Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as insane as Anthropic’s IPO financials 🤯
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to run your whole fitness life from one app
⛽️ $100 to $15k MRR in four steps, Cal AI's influencer playbook + more
🔍 Instinct's $1bn raise, Zuckerberg on AI + more
🍻 An idea to destroy the websites that annoy you
Let’s goooo 🚀
FYI: Applications for START are open (for now) where you'll go from zero to launched with playbooks, live sessions, a cohort of fellow founders and cash prizes up for grabs. We kick off 5 October and spots are limited, so don't sit on this one.
💡 AI Fitness Operating System
Waist Management
Name.com Domain: Formward.com
👤 Source: An idea from yours truly, after realising I badly need to get in shape…
❌ Problem:
Full disclosure - running Half Baked has definitely taken a toll on my health. Sleep scores have been worsening, body fat has been creeping up, and stress levels have been slowly rising. That’s why, in the last few weeks, I’ve been taking steps to get healthier.
That’s meant putting together a hodgepodge of tools to track my calories, food intake and workouts, and even trying to visualise what I’d look like as I get leaner to keep me motivated. I’d love one place that brings all of this together. Basically, an operating system for my health and fitness. Which brings us to today’s idea…
✅ Solution:
Build an AI fitness app that acts as an operating system for your health and fitness. During onboarding, upload photos to create an AI avatar of yourself. Use a slider to visualise how you might look as you get leaner or build muscle, with that projection adjusting based on your plan and how consistently you follow it.
Track your food by snapping a picture of your meal or simply telling the app what you’re eating through voice mode. Log workouts the same way, and connect your fitness wearable to bring in activity, sleep and recovery data.
Bring everything together into one daily plan, with recommendations that adapt to your progress. Your food, workouts and sleep all inform what the app suggests next, so you spend less time piecing together data and more time acting on it.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: The avatar gets people through the door. Removing the daily admin is what could keep them paying. The product earns its place when “here’s what I ate and did today” becomes a useful plan for tomorrow.
Rate this idea
🧠 “I’ll Remember That After the Call”
A bold strategy when you’ve got three more calls, a product bug and a pitch deck to finish.
Pipedrive’s AI-powered Meeting Intelligence records your sales calls, creates summaries and transcripts, and updates your CRM automatically. It also briefs you before the next conversation.
So when a prospect explains what’s stopping them from buying, you can listen without scrambling to write everything down.
It’s built into Pipedrive’s easy-to-use CRM and now included in all plans, at no additional cost.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻 SaaS: Companies are paying for software seats nobody uses. Build the tool that tracks real usage against every licence and flags cheaper swaps.
📱 Mobile App: An app that predicts how tall teenagers will be sounds completely unhinged, yet it does six figures a month for its 20-year-old founder. Truly wild.
🛍️ E-Commerce: Good at spinning up a slick website fast? Then pitch brands on digital pop-up stores. We floated it back in #155 and it's still up for grabs.
💵 Side Hustle: Turn grainy family tapes into HD with AI and charge per reel. We broke this one down in #291, and nobody's cracked it yet.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: This guy was stuck at $100 MRR for six months, then followed four steps in order to hit $15k MRR. Crucial reading.
🛠 AI Tool: OpenAI have launched Dots, their Muse competitor. You text or Slack it like a colleague, it runs on its own virtual computer, and it gets on with tasks in the background without being asked. Super cool.
📘 Playbook: Jake Castillo, co-founder of Cal AI, lays out how they scaled the app to $50M ARR with influencers. A great playbook for anyone building an app.
🤑 Money Shot: This founder went from a suitcase of Spanish olive oil to a $600M sale on less than $3M raised. 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.
📦 Your First Wholesale Order. Now What?
Landing a wholesale order is exciting. Working out how to ship a pallet? Slightly less glamorous.
ShipStation’s less-than-truckload (LTL) freight platform lets you compare carriers, book and track your shipment in one place.
You’ve convinced a retailer to stock your product. Now give getting it there the same attention.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: How to spot 10-year trends and build $1B companies with Tim Ferriss. Listen to the guide.
🎧️ Must-Listen: Patrick O’Shaughnessy sits down with Noah Shinn, founder of Instinct, who just raised $1B after only a few months of going live.
📺 Must-Watch: Zuckerberg believes the future of compute has nothing to do with screens. Check out what he thinks in under 20 seconds.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Logan Kilpatrick makes a bold claim about the future of profit in 2027. Could he be right?
⭐️ Reader's Pick: Greg Isenberg believes that there’s a $5T opportunity hiding in plain sight in 2026. Here’s the breakdown. (Top click from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Website Destroyer
Had a website ruin your day? Wish you could climb inside and fight it?
Introducing WebWrecker™, the world's first browser extension that drops a gun-toting stickman onto any webpage and lets you blow it to bits. Seven weapons, unlimited grenades, and a jetpack for reaching those hard-to-hit nav bars.
WebWrecker™ - Ctrl, Alt, Destroy.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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