Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as ambitious as Elon's 30-minute Hyperloop from Austin to San Antonio 🚄
In today’s edition:
💡An idea to settle which AI tool is actually best
⛽️ A $200m brand born from a knee injury, the conference playbook we swear by + more
🔍 Anthropic's rumoured $2tn IPO, a $10k basement experiment to a $600m exit + more
🍻 An idea to pressure-wash your ears
Let’s goooo 🚀
FYI: We've just opened applications for START, a free 30-day programme that gets you from no idea to a launched business. Playbooks, live sessions, a founder cohort and cash prizes included. The cohort kicks off 5 October and spots are limited.
💡 Independent AI Tool Ranking
Putting AI to the test
Name.com Domain: Toolradar.io
👤 Source: Ole Lehmann asked which tool is best for creating animations through MCP. Even people deep in AI struggle to keep up. There’s a business in doing the homework.
❌ Problem:
Choosing an AI tool is becoming a part-time job. You find something good, learn how to use it, and then someone on X announces that your entire workflow is prehistoric.
Recommendations are hard to judge. Was the tool actually tested? Does “best” mean best for your work? And would it still rank first without the affiliate commission? Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Build an independent testing lab for AI tools. Give competing products the same real-world tasks, from creating a product animation to analysing a spreadsheet. Publish the outputs, costs, time taken and human fixes required.
Let users find winners by task, budget and experience level. Every recommendation includes a testing date. Users can save their current tools and get alerted when an alternative performs well enough to justify switching.
Keep basic rankings free and test a $19/month membership for detailed comparisons, recommended tool stacks and switching alerts. Offer paid evaluations to businesses choosing software for their teams.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: Start with one category and make the comparisons genuinely useful. Custom evaluations could fund the early testing, while published results attract subscribers. The recurring subscription has to earn its keep by answering one question: “Has anything changed enough that I should care?”
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🗂️ Your Business Grew. So Did Your Browser Tabs.
One portal for parcels. Another for pallets. A spreadsheet trying to hold the whole thing together.
ShipStation puts LTL freight alongside your everyday parcel shipments, so your team can manage both in one place.
Growing a product business comes with enough moving parts. Shipping should help you keep track of them.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻 SaaS: Greg Isenberg shares 10 products he'd build on Jev, from an agent spend firewall to a self-healing tool caller and an autonomous refund desk. A goldmine of ideas.
📱 Mobile: This person made their own AI stylist that picks one piece from her favourite stores, styles a full look around it and learns her taste every time she gives feedback.
🛍️ E-commerce: We keep waiting for someone to build this e-commerce site, so we're putting it out there. Go on, take it.
💵 Side Hustle: Chris Koerner says now is the time to start a home service business. Here's his zero-cost playbook for getting found on Google.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: Here’s an amazing tutorial on how to become disgustingly self-disciplined. We love it!
🛠️ AI Tool: Side B resurrects the mixtape — minus the cassettes, the boombox and most of the inconvenience.
📘 Playbook: We've hit a few conferences lately, and this is the playbook we swear by. It took one YC company to $2m ARR in six months with zero other acquisition channels.
🤑 Money Shot: This couple turned a wedding-week knee injury into a $200M calm-drinks brand. Here's how.
P.S. Got an idea you're ready to take seriously? Our Founder pack has the deals, playbooks and exclusive content to get you moving, and it's 100% free.
📈 Is 4,000 Visitors a Month Good? Depends Who You’re Up Against
Your dashboard only shows your own numbers, so every result looks fine in isolation. Semrush puts your domain next to your competitors and shows their traffic, best pages and where it comes from.
Fourteen days free is long enough to find out where you actually stand.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Only one type of app is growing revenue and usage. Essential reading for anyone looking to build an app.
📚 Must-Read: No clue what Jev is? Here's the whole thing, explained in plain English. Check it out.
📺 Must-Watch: RXBAR founder Peter Rahal on turning a $10k basement experiment into a $600m exit, and what most CPG founders get wrong. A masterclass in brand building.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Anthropic is reportedly eyeing a November IPO at a $2 trillion valuation, raising up to $100bn. That would make it one of the biggest listings in history. Buckle up.
⭐️ Reader's Pick: Here’s a simple app that is going viral at the moment. What else could this concept be applied to? (Top pick from Friday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Ear Cleaning Headphones
Sick of cotton buds that just shove the wax further in? Wish you could deep clean your ears without putting your phone down?
Introducing Earigator™, the world's first over-ear cups that pressure-wash your ear canals hands-free. Twin 250ml tanks blast warm saline at 40psi for 20 minutes of wax-dissolving bliss, with a clear reservoir so you can watch the gunk pile up in real time. Comes in three settings: Gentle, Thorough, and Turbo Flush.
Earigator™ - Lend us your ears.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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