Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as incredible as Nvidia acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9bn 👀
In today's edition:
💡 Rebuilding a dev platform for a new audience + more
⛽️ Grokbot armies, 10,000 users for $0, a $12.9b exit + more
🔍 Instinct's $250m, Codex's non-coders, Collison on AI + more
🍻 A band-aid that’ll bring you back to your childhood
Let's goooo 🚀
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📦 GitHub for Non-Coders
Commitment issues
Name.com Domain: Makebase.com
👤 Source: Greg Isenberg (CEO of Late Checkout, host of the Startup Ideas Podcast) reckons millions of people are now building software with nowhere to show, share or collaborate on projects. Hard to disagree.
❌ Problem:
GitHub is where the software world keeps its work. It stores your project, records every change so you can undo mistakes and lets others copy and build on it. All of it wrapped in engineer language - repos, commits, branches, merge conflicts.
But now, as millions and millions of us non-technical folk are starting to build software, GitHub doesn’t feel like the right tool to use. We need a more user-friendly version. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A home for software built by people who don't code. Apps from Lovable, Replit, Claude or Wabi sync in automatically and sit in your library as cards with live previews you can tap and use, with every edit saved as a snapshot named "before I broke the login".
Every app gets a public page and your profile becomes a shelf of everything you've built. Remix hands anyone a working copy to change and republish, and suggesting a fix to someone else's app is just "here's a change I made, want it?"
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: Don't try to out-engineer GitHub, you'll lose. Win on the showing-off and the storage quietly becomes a feature nobody has to think about.
Rate this idea
🗓️ What Your AI Marketing Team Does While You Ship
You do not have a marketer. You have a product to build and a list going stale. Here is what Active Intelligence takes off your desk.
Writes the email in your voice, pulled from your website and anything you have sent before.
Works out who on your list should get it, from a plain English description.
Sends it to each person at the hour they are most likely to open it.
You approve, it goes out.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻️ SaaS: Marc Lou turned his startup revenue database into a galaxy where every company is a planet, sized by what it earns. Could this be a SaaS?
📱 Mobile App: The dating game is changing fast, with both Tinder and Bumble reworking how their apps function. Here's an idea we ran a while back that suddenly looks very well timed…
🛍️ E-commerce: A founder is auctioning off ad space he doesn't own yet to pay for the thing itself. Interesting concept - what else could it be applied to?
🤖 Hardware: There's a hardware playbook hiding in plain sight: take a dull kitchen product and make it smart. Ninja has done it six times.
💵 Side Hustle: This simple side hustle has real legs, and this founder is giving it a go and documenting every number from day one.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: Here’s how to set up Grokbot properly so a team of bots run your business overnight. Most people never get past bot one.
🛠️ AI Tool: Anyone can ship mobile apps now - describe the app you want and Rork builds it for iOS, Android and web, App Store submission included.
📘 Playbook: This founder got 10,000 users with $0 ad spend, and shared exactly how he did it.
💸 Founder Deal: One for the early-stage teams out there: get a free year of Fin plus 93% off Intercom. Nice.
🤑 Money Shot: They turned down $500M from Nvidia in 2025. Nvidia just came back with $12.9B. Here's what happened.
🔧 No IT Team? No Problem.
CoreMobile from T-Mobile for Business is built for teams without a dedicated IT department: unlimited talk, text and 5G data, no annual contract, and a price guaranteed for 5 years.*
Simple by design.
With Autopay, plus taxes & fees; during congestion, customers using >50GB/mo. may notice reduced speeds until next bill cycle. * 5-Year Price Guarantee applies to monthly price on-network talk, text, and 5G data. Exclusions like taxes & fees apply.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
💰 Bag Secured: Instinct, a one-year-old AI assistant run by a 23-year-old, just raised $250M at a $2.5B valuation. Go see what it does.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: The fastest-growing group of Codex users aren't engineers. a16z's latest chart breaks this down.
📺 Must-Watch: The consensus says AI hands the economy to five companies. Patrick Collison disagrees, and his reasoning is worth hearing. Press play.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Greg Isenberg reckons this is the most asymmetric window he's ever seen in business, and he's listed five ways to take a swing at it. Go pick one.
⭐️ Reader's Pick: Here’s how to find mobile app ideas worth building. Absolute gold mine. (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Pixel Band-aids
Sick of your injuries going completely unnoticed? Wish a papercut looked like it came from a boss fight?
Introducing Pixel-Aid™, the world's first bandage pre-printed with a 16-bit blood splatter so every scrape looks like an injury in a video game. Band-aids come in four damage states, from Minor Scratch to Critical Hit, plus a Final Boss edition that covers the whole forearm.
Pixel-Aid™ - Patch notes included.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks
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