introducing KettleCell™, the world's first 16kg cast-iron kettlebell with a polycarbonate vault in the bell. Slot your phone in, set your target, and the magnetic lock won't release until the onboard accelerometer counts 50 reps. No override, no exceptions.
KettleCell™ - Doing hard time.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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