Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as hotly anticipated as Apple's rumoured folding iPhone 📱
In today's edition:
💡 An idea inspired by a personal problem + more
⛽️ SEO Engine, iOS app playbook, $100M+ selling luggage + more
🔍 $30B investment, Altman interview, PG tweet + more
🍻 A product to help you stay more present
Let's goooo 🚀
P.S. Shoutout to last week’s giveaway winner Bella Hsueh. Congrats Bella!
FYI: We're running a vibe coding masterclass on Wednesday 26th August. You'll watch a real app get built live and get the exact tools, prompts and workflow to do it yourself.
🎙️ Podcast Guest Booking Platform
In the books
Name.com Domain: Podguest.com
👤 Source: Chris Koerner (serial operator and co-host of The Koerner Office) gets 3-7 cold emails a day pitching podcast guests, and reckons they're the worst cold emails in any industry. He thinks you could build an agency to do this…we think you can build software.
❌ Problem:
Here at Half Baked we may or may not be in the process of starting a podcast (big announcement coming soon). But the biggest issue with running a podcast is trying to book guests.
It turns out there’s an entire industry built on this. You can hire people who specialize in booking podcast guests, but nobody owns the full loop for someone booking 40 placements a month across eight clients. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
An AI tool that helps users to source, outbound and book podcast guests. You give it a brief, it researches the right shows, drafts the outreach and manages the pipeline from first email to recording date.
Each client gets their own workspace. It builds a target list of shows that are actually active, actually take guests and have a contact address that works, scores each one on fit using episode transcripts rather than the Apple blurb, then sends from your own inbox with proper deliverability.
💡 The Half Baked Take: The picks-and-shovels version of Chris's tweet is the better business here. You're not competing with the agencies, you're arming them, and there are thousands of one-person booking shops running this off a spreadsheet right now.
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🧮 Your Bookkeeping Costs More Than You Think
Quick maths: 5 hours a week on your books, at even $100 an hour of founder time, is $2,000 a month going straight to admin. Swap in your own numbers, the direction holds.
QuickBooks Online gives those hours back: AI categorises, reconciles and monitors your accounts on its own, with real human experts on hand for the judgement calls. The cheapest hire you'll make this year is buying back your own time.
Half Baked readers get 50% off for your first 3 months.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻️ SaaS: Nobody at your company has opened half those Notion pages in two years. Someone should be charging to fix that.
📱 Mobile App: BeReal, but for voice notes. One random friend, one minute, once a day. No retakes.
🛍️ E-commerce: "Vegan leather", "alcantara", "olefin". They're all just plastic with a nicer name, and you breathe it in for 20 years. Someone should build the shop that sells the alternative.
🤖 Hardware: The World Humanoid Robot Games are a proper marker of how far robotics has come. Watch a humanoid trade real shots with a human on a tennis court.
💵 Side Hustle: On-demand bug consultations for vibe coders, at $5 to $20 a pop. Nice one for anyone who can actually read a stack trace.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: You can build an SEO engine that audits and rewrites your blog every week. Here’s how.
🛠️ AI Tool: This website has every AI tool you could ever imagine in one place. Totally worth bookmarking.
📘 Playbook: This is how one founder took an iOS app to $10k a month in eight weeks, right down to the exact ad campaign settings he used.
💸 Founder Deal: Upwork gives you vetted freelancers with public work history and ratings. Make your first hire and get a $50 gift card.
🤑 Money Shot: This founder quit accounting, spotted the one thing every luggage brand ignored, and hit $100M+ in 2 years. Here's how.
🔧 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
📰 Breaking News: Nvidia is in talks to invest in Perplexity at $30bn, after revenue tripled to $750m in eight months. Epic.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Humans became the minority user of AI back in February. a16z has the chart and the second-order effects.
📺 Must-Watch: David Senra just interviewed Sam Altman where they covered the small-business boom, AI's two biggest risks and why adoption is surprisingly slow. Great interview.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Paul Graham's answer to what he'd do at 17 today has 710k views and a lot of founders rethinking their plans…
⭐️ Reader's Pick: Entrepreneur rounded up 12 side hustles you can start this weekend. One of them is apparently the fastest-growing one in the US. (Top link from Friday’s Edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Now Watch
Sick of watching time slip away on your wrist? Wish you could stop clock-watching and just live in the moment?
Introducing Presently™, the world's first watch that tells you exactly one time: NOW. No hands, no digits, no dates, just the word. You'll miss flights, deadlines and your daughter's wedding, but you'll stay in the present.
Presently™ - There's no time like the present.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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