October 26, 2026 | Read online | Listen to our podcast
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as wild as Anthropic’s S-1 filing 🤯
Welcome to the 421 new readers who joined yesterday. In today's edition we’re covering:
💡 An idea for anyone who’s ever fitted a shelf backwards
🛠️ How to get 10x more views on a flopped reel
⛽️ A startup laughed out of YC now worth $8.8bn + more
🔍 39 “obvious” startup ideas for the agent era + more
🍻 An idea to catch the office lunch thief
Let's goooo 🚀
💡 AI Product Instructions Platform
Assembly required. Arguments optional.
Name.com Domain: StepKit.io
👤 Source: Our new office, a pile of flat-pack furniture and Hassan’s recent demo bringing IKEA instructions to life. There’s a bigger business here…
❌ Problem:
We recently moved into a new Half Baked office, which as you can imagine meant buying a ton of stuff from IKEA. It also meant spending hours holding a screwdriver, failing to assemble things and questioning our career choices…
Hassan’s demo tackles the Ikea assembly problem with interactive assembly guides. But almost all furniture companies need a solution like this. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Launch StepKit, a platform that turns product designs, manuals and demonstration footage into illustrated instructions and interactive walkthroughs.
Customers scan a QR code, follow along on their phone and zoom into the bit they’ve inevitably fitted backwards. Brands review every guide before publishing and update it when the product changes.
Start with furniture brands, charging a monthly subscription based on their product catalogue. Show them where customers get stuck so they can improve the instructions.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: Over time you could layer the solution into AR/smart glasses and get live feedback while you’re building the product.
Rate this idea
📝 Imagine Beating a Month’s Email Revenue with One Send
Thank you for supporting our sponsors, they keep this newsletter free!
You’d probably double-check the numbers.
Enflow Digital did exactly that for a skincare client ahead of BFCM. A plain-text email, an offer just for VIPs, and 1,676 recipients brought in nearly $18,000. More than the previous month’s broad-audience campaigns combined.
Co-founder Karolina shares how they pulled it off with Omnisend, from choosing the audience to making the offer worth opening. Worth a read (or a watch) before you hit send on your own BFCM campaigns.
New to Omnisend? It's an email and SMS marketing platform for ecommerce used by more than 150,000 brands, generating an average of $79 for every $1 spent. Migration is free, takes up to five business days.
Use code HALFBAKED30 and get 30% discount for Omnisend paid plans.
🛠️ How to Use Instagram Trial Reels to Get 10x More Views
The Tutorial: Instagram’s trial reels show your video to non-followers only, so you can test it without cluttering your feed. Ole Lehmann posted a video that flopped at 6k views. The next day a trial reel version hit 40k and brought in 500 new followers. Here’s how he does it.
Step-by-step:
Make 2 or 3 versions of your video. Only change the hook: the on-screen text, the opening line or the cover image. It takes about 5 minutes.
Post your strongest version to your main feed first. If it doesn’t take off, post the others as trial reels, all in a row.
When one of them takes off, push it to your main feed. Sometimes changing one word is enough to make a video do 10x better.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
📱 Mobile App Idea: A boxing app that doesn’t even exist yet just went from 0 to 53.5k followers in a month using nothing but AI-made videos. The waitlist playbook is genius.
💸 Side Hustle Idea: Forget SaaS. Roblox games are a $10M opportunity nobody is building, and AI can now build one in a single prompt. Marketing them is the easy bit.
💰 Founder Deal: Your browsing is your business. Keep it private with Surfshark VPN, with unlimited devices covered by one subscription.
📘 Playbook: Together AI’s Hassan shares the 6-step process he uses to build apps with agents, starting with a 5-minute voice prompt. Steal the whole thing.
🤑 Money Shot: This startup got laughed out of its YC interview. Three years later, it’s worth $8.8 billion. 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.
🦈 Less Primetime TV. More Business Building.
You might not need to go on Shark Tank to grow your business. You might need new equipment, more inventory or room to grow.
Compare small-business loan options from multiple lenders through one NerdWallet Small Business application.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Monid just launched Product Hunt for agents, a live leaderboard of the tools AI agents actually use.
🎧 Must-Listen: David Senra sits down with the founder behind $115bn Revolut, who wants to be the number one bank in 100 countries. Hardcore stuff.
📺 Must-Watch: Rob Snyder has taken 50+ startups from zero to $1M ARR. His 86-minute guide to finding product-market fit with Lenny is the closest thing to a cheat code.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Greg Isenberg just dropped 39 “obvious” startup ideas for the agent era. Absolute goldmine. Steal one and build it.
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: In February, this 18-year-old had never written a line of code. Now his ab-scanning app makes $55K a month. Here’s how. (Top link from Friday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Secure Tupperware
Tired of your leftovers vanishing from the office fridge before noon? Wish your lunch had the same security as a bank vault?
Introducing TupperWarden™, the world’s first lunchbox with a fingerprint lock to protect your precious leftovers. No more going to the fridge and realising your lunch or leftovers are no more…
TupperWarden™ - Serve and protect.
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!
Before you go:
Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you asap.
We recently launched the Half Baked Podcast. If you like this newsletter, you’ll love the podcast. Check it out!
See you soon,
