Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as celebrated as Anthropic extending our access to Fable 5 for a few more days 🙏
In today's edition:
💡 An idea from an e-commerce legend (not an e-commerce idea weirdly)
🔋 Pushup battles, cartoon owls, college job board + more
🔍 Sinew, dilution, future thoughts + more
🍻 An idea with some buzz about it
Let's goooo 🚀
🎙️ Podcast Ad Auction Marketplace
Sold Out Loud
Available Domain: Lastcall.ad
👤 Source: Sean Frank (CEO of Ridge Wallet, doing >$300M in revenue per year) tweeted about two areas he sees huge alpha in today. This is one of them.
❌ Problem:
Everybody’s got a podcast these days (we’re cooking one up ourselves actually…). But we’re still in the early days of podcast ads.
Global podcast ad spend is on track for $4-5B in 2026 and growing double digits a year, exactly the stage Facebook ads were at back in 2015, before the legacy agencies would touch them and the spend doubled every year after.
But unlike Facebook, there's no perfect auction market for this inventory. Pricing still runs on rate cards and relationships, and it's worst for last-minute inventory where slots need to be sold before an episode drops or they're gone for good. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A real-time bidding exchange for podcast ad slots, so unsold inventory gets auctioned off instead of wasted.
Creators list a slot with a floor price and a hard deadline, and advertisers bid against each other as the deadline closes in, the same live price discovery Facebook eventually built for display.
Once an ad is locked in, the brand shares creative with the podcast for approval, and an AI model trained on the host's own back catalogue generates the ad in their real voice.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: Podcasts seem like a good place to start, but this could be applied to a bunch of other verticals in the future (newsletters for example). Pretty cool.
Rate this idea
🤖 The AI Assistant That Runs Your Inbox While You Run Your Company
Founders lose hours a week to admin that isn't the job: triaging email, chasing follow-ups, prepping for calls, wrangling calendars. Lindy takes it off your plate entirely.
It triages and replies to email in your voice, preps you before every meeting, records and summarises calls, then sends the follow-ups so nothing slips. Text it from iMessage like you'd text a co-founder.
Hundreds of integrations, no setup slog, 2+ hours back every day.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration: Someone vibe coded a live 1v1 pushup battle app in Claude Code: you get matched with a stranger, your webcams count reps in real time, first to out-rep wins. Genius.
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: Obsidian + Claude Code turns a folder of your PDFs, URLs and transcripts into a self-building wiki that cross-links everything for you.
🆓 Playbook: One cartoon owl took Duolingo from 50k to 10.7m followers and $1bn a year - here's the mascot playbook for building your own with AI.
💳 Deal of the Day: Run a Business? Earn a $1000 Welcome Bonus and Unlimited Cash Back with This Card.
🤑 Money Shot: This college job board was quietly dying in spring 2025. Then it flipped one thing and hit 700,000 creators. 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: Sinew Design turns one prompt into a striking, on-brand landing page. No templates, no AI slop.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Founders are giving away less equity per raise, with dilution down 3-5 points across every stage in three years. It’s a founder’s market baby.
📚 Must-Read: Here are 46 thoughts on the near future - a sprawling, occasionally unsettling take on AI takeoff, robotics, jobs and where power ends up.
📺 Must-Watch: Warren Buffett says he's never met an unhappy person who lives by one simple rule. Thirty-six seconds, worth a watch.
✖ Trending Tweet: This one-pager from YC on how to get your first 10 customers is doing the rounds on X
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Robot Mosquitos
Tired of getting eaten alive every summer while the mosquito walks free? Wish you could fight fire with fire, or in this case, bug with bug?
Introducing Buzzkill™, the world's first swarm of robotic mosquitos engineered to hunt and exterminate the real ones ruining your evening. Each 40mm drone packs a thermal-seeking targeting system, an 8-hour battery, and a micro-taser that fries anything with wings and a bloodlust.
Buzzkill™ - Buzz off.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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