Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as Meta launching a prediction market 👀
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to finally fix work chat
🔋 Musk's principles, going viral, $1.4B Walmart exit + more
🔍 Smart glasses, Claude Tag, first 10 customers + more
🍻 A Vegas experience for your furry friend…
Let's goooo 🚀
P.S. Right, let's get serious for a second. Next month we're running a 30-day program for people ready to stop thinking and start shipping. It's free, but spaces are invite only. We’ll give you the tools, the playbooks and in some cases the funding to start.
👉 Read the one-pager
👉 Apply here
🗨️ Agent-Native Work Chat
Slacking off
Available Domain: Concord.ai
👤 Source: Theo Browne, the founder of t3.chat (YC W22), YouTuber with 500K+ subscribers and prolific investor, shared 6 startup ideas he wants other people to build. We couldn’t not share one of them…
❌ Problem:
As far as I can tell there are two types of people in the world - those who have nightmares about the MicroSoft Teams pre-call jingle, or those who hear Slack notifications in their dreams. That’s it. Because bottom-line, no workplace chat platform is perfect.
And now, more than ever, as work evolves and as agents are turning into co-workers there’s never been a better time to re-imagine a work-chat platform from the ground up. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A Slack alternative built on posts instead of channels, so work stays grouped and easy to follow, with humans and AI agents in the same room.
Reply to a post (human or agent) and it jumps back to the top of the feed, so whatever is active surfaces first and nothing important sinks out of sight. Hand any comment to an agent and it does the task and replies right there in the thread.
Over time you could add more features like a live view of who is working on what without asking anyone, decisions saved as first-class objects, and your agent able to tap a teammate's agent on the shoulder and coordinate without pulling either human in.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: Theo actually started building this one himself before getting too busy, and Greg Isenberg thinks a new product needs to be built here too. Whoever nails the product here will make approximately 1 gazillion dollars (not financial advice).
Rate this idea
🧑💻 Skip the $74K Legal Entity. Here’s How Remote Hires Talent Abroad the Easy Way.
They're based in Brazil, and the instinct is to set up a local entity to hire them. That's $74K, months of legal work, and a compliance burden that never goes away - before their first day.
How Remote gets them working next week:
As your employer of record, Remote becomes the legal employer in 180+ countries, so you skip the entity entirely
Compliant contracts, local payroll, and benefits handled from one platform
Onboard in days, not the quarter it takes to stand up an entity
The hire was the hard part. The paperwork shouldn't be.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: How to Run a Company like Elon Musk
David Senra and Eric Jorgenson just broke down the 5 principles Elon uses to run his businesses. They are:
“Tip-of-the-spear focus”.
Pushing through roadblocks.
Scrappiness.
Questioning requirements.
Treating everything as learning.
🆓 Playbook: The 8-step playbook for building a consumer app and getting it to go viral is gold.
🤑 Money Shot: These founders just sold to Walmart for $1.4B in under four years. 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.
🤖 Wix Paid $80M For This. Now It Works For You
Six months after launch, Wix bought Base44 for $80M. What they paid for: 250,000 founders building real apps just by describing them in plain English. The same engine now powers Superagents.
Tell one to triage your inbox overnight, chase every new lead, or send a Monday metrics digest, and it builds the workflow, connects your tools and runs it 24/7. No code, no servers, no engineer in the loop.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Talkspace sets your sub-100-person team up with licensed therapists from just $15 a head a month. Check it out.
🚀 Just Launched: Anthropic just dropped Claude Tag, so you can tag it in Slack and delegate the busywork.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Smart glasses are having a real moment right now. Meta just launched $299 glasses, Snap launched Specs and Apple is cooking something up too.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Gary Vaynerchuk reckons this is the next thing about to explode.
🎧️ Must-Listen: Your first 10 customers won't come from where you think they will. YC's Max Kolysh draws on dozens of founder stories to explain where they really come from…
🗓️ Save the Date: Run an ecommerce store? You don’t want to miss this. 25+ ecommerce heavyweights are handing over their playbooks, live tomorrow 1-4pm EST.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Dog Slot Machine
Enjoy the occasional Vegas trip? Wish your dog could have the same experience in their lives?
Introducing Boneanza™, the world's first canine slot machine that drops a treat only when three squeaky tennis balls line up. With a paw-activated lever and 1-in-12 payout odds, your dog is gonna love it.
Boneanza™ - The house always wags.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks
Before you go, just a few public service announcements:
Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you asap.
See you soon,
