Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as chilling as the teaser for Nathan Fielder’s new secret Elizabeth Holmes documentary 😬
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to support a struggling market
⛽️ 9 Astra prompts, a $12 dog blog turned 8-figure brand + more
🔍 A parabolic cyber curve, Paul Graham's reframe, what's coming from OpenAI + more
🍻 An idea to make your mornings 10X more peaceful
Let's goooo 🚀
🏠 AI Property Walkthroughs
Virtually home
Name.com Domain: Nextroom.co
👤 Source: Yunfan Ye shared a demo turning property listing photos into a remodelled, virtually staged 3D home, with modelling and corrections taking around three hours. There’s a startup idea here I reckon…
❌ Problem:
Google searches for “can’t sell house” have reached an all-time high. Yikes. And it’s no surprise given…eh, everything right now I guess? Sellers need to do whatever they can to get buyers over the line.
But empty rooms and unflattering photos leave buyers guessing how a home fits together, never mind how they’d live in it. AI presents a solution to this. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Build an AI property walkthrough tool that turns listing photos and floor plans into interactive 3D tours. Agents could embed them on their existing websites or generate a dedicated property page, paying per listing.
Buyers could explore the layout and switch between the actual rooms and clearly labelled virtual furnishing options. They could also furnish the home digitally to get a sense of how it would look if they lived there.
The grander vision: create a property marketplace built around walking through homes. With agents’ permission, bring their listings into one searchable catalogue where buyers can jump between shortlisted kitchens, compare layouts and try the same furniture in different homes before booking viewings.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: Zillow already offers 3D tours, so the opening is making accurate walkthroughs easier to create from assets agents already have. Sell the tool to agents first. Their listings could become the foundation for the bigger browsing destination.
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📧 The 400 Signups You Have 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 already sounds like you.
Ten minutes on a Tuesday, not a whole Sunday.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻️ SaaS: Here's a website we'd genuinely love to see built, it would make amazing content too. MrBeast would totally invest in it.
📱 Mobile App: Anxious new parents already read every label. This app could do it for them (if someone built it…)
🛍️ E-commerce: Slow commerce is finally having its moment. We flagged it back in March 2025 and reckon there are a few real businesses hiding in it.
💵 Side Hustle: This guy makes $65k a month selling eBooks he didn’t write. And he reckons anyone can make money quickly by doing the same. Cool side hustle.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: Everyone's shouting about AI app building. This is the guide that actually tells you how to do it.
💬 AI Prompt: Check out these 9 cool GPT 6 Astra prompts from Greg Isenberg. This model is legit insane.
📘 Playbook: Here’s a full guide on how to get users if you have no budget. We’ve all been there before!
💸 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 idea went from a $12 dog blog to an 8-figure grooming brand run by four people. Here's how.
💀 Most Startup Disasters Are Survivable. This One Isn't.
Bad launch, you ship again. Churn spike, you fix onboarding. But a phishing attack or ransomware can take down your business overnight.
Bitdefender installs on every laptop in an afternoon, then runs itself and blocks attacks before they start. Get a 3-month free trial, courtesy of Half Baked.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Cyber risk went parabolic this spring after four flat years. If that curve holds, there are a lot of startups to be built here.
📚 Must-Read: This is what OpenAI's chief scientist thinks is coming in the next few years. Heavy, but essential reading.
📺 Must-Watch: These three minutes with Ajahn Brahm are a great, short pause for anyone whose brain currently has more open tabs than their browser.
✖️ Trending Tweet: A demoralised founder asked Paul Graham what to do when your idea can be duplicated in a weekend. His answer reframes the whole thing.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Silent Blender
Tired of your 6am smoothie waking the entire street? Wish making breakfast didn't sound like a jet engine was going off in your kitchen?
Introducing Deciblend™, the world's first blender with a vacuum-sealed sound chamber and a rubber-suspended 1400W motor. Pulverises fruit at 24,000rpm at a whisper-quiet 18 decibels.
Deciblend™ - a smooth silencer.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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