Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as OpenAI launching a “humanlike AI companion” 👀
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to turn founders into closers
⛽️ E-commerce niches, AI slop, game consoles + more
🔍 Self-funding AIs, contemporary art, agentic phones + more
🍻 An idea for anyone who hates their fitness tracker
Let's goooo 🚀
🎯 Founder Sales Training Platform
Rep-etitions
Available Domain: Salescademy.ai
👤 Source: Andrew Gazdecki (founder of Acquire.com) tweeted that sales is 90% of the job as a founder, and to just go and learn it. He's right, and yet there's still no Codecademy-style way to actually practise the thing. That's the gap.
❌ Problem:
Being a founder is super hard…and the hardest part? Sales. 42% of startups die because there was no market need - the exact thing you only surface by getting out there and selling to customers. But can a founder actually learn sales?
The stuff that exists to fix this is either passive (a course you half-watch) or pricey (a human coach at $300 an hour). It’s time to create a new alternative. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
An AI-powered learning platform that teaches founders to sell the interactive, real-world way - from cold outbound all the way to closing, learning by doing rather than watching lectures.
A founder joins and works through every stage of selling: starting with cold outbound across email and LinkedIn, writing copy that actually gets replies, and building and simulating full outreach sequences step by step.
Then it moves into live roleplays against AI avatars they're pitching to - the sceptical CFO, the ghosting founder, the price-anchoring buyer - and grades them on the pitch, the objection handling and their ability to sell overall, all wrapped in a Duolingo-style streak and skill tree.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: AI sales roleplay tools already exist - angling it to founders is a great call imo.
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🤖 What Drives Your Marketing This Month? Just Ask
You know your numbers went up or down. But do you know what actually drove the month, and what to do about it next?
Now that Omnisend works with Claude and ChatGPT, all it takes is a simple prompt.
Ask your favorite AI: "Give me a monthly summary of my Omnisend account I can share with my team. What worked, what didn't, how this month compared to last month across campaigns, automations, revenue, and subscribers, and what we should focus on next month." In seconds, you'll get a clear picture of how the month went and where to focus next, pulled straight from your real account.
Not yet an Omnisend user? Brands using Omnisend generate an average of $79 for every $1 spent. Migration is free and takes up to five days, while pricing is up to 35% lower than Klaviyo's.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration: The founder who scaled a wallet brand from $0 to $28M breaks down 5 e-commerce niches about to blow up. Pick one and build.
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: Greg Isenberg just broke down how to use AI loops to run your business 24/7. Very cool.
🆓 Playbook: Here’s the playbook on how to fix AI slop using Hermes.
💰 Deal of the Day: Granola captures action summaries for every meeting. They're giving Half Baked readers their first month free. Claim the deal.
🤑 Money Shot: This guy makes $2.7M/yr selling game consoles. 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.
💸 Stop Paying For Five Tools You Could Build In One Afternoon
Devs.ai's App Builder turns a plain English description into a working business app, connected to your real data, no code and no dev hire required.
Founders are using it to replace redundant SaaS subscriptions with tools built for exactly what they need.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Boardy is an AI super-connector that phones you, learns what you're building, then makes warm intros while you get on with your day. It raised its own $8M seed round by pitching the VCs itself. Wild.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Alexis Ohanian reckons collectibles are his generation's contemporary art. Tonnes of opportunity in this space!
📚 Must-Read: Demis Hassabis lays out his framework for frontier AI, arguing AGI is only a few years out and 10x the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. Must must must read.
📺 Must-Watch: Zynga founder Mark Pincus breaks down how to find your next business idea in four minutes.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Paul Graham on why an initial startup idea can't be both grand and precise, and which one you should pick. Typical gold from PG.
📲 Cool Tech: Check out this agentic phone that won the OpenAI Hackathon. It found a contact, emailed Paul Graham, and rescheduled a meeting, all on its owner's behalf. The future's calling.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Positive Fitness Tracker
Tired of your fitness tracker making you feel worse about yourself? Wish it would just lie to your face like a supportive friend?
Introducing Fibbit™, the world's first wearable that only ever delivers good news. Every night you get a 98+ sleep score, even the nights you pass out on the couch, and any movement at all counts as a workout. Exactly the kind of gaslighting we need in our lives.
Fibbit™ - Ignorance is bliss.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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