Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as era-defining as Buffett's last day as chair of Berkshire Hathaway 🎩
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to rescue you when your flight gets cancelled
⛽️ Meta's Muse hits Mac, nine figures after nearly dying + more
🔍 The fix that saved early Twitter, Codex for beginners + more
🍻 An idea to make your vitamins hurt
Let’s goooo 🚀
FYI: We've just opened applications for START, a free 30-day programme that gets you from no idea to a launched business. Playbooks, live sessions, a founder cohort and cash prizes included. The cohort kicks off 5 October and spots are limited.
💡 Flight Rescue Concierge
Connecting flights. Disconnecting stress.
Name.com Domain: wayhome.co
👤 Source: Zynga founder Mark Pincus suggested on My First Million that when your flight gets cancelled, you’d happily pay $50–$100 for a trusted human to jump in and rebook it. Which got us thinking: what would roadside assistance for stranded travellers look like?
❌ Problem:
Your flight gets cancelled. The airline app offers you Thursday. It’s Monday. Now you’re juggling flight comparison sites, nearby airports and a customer service queue that could qualify as a long-haul flight itself.
Finding another route takes time, especially when you’ve got connections, luggage or kids to consider. If you’re trying to make a wedding or get home for work, there’s real value in someone sorting it out. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Build a flight rescue concierge that helps stranded travellers find and book an alternative route. Forward your booking via WhatsApp, share your budget and latest arrival time, and get options covering different airlines, nearby airports and train connections.
Use AI to help compare routes, with an experienced travel agent checking availability, transfer times and baggage requirements. The customer approves the itinerary and cost before anything gets booked.
Start with a small team covering a specific region and set hours. Test a $99 rescue fee, with replacement tickets paid separately. Partner with travel creators and independent travel agencies to reach your first customers.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: The first thing to validate is whether you can solve the problem quickly enough to make the fee worthwhile. Start by handling 20 cases manually and track the time each takes. Three hours on hold for every $99 booking would make this a very stressful charity.
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💸 Treat the team without guessing the bill
You want lunch to feel generous. You still need the numbers to make sense. ezCater helps US workplaces set spending limits and track food expenses in one dashboard, backed by ezCater's equal price guarantee.
Give your team something to look forward to, while keeping a clear view of what you're spending.
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻 SaaS: This guy pointed an agent at years of his own writing and got back something he didn't expect. Worth 45 seconds of your time.
📱 Mobile: Here’s a simple app that is going viral at the moment. What else could this concept be applied to?
🛍️ E-commerce: Two years ago this needed a dev team. Here's the idea we pitched in 2024, and it's now sitting there waiting for someone to pick it up.
💵 Side Hustle: Cody Schneider says there's $80k MRR sitting in six boring verticals. One build serves all of them.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: Twenty companies and $100M in revenue later, one founder uses a single test to pick what to build next.
🛠️ AI Tool: Meta's Muse just landed on Mac. Expect some incredible use cases to be generated shortly.
📘 Playbook: One month, three rules, and you come out the other side fluent in AI. Brutally honest, but he's right.
🤑 Money Shot: Three weeks from dead in 2020, now nine figures in revenue. Here's how.
P.S. Got an idea you're ready to take seriously? Our Founder pack has the deals, playbooks and exclusive content to get you moving, and it's 100% free.
💰 A Bigger Order Deserves a Better Rate Check
You negotiated the supplier price. You checked the packaging costs. Give the freight quote the same scrutiny.
ShipStation lets you compare live rates and transit times across 50+ national LTL carriers on one screen.
See your options before you book. Your margin has already worked hard enough.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
📚 Must-Read: Millions signed up to early Twitter and never came back. Josh Elman on the fix that finally made it stick. Ten minutes well spent.
🎧️ Must-Listen: Jev is storming Twitter right now. Don’t know what it is? Check out the launch video.
📺 Must-Watch: New to Codex? Check out Riley Brown’s comprehensive two hour beginners guide. Pure gold.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Kalypta’s launch has done 2.2M views in two days. We think it changes how meetings work from here on.
⭐️ Reader's Pick: People are creating some incredible stuff with Codex and Hyper3D. Check it out. (Top pick from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Wasabi Multivitamins
Tired of forgetting your daily vitamins? Wish your supplements hit like a slap to the sinuses?
Introducing Wasabites™, the world's first multivitamin gummy blended with 12,000 Scoville units of real Japanese wasabi. One chew delivers your full daily A, B12, D3 and zinc, plus a nasal blast that clears your sinuses, your schedule, and the room.
Wasabites™ - A taste of your own medicine.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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