Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as quickly as Elon’s net worth is falling 📉
In today's edition:
💡 An idea inspired by a $5,000 idea (ideaception)
🔋 Feynman Method, self-improving loops, $30M exit + more
🔍 AI time travel, PG tip, solopreneurs + more
🍻 Topping the Strava leaderboard from your sofa
Let's goooo 🚀
P.S. On 7 July, we're running a free, invite-only 30-day programme for anyone with the itch to build. No idea or experience required. You'll get the tools, the playbooks and, for the ones we believe in, cash prizes to back what you create. Applications close 4 July.
👉 Apply here to secure your spot
💡 Marketplace for Ideas
Penny for your thoughts
Available Domain: Ideabay.com
👤 Source: Alexander Liteplo, founder of Rentahuman (YC P26), just built a website and listed one of his ideas for sale for $5K. Why didn’t we think of this?
❌ Problem:
We’ve all heard the age-old expression "ideas are worthless, execution is everything". Well in 2026 with AI taking care of the execution, ideas are more important than ever (which is the entire reason we started Half Baked FYI).
So one founder, Alex from Rentahuman (a super interesting startup BTW), is testing this principle in the most literal way possible…by selling an idea he has for $5K. Which got us thinking - why not build a marketplace to let anyone sell their ideas?
✅ Solution:
A marketplace that allows users to post their best ideas and sell them to willing buyers.
Users can browse listings where each idea listed is locked, but has a small teaser for what the idea relates to. Once a payment is made, the idea is unlocked for the buyer and the listing is removed from the platform.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡The Half Baked Take: Fun thought experiment - if we managed to sell every idea we ever published in this newsletter for $5K (totally impossible I know, but go with me here), we’d have made more than $3M in revenue. Really makes you think…
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🤖 All the Best AI Models for $20/mo
Here's the deal.
Bluehost's AI All-Access Pack gives you access to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok in one dashboard for $20 a month. Those same four models cost $100+ per month when you buy them separately. Cool, right?
Pick the right model for each job and stop paying four bills.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: How to Remember 90% of What You Read Using Claude
Richard Feynman won a Nobel Prize using this 4-step method. Here's the playbook to run it inside Claude in 20 minutes:
Finish reading, then open Claude and ask it to map the 5 ideas that actually matter, one line each. Now write your own version of each like you're teaching a 12-year-old.
Paste your explanations back and tell Claude to play strict tutor: mark each one STRONG, WEAK or WRONG, and hand you one summary sentence per idea to reread the next morning.
🆓 Playbook: Stop being a prompter. Here's the 10 moves that turn Claude Code into a self-improving loop, from harness to grader to memory.
🤑 Money Shot: One tweet crashed his app overnight. Three years later it sold with 19 million users. 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.
🧑💻 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.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Wispr Flow is the most-used AI tool at Half Baked. Get a 45-day free trial on us.
📈 Trends with Benefits: AI "time travel" vlogs are blowing up, and the breakout creator, Chloe vs History, pulled 500k+ followers from just 21 posts. Great AI use case.
📚 Must-Read: Paul Graham's Life is Short essay is a great read. Don't wait to read it (life’s short after all)
🎧️ Must-Listen: James Dyson broke down why failure beats success in business and how 5,127 failed prototypes became the basis of his multi-billion-pound empire.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Vercel's Guillermo Rauch reckons AI is about to trigger an unprecedented surge in entrepreneurship, from solopreneurs to the biggest companies of our time. We hope he’s right.
🧬 Science Corner: A new $500M initiative called Intercept wants to wipe out respiratory viruses for good, the common cold included, using AI-designed drugs and air-cleaning tech. Nothing to sneeze at.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Fake Run Generator
Tired of your mates flexing 10Ks while you've not laced up in months? Wish you could get in on the Strava action without leaving the sofa?
Introducing Cheetah™, the world's first run generator that lets you scribble any route across a map and snap it to real roads with one tap. Dial in your pace, your splits, and 320m of elevation gain, hit export, and out comes a ready-made Strava screenshot you can share on your story, with your friends, wherever you want to.
Cheetah™ - Outrun the truth.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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See you soon,
