October 20, 2026 | Read online | Listen to our podcast
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as Robert Downey Jr. becoming the CCEO of Snapchat? 😎
Welcome to the 398 new readers who joined yesterday. In today's edition we’re covering:
💡 An idea to make your to-do list do the work
🛠️ How to build an AI sales team
⛽️ A $268m AI companion from a “terrible” idea, 255m workers who need AI help + more
🔍 PR specialists, Mark Pincus’ framework + more
🍻 An idea to give your dog’s dinner Face ID
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!
💡 Self-Completing To-Do List
Much ado about nothing
👤 Source: This one’s from us. Looking at Todoist’s 50M+ users got us thinking. You’d expect AI to kill the to-do list, but clearly people still want one. What if the list could also do the work?
❌ Problem:
To-do lists are as old as time. We all have one. Write everything down, tick off the easy bits, move the rest to tomorrow. Rinse and repeat indefinitely.
But we live in an agentic world now. AI can research suppliers, draft emails and prepare presentations. Why are we still staring at lists when agents could be working through them? Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Launch ToDone, a mobile and web app where adding a task kicks off the work. Connect your Slack, email accounts, calendar and documents, then share your list for the day. Agents gather the context and prepare a first version of each suitable task.
Add “follow up with yesterday’s leads” and get personalised email drafts. Add “research competitors” and get a comparison with sources. Review the results, leave feedback and send agents back for another pass.
Start with founders and freelancers whose lists are full of research, writing and admin. Charge a monthly subscription with usage limits. You manage the list; your agents handle the legwork.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: Most productivity apps help you organise your workload. Opening your list to find five things ready for review beats another notification reminding you how behind you are.
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🧮 One Business Expense Worth A Second Look
Thank you for supporting our sponsors, they keep this newsletter free!
You know what your next hire will cost. Your team's mobile setup? That might require a small archaeological dig through the accounts.
Start with a clear offer to compare: T-Mobile for Business CoreMobile gives businesses 10 lines for $150/mo with Autopay, plus taxes and a $35 device connection charge. Additional lines are $15/mo/line. Check the terms against your current setup.
🛠️ How to Build an AI Sales Team
The Tutorial: Finding customers is the job most founders hate and can’t skip. J.B. just shared a full masterclass on building an AI team that finds prospects, researches them and drafts your pitches, so you open your laptop to a ready-made pipeline. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Write a one-page brief: who you help, exactly what you deliver, proof it works and who you never want to contact.
Split the work into five jobs: find prospects, research them, decide what to offer, draft the message and track the next step. Start with just five prospects.
Review every draft yourself before anything goes out. Once a small batch looks good, put it on a daily schedule.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Software Idea: A developer turned ordinary restaurant CCTV into a live dashboard showing which tables are free and how long diners stay. Someone please build this into a startup.
📱 Mobile App Idea: Lovable just shared an app that lets you photograph any menu and maps every dish and drink by taste, so you can order for your mood. They’ve even posted the starter prompt to build it yourself.
🛍️ E-commerce Idea: Sneakerheads have StockX and fashionistas have Depop, but there’s still no go-to marketplace for buying and selling rare tech swag. We think there should be…
💸 Side Hustle Idea: Most of the world’s 255 million knowledge workers have barely scratched the surface of AI. Get paid to set up their AI workflows as a side hustle that costs nothing to start.
🤑 Money Shot: This idea went from a “terrible” kids’ idea to a $268M AI companion. 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.
💸 Still Putting Business Expenses Through Your Personal Amazon Account?
Here at Half Baked, we buy a lot of random stuff. And by “we”, I mean Darragh of course. The problem? These costs all go on his personal Amazon account.
Create yours and get 20% off your first order, up to $100. Terms and conditions apply.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Newsjack is a free GitHub repo that turns your AI agent into a full-time PR specialist hunting down media placements for you. It even has a “meanest editor” that roasts your pitch before you send it.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: One creator’s tier list of AI side hustles puts media and distribution at the top. Worth a look before you pick your lane.
📚 Must-Read: A solo founder vibe coded an iOS app and hit 4K downloads with zero ad spend, every single one from Reddit. His breakdown of what he’d do differently on day one is gold.
📺 Must-Watch: Zynga founder Mark Pincus breaks down “proven, better, new”, the simple product framework that was Zynga’s religion. Every founder shipping a product should read this.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Acquisition.com CEO Sharran Srivatsaa squeezed 30 years of wealth knowledge into five short lines. Check it out.
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: Looking for a side hustle? Mark Tilbury has 5 that anyone can start in 2026. Take your pick. (Top pick from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: AI Pet Bowl
Tired of the dog hoovering up the cat’s dinner the second you turn your back? Wish your pet’s food came with Face ID?
Introducing KibbleLock™, the world’s first AI-powered pet bowl that uses facial recognition to feed one pet and one pet only. A front-facing camera and deep neural network scan every snout that approaches, sliding the flap open for the registered diner and locking out rival pets, birds, wild animals and, per the actual spec sheet, babies.
KibbleLock™ - Paws for identification.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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