Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as crazy as OpenAI’s model hacking into Hugging Face 👀
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to help people find love
⛽️ AI basketball, app designs, Beckham's $108M win + more
🔍 Sarah Guo's contrarian AI bet, $10M ARR playbook + more
🍻 An idea that could really make waves
Let's goooo 🚀
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📸 Dating Profile Reviews Marketplace
Match fixing
Available Domain: MatchReady.co
👤 Source: Roy Lee (founder of a16z-backed Cluely) shared three business ideas he thinks someone should start - this was our favorite.
❌ Problem:
I’ve never used a dating app before, and as someone with a “face for radio“ (or a “face for newsletters“ more accurately), I count myself lucky…
That’s because on dating apps photos drive 80%+ of the swipe decision - and getting the full profile right can improve date conversion by 21x.
Plenty of AI apps offer critiques of dating profiles, but these are all garbage. What you actually need is a panel of the demand side, and right now there's no way to buy that. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
A marketplace where you submit your full profile - photos, bio, the lot - and get personalized feedback from a panel of vetted reviewers who actually swipe: a ranked photo order, what to cut, a bio rewrite, and a specific reshoot list.
Charge $50-100 per audit, with reviewers taking a cut of every review. Aggregate the panel's verdicts so users see where three out of five reviewers agreed - that's signal, not opinion.
Start scrappy: recruit 10-20 reviewers with good judgment, run submissions through a form and payment link, deliver feedback as a written report with a Loom walkthrough on the premium tier. Before/after match-rate screenshots become the marketing engine.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: Like the AI audits idea from yesterday, this is more of a service business than a startup - but that's the point. Zero build cost, week-one revenue, and every happy customer is a TikTok testimonial waiting to happen.
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💰 We Got Founders a Better Deal Than Their Current Carrier
Most SMB phone plans creep up every year until you're paying double for the same coverage. We worked with T-Mobile for Business to get Half Baked readers a straight up deal: switch 10 or more lines to the CoreMobile plan and pay $20 a line a month.
Switch to the T-Mobile for Business CoreMobile plan and get an extra $150 back per line too, no cap on how many lines qualify. Same numbers, same devices, just a lower bill.*
*10 lines for $200/mo; each additional line $20/mo./line with Autopay; plus taxes & $35 device connection charge. $150/line credit via one-time bill credit.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration: Lumistar built a $2,399 AI machine that turns solo basketball practice into personalised coaching. The AI-hardware-for-sport wave is just getting started.
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: Here’s how to make your app look and feel 10x better without adding a single feature, from a team that's designed hundreds of them.
🆓 Playbook: Here’s how to get your first 100 customers from Reddit without getting banned, from someone who got banned learning it.
💰 Deal of the Day: Devin will dollar-match up to $50K of your usage, plus $15K in free credits on approval. Check it out if you’re building.
🤑 Money Shot: This founder watched 90% of his revenue vanish with the pandemic, then had one dinner with David Beckham and built a $108M ARR brand in 11 months. 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.
📖 HubSpot's 5-Minute Playbook for Ranking in ChatGPT
AEO is doing for LLMs what SEO did for Google, and the founders who move first take the citations.
HubSpot's playbook covers four plays: get cited by LLMs, convert that traffic, get in front of investors, attract talent. Real tactics, real data, built to actually use.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Bluehost’s AI All-Access Pack bundles ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok from just $20/mo.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Why are so many companies hitting $10M ARR so quickly these days? This is how.
📚 Must-Read: Sarah Guo seeded Harvey and Baseten before ChatGPT even shipped, and now she's betting against the trillion-dollar labs building everything. The best profile you'll read this month.
📺 Must-Watch: If you want to be a great founder then you need to be a great communicator. Joseph Tsar just dropped a full free course on how to be articulate in 36 minutes.
⭐ Reader’s Pick (top link from Monday’s edition): After his house burned down this founder spent the insurance money to make a phone gadget nobody asked for. It's now sold 290 million units. Here's how.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Fish Tank Backpack
Sick of leaving your goldfish home alone? Wish your fish could see the world beyond their bowl?
Introducing GoFish™, the world's first backpack aquarium that lets your fish join you on your morning stroll. A 4L shatterproof tank sits in a padded shoulder-strapped rucksack with 8 hours of oxygen for the open road, plus a panoramic viewing dome so your fishy friend can watch the world go by.
GoFish™ - your fish will tank you.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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