Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas faster than AI models are solving every major math problem 🧮
In today's edition:
💡 An idea with a $5,000 bounty on its head
⛽️ Sam Altman idea, cold email playbook, dentist offices + more
🔍 YC agent harness, AI investing guide, robot cleaners + more
🍻 An idea you need to hear to believe
Let's goooo 🚀
🎉 Winner Winner: A MacBook Neo is on its way to Rodney Taylor, courtesy of last month’s Wispr Flow welcome giveaway. Well done Rodney!
🎬 Media Clipping Extension
Margin Call
Available Domain: Clipnotes.co
👤 Source: Jason Calacanis (+$100M angel investor, All-In pod host) is putting his money where his mouth is, offering a $5,000 winner-takes-all bounty to whoever builds his idea for annotated.com to spec.
❌ Problem:
Think about how the internet actually discusses media today. Someone screenshots a paragraph, crops out the source, slaps their hot take on top and posts it. The original creator gets nothing, the context gets lost, and the reader can't check whether the quote was even real.
Quote tweets, reaction clips, screenshot threads...commentary on other people's content is arguably the internet's biggest content category, yet there's no native product for it. Well, Jason Calacanis (AKA J-Cal) may have an answer for this. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
A sidebar Chrome extension that lets users clip media from anywhere on the web (up to 90 seconds of a YouTube video or podcast, or a highlighted passage from an article) and add their own text or recorded audio commentary on top.
Every clip becomes a public landing page that always links back to the original source, with clips downscaled to 240p and a visible "File a claim" button so fair use disputes have an off-ramp.
Annotations flow into a public social feed where users follow each other, comment and discover takes. Think Genius-style margin notes, but for the entire internet instead of just song lyrics.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: Most ideas in this newsletter come with zero guarantees. This one comes with an investor looking to give $5,000 to whoever builds it.
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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.
We didn't have to build our own chatbot for any of it either. Omnisend conveniently plugs into ChatGPT and Claude, so you can work from your actual account.
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: Sam Altman heard about a ChatGPT use case last night and posted it. It's a product waiting to be built for every parent.
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: Jake Castillo spent 2.5 years scaling Cal AI and gave away all the marketing sauce in these posts.
🆓 Playbook: This cold email playbook from the CEO of Lemlist took his business from $15M to $53M ARR. Here’s how he did it.
🤑 Money Shot: This founder took a job in his own dentist's back office, then raised $35M at a $250M valuation five years later. 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.
🔧 No IT Team? No Problem.
CoreMobile from T-Mobile for Business is built for teams without a dedicated IT department: unlimited talk, text and 5G data, no annual contract, and a price guaranteed for 5 years.*
Simple by design.
With Autopay, plus taxes & fees; during congestion, customers using >50GB/mo. may notice reduced speeds until next bill cycle. * 5-Year Price Guarantee applies to monthly price on-network talk, text, and 5G data. Exclusions like taxes & fees apply.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: YC has open-sourced QM, the multi-agent harness they run internally. With connectors, crons and shared memory, it’s pretty epic.
📚 Must-Read: Chamath Palihapitiya has just published his AI investing guide, six layers of the stack. This could be worth millions to the right person.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Pangram CEO Max Spero just shared the three tiers of AI verifiability. He reckons one of them will never get solved.
🤖 Tech Breakthrough: Humanoid robots are now cleaning homes in San Francisco for $30 an hour. Where can I buy one?
👥 From the Community: Want to be an Android pre‑launch tester for one of our readers? Andrew is building Contingency, a travel preparedness & crisis response app for solo travelers. Join the Founders’ Circle as a tester and receive free lifetime access here.
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: We've published 650+ ideas, and these 5 were given to us by some incredible founders. 100% free to steal. (Top link from Friday’s Edition).
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Earphone Earrings
Tired of losing your earphones all the time? Wish they were much, much harder to lose?
Introducing Hearrings™, the world's first gold-plated earrings with a wireless bud dangling off each lobe. Unclip, slot in, and get 9 hours of playback time.
Hearrings™ - A sound investment.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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