Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas so powerful they’re in limited release at the request of the US Government (just like GPT 5.6) 🤥
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to reignite an ailing industry
🔋 Agent teams, $1M/yr playbook, $100M ARR success + more
🔍 Solopreneur success, startup success predictor + more
🍻 A product that’s totally got your back
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
📰 AI-Native Local News Bureau
Stop the presses
Available Domain: Frontpage.co
👤 Source: Michael Girdley (built 12+ businesses across multiple industries and has hundreds of thousands of followers across socials) mentioned this idea on this episode of The Koerner Office. He shared 5 other ideas on the podcast too if you’re curious…
❌ Problem:
Like the dodo, NFTs and my attention span, local newspapers are slowly going extinct. The US has lost nearly 3,500 of them since 2005, almost 40% of the total, and they're still shutting at more than two a week.
That leaves around 50 million people with limited or no access to reliable local news. Residents still want to know what's happening, and local businesses are starving for a trusted local audience to advertise to.
So…why not leverage AI to fill this gap? Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
An AI-native local news business that researches and creates news content for small towns and villages.
You select a town, build an AI workflow to research local events, council announcements, planning notices, public records and anything else happening on the ground and create a dedicated website and email newsletter that goes out to residents daily.
After nailing the format on one town you hire one operator in each town you operate in to oversee the publication, secure local businesses as sponsors and keep the readership growing.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: I like this idea a lot, but it will live or die by the quality of the content produced. AI slop won’t cut it here, so curation and quality control will be needed to make this work.
Rate this idea
🔥 You're Running a Business. You Shouldn't Be Reconciling Expenses
Between fundraising, hiring, and shipping - manually tracking who spent what is not a good use of your time. And a spreadsheet isn't an expense management system.
How BILL Spend & Expense fixes it:
Free software powered by a Visa business card - automate reports, set team budgets, see every transaction live
Customers save an average of $10k+ per month and 12 hours of finance admin
94% of users would recommend it to a friend
Right now, new customers get $500 back when they spend their first $500.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: How to Build a 4-Agent Team in Claude Code
AI makes mistakes, which is why you need agent teams to complete complex tasks. Here’s how:
Drop three text files into a
.claude/agentsfolder, a writer, a tester, and a reviewer, each with one job. Add ashipskill to brief all three and hand you one report.Type
/shipand walk away. The reviewer, seeing the code fresh, catches the bug the writer was blind to.
🆓 Playbook: Here's a step-by-step plan to hit $1M/yr leveraging Claude's memory imports.
🤑 Money Shot: This founder turned a flopped teen chatbot into a $100M ARR AI powerhouse. 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.
✍️ See How Your Writing Lands Before You Hit Send
Grammarly's AI agents work proactively in the apps you already use, no prompting required.
Reader Reactions predicts how your reader might respond.
Humanizer makes AI sound like you.
Proofreader and Paraphraser refine tone and clarity.
Each one reads your context and goals to give writing help that actually fits.
Write better with AI, 40% off ending soon
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Meev tracks where ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI answers are (and aren't) citing your brand, then hands you a prioritized list of what to publish to start showing up. Very cool.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Solopreneurs are scaling businesses faster than ever before according to these findings from Stripe. What a time to be a solo founder.
📚 Must-Read: Anthropic just shipped a product that should have killed this startup. Instead of panicking, the founder turned launch day into one of their best growth days ever.
🎧️ Must-Listen: The Acquired Podcast just dropped the definitive deep dive on the Walt Disney company. This is gonna be a good one.
📺 Must-Watch: Greg Isenberg just broke down the 6 most valuable skills anyone can learn in the agentic era. Block out some time for this, trust me.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Paul Graham (YC co-founder) just named what he thinks is the single best predictor of startup success, at every stage from YC batch to billion-dollar public company. It's much simpler than you'd think…
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Sunscreen Applicator
Looking to protect yourself from the sun this summer? Ever find those hard-to-reach places (like your back) getting burned to a crisp on the beach?
Introducing SolMate™, the sunscreen roller that slathers SPF across every unreachable inch of your back. Does it look like a mini paint roller? Maybe. Does it work? You bet.
SolMate™ - Got your back.
Poll: Is this product real?
👋 That’s All Folks
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