Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as juicy as the insane Factory AI and Cognition drama 👀
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to find the money you’ve forgotten about
⛽️ Interactive websites, LinkedIn’s new rules, a $2.25B snack empire + more
🔍 Smaller social lives, Sam Altman’s building advice + more
🍻 An idea to really dial in your late night calls
Let’s goooo 🚀
FYI: Applications for START are open, our free programme taking you from no idea to a launched business in 30 days. Playbooks, live sessions, a founder cohort and cash prizes. We kick off 5 October. Go go go!
💡 AI Money Recovery App
Making cents
Name.com Domain: Refundry.com
👤 Source: Ole Lehmann pointed out how many businesses rely on people never getting around to cancelling, claiming or filling out paperwork. AI agents could get us some of that money back…
❌ Problem:
Change jobs, move house, sign up for another free trial. Somewhere along the way, your money gets scattered. There’s the refund you never chased, the old retirement account you lost track of and the subscription you keep meaning to cancel. None feels worth sacrificing a Saturday for.
Getting it back means digging out documents, filling in forms and chasing replies. Finance apps can show you where your money went. There’s room for one that goes out and gets some of it back. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Build an app that finds and recovers forgotten money. Users connect their bank accounts and email, then add previous addresses and employers. An AI agent identifies potential claims, gathers the paperwork and handles follow-ups, with users approving submissions.
Start with repeatable recoveries, like unclaimed utility deposits and missing refunds. Build the process for each provider, then expand into subscription cancellation, bill negotiation and savings management.
Offer a free scan and charge a share of eligible successful recoveries. Then license it to neobanks as an embedded “Find my money” feature. Customers recover cash, banks get deposits and you get distribution.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: The moat is getting claims paid. Build the provider-specific workflows and bank relationships. Copying the chatbot is easy, copying hundreds of reliable recovery processes is considerably harder…
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📈 A Double Shot of Growth, Just in Time for PSL Season
Every fall, the $250B global coffee market gets a clearer picture of which producers are best positioned for the year ahead. Green Coffee Company (GCC) has a major advantage: it expects coffee production to more than double last year’s output.
GCC fully controls 45 FairTrade-certified farms in Colombia and holds the exclusive U.S. and Canadian distribution rights to the iconic Juan Valdez brand.
This is a paid advertisement for Green Coffee Company Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at https://invest.greencoffeecompany.com/
💡 Ideas to Inspire You
💻 SaaS: Every online store has that same spin-to-win popup. Here’s an idea from our archives for anyone who thinks we can do better.
📱 Mobile App: This $100K/mo app is just 4 months old, and the concept is incredibly simple.
🤖 Hardware: This lifebuoy that flies to the person who needs it is an amazing example of the kind of hardware innovations we’ll be seeing in the coming years. So sick.
💵 Side Hustle: One Redditor says he brought in $7k in a single month teaching kids to make video games. New side hustle unlocked?
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🎓 Founder Tutorial: Viktor Oddy shows how he built an interactive North Face concept site with rain physics, a 3D jacket and a checkout flow with AI. Awesome build.
🛠️ AI Tool: Base44’s Base Code lets your team make changes to an existing codebase through chat, preview them and send them to engineering for review. Handy for that tiny change stuck in the backlog.
📘 Playbook: Paolo Trivellato shares his epic LinkedIn distribution playbook - tighter topics, original examples and posts people want to save. Useful if LinkedIn is a big traffic source for you…
🤑 Money Shot: This founder exited his business for $600M. Now his second business is worth $2.25B. Here’s how.
P.S. Got an idea you’re ready to take seriously? Our Founder pack has deals, playbooks and exclusive content, and it’s 100% free.
🔧 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: Google just unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, built for complex coding and business workflows. Is Google back in the AI race?
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Derek Thompson shares the charts behind our shrinking social lives. Plenty to think about if you’re building something that gets people together.
📺 Must-Watch: Sam Altman reckons the advice to pick one thing to build and pour all your focus into it no longer applies. Here’s what you have to do instead.
📚 Must-Read: Noah Kagan dug through $46M of AppSumo sales to see what software people still pay for. The winners get you customers or do the work for you.
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: A 20-year-old student got rejected from his dream job, so decided to build a height predictor for teenagers. I can’t believe this makes money… (Top link from yesterday’s edition.)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Retro Phone Receiver
Tired of your phone cooking your cheek three hours into a sleep call? Wish your iPhone felt a bit more 1987?
Introducing Cord Blimey™, a retro handset for your smartphone. Coiled cord, reassuring clunk and absolutely zero AI. Slam it down to end calls, then realise you’ve cracked your screen.
Cord Blimey™ - Dial it back.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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