Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as TIME’s 100 AI list (that left out Jensen somehow…) 🤷♂️
In today's edition:
💡 An idea inspired by Shopify’s billion-dollar founder
⛽️ 11 agent tips, $10M in five months, an $8M exit + more
🔍 DeepSeek's $74B, Koe's three types, Altman on AGI + more
🍻 A business card that arrives at 40mph
Let's goooo 🚀
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🧠 Identity Training App
Appfirmations
Available Domain: Affirms.co
👤 Source: In a January 2026 conversation with David Senra, Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke described overcoming his fear of public speaking using affirmations. We think you could productize this…
❌ Problem:
I’ve never been big on things like manifestation, the Law of Attraction, affirmations, etc. So when I heard Tobi Lütke describe how he overcame his fear of public speaking by sitting down every day for one week and writing down “I love public speaking”, I was floored.
So if Tobi, one of the most analytical founders alive, uses affirmations, more of us should be too. Affirmation apps already exist of course, but most are passive feeds of encouraging sentences rather than structured experiments. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Launch an app for running seven-day “identity experiments”. A user chooses something they want to change, records a baseline and chooses one personalised statement to bring about the change.
Each day, they write the statement repeatedly in the app or photograph a handwritten page. They must then complete one tiny proof action, because identity becomes more believable when there is evidence attached.
On day seven, the app repeats the original test and produces a before-and-after report. Start with public-speaking challenges, then expand into other things people want to change.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: The big thing to crack here is measuring behavioral change. If you can nail that you’ll have an incredible product.
Rate this idea
💤 The Emails That Go Out While You’re Building
Someone signs up at 2am. They get nothing, because the welcome email has been on your to-do list since launch and you are the only person who could write it.
Active Intelligence builds the automatic ones to the same standard as the ones you write by hand, off your website, your voice and your own instructions.
Set it up once and it keeps working on the days you never open your laptop, which is most of them.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻️ SaaS: Becoming a solo founder means giving up everything an employer used to cover. We've mapped out the product that fixes it, and we want someone to build it.
📱 Mobile App: A map, your friends, and one very good idea. We can think of five spin-offs already.
🛍️ E-commerce: I’ll be honest, we could use some fashion tips here at Half Baked. Here’s an idea we’d love to see someone build.
🤖 Hardware: This product is going mega viral at the moment. Is there a more modern, grown-up version to be built?
💵 Side Hustle: Roy Lee reckons AI video agencies are the easiest way to make a million dollars right now. He could be right.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: Riley Brown's 11 tips for building a team of agents in 37 minutes is a masterful tutorial.
🛠️ AI Tool: Describe the business you want to build and Whop builds the whole thing for you, from marketplace to paid community or anything else you can think of. Very cool.
📘 Playbook: Ben Cera, founder of Polsia, shared 17 growth tactics that got him to a $10M run rate in five months. He's honest about which ones flopped.
💸 Founder Deal: Granola captures action summaries for every meeting. They're giving Half Baked readers 100% off their first month. Claim the deal.
🤑 Money Shot: This founder went from €250k in debt and ten dead products to an $8M exit in 24 months. 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
📰 Breaking News: DeepSeek is closing a round at a $74B valuation, weeks after its first ever outside raise.
📚 Must-Read: Dan Koe reckons there are three types of people in the AI age, and two of them lose.
📺 Must-Watch: This Sam Altman lecture is everywhere this week. Ideas, money, AGI risk. Great watch.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Paul Graham dug out the pep talk he sent the 2007 YC batch before Demo Day. Still holds up today.
⭐️ Readers’ Pick: This simple side hustle has real legs, and this founder is giving it a go and documenting every number from day one. (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Business Card Gun
Tired of fumbling through your wallet for a business card that's gone soft and bent? Wish networking felt a little more decisive?
Introducing Cardridge™, the world's first semi-automatic business card launcher. Holds 62 cards, fires at 40mph, and ships with a laser sight for picking off angels across a crowded conference hall.
Cardridge™ - Reload your network.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks
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