Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as hotly anticipated as Tesla’s literal launch event 🚀
A massive welcome to our 526 new readers who joined since yesterday. In today's edition we’ll be covering:
💡 An idea to tidy up your data before the AI arrives
🛠️ How to do market research in an afternoon
⛽️ 30m after two firings, ghostwriting for $15k + more
🔍 What $46m of AppSumo sales says about agents, 21 takeaways from SF + more
🍻 An idea to make your drinks follow you around the house
Let's goooo 🚀
💡 Data Cleanup Agency for AI Agents
Clean before clever
Name.com Domain: Groundwork.net
👤 Source: Greg Isenberg spotted an opportunity during his latest trip to San Francisco: companies want agents connected to their internal data, but it takes some work to get it ready for that…
❌ Problem:
Almost every business on earth is wondering how to use AI right now. But in order to be effective, particularly in a business context, AI needs data…like all of the data. It needs to know everything about a business in order to be maximally helpful.
The problem? If you’ve spent any time inside of a large company you know their data is all over the place - in spreadsheets, in Slack, it’s everywhere. There’s a huge business opportunity hiding in the chaos. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Launch Groundwork, an agency that gets company data ready for AI agents. Audit the CRM, shared drives and knowledge base, merge duplicate records, flag outdated information and establish a reliable source for each important process.
Charge for the initial cleanup, then offer ongoing maintenance to catch conflicting documents, broken connections and information that needs an owner. Turn the repeatable parts into software as you learn what customers need.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: Everyone’s selling businesses a smarter employee. Sell them an office that employee can actually work in. Start with one department and prove the cleanup makes its agent more useful.
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✅ Move Cybersecurity Off The “Later” List
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🛠️ How to Do Market Research in an Afternoon
The Tutorial: Market research used to mean weeks of digging. With AI you can get most of the way there in an afternoon, as long as you know where to look. Here’s how to check your idea has a real gap before you build anything.
Step-by-step:
Tell an AI chatbot exactly what you’re building and the problem it solves, then ask it to list your closest competitors.
Visit each competitor’s site and note what they do well, what they do badly and where the gap might be.
Search forums and Reddit for people complaining about those competitors. If the same frustration keeps coming up and looks easy to fix, that’s your opening.
🛰️ Coverage Where Cell Towers Give Up
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⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Extra Startup Idea: Over 5 million US kids are now homeschooled, nearly double since 2019. This AI operating system that turns any parent into a confident homeschool teacher rides the homeschool boom.
💸 Side Hustle Idea: Founders and execs need a personal brand but have zero time to write. Here’s why premium ghostwriting pays $5K-$15K a project and how to start.
📘 Playbook: No editing skills needed. Here’s how to make a cartoon explainer video with Claude using one prompt and four approvals.
🤑 Money Shot: This AI employee got “fired” twice, then made $30M in six months. 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.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Your next customer might be an AI agent. YC-backed Scope shows which agents visit your product, where they give up and what it’s costing you. Very clever.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Everyone’s hyping AI agents, but Noah Kagan dug into $46M of AppSumo sales and found they make up just 12% of spend. He explores where the real money goes.
📚 Must-Read: Mitchell Keller emailed 7,800 business owners in three weeks and now has 13 data deals in play worth $100K-$500K each. His step-by-step playbook shows how you could take a cut of the data broker gold rush.
🎧 Must-Listen: Forget “fail fast”. Sam Altman reckons you learn far more from success than failure, and his 40-second case is hard to argue with.
📺 Must-Watch: Told he’d die at 38, Ben Wilson joins David Senra for an unforgettable episode on what history’s greatest leaders taught him. Heavy, but important.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Greg Isenberg spent two days rubbing shoulders with SF billionaires and came home with 21 big takeaways. Wild stuff.
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: micro1 is spending $1B licensing operational data from real businesses, and it’s paying referrers a flat $50K for every company that signs. This is a huge opportunity. (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Drone Cup Holder
Sick of putting your drink down and forgetting which room you left it in? Wish it would just follow you?
Introducing Cuppacopter™, the world’s first quadcopter cupholder that tails you around the house at a polite 40cm hover. Holds up to 500ml of tea, coffee or wine, takes the stairs in under four seconds, and dive-bombs anyone else who reaches for a sip.
Cuppacopter™ - Drinks on the fly.
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👋 That’s All Folks
We hope you enjoyed today’s edition, shoot us a reply if you have any feedback. We read every single one!
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