October 28, 2026 | Read online | Listen to our podcast
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as lean as the one-person biotech Anthropic just acquired 🧬
Welcome to the 343 new readers who joined yesterday. In today's edition we’re covering:
💡 An idea to make the government fetch its own paperwork
🛠️ How to check your app before your customers do
🤑 He turned doomscrolling into $2m a month
⛽️ What if your town was the crime scene? + more
🍻 An idea for better butter
Let's goooo 🚀
🎉 We have a winner: Huge congrats to Drew Grannemann, who’s walking away with a brand-new MacBook Neo. Thanks to everyone who entered. More giveaways coming soon, so keep an eye on this spot.
💡 Plaid for Government Benefits
Less formality
Name.com Domain: on-file.io
👤 Source: YC just released their Winter Requests for Startups, which is basically Christmas for Half Baked. Here’s our favourite idea from the bunch.
❌ Problem:
Applying for government benefits can feel like a full-time job. Prove your income. Upload your ID. Confirm your address. Then apply for another programme and do the whole thing again. Apparently the government departments aren’t on speaking terms.
Applicants chase documents while staff manually check them. Missing paperwork holds up legitimate claims, and forged documents make verification harder. What if the information came straight from the source? Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Launch Onfile, a platform that connects verified income, tax and residency records to participating benefits programmes. Applicants choose what to share; agencies receive the information needed to assess their application.
Start with one programme in one jurisdiction, charging organisations to use the verification service. Expand those connections so applicants can reuse their details across applications and renewals.
🧪 How to Validate: Partner with one organisation helping people apply for benefits. Test whether verified records reduce missing documents and processing time.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: Nobody wants another government portal. Build the connections behind the existing ones, and you could become very difficult to replace.
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 Check Your Vibe-Coded App Before Launch
The Tutorial: AI says your app is finished. Your first customer might disagree. Borrow these checks from the Claude Code team before sharing it with the world.
Step-by-step:
Ask your coding agent to test the main user journey and show evidence it works, including test results and screenshots.
Start a fresh agent session to review the changes for bugs and security issues. Fix what it finds, then rerun the checks.
Test with a small group first, and make sure you can restore the previous version if something breaks.
🤑 How a Solo Founder Turned Doomscrolling Into $2M MRR
The Background: Gabriel Jacobson built Scroll The Bible, an app that turns the Bible into a TikTok-style feed, one verse per swipe. Ten months after launch, it’s estimated at up to $2M a month.
The Execution:
The idea hit while he was scrolling Facebook Marketplace and saw a YouVersion post that put “scrolling” and “Bible” together. He’d already shipped one Bible app after a sermon on Greek and Hebrew sparked the first.
Paid Instagram and Facebook ads in July pushed downloads past 15,000 a week. TikTok faith creators did the rest, opening with a real prayer and only mentioning the app around 40 seconds in.
Part of every subscription goes to a ministry subscribers vote on each month. Spanish just launched, and the app now tops the App Store’s Books chart.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Software Idea: YC wants to fund the “$15-an-hour expert”, where AI turns ordinary workers into specialists in tax, insurance, and medical billing.
📱 Mobile App Idea: Pokémon Go had 200m+ people hunting Pikachus. Now imagine an app that turns your town into a crime scene. Sherlock would approve.
💸 Side Hustle Idea: Roughly 8bn home videos were filmed between 1977 and 2000. Here’s how to turn them into an AI video restoration side hustle.
📘 Playbook: Replies, call recaps, CRM updates and bug reports, all drafted for you. Here’s Garry Tan’s AI customer support setup.
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.
🧠 Test The Idea. Keep The Job.
Still waiting for the perfect moment to test that startup idea? Your resignation letter can wait.
Forum Ventures’ five-week Foundry sprint helps you test customer demand while keeping your job. Work with its Venture Studio team on customer conversations and market-demand testing, with no cost to participate.
Applications for the next cohort close 4 November. Explore the programme and check whether it fits your idea.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
💬 AI Prompt: Grab the single Claude Code prompt behind 5M-view AI reels. Copy, paste, go viral.
📚 Must-Read: a16z’s Andrew Chen breaks down the five new founder archetypes AI is creating, and why each might fail. Worth a read to see which one you are.
📺 Must-Watch: Walter Isaacson asks Peter Thiel which skills humans still own in the AI era, and his answer is pretty old school.
✖️ Trending tweet: He just sold his company for a life-changing sum, now he’s revealing the Meta ads playbook that crushed his competitors. Read it.
⭐️ Reader’s Pick: The next wave of millionaires might be AI book publishers. This thread breaks down a four-step system for publishing AI books on Amazon. (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Smart Butter Dish
Tired of rock-hard butter shredding your toast? Wish you didn’t have to microwave it into soup?
Introducing Butler™, the world’s first Wi-Fi butter dish that holds your block at a perfectly spreadable 19.5°C, 24/7. It’s app-controlled, has a “Croissant Mode”, and reports anyone who double-dips with a crumby knife straight to the family group chat.
Butler™ - Your butter half.
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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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