Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as spicy as Jensen Huang calling a doomer's AI warning "deeply untrue" 🌶️
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to learn from the greats of history
⛽️ A 31-line agent prompt, $15k to $250k MRR in 12 weeks + more
🔍 Miro sells for $1.355B, the "I do hard things" lie + more
🍻 An idea to make strangers stare at you
Let's goooo 🚀
📩 Masterclass for Dead Geniuses
Six-feet undergrad
Name.com Domain: Oldschool.co
👤 Source: Michael Girdley suggested a MasterClass where every instructor is dead. We couldn't stop thinking about it.
❌ Problem:
MasterClass charges $120 a year to watch Gordon Ramsay shout at an egg. Great business, but its roster has one brutal constraint: the teacher has to be alive and willing to sit in a studio for a week. That rules out some of the best instructors in history.
Feynman recorded thousands of hours of lectures. Marcus Aurelius left a 12-book journal on running an empire without losing your mind. Da Vinci left 7,000 pages of notebooks. All public domain, all sitting in PDFs, and we're paying YouTubers to paraphrase them instead of learning from the source. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
Build a course platform where history's greatest minds teach their own subject, with every course generated from their complete works, letters and recordings.
Each course is 6-10 structured lessons with a stylised avatar (licensed likeness where the estate plays ball), plus "office hours" where you can ask specific questions.
You could also add a debate function: pick two geniuses and a question. Keynes vs Hayek on your pricing. Sun Tzu vs Napoleon on your go-to-market. Charge $10/month, matching MasterClass.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: The library is the moat. MasterClass can't poach your instructors and the training data can't get you sued. Nice.
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📱 Your Phone Bill Shouldn't Need Its Own Spreadsheet
Running an 11-99 person business usually means someone's already doing IT on the side, so the last thing you need is a phone plan with hidden fees and price creep.
CoreMobile from T-Mobile for Business guarantees your rate for 5 years on talk, text and 5G data - no annual contract needed.
Get $20 per line when you switch 10 or more lines to the T-Mobile for Business CoreMobile plan. Plus, you can bring your current devices, keep your current numbers.
5-Year Price Guarantee applies to monthly price on-network talk, text, and 5G data. Exclusions like taxes & fees apply. 10 lines for $200/mo; each additional line $20/mo./line with Autopay; plus taxes & $35 device connection charge. $150/line credit via one-time bill credits.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻️ SaaS: This guy asked AI to create a viral website and what it created is gold. Finally a use for my terrible doodles…
📱 Mobile App: Here’s a killer app we think has a lot of potential in other areas. What else could it be applied to?
🛍️ E-commerce: Greg Isenberg reckons there are thousands of $1M business ideas hiding in this new e-commerce angle. Check it out.
💵 Side Hustle: Here’s a full guide on how to start an AI service business. The discovery questions are worth stealing.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: Fed up of Claude? Here’s an amazing guide on how to migrate from Claude Code to Codex.
🛠️ AI Prompt: The best GPT-6 Astra coding prompt we've seen: 31 lines that turn your agent from a keen intern into an engineer.
📘 Playbook: This guy went from $15K to $250K MRR in just 12 weeks. Here’s the playbook they used to grow their startup.
🤑 Money Shot: This company went from a $17.5B valuation to a $1.36B sale just yesterday. Here's what happened.
🤖 Type Your Category into ChatGPT. See Whose Name Comes Back.
Plenty of buyers now build a shortlist inside an AI answer before they ever open a search page. Semrush AI Visibility tracks which brands get named for the prompts your buyers use and how often you make the list.
Half Baked readers get 14 days free to check.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
📰 Breaking News: Bending Spoons has agreed to buy Miro at $1.355B. An incredible price for all the wrong reasons.
📚 Must-Read: The "I do hard things" lie is something a lot of us are guilty of. Ouch. Here’s why.
🎧️ Must-Listen: Gavin Baker and David George discuss the state of the AI boom. Some great insights here.
📺 Must-Watch: Polsia founder Ben Cera believes we’ve already achieved AGI. And the next massive startup opportunity is there for the taking.
⭐️ Reader's Pick: We called for this Lego idea previously and someone’s finally built it with Astra. Pretty cool! (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: FrogPods
Tired of earbuds that look like every other pair of white plastic sticks? Wish your earphones came with a bit more personality?
Introducing FrogPods™, the world's first earbuds moulded to look like two tree frogs mid-escape from your ear canal. Hand-painted silicone, anatomically accurate down to the toe pads, with bulging eyes that hold eye contact with anyone within two metres.
FrogPods™ - Hop in, tune out
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👋 That’s All Folks
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