Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as hilarious as Trump roasting Jensen live on stage 🫣
In today’s edition:
💡 Building a media brand around a specific vertical
⛽️ AI video editing, a $1m idea filter + more
🔍 Summation's $35m, YC's agent army, Zuck up close + more
🍻 Wipers for your face
Let’s goooo 🚀
FYI: 🎙️ We've just launched the Half Baked podcast! In Episode 1, we brainstorm four $100M startup ideas anyone could run with. Give it a listen (and a follow).
💡 Morning Brew for Sales
Always be scrolling.
Name.com Domain: thedailygong.com
👤 Source: Jen Abel called for more insights from frontline salespeople after she appeared on Lenny’s podcast. Morning Brew co-founder Austin Rief replied that he’s been looking to fund someone in this space. Huge opportunity!
❌ Problem:
We’re all being constantly sold to. Whether it’s online ads or people. showing up to our front door, someone always wants to sell us something. The interesting thing? There’s a clear lack of content in the sales space.
The biggest recent breakthrough in this vertical is Shelby Sapp, who built her brand around her big fancy house, her collection of pink luxury cars and occasionally teaches people how to sell stuff (how she made all her money). As Austin Rief (co-founder of Morning Brew said), he’s been trying to find and fund a creator or business in this space for years. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Build a multimedia company helping salespeople get better at their jobs through an entertaining newsletter, podcast and short videos. Bascially Morning Brew for sales.
Start with a weekly interview with a working salesperson. Break down a real deal from first contact to final decision, including the scripts, mistakes and follow-ups. Turn each episode into newsletter lessons and social clips.
Monetise through relevant sponsors, then introduce paid workshops, courses and training packages for sales teams. Use reader questions to decide what to teach next.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: The strongest starting point is access to salespeople willing to share specifics. Build a reputation for useful deal breakdowns, and the newsletter and podcast become the distribution for a larger training business.
Rate this idea
📅 Stop organizing the same lunch every week
If team lunch repeats, why does the admin start from scratch? ezCater's Meal Program helps US workplaces manage recurring meals: employees choose from pre-selected restaurants, while you manage schedules, budgets and full or partial meal stipends in one dashboard.
Give lunch a system, so it stops borrowing time from everything else you're building.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻 SaaS: Here’s an idea we love the sound of - OpenRouter, but for tools.
📱 Mobile: Someone has made packing your suitcase look oddly satisfying. Now for an app that makes unpacking happen.
🛍️ E-commerce: Here's an you could spin up in a weekend: an Ikea-style local AI kit for the people who want private, offline AI but don't know where to start.
💵 Side Hustle: Some customers don’t want a gym membership. They want the gym to come to them. What else can this be applied to?
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: Hook Codex up to DaVinci Resolve with MCP and AI edits your videos for you: sources the b-roll, cuts the pauses, picks the format.
🛠️ AI Tool: Someone went through hundreds of posts to find 128 real use cases for Meta's new personal agent Muse, each with a prompt you can copy.
📘 Playbook: Here’s a simple way to find $1m business ideas. Make sure you bookmark this!
🤑 Money Shot: A 19-year-old shared some abandoned code and ended up running 43% of the web. Here's how.
🚀 Get More Done Without Doing It All
Founders are brilliant at creating work for themselves. But every hour spent wrestling with a task outside your wheelhouse is an hour not spent growing the business.
Upwork connects you with quality freelancers for the extra help you need, when you need it. Bring in expertise for a project, clear the backlog and buy back your time without committing to a permanent hire.
New to Upwork? Make your first hire and get a $50 gift card.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
💰 Funding Secured: Opendoor cofounder Ian Wong says his new AI analyst startup, Summation, has raised $35m. Looks really cool, check it out.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Every YC demo day pitch was basically a domain-specific agent harness. Greg Isenberg breaks down why they're the new GPT wrappers.
📺 Must-Watch: xAI has three days of Grok Bot demos streaming live on X, with sessions built for founders, engineers and marketers. Day 1 is ready to watch now.
📚 Must-Read: Colossus went and wrote the definitive profile of Zuckerberg, from his family dinner table to his fight gym. Brilliant.
⭐️ Reader's Pick: Here’s the playbook to build a one-person $1M company with Grok Bot. (top pick from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Smart Glasses Windshield Wiper
Tired of your $400 smart glasses being unusable in the rain? Wish your specs handled rain half as well as your car did?
Introducing Wipe-Bans™, the world's first windshield wipers for smart glasses. Two 4mm silicone blades sweep each lens up to 60 times a minute, with intermittent, mist, and full monsoon settings.
Wipe-Bans™ - Wiping the floor with the competition
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks
Before you go, one quick public service announcement:
Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you asap.
See you soon,
