Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to replace half your subscriptions with one bill
⛽️ 16 OpenAI plugins, $1.4M a month in payouts + more
🔍 An Anthropic cancer-cure rumour, the jobs AI didn't kill + more
🍻 An idea to creep your guests out
Let's goooo 🚀
💡 Software Co-op
One Bill to rule them all.
Name.com Domain: Stackpass.com
👤 Source: Nader Dabit suggested a software “co-op”: one subscription giving you access to hundreds of apps you’d otherwise pay for separately.
❌ Problem:
You need a tool to send invoices. Then another to schedule calls. Then another to collect signatures. Before long, running your business involves managing a small collection of direct debits.
Each app sells you an entire product when you might only need two features. You’re paying for the buffet and eating the bread rolls. There’s room for a subscription that bundles the everyday essentials. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Build a software membership where one monthly payment unlocks a growing library of useful apps: invoicing, scheduling, forms, proposals, image editing and more. One account, one dashboard, one bill.
Start by partnering with independent software makers. Members get access to their tools, and makers receive a share of subscription revenue based on usage. They get distribution; customers get a reason to cancel several subscriptions.
Launch with 10–20 genuinely useful apps and test a membership around $49/month. Add shared contacts and files so a customer entered in one app is available in the others. Expand the catalogue as members tell you what they’re still paying for elsewhere.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: The best acquisition pitch is a cancellation list. Show someone exactly which subscriptions your membership replaces and what they’d save. That’s much more convincing than promising access to another 100 apps they’ll forget to open.
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📧 They Migrated a Client Weeks Before Black Friday. It Made $113K.
BFCM isn't when most brands like to experiment. With nearly 1 in 6 ecommerce brands earning at least 30% of their annual orders in that short window, it's about the riskiest time you could pick to switch email platforms.
Which is exactly what agency owner Jocelyn A., COO at Ecom2Win, and her client did, moving to Omnisend just weeks before Black Friday. They knew what was on the line – deliverability, automations, the whole setup, right before the biggest weekend of the year. Instead, revenue came in on par with the previous year.
In the article below, Jocelyn shares why they switched so close to BFCM, how the migration came together, and what made the risk worth taking.
Not yet an Omnisend user? It's an email and SMS marketing platform for ecommerce used by more than 150,000 brands, generating an average of $79 for every $1 spent. Migration is free, takes up to five business days, and plans cost up to 35% less than Klaviyo's. Since Klaviyo just increased their SMS prices, it is worth considering Omnisend's migration offer.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻️ SaaS: Sara Mauskopf wants someone to build a service that phishes your parents on purpose, reports where they slipped up, then trains them on it.
📱 Mobile App: Chat is a brilliant input and a terrible output, and it's ruining AI consumer apps. Read the whole thing.
🛍️ E-commerce: A stock market for tickets, with bids, asks and every price out in the open. StockX killed fake sneakers, so why not fake tickets?
🤖 Hardware: MacTap listens for you knocking on your laptop and fires shortcuts off the back of it. No new hardware required.
💵 Side Hustle: Check out this amazing solution to phone addiction. This would be easy to set up as a side hustle for others.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: Want to master Astra? Here’s a 16-minute video by a guy who's racked up dozens of hours using it.
🛠️ AI Tool: OpenAI have showcased 16 plugins that help small business owners. Check out the collection.
📘 Playbook: Here’s how to turn GPT-6 Astra into the ultimate second brain. Steal the setup.
💸 Founder Deal: Get 50% off the first three months of Slack Pro. Claim the deal.
🤑 Money Shot: From 120 signups on Hacker News to 50,000 tools and $1.4M a month in payouts. Here's how.
🧨 How One Bad Click Can Damage Your Business
One fake invoice, one cloned login page, or one phishing email attachment can severely disrupt your business. It almost happened to us a few weeks ago when one of us (I won’t say who) almost got duped by a fake email.
Bitdefender catches the phishing, fraud and ransomware automatically, before your team ever sees it. Get a 3-month free trial, courtesy of Half Baked.
🔍️ Everything Else from Today
📰 Breaking News: There’s a rumour that Anthropic is sitting on a cure for cancer and saving it for the IPO. Imagine…
💰 Bag Secured: Cognition just raised $2bn at $48bn, double what it was worth in May. Wild.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: The jobs AI was meant to kill are fine, and a new category is exploding. Levie's take on why automation isn't behaving as predicted. Go see if you buy it.
📚 Must-Read: Shaan Puri's playbook for when everything piles up at once. Written as an email to a mate who was drowning. Go and read it properly.
✖️ Trending Tweet: An Anthropic researcher just quit and warned that the lab is gambling with our lives. Stop what you're doing and read it.
⭐️ Reader's Pick: Here’s a prediction worth a second look. There’s definitely a side hustle buried in this.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Nose Soap Dispenser
Tired of hand sanitiser dispensers with no personality? Wish your bathroom mirror could sneeze on command?
Introducing Snozzle™, the world's first suction-mounted silicone nose that fires 2ml of gel per honk. Holds 250ml, sticks to any mirror or tile, and comes motion-activated, so it sneezes at every guest who walks in. Squeeze the bridge for a full blast, or hold it down for a slow, worrying drip.
Snozzle™ - Nothing to sniff at.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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