Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as important as this newsletter's opening line (sorry we forgot you yesterday) 😆
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to turn any subject into a daily streak
⛽️ 7 Astra use cases, a $1.1m AI bill cut + more
🔍 Andreessen on compute, the jobs AI might take + more
🍻 An idea to make strangers stare at your feet
Let's goooo 🚀
🐦 Duolingo for Everything
Every day’s a school day
Name.com Domain: Learnquest.co
👤 Source: I was cruising on X yesterday and saw Duolingo's outrageous response to Apple's latest product launch. Hence...this idea.
❌ Problem:
Duolingo is the definitive learning app. It’s a $6.5B juggernaut of a business with some of the wildest marketing I’ve ever seen (check this out from yesterday’s big Apple launch event - totally unhinged).
But what if you want to learn something that isn’t a language (or chess)? What about everything else in life you might want to learn? We think there should be an app for that. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Build an app that generates a Duolingo-style learning path for anything. Enter “I want to understand football tactics” or “teach me the basics of philosophy”, answer a few questions about your starting knowledge, and get a personalised course.
Each day unlocks a five-minute lesson with interactive challenges. Position players to beat a high press. Match an argument to a philosopher. The app adjusts the difficulty and brings back concepts you’ve struggled with. Add streaks, levels and the occasional guilt trip.
Let users share their learning paths so others can join them. Offer a free path, with a subscription unlocking more topics and deeper courses. Every shared course becomes a potential way to attract new learners.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: Oboe already generates personalised learning paths, so course creation alone won’t distinguish this. The opportunity is making daily practice enjoyable enough that people keep returning. Everyone’s got a subject they wish they understood. Give them a reason to start tonight.
Rate this idea
📧 They Migrated a Client Weeks Before Black Friday. It Made $113K.
Nearly 1 in 6 e-commerce brands earn at least 30% of their annual orders over Black Friday, so it is the riskiest possible time to switch email platform.
Jocelyn A., COO at Ecom2Win, moved a client to Omnisend weeks before Black Friday anyway. Deliverability, automations, the whole setup, days before the biggest weekend of the year. Revenue landed on par with the year before.
Omnisend runs email and SMS for 150,000 brands. Migration is free, takes five days, and costs up to 35% less than Klaviyo.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻️ SaaS: Online shopping would be a lot more interesting if the model looked familiar. There's a great idea in this.
📱 Mobile App: A free afternoon in LA turned into a Pokémon Go-style tour guide app. Someone needs to build a global version!
🛍️ E-commerce: We called for this Lego idea previously and someone’s finally built it with Astra. Pretty cool!
🤖 Hardware: Apple just announced the Duo, and people are already dreaming up what to build on it. Two great lists here and here.
💵 Side Hustle: Your bookmarks might be hiding your next income stream. Here’s where to look.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: How to put GPT-6 Astra to work: 7 use cases to steal. There’s some insane stuff in here.
🛠️ AI Prompts: Here’s 10 GPT-6 Astra prompts that replace an entire workflow. Full guide inside.
📘 Playbook: Ben Cera says his team cut its monthly AI bill from $1.2M to $100K. He breaks down the infrastructure decisions behind the reduction.
💸 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: He deleted $2M in revenue overnight and rebuilt from zero into a $750M-a-year business. Here's how.
🔍 Somebody In Your Category Is Winning An AI Answer You’ve Never Checked
Every competitor gets named in AI answers more than they realize, and it's rarely for the reason they'd guess.
Semrush AI Share of Voice breaks their numbers down prompt by prompt, so you can see exactly who's winning and whether it's winnable for you.
14 days free to find out where you rank.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Think you know what AI will do to jobs? Anthropic’s economics team built a model of how AI might affect jobs.
📚 Must-Read: Marc Andreessen says software is about to eat the world at the speed of compute. Great take.
🎧 Must-Listen: When should a product-led company hire salespeople? Gamma's Grant Lee tells SaaStr why he'd have made the move sooner.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Vercel’s CEO says everyone in AI is working the hardest they ever have, and calls it the most fun epoch in human history. What do you think?
⭐️ Reader's Pick: Check out this amazing solution to phone addiction. This would be easy to set up as a side hustle for others. (Top link from yesterday’s edition).
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Banana Shoes
Are your shoes a little…boring? Wish strangers would stop you in the street to ask what's wrong with you?
Introducing Banana Split™, the world's first knee-high boot wrapped in four hand-stitched leather peel flaps that flop open with every step. 4-inch lugged sole, three ripeness options: Under-ripe Green, Cavendish Yellow, and Bruised Brown. They’re bananas.
Banana Split™ - Slip into something a-peeling.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks
Before you go, one quick public service announcement:
Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you ASAP.
See you soon,
