October 19, 2026 | Read online | Listen to our podcast
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as out of this world as Elon gifting SpaceX shares to every American kid 🪐
Welcome to the 484 new readers who joined yesterday. In today's edition we’re covering:
💡 An idea shared by a billion-dollar founder
🛠️ How to make Claude write like a human
⛽️ Buy a ticket to a stranger’s wedding, 64 app bets paying off in millions + more
🔍 The 9-stage war on AI agents, a $1m pizza giveaway + more
🍻 An idea to stop your phone ever hitting the ground
Let's goooo 🚀
💵 Half Baked x T-Mobile: This week we’re teaming up with T-Mobile to give away a MacBook Neo to help one of our readers to build their business. In order to enter simply:
Click here and fill out the form (it takes 2 seconds)
Reply to this email with what color computer you’d like
Good luck!
💡 Crowdsourced Spam Blocker
Penny dreadful
Name.com Domain: PennySpam.io
👤 Source: We recently recorded an episode of the Half Baked podcast with Paul English, co-founder of KAYAK (sold for $2B), Lola and Boston Venture Studio. His episode drops soon, but here’s a sneak peek at one of like ten startup ideas he shared with us…
❌ Problem:
If you’re anything like me, your inbox is a bit of a mess. Unsolicited sales emails, phishing scams, random newsletters you never subscribed to (unlike ours of course).
So what do you do? Report spam, block, reply angrily (maybe that’s just me). What if you could do more though? What if reporting one sender could help clean up thousands of other inboxes too? Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Launch Penny Spam, a shared spam blacklist with a Gmail and Outlook extension. When an unwanted message arrives, pay 1c to submit the sender and the offending email for review. Preload a small balance so reporting doesn’t require a checkout every time.
Build a reputation score from independent reports, supporting evidence and repeat behaviour. Users opt into filtering confirmed offenders, with stricter settings for persistent cold pitches. Give senders a way to challenge mistakes, so one annoyed recipient can’t block a legitimate business for everyone.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: This links nicely with our Micropayments Inbox Filter from edition #644, where strangers pay to email you. One charges people for your attention; the other lets you spend a penny protecting everyone else’s. Your inbox could finally have a bouncer.
Rate this idea
📶 Your Business Grew. Did Your Phone Plan?
Thank you for supporting our sponsors, they keep this newsletter free!
Your business has more people, more customers and more moving parts. Somehow, the phone plan is still from three hires ago.
Growth is a good moment to review the basics. T-Mobile for Business CoreMobile offers 10 lines for $150/mo with Autopay, plus taxes and a $35 device connection charge. Compare the details with your team's needs before the next round of hiring.
🛠️ How to Make Claude Write Like a Human
The Tutorial: Claude is a brilliant writer, until it starts overcomplicating everything. One creator just shared 7 rules that fix it, and they’re dead simple. Here’s how to put them to work.
Step-by-step:
Tell Claude to keep it simple and write as little as possible. Short usually beats clever.
Ask for the human touch: contractions, small asides and one idea per sentence, like it’s chatting to a mate over coffee.
Don’t ask for the whole piece in one go. Build it section by section, then get a different AI model to flag anything your audience might find unclear.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Software Idea: Fancy crashing a wedding, legally? This website lets you buy a ticket to a stranger’s wedding, with seats going for $40 to $160. Couples get a cash boost, you get free cake.
📱 Mobile App Idea: Get paid to stand in line. That’s the pitch behind this micro-gigs mobile app idea. Check it out.
🛍️ E-commerce Idea: Google’s Universal Cart is rolling out across Search and Gemini, letting shoppers fill one cart from multiple retailers and check out in one go. Big opportunity for e-commerce brands ready for it…
💸 Side Hustle Idea: Looking for a side hustle? Mark Tilbury has 5 that anyone can start in 2026. Take your pick.
🤑 Money Shot: This ex-Meta founder treats his solo app studio like a VC portfolio, and 64 bets later it’s paying off in the millions. 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.
🛍️ Give Your Business Its Own Shopping Account
Your business has its own expenses. Give it an account built for them. Amazon Business is free, with business pricing and buying tools for work essentials.
Create your free Amazon Business account and get 20% off your first order, up to $100. Terms and conditions apply.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Want a free pizza? Hark’s AI agent will order you one as part of a $1m giveaway from Brett Adcock’s $6B startup. Easily the tastiest product demo of the year.
📘 Playbook: How one founder turned a list of 700 investors into a portfolio of database sites making $30K+ a month. Boring data, very exciting opportunity.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Delta, Chase and Amazon are now blocking AI agents, and Greg Isenberg reckons it’s the opening shot of a 9-stage war on agents. Plenty of startup ideas hiding in stages 4 to 7.
📚 Must-Read: This guy co-worked with 70+ YC founders and boiled it down to 10 hard-won lessons. Totally worth a read.
📺 Must-Watch: AI labs are paying up to $2M for company data, and almost nobody is brokering it. That’s one of 3 wide-open AI businesses on the latest episode of our podcast. Get in early.
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: Want a side hustle that runs itself? Alex Finn’s free Grok Bot template interviews you, pitches three microbusinesses and launches one autonomously. His made $1,800 in a week. (Top link from Friday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Rocket Phone Case
Sick of watching your $1,200 phone swan-dive onto the pavement? Wish it would just catch itself on the way down?
Introducing AirDrop™, the world’s first phone case with four micro-thrusters that fire 0.2 seconds into free fall and fly your phone straight back up to hand level. They took Tesla’s rocket tech and made it smaller and much more practical. Epic.
AirDrop™ - The ultimate screen saver.
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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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