Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as wild as three secret AI civilisations forming inside OpenAI 🤖
In today's edition:
💡 An idea inspired by a $250M founder + more
⛽️ 3D sites, a $200k teenager, a $300M pivot + more
🔍 OpenAI's ad business, PG on ideas, a $1.65B video + more
🍻 An idea with a real ring to it
Let's goooo 🚀
We're teaming up with ActiveCampaign to run an AI marketing masterclass this Wednesday to help our readers turn strangers into customers. It's gonna be epic - save your spot here!
💊 Nicotine Taper Subscription
Diminishing returns
Name.com Domain: Quitatin.com
👤 Source: Sean Frank (CEO of Ridge) said that if he sold Ridge, he'd build a business in this exact space. This could work…
❌ Problem:
Nicotine pouches are this generation’s cigarettes. Roughly 10% of 21-year-old men use nicotine pouches, and 42% of adult pouch users say they picked them up to quit smoking in the first place.
And like smoking before it, over time you’re going to see a long line of Zyn users looking to quit. However every "quit Zyn" guide describes the same process - drop your strength about 10% a week until you hit zero, which means every single person attempting it is doing the math themselves. It’s time to make things easier. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A pouch subscription which steps from 9mg down to zero over 16 weeks to help Zyn users to quit.
A customer takes a 60-second intake quiz (current strength, cans per week, years of use) and AI generates their personal taper curve.
Every box arrives pre-sorted by day instead of by strength, and if you slip up and the accompanying app re-ladders the curve instead of making you start over
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: If you started here with pouches there’s no reason you couldn’t repeat the playbook for vapes too. Super exciting space - I can see why Sean’s pumped about it.
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🎧 Turn Every Sales Call Into a Coaching Session
Founders juggling calls, texts and video across five different apps lose the details that actually close deals.
Dialpad on T-Mobile for Business puts it all in one app, then uses AI to do the work you don't have time for: it transcribes and summarises every call automatically, scores sentiment and CSAT in real time, and flags the exact moment a prospect objected so you know what to fix next time.
Plans start at $25 a user a month, backed by a 100% uptime SLA.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻️ SaaS: Mike Strives listed 38 ways to find $1M startup ideas, from mining one-star reviews to searching X. We love this.
📱 Mobile App: GoFundMe, but for weddings. Great idea or the next “Uber for dogs?“
🛍️ E-commerce: Here's the idea we ran back in #597. Upload a photo and get a buildable LEGO kit of it on your doorstep in a week. I need this in my life.
🤖 Hardware: 55 million people live with dementia, and six in ten of them will wander. This is the wearable we'd build for them.
💵 Side Hustle: Alex Moore reckons a laptop, Wi-Fi and some spare time are all you need to make $500 a day. Here are the 10 Claude prompts he'd start with.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: In ten minutes you can learn how to build 3D websites with AI. Great for building the perfect landing page.
🛠️ AI Tool: Meta's terminal coding agent Muse Code is out of beta. Zuck ain’t playing around any more.
📘 Playbook: Greg Isenberg sat down with a 19-year-old pulling in $200,000+ building apps with AI, and he shared his entire playbook.
💸 Founder Deal: Get 45 days of Wispr Flow free, still the most used AI tool at Half Baked.
🤑 Money Shot: She raised $2.5M, made almost no sales, then bet everything on the $100K side project every investor told her to kill. It now does $300M a year. Here's the story.
☕ While Big Coffee Flinches, This Brand Adapts
Between heavy downpours decimating Brazil’s coffee plants and commodity swings, big brands like Starbucks are struggling to get the best arabica coffee beans.
But Green Coffee Company (GCC), Colombia’s #1 largest and vertically integrated coffee producer, is protected against these hits. While big brands absorb rising input costs, GCC is expanding across the US and Canada.
*Green Coffee Company is offering securities through the use of an Offering Statement that has been qualified by the Securities and Exchange Commission under Tier II of Regulation A. A copy of the Final Offering Circular that forms a part of the Offering Statement may be obtained from: https://invest.greencoffeecompany.com/
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: OpenAI's advertising business has hit a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate after just 200 days. Are ads about to be everywhere in chatbots?
📚 Must-Read: Two people spend the same 100 hours on a skill and walk away with completely different results. Here are seven principles that explain why.
📺 Must-Watch: In 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. The founders, somewhat poetically, recorded this video of themselves the day they got acquired. Goals.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Paul Graham reckons the best startup ideas never come from looking for startup ideas. You should do this instead.
⭐️ Reader's Pick: This product is going mega viral at the moment. Is there a more modern, grown-up version to be built? (Top link from Friday's edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Ring Watch
Tired of your watch being all the way down at your wrist? Wish telling the time required significantly more squinting?
Introducing the Ring Watch™, a fully working digital watch shrunk onto a stainless steel ring. Stopwatch, alarm, LED backlight, dual time. The screen is roughly the size of a Tic Tac. Incredible.
Ring Watch™ - Finger on the pulse.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks
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