Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as Apple suing OpenAI 😳
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to help founders stay accountable
⛽️ Weight loss, 144 ad angles, 67 rejections + more
🔍 Agentic design, secondhand unicorns, $1m success + more
🍻 An idea strictly on a need-to-hear basis
Let's goooo 🚀
P.S. On July 14, Zapier’s Chief People and AI Transformation Officer is running a free session on getting your team to actually use the agents you’ve built. More below, or save your seat here.
🤝 Founder Accountability Pods
Pod Bless You
Available Domain: Peerpods.com
👤 Source: Nathan May tweeted about how he and 8 founder friends share exact revenue and profit every month and rank each other on it. Most would call it toxic. He calls it one of the best things they do. We see an idea here.
❌ Problem:
Building a company is lonely, and the feedback loop is broken. Founders benchmark against LinkedIn highlight reels and "$0 to $1M in 6 months" threads, which tell you nothing about real margins or growth in your space.
The founders who do have a trusted circle sharing real numbers built it over years, before anyone was making money. That's a decade-long moat most people will never have. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A platform that matches founders into private pods of 8 at a similar stage, in similar industries, who meet monthly to share progress and hold each other accountable.
Each founder picks their own transparency level: some share exact revenue and profit (verified via a read-only Stripe connection), others share growth percentages, goals hit, or just what they're working through. The pod ranks and tracks whatever everyone opts into.
Pods that consistently perform graduate upwards into higher-revenue pods, so the person at the top of your leaderboard is always someone slightly ahead of you, proving the next level is real.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡The Half Baked Take: Hampton charges $8,500/year for founder peer groups and YPO has 35,000 members paying thousands annually, but both are super expensive. The play here is everyone below that bar.
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🤖 Your Agents Are Ready. But Is Your Team?
You can build an agent for every function at your startup, but if your team isn't using them, all that work goes down the drain.
On July 14, Zapier's Chief People and AI Transformation Officer Brandon Sammut shows founders how Zapier got there: the first workflow that went viral inside the org, how to keep adoption alive past the initial spike, and how to watch AI spend without throttling the team.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration: Every weight loss app is too passive to keep you on track. This app takes a very different approach. Love this idea!
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: How to turn one product into 144 distinct ad angles in a single hour, using Claude and the Meta MCP.
🆓 Playbook: Every founder post you've ever read is one of six formats. Here's the full teardown, with the posts that prove it.
💰 Deal of the Day: Bluehost’s AI All-Access Pack bundles ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok from just $20/mo.
🤑 Money Shot: This founder got 67 no's before his caffeine-free energy shot crossed $100M in lifetime sales. 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.
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🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: No designer? Melius turns a plain-English brief into finished creative, routing each step to the right image or video model.
💰 Funding Secured: YC-backed Fleek closed $25m building the AI layer for secondhand clothing, a $200bn market growing three times faster than new apparel. Great idea.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Big Tech's free cash flow is collapsing to 2014 levels on 7x the revenue. One chart shows exactly where the cash has gone. Chart of the year right here.
📚 Must-Read: Pushscroll's founder set $5,000 on fire buying influencers, then did $1m in app store proceeds without spending another penny. Here’s the whole playbook, start to finish.
📺 Must-Watch: Alex Finn has spent 100+ hours inside Hermes and now calls it the most powerful AI agent on Earth. Here’s twenty minutes on which model to run, how to set it up, and how not to get burned on security.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Vocal Muzzle
Love dictating your prompts everyday (shoutout Wispr Flow)? Wish you could dictate your prompts without the whole office hearing?
Introducing Muffl™, the world's first vocal muzzle that lets you talk to your AI in total privacy. Just strap in, mumble away, and our patented sound-dampening cone captures 99.7% of your voice before it reaches another human ear.
Muffl™ - Zero words heard.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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