Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as unbelievable as the names OpenAI almost launched with instead 🧐
In today's edition:
💡 An idea from a $75M founder anyone can steal
🔋 Personal brands, app exit, Google rejections + more
🔍 Hacker Trends, $135M raise, millionaire odds + more
🍻 A product to help you communicate with other cars
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
💬 Multiplayer Web Collaboration Tool
Play the game
👤 Source: Alex Lieberman (co-founder of Morning Brew, which sold to Insider for $75M) and founder of Tenex came up with this idea.
❌ Problem:
AI is helping everyone to ship. Designers are shipping app prototypes, marketers are crafting landing pages, engineers are building internal tools, and every one of them lands as a naked URL with no way to talk about them.
So you do the same thing every time - make a list of all of your feedback, paste it into Slack, send it on and wait for approximately none of it to be actioned. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if all of these pages could be like Google Docs, with built-in comments directly on the pages? Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
A browser extension that turns any website into multiplayer mode so users can comment and iterate on any web app, internal tool or website together.
You hit the extension on any page, highlight anything, and leave a threaded comment for the owner to reply to or ask the built-in AI a question grounded in the page and your team's docs.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: Web annotation has been a graveyard for fifteen years (RIP Google Sidewiki), mainly because random web pages gave nobody a reason to comment. Internal feedback on AI-built tools gives lots of people reasons to comment. Super cool idea.
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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 Your Founder Journey
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: How to Build a Personal Brand That Actually Sticks
Someone who's spent 17 years building brands just broke down how to build a great personal brand. Here's the short version:
Start with the end in mind. The roadmap you build backwards before posting anything.
Find your contrarian belief. A two-column trick that hands you the one idea your whole brand should sit on.
Optimise for trust, not virality. Why the metric everyone chases is quietly killing your conversions.
Branding is intentional pairing. What Nike and Jordan understood that has nothing to do with shoes.
Make case studies your content. The thing you're already sitting on that sends trust through the roof.
🆓 Playbook: One founder took his app from $0 to a full exit with no funding, no co-founders and no ad spend. Here's the exact system he used to do it.
🤑 Money Shot: He turned down Google three times to sell a $129 puck. Here's why.
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.
🔀 How We Use Notion to Switch Between AI Models at Half Baked
We use Notion every single day at Half Baked. I'm literally writing this ad in Notion right now.
Our favourite use though? Switching between AI models without missing a beat. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Manus are each best at different jobs, so we document our processes and workflows in Notion, then point whichever model we're using at the docs for context. Notion have given Half Baked readers a 90-day free trial on their Business plan.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Hacker Trends is essentially Google Trends for Hacker News. Overlay any tools, persons or topics and watch their traction rise and fall across 18 years and 45 million posts and comments. Very cool.
💰 Raise Alert: 8090 just raised a $135M Series A led by Salesforce Ventures for its AI "Software Factory" that rebuilds enterprise software at 80% of the product for 90% less cost. Chamath securing the bag again…
✖️ Trending Tweet: Parth Rastogi ranked the odds of making your first $1 million across six different paths. One of them is wildly more likely than the rest, and it isn't the stock market.
📚 Must-Read: Sam Altman wrote one single paragraph on how to be successful. The opening line alone is worth the click.
📺 Must-Watch: Charlie Munger spent decades working out why clever people make catastrophically stupid decisions. Very important for founders to understand these…
🧠 Tech Breakthrough: Meta just announced a major breakthrough in their non-invasive brain-to-text decoder research. This is literally mind reading.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Car Gestures
Wish you could communicate with other drivers in seconds? What if your car could just do it for you?
Introducing Signull™, the world's first hands-free automotive gesture system. Simply mount it in your rear window, pair via Bluetooth to your dashboard button, and press whatever hand gesture you want to sign at everyone. And before you ask…of course you can flip people off with it.
Signull™ - Express yourself.
Poll: Is This Product Real?
👋 That’s All Folks
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