Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as often as frontier models are hacking other companies (Meta this time) 🙃
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to price up your Pokémon shoebox
⛽️ Billion-dollar ideas, Claude Code, a $3.8B payday + more
🔍️ Meta launch, Tobi Lütke, telepathy + more
🍻 An idea to maximize your gains
Let's goooo 🚀
P.S. Starting a business? Our Founder Toolkit has the playbooks and deals to get you moving.
🃏 Collectibles Identifier App
Grade Expectations
Available Domain: Cardlens.co
👤 Source: Sabba Keynejad (co-founder of VEED) and Charlie Ward (founder of Ramen Club) broke down the identifier app gold rush on the Napkin Math podcast this week. We reckon the same playbook works for collectors...
❌ Problem:
When I was a kid Pokémon, was all the rage. I played the games, collected the cards, watched the TV show. And somehow, in 2026, it feels just as popular.
The wider trading card market is valued at $13 billion, heading for $21 billion by 2034, yet most collectors still have no idea what's sitting in their shoebox. Is that Charizard worth $40 or $4,000? There should be an app for that. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A mobile app that identifies any trading card or comic from a photo (set, year, variant, print run), pulls live sold comps and returns a rough valuation plus an AI condition estimate across centring, corners, edges and surface.
Users can catalogue their collection, track its value like a stock portfolio, and even sell cards once the app expands.
Over time you could partner with grading companies and route users to them with the scans as pre-qualified submissions.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: The “scanner app” window won’t be open for long. There are tonnes of great ideas in this space once you take a look.
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🩸 160+ Lab Tests for $365. It Could Have Cost You $15,000.
Function gives you access to 160+ lab tests a year, which is 5x more than the typical annual physical includes.
That spans heart, hormones, thyroid, liver, kidneys, heavy metals, nutrients and inflammation, for a properly detailed look at what is going on inside you. Test at home or at one of 2,000+ locations, with no insurance or referrals needed.
What could have cost $15,000 now costs $365 for the year.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration: These five ideas from our archives all have the potential to become billion-dollar companies. Let’s get them built!
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: Want to learn how to use Claude Code? This 4-hour course will turn you into an expert.
🆓 Playbook: This founder got to 21K users in 3 weeks with zero ad spend. Here’s how.
🤑 Money Shot: This business went from a $5 stock nobody wanted to a $3.8 billion exit in 3 years. Here's how.
🤫 The $100K AI Jobs No One is Talking About
Two new career paths are quietly emerging in the AI space.
This guide reveals how to position yourself for roles offering $50K-$100K+ salaries before they become mainstream.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Meta just launched Muse Code, a terminal coding agent built for long-horizon software engineering. Zuck is back in the game.
📚 Must-Read: Building a mobile app? These seven practical tips for designing an onboarding flow come from a designer who has built hundreds of them. Steal them before your next launch.
🎧️ Must-Listen: Shopify's Tobi Lütke was terrified of public speaking, then fixed it in a week with a ten-minute daily exercise. This is so good.
✖️ Trending Tweet: An OpenAI researcher quit to go build thought-to-text telepathy. You need to be more bullish on AI.
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: Check out these five side hustles that you can start immediately from past editions of Half Baked. (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Tinned Protein Bars
Tired of protein bars with 10,000 ingredients in them? Wish your snack came sealed like a wartime ration?
Introducing Canabolic™, the world's first protein bar hermetically vacuum-sealed in a 52g pull-ring tin. Four ingredients, zero preservatives, because nothing gets in and nothing gets out.
Canabolic™ - Whey ahead of its time.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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