Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as high-flying as DoorDash’s new drone delivery business 🚁
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to help businesses save on their bills
⛽️ 10 mobile apps to steal, Altman's daily routine, $250K flight app + more
🔍 Sales agent, toilet cameras, Chamath's biggest bet + more
🍻 An idea to totally fall in love with
Let's goooo 🚀
🧾 Always-On Procurement Agent for SMBs
Auto-correct
Available Domain: Spendwise.ai
👤 Source: Mar Hershenson (Pear VC) put this in Pear VC’s latest Request for Startups, where they’re looking to fund builders in this vertical. Good shout Mar.
❌ Problem:
As a “recovering accountant”, I spend more time than I should looking at our company’s expenses. And you know what? They really start to add up really fast. Software subscriptions, expensive dinners I don’t tell anyone about…the expenses really rack up quickly.
But in most small companies, no-one’s really looking at this stuff. There's no procurement team, so the electricity, the insurance, the card fees and half the software quietly auto-renew at whatever rate the vendor fancied. It’s time to bring in agents to solve this. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
An agentic platform that runs in the background and continuously looks for savings across every category of business spend.
A user connects their bank feed and inbox/Google Drive to the platform, which maps each recurring charge, pulls contract end dates and notice periods out of the relevant contracts, and finds out where the business is overpaying.
The agent then proactively renegotiates bills, finds cheaper options and makes switches where possible, saving money on autopilot.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: Some spend platforms like Ramp or Brex will have features like these built in - the key is to find the small businesses using older software and sell into them. That’s the early adopter here.
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🤖 10 Ways Your Favorite AI Can Improve Email Marketing
What if we told you that in under 30 seconds, you can see your subscriber growth trends and your latest campaign activity without opening a single dashboard?
That's one of 10 ways our new guide puts your AI to work. Others pinpoint which email in your welcome flow earns the most, catch rising bounce rates before they cost you opens, or hand you a lapsed-buyer segment with the email already drafted.
Haven't used Omnisend before? More than 150,000 ecommerce brands use it for email and SMS marketing, and they average $79 back for every $1 spent. Migration is free, takes up to five business days, and plans cost up to 35% less than Klaviyo's.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Idea Inspiration: We’ve published 650+ ideas, and these are the 10 mobile apps we'd build first. 100% free to steal.
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: This is the routine Sam Altman follows to maximize his productivity, summarised on one page.
🆓 Playbook: Here’s the playbook for going from zero audience to a distribution channel that sells. This is the way.
🤑 Money Shot: This flight app went from empty domain to $250k in bookings in under 8 weeks. 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.
📖 HubSpot's 5-Minute Playbook for Ranking in ChatGPT
AEO is doing for LLMs what SEO did for Google, and the founders who move first take the citations.
HubSpot's playbook covers four plays: get cited by LLMs, convert that traffic, get in front of investors, attract talent. Real tactics, real data, built to actually use.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Instantly is an AI sales agent that finds your leads, verifies the emails, writes the copy and runs the whole outreach campaign while you sleep. Perfect for early startup idea validation.
💰 Funding Secured: Throne Science just raised $10m to put a camera in your toilet. Sounds like one of our drunk ideas…but no, it’s very real.
📚 Must-Read: Chamath Palihapitiya (billionaire founder and investor) wrote this piece on the biggest opportunity he has ever seen. Worth a quick skim.
📺 Must-Watch: Something happened at OpenAI that made Sam Altman pause training. He just broke down why for the first time.
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: Here’s the playbook on how to go from $0-$10k a month in under 30 days. From someone who’s done it 3 times. (Top link from yesterday’s edition).
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Heart Shaped Phone
Sick of holding a soulless slab of glass all day? Wish your phone loved you back?
Introducing Ticker™, the world's first heart-shaped smartphone. With a 6.9-inch OLED (depending on how you measure), split-screen mode, and two cameras at the back, it’s less smartphone and more heartphone.
Ticker™ - Phone is where the heart is.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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