Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as controversial as Instagram's new logo design 🆕
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to upgrade the family group chat
⛽️ AI workshops, $90k/mo app, a $13.3bn side project + more
🔍️ AI video, first principles thinking, $80k/mo idea + more
🍻 An idea to level up your car
Let's goooo 🚀
🗞️ Family Newspaper Subscription Service
It’s All Relative
Available Domain: Famfax.com
👤 Source: Sam Parr and Shaan Puri recently featured The Funday Press, a physical newspaper filled with games instead of news, on My First Million. That got us thinking about another kind of newspaper people might actually look forward to receiving…
❌ Problem:
Keeping up with family can be hard. Updates are scattered across WhatsApp groups, Instagram, camera rolls and voice notes. And if someone shares a new baby photo or holiday story, everyone reacts for 30 seconds until it disappears beneath 47 messages arguing about something random.
Which got us thinking…what if family updates became an occasion - something everyone devoted time to each month? We think we have a way to do exactly that. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
A family newspaper subscription service that uses AI to turn photos, messages, voice notes and calendar events into a professionally written, physical monthly newspaper about everything that happened in your family.
Relatives send updates to a private WhatsApp number or shared app throughout the month. AI transcribes voice notes, writes short articles, creates captions and organises everything into sections such as birthdays, new arrivals, holidays, children’s artwork and “this month five years ago”.
Every month, each family member receives physical and digital copies of the newspaper so they can catch up on everything that’s happening.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: The newspaper is the hook, but the private family archive is the real business; the winner will be whichever product captures memories without giving relatives another app they have to remember to use.
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🤖 AI Alone Gets Your Books 90% Right
Every tool you use is bolting on AI right now. With your finances, that only gets you so far. I'm a recovering accountant, so believe me on this: AI takes the books 90% of the way, and the last 10% is where the tax problems live.
QuickBooks Online covers both ends, a co-pilot for your finances. AI handles categorisation, reconciliation and anomaly detection, and real human experts handle the calls that need judgement.
Half Baked readers get 50% off for your first 3 months.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration:
Software: Corey Ganim reckons there's real money in half-day AI workshops for SMBs, and about 100 things you could upsell after. Good call, Corey.
Mobile App: This offline games app pulls in $90k a month from ad revenue alone, and anyone could ship something similar in a few hours.
E-commerce: This post-purchase concierge idea from the archives is one of our favorites. Would love to see someone try it!
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: With this guide, you can master AI marketing in just 30 days, with the full plan laid out day by day.
🆓 Playbook: Here’s how to build an AI-native company in 2026, from someone running a 34-agent workforce on a three-word prompt.
🤑 Money Shot: Less than three years after launching, a weekend side project is worth $13.3 billion. Here's how.
📧 10 Ways Your Favorite AI Can Improve Email Marketing
Here are three of them: pull your growth trends, spot rising bounces, and draft a win-back segment, none of it needing a dashboard.
Omnisend plugs into ChatGPT and Claude, so you work from your real account, on plans up to 35% cheaper than Klaviyo. The other seven are inside the guide below.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: VEED turns a script into a finished, branded video without a camera, then auto-subtitles, dubs and clips it for every platform you post to.
📰 Breaking News: Anthropic could go public in October at $2tn+, which would make it the biggest stock market debut in history. Not bad for a company less than five years old…
📚 Must-Read: This one habit can 10x your surface area for success. This is really important.
📺 Must-Watch: Garry Tan just spoke about YC and first principles thinking in a conversation covering everything from solo founders to the future of SF. Totally worth a listen!
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: This guy makes $80K/mo localising proven app ideas. No new idea needed, just the first mover in a smaller market. (Top pick from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Headlight Eyes
Tired of your car looking like everyone else’s? Wish it had a bit more character?
Introducing Beamers™, the world's first headlight assembly with fully animatronic eyeballs. Because…why not? Use these lights to see around corners, blind pedestrians or even wink at other drivers (if that’s what you’re into).
Beamers™ - Reflect on that.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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