Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as shocking as Brad Lightcap (OpenAI COO) leaving the firm 😲
In today's edition:
💡 A food diary that texts you first
⛽️ AI side hustle, app ideas, a $12M soda brand + more
🔍️ Grok Bot, brain rewiring, Patrick Collison + more
🍻 An idea to turn smoking into a home comfort
Let's goooo 🚀
FYI: We're running an epic masterclass with ActiveCampaign on Wednesday (August 12th at 1pm ET) that will take you from an idea to an automated marketing system in just 45 minutes. Don’t miss it!
📲 iMessage Calorie Tracking Agent
Food for Thought
Available Domain: Textmymacros.com
👤 Source: Nick Vasilescu (cofounder of Orgo) floated this idea on X yesterday.
❌ Problem:
Ever tried to track your calories and gave up after a few days? Me too. That’s because calorie tracking is among the most abandoned habits in consumer software. Around 70% of users quit within two weeks, and the strongest predictor of whether you're still logging in six months isn't willpower, it's seconds per meal.
The industry already fixed the slow part. Cal AI turned photo-in, macros-out into $30m of revenue and a sale to MyFitnessPal before its founder turned 20. Food recognition is now a commodity. What's left is everything around it: download the app, make an account, remember it exists, open a fourth icon at the dinner table. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A calorie tracker with no app, no account and no home screen icon. You text a photo of your lunch to a number in Messages and it texts back the macros. The thread is your food diary, scrollable, already open, already on your phone.
It also texts you first, which is the retention mechanic nobody has. A message at 8pm asking how dinner went is a normal thing to receive. A push notification from an app you ignored nine days ago is not.
No app also means no App Store tax. Cal AI's $29.99 a year leaves roughly $21 after Apple's cut. Bill $9.99 a month on the web and you keep about $116. Then sell coach and clinic seats on top, where the trainer buys the dashboard and the client just texts.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: Same customer, four to five times the net revenue, purely because the log happens in Messages instead of an app. I like this a lot.
Rate this idea
📧 The 400 Signups You’ve Not Emailed Since March
They gave you their email because they liked what you were building. Then you got busy building it and the list went quiet. Now sending anything feels like it needs a free afternoon and a design sense you do not have.
Active Intelligence writes it from your website, your voice and whatever you have sent before, so the draft that comes back is grounded in your brand voice.
Ten minutes on a Tuesday, not a whole Sunday.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration:
Software: This AI side hustle is one of the biggest opportunities out there right now, with people making an extra $5K - $8K per month.
Mobile App: We’ve shared dozens of mobile app ideas in past editions of Half Baked. Here are five we’d love to see built.
E-commerce: Peter Rahal, founder of David Protein, is launching HallPass, ‘the Coke Zero of candy’. You could follow this playbook for dozens of other products…
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: This is the ultimate marketing guide for app founders, covering onboarding, account warm-up, format research and what to pay creators.
🆓 Playbook: Check out this full workflow for creating AI product ads, including the master prompt and a category modifier sheet you can lift straight into your own builds.
🤑 Money Shot: This founder went from $72k in first-year sales to building a $12M soda brand. Here's how.
💰 $1,000 Off Every Line, 20 Lines or More
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Unlimited premium data and satellite coverage included.
With 36 monthly bill credits for new accounts that add at least 20 lines on SuperMobile. 5-Year Price Guarantee applies to monthly price on-network talk, text and 5G data; exclusions like taxes & fees apply.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🤖 AI Tool: SpacexAI just launched Grok Bot, persistent AI agents that sign into tools like Gmail, Salesforce, and LinkedIn to complete end-to-end tasks. The early reviews are really promising.
📚 Must-Read: This deep dive on how repetition physically rewires your brain, including the region that only grows when you do things you don't want to do, is key to understanding how to get better at anything.
🎧️ Must-Listen: These 90 seconds from Marc Andreessen on why founder-run companies resist disruption are gold.
📺 Must-Watch: Alex Finn makes the case that ChatGPT Voice is the most underrated AI feature of 2026, then hands over 8 tips to master it.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Patrick Collison recently broke down what Stripe was almost called, and the deadline that decided the name. Fascinating story.
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: Here are five zero-inventory e-commerce ideas anyone can steal. No warehouse, no stock, no $4k of inventory sitting in your spare room. (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Cigarette Incense
Quit smoking but miss the ritual? Wish your house could smell incredible while you relive your glory days of smoking?
Introducing Fauxbacco™, the world's first incense stick built to look, feel and burn exactly like a cigarette. 20 to a pack, 11 minutes of burn time, and they make your home smell like sandalwood (whatever that is) instead of smoke.
Fauxbacco™ - Smoke and mirrors.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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