Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as sudden as Leopold Aschenbrenner selling Situational Awareness’s entire portfolio 🫠
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to get your kids into tech
⛽️ AI film studio, side hustles, $71 to $2bn + more
🔍 Modern Figma, the founder age myth, 10x compute costs + more
🍻 An idea to get things rolling
Let's goooo 🚀
🧰 Build-Together Tech Kits
Ohm schooling
Available Domain: Livewires.tech
👤 Source: Dan Peguine, ex-VP of growth at Nexar, recently built a screen-free WhatsApp voice messenger so his kids could speak directly with their grandparents without using a screen. It got me thinking…why not empower more people to build cool tech with their kids?
❌ Problem:
Children spend plenty of time (AKA too much time) using technology these days, but rarely understand how it actually works. Many STEM kits briefly demonstrate a concept, then join the growing collection of abandoned toys under the bed.
Parents would love to build genuinely useful gadgets with their kids, but choosing components, finding compatible instructions and debugging somebody’s six-year-old GitHub project can quickly turn Saturday afternoon into unpaid IT support. It’s time to simplify this. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
A monthly subscription service that sends families everything needed to build one useful tech product together. Projects could include a screen-free family messenger, a bedroom weather station, a pet alarm, a secret-code radio or a plant that asks for water.
Each kit explains what the components do as the family assembles them, with different build paths for younger children, older children and ambitious parents who inevitably start “improving” everything.
The hardware, instructions and support come with the subscription, while all code is free and open source. Families can remix projects, reuse old components and share their own modifications with the community.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: This works if every box produces something children genuinely want to keep using - the moment it feels like homework, the idea dies.
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🤖 10 Ways Your Favorite AI Can Improve Email Marketing
What if we told you that in under 30 seconds, you can see your subscriber growth trends and your latest campaign activity without opening a single dashboard?
That's one of 10 ways our new guide puts your AI to work. Others pinpoint which email in your welcome flow earns the most, catch rising bounce rates before they cost you opens, or hand you a lapsed-buyer segment with the email already drafted.
Haven't used Omnisend before? More than 150,000 ecommerce brands use it for email and SMS marketing, and they average $79 back for every $1 spent. Migration is free, takes up to five business days, and plans cost up to 35% less than Klaviyo's.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration: A California-based startup just unveiled a 2-meter-tall robotic centaur designed to enter disaster zones too dangerous for humans. I love the future.
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: Here’s how to build a working film studio in Claude Code while you sleep.
🆓 Playbook: These 4 AI side hustles pay $5K - $10K per month. Here’s the playbook.
🤑 Money Shot: A Google Form, a WhatsApp group, and $71 in prize money turned into a $2bn run rate in four years. 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.
📖 The LinkedIn Playbook for Startup Founders
Most founders treat LinkedIn like a CV. The ones who raise, hire and sell treat it like a channel.
HubSpot's free LinkedIn Growth Playbook breaks down the profile setup, hooks and posting cadence that turn a founder account into pipeline.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Paper connects your teams, agents, code, and data on a single design space. It’s Figma for 2026.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Think you’re too old to be a founder? The data says the opposite, and the gap has been growing since 2010.
📚 Must-Read: Everyone's pricing in cheaper compute. Dwarkesh Patel thinks it’s going to get 10x more expensive instead. Here’s why.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Need an idea? Ben Lang has YC's full process for picking one in the AI era.
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: We’ve published 650+ ideas, and these are the 10 mobile apps we'd build first. 100% free to steal. (Top link from yesterday’s edition).
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Wheel Heels
Tired of walking everywhere? Wish you could unleash your inner child anywhere you walk?
Introducing Wheel Heels™, the world's first bolt-on wheel cartridge that turns any shoe into Heelys. Ships with a quick-release pin, three tread depths, and absolutely no brakes.
Wheel Heels™ - They see me rollin’
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👋 That’s All Folks
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