Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas so secretive they’re discussed at Peter Thiel’s secret society’s meetings 🤫
In today's edition:
💡 An idea inspired by an internal Shopify tool
🔋 Claude loops, stealing strategy, a $3.2B comeback + more
🔍 AI video generation, “doom trolling”, OpenAI’s financials + more
🍻 A product you need to hear to believe
Let's goooo 🚀
P.S. Welcome to the new Half Baked brand. We’ve grown up a bit, and decided to say farewell to our beloved unicorn mascot. Reply to this with any feedback on the new brand, we’ll read through every email!
🔍 Unified Customer Feedback Platform
Scout's honor
Available Domain: Murmur.ai
👤 Source: Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tweeted about Scout, their unified, internal customer feedback search engine and how every company needs their own version.
❓ Problem:
We’ve all heard the old adage that the customer is always right. But when you think about it, the employees of a company might all have very different perceptions about what customers think, want or need.
That’s because customer feedback is splattered across multiple surfaces inside organizations: Zendesk, Intercom, Gong calls, App Store reviews, socials, etc. So while a PM reading support tickets thinks one thing, someone in marketing reading YouTube comments could think another. It’s time to create some common ground here. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A platform that ingests every customer-facing channel, semantically indexes the whole corpus, and exposes it via MCP so employees can query the data in LLMs
Example: An engineer types "are merchants moaning about the new checkout flow?" into their chat tool and gets a cited, grounded answer in 30 seconds, pulled from 4,000 tickets, 200 Reddit threads and 60 sales calls.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: Speaking as a business that gets a lot of feedback on our product every day from a variety of sources, this is something we need for sure…
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⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: How to Create Loops with Claude
Pick a recurring task you do by hand and automate the trigger - a cron job or hook that fires without you. "Every morning at 8am, read yesterday's CI failures and write the findings to a markdown file.”
Create one
STATE.mdthat the agent reads first thing each run and writes back to at the end. The agent forgets everything between runs, the file doesn't.
🧠 Idea Inspiration: This guy used AI to build an AI badminton score eeper. There’s definitely a startup idea in this, I’m just not clever enough to know what it is right now…
🆓 Playbook: There are 5 ways to legally steal your competitor's entire business strategy in 2 hours for like $30. Here they are.
🤑 Money Shot: This founder survived legal cases, frozen accounts and getting robbed to build a $3.2B business. Here's how.
P.S. Our Half Baked Founder Toolkit has playbooks, deals, exclusive offers and much more for founders looking to take action and start or scale their business. 100% free.
🚨 Skipping This Ad Could Cost You $1,000
Paying for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok separately? That's $100+ a month, roughly $1,200 a year.
Bluehost's AI All-Access Pack bundles all four from $20 a month. That's close to a grand a year you're handing over just for four logins.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Higgsfield is giving users unlimited access to Seedance (frontier AI video generation model) for 30 days, starting today. Get it while it’s hot!
📈 Trends with Benefits: Cal Newport just invented a new term - “doom trolling”, something all the frontier AI labs are engaging in. Here’s what it means.
📚 Must-Read: Ed Zitron got an exclusive look at OpenAI’s audited financials, and they’re absolutely wild. Like burning $5B/yr wild.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Snap just unveiled their $2,195 AR glasses. This tweet pretty much sums up the sentiment around it.
🔮 Future Tech: Chinese brand Yueban just unveiled a smart toilet that drives to your bed and cleans itself when you’re done. May sound a bit like one of our drunk ideas, but it’s actually a great innovation to help elderly and disabled people live more independently.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Motorized Q-Tips
Still cleaning your ears like a caveman, sticking a soggy cotton stick into your ears?
Introducing Spinswab™, the battery-powered spinning silicone swab that gently corkscrews earwax out so you don't have to. Just don’t sneeze while using it or you’ll give yourself a lobotomy.
Spinswab™ - Ear we go
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👋 That’s All Folks
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