Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as fresh as OpenAI's $400 doughnut 🍩
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to disrupt big SaaS
⛽️ AI services, subscription boxes, a $3.5M pickleball payday + more
🔍️ Bumble's pivot, Ben Horowitz, Patrick Collison + more
🍻 An idea to support the conspiracy theorists out there
Let's goooo 🚀
🧬 SaaS Cloning Bounty Platform
Fork Yeah
Available Domain: Cloneathon.com
👤 Source: Shawn Wang, founder of smol.ai and co-host of the Latent Space podcast, floated this on X after his team asked him to sign off on $40K a year for software they'd never used. Thanks for the inspo Shawn!
❌ Problem:
15 years ago, Marc Andreessen famously said that “software is eating the world”. It did. But that’s left a lot of businesses paying big bills every month for pretty basic software packages to run their businesses.
Enter AI, the great equalizer. What once took teams of engineers months to build can be built in a weekend with AI and a few Red Bulls. The result? Many businesses are paying far more than they should be for software. So why not create a platform to level the playing field? Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A marketplace where companies incentivize engineers to create low cost clones of software platforms they use.
They post the tool they're overpaying for, the workflows they need it to do, and a cash prize for whoever can rebuild it.
Builders get a deadline to produce a solution. The company runs the eval and the winner takes the cash. The developer maintains the software moving forward, gets paid by the company and can sell it to other businesses too. Everybody wins.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: You’ll need to be careful here that entire software platforms aren’t actually being fully cloned, otherwise you could get some nasty letters from Big Tech lawyers. Solve for that and this could be a winner.
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⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration:
Software: There are seven AI services that old-school businesses are queuing up to pay for. Someone needs to productise these…
Mobile App: The fitness app market is worth $14.7B and growing 17.6% a year. This idea from edition #246 could disrupt that market.
E-commerce: Here are five subscription boxes we reckon someone should be running by Christmas. Pick one, steal it, tell us how it goes.
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: ChatGPT Work is incredibly powerful. Here’s how to use 99% of it in 61 minutes.
🆓 Playbook: Sam Altman wrote out his entire playbook for building a startup while he was running YC. It’s really, really good.
🤑 Money Shot: He got a black eye playing pickleball at 64 and turned it into a $3.5M business. 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: Clicky is going super viral right now. It’s a free, screen-aware macOS AI assistant that lives right next to your cursor. Coolest tool I’ve seen in a while.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Bumble and Tinder are both ditching the swipe and pivoting to real-world events. Big opportunities in this space.
🎧️ Must-Listen: Big oil, big auto and big government were all meant to kill Tesla. Ben Horowitz explains why they couldn't, and what that says about founders.
📺 Must-Watch: Garry Tan just broke down why the next generation of startups will be built by smaller teams than ever before. He walks through the tools, the workflows, and how to build your own personal AGI.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Here's what Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe) would build if he started over today. And no, it’s not an AI lab.
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: These five ideas from our archives all have the potential to become billion-dollar companies. Let’s get them built! (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Tin Foil Hat
Tired of the Government reading your thoughts? Wish you could shield yourself in a stylish way?
Introducing Conspiracap™, the world's first drop-in tin foil liner that turns any hat into a tin foil hat in seconds. It protects your head from Government mind control, foreign surveillance and telepathic attacks.
Conspiracap™ - Foiled again.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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