October 21, 2026 | Read online | Listen to our podcast
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as terrifying as the PHP vulnerability that broke the internet 😬
Welcome to the 379 new readers who joined yesterday. In today's edition we’re covering:
💡 An idea to hire someone to finish your half-built apps
🛠️ How to get recommended by Meta Muse
⛽️ A $13k/month game built solo, laundry to seven figures in 8 months + more
🔍 Three ways superintelligence ends, a $5.5m bet against OpenAI + more
🍻 An idea to find the next bar when nobody else can
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!
💡 Personal Vibe Coder
Whatever floats your code.
Name.com Domain: Shipmate.co
👤 Source: Angel Studios co-founder Jeff Harmon recently told Shaan Puri on My First Million about having a personal vibe coder to carry his prototypes forward when meetings take over. What if other founders could hire the same help?
❌ Problem:
AI has made starting a software project dangerously easy. A few prompts and you’ve built a dashboard, a booking app and something you’re calling “Uber for accountants”. Unfortunately, none of them quite work.
Finishing means fixing bugs, connecting accounts and testing the bits you conveniently skipped. Your engineering team has other priorities, and your calendar has other plans. What if someone could pick up where you left off? Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Launch Shipmate, a subscription service pairing founders with a personal vibe coder. Share your unfinished project, a short walkthrough and what you want it to do. Your builder takes over and gets a working version ready to test.
Start with landing pages, internal tools and simple prototypes. Agree on the scope, receive progress updates and review the finished build before it goes live. When something needs a specialist engineer, your builder prepares the handover.
Charge a monthly retainer for a defined amount of building time, with one active project at a time. You can find your first customers among founders sharing unfinished builds online.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: As starting projects gets easier, finishing them becomes a service worth paying for. A founder with ten unfinished prototypes probably doesn’t need another coding tool. They need a Shipmate.
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💸 The Funding Announcement Is Done. Now For The Bills.
Thank you for supporting our sponsors, they keep this newsletter free!
You landed funding. Congratulations. The less glamorous sequel is deciding how to spend it while building the business.
Before adding another recurring expense, review the ones that keep your team connected. T-Mobile for Business CoreMobile offers 10 lines for $150/mo with Autopay, plus taxes and a $35 device connection charge. It's a practical option to compare as your team grows.
🛠️ How to Get Recommended by Meta Muse
The Tutorial: Meta Muse is now recommending products by name and pushing people to sign up. Rob Hoffman just got a client to the top spot, with Muse even trashing their biggest competitor. Here’s how to get there first.
Step-by-step:
Make sure AI can actually read your site. Put your pricing, testimonials and key facts in plain text, not images. Quick test: if you can’t highlight it with your mouse, AI probably can’t read it either.
Swap vague slogans for a clear one-line definition: what it is, who it’s for and what it does. Then answer your customer’s main question near the top of the page, in their own words.
Keep it fresh. Add “as of 2026” to key facts like pricing and user numbers, and update your pages every 30 to 90 days.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Software Idea: Selling your car privately leaves $2-3K on the table and an inbox full of lowballers. Our fix? An AI agent that lists it everywhere and handles the “is this still available?” crowd for you.
📱 Mobile App Idea: We’ve been banging on about dating apps losing the plot. One founder thinks the answer is ripping packs of verified singles like trading cards. Genius or chaos? You decide.
🤖 Hardware Idea: Smart walkers cost $2K+. We pitched a clip-on that does the same job for a fraction of the price, with 4.6M Americans as the market. Still waiting for someone to build it.
💸 Side Hustle Idea: 5 faceless channels at $6K each is one creator’s two-year route to $30K a month. No camera, no fame required, just a content machine and a very specific niche.
📘 Playbook: Here’s how one dev quit Meta and built a $13K/month mobile game solo, with $0 on ads and one viral Reddit post.
🤑 Money Shot: This founder went from folding strangers’ laundry to seven-figure ARR in 8 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.
🚀 Big Plans Still Need the Basics
Building a business involves a surprising amount of buying things to keep it running. Amazon Business helps with business pricing and buying tools.
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: Anthropic just launched Duet, their always on agent product. It’s epic, give it a go!
📚 Must-Read: One founder has missed his 5am call just 3 times in 14 years. Here’s the five-step system that keeps him out of bed.
📺 Must-Watch: Life is short, says Tim Ferriss, who then makes the case in under 10 minutes.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Sam Altman reportedly told OpenAI staff there are three ways superintelligence ends. Gulp.
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: 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. (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Bar Compass
Ever feel the need for a casual drink? Or stumbled out of one bar with no idea where the next one is?
Introducing Bar-ometer™, the world’s first brass pocket compass with a needle magnetized to the nearest open bar. GPS-linked to 65,000 US watering holes, it recalibrates every 30 seconds and vibrates 15 minutes before last call. Does not point home. Ever.
Bar-ometer™ - Bar none.
Vote
👋 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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