Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as ambitious as Anthropic's $30 trillion revenue forecast 🤯
In today's edition:
💡 An acquisition funnel that serves flat whites
⛽️ Hackathon secrets, Thiel's new CRM, a $16B IPO + more
🔍 Stability's $76m, Gates on AI jobs, App Store warning + more
🍻 A writing instrument with all the answers
Let's goooo 🚀
☕ Startup Cafés-as-a-Service
Finding common grounds
Name.com Domain: Commongrounds.co
👤 Source: Brycent (founder of Vesting.tv, reviews startups live on Twitch) reckons someone should take the Corgi Café model and run it as a managed, white-labelled chain. We totally agree.
❌ Problem:
Back in February, an AI insurance startup called Corgi opened a 24/7 café in SF. By May the company was worth $1.3B, and half the timeline decided they needed a café of their own.
The problem is that running one is a nightmare. High costs, thin margins, huge competition. But for Corgi, this has proved to be an incredible marketing campaign, driving brand awareness and new customers their way. So why not make this available to other tech companies too? Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A company that opens and operates 24/7 cafés on behalf of large tech companies.
The client picks a city and a budget, and the business handles site selection, lease negotiation, permits, buildout, staffing, supply and compliance, then runs it day-to-day under the tech company’s brand.
You could sell a café to a single company, or split it - a sponsor a night, a branded room, a takeover week. The Wi-Fi login and loyalty app turn foot traffic into a CRM for new customers or even recruiting talent.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: Hospitality margins are horrific, so don't think of this as a coffee business. It's a recruiting, branding and customer acquisition exercise that happens to involve selling flat whites.
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📧 The 400 Signups You Have Not Emailed Since March
They gave you their email because they liked what you were building. Then you got busy building it and the list went quiet. Now sending anything feels like it needs a free afternoon and a design sense you do not have.
Active Intelligence writes the email from your website, your voice and whatever you have sent before, so the draft that comes back already sounds like you.
Ten minutes on a Tuesday, not a whole Sunday.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻️ SaaS: This developer turned a boring revenue dashboard into a living forest. Super cool. What else could this be applied to?
📱 Mobile App: Here’s how to find mobile app ideas worth building. Absolute gold mine.
🛍️ E-commerce: Returns are an $800B problem. Here's the resale marketplace we'd build to fix it.
🤖 Hardware: Enjoy Alex Hormozi’s content? This hardware idea inspired by him needs to be built ASAP.
💵 Side Hustle: Everyone's selling AI courses online, but almost nobody is teaching these skills in person. Huge side hustle opportunity in 2026.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: Here’s the definitive guide to finding hackathon-winning ideas, from someone with 15 wins and a pretty insane first rule.
🛠️ AI Tool: Monaco is an AI-native CRM that finds your buyers, scores them and runs the sequences on its own. Peter Thiel and Garry Tan are both investors, so you know it’s good.
📘 Playbook: Here’s how anyone can build a Kindle portfolio with Claude, one book at a time.
💸 Founder Deal: Devin will dollar-match up to $50K of your usage, plus $15K free on approval for startups. Check it out if you’re building.
🤑 Money Shot: This founder went from a $651K Kickstarter in a Finnish town to a $16B IPO. Here's how.
🩺 Your Health is Your Wealth
You obsess over revenue, run rate and churn. Your most valuable asset gets nothing.
Function Health, now a tech unicorn, runs 160+ lab tests plus a 22-minute FDA-cleared MRI, built to catch disease before symptoms show. A few hundred dollars a year for the one asset you can't replace.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
💰 Bag Secured: Stability AI, maker of image generator Stable Diffusion, just raised $76M in fresh funding.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Adam Lyttle posted one chart that should worry anyone with an app on the App Store.
📚 Must-Read: Bill Gates thinks we're not ready for what AI does to work. Kinda hope he’s wrong…
✖️ Trending Tweet: Here are 13 rules for building SaaS in 2026. Some great learnings here.
⭐️ Reader's Pick: Here are five AI automations that could be spun up into a decent side hustle. Pick one, build it, sell it. (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: AI Pen
Tired of your stationery just sitting there, contributing nothing? Wish your stationery could do your work for you?
Introducing Inkling™, the world's first ballpoint that reads your handwriting and answers back. A 3MP nib cam scans whatever you scribble and fires the answer to a side-mounted display. Epic.
Inkling™ - The write answer.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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