Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as exciting as a humanoid robot kickboxing match (yes, it’s a thing) 🤖
In today's edition:
💡 An idea inspired by a YC tool
⛽️ Pottery wheels, ad dials, $65k in credits + more
🔍 Kimi K3, training data, Replit's agents + more
🍻 An idea to manage the summer sunshine
Let's goooo 🚀
👥 Founder Social Network
Face Value
Available Domain: Backchannel.co
👤 Source: Brett Goldstein (founder at Micro, ex-Google) posted that a popular YC startup tool needs to be cloned for everyone else. We back it, Brett.
❌ Problem:
If you haven't been to YC (don't worry, you’re not alone), then you might not be aware that YC has its own internal social network. What’s it called you ask? Bookface. Yes, it's genuinely called Bookface. You post a question and can get replies from 11,000 people who have also gone through YC, plus warm intros, a deal directory and a straight answer on which investors are worth six weeks of your life.
Here's the thing though - the founder who didn't get into YC has the exact same problems. So why not build a similar tool for the rest of us? Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
Launch a closed, founder-verified network for non-YC founders.
Founders apply to join and once accepted can post their questions, thoughts, feedback and more on the site, inviting comments from other founders.
From there it grows the way BookFace did, into intros, hiring, a deal directory and the 2am question that saves your week.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: Any tool or platform that increases the probability of founders winning we think is worth a try.
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🧭 Enterprise-Grade AI, Without The Enterprise Wait
Devs.ai is a governed AI platform where teams build real business applications and deploy custom agents, on their own data, without waiting on engineering or adding another SaaS subscription.
It runs on 50+ LLMs with no vendor lock-in, and every app goes through an approval workflow with full audit trails built in from day one, not bolted on after something goes wrong. Start on the free tier and see what your team builds in a week.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration: Someone put a pottery wheel on an iPhone. Worth a look, then a think about which other crafts are sitting there untouched.
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: How to never run out of winning ads. Four dials, one turned at a time, and you stop hunting for new concepts.
🆓 Playbook: YC's playbook for building AI-native services companies covers picking the market, why variance kills these businesses, and the P&L math that changes the model.
💰 Deal of the Day: Cognition are handing startups $65k in Devin credits, plus unlimited seats, exclusive events and swag. Applications are open now.
🤑 Money Shot: Apple quietly opened up the iPhone alarm. Four months later this solo founder was doing $50K/month. 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.
🤖 What Actually Drove Your Marketing This Month? Just Ask
You know the numbers moved. You don't know why. Omnisend now works with Claude and ChatGPT, so you can just ask: "Summarise my month across campaigns, automations, revenue and subscribers, and what to focus on next." Seconds later, you've got the answer, pulled from your real account.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Kimi K3, a Chinese open-source model, is the first one to compete on the frontier. Here's why it matters.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Selling training data to frontier labs has become a goldmine. Strike while the iron’s hot.
📚 Must-Read: Amjad Masad (Replit CEO) just wrote a piece on the “self-driving company”, what happens when a company learns to operate itself.
📺 Must-Watch: Marc Andreessen's advice to anyone starting out: lean incredibly hard on AI, because it's the skill underpinning the next 50 years of your career.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Chris Lakin's chart of what your risk-aversion costs you has done 563k views in two days.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Hand Cap
Tired of squinting into the sun with your hand stuck to your forehead? Wish your cap could take the place of your hand?
Introducing Handcap™, the world's first baseball cap with a 30cm foam hand moulded permanently into the salute position. Weighted brim keeps it level, six-panel cotton, one size fits all.
Handcap™ - Cap in hand.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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