October 29, 2026 | Read online | Listen to our podcast
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as terrifying as Binance getting hacked 🕵
Welcome to the 367 new readers who joined yesterday. In today's edition we’re covering:
💡 An idea to kill half your agency’s subscriptions
🛠️ How to validate an idea in under 2 hours
🤑 They faked a product and hit $1m ARR in six days
⛽️ The job app one husband built, then gave away + more
🍻 An idea to sit on a giant pigeon
Let's goooo 🚀
💡 All-in-One Agency Platform
Client control.
Name.com Domain: Signoff.app
👤 Source: Agency owner Kartikey Singh wants one platform for managing clients, projects and payments. He says he’d happily pay for it. Here’s what you could build.
❌ Problem:
Running an agency means tracking projects in Trello, sharing files in Notion, chasing feedback over email and sending invoices somewhere else. You’ve accidentally become the project manager for your own software subscriptions.
Meanwhile, clients can’t find the latest designs, approvals get buried and finished work sits unpaid. The tools all work individually. Getting them to work together is another job. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Launch Signoff, a client management platform for agencies and freelancers. Each client gets one shared workspace with project timelines, chat, files, approvals and invoices. One login, one place to find everything.
Connect approved milestones to payment requests so sign-off leads straight to an invoice. Charge a monthly subscription based on active clients, and make importing existing projects part of onboarding.
🧪 How to Validate: Move one live project from each of five agencies into a simple prototype. See whether their clients use it and the agencies pay to keep it.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: The competition is another tab away. Make this easy enough for clients to actually use, and agency owners might finally close a few.
Rate this idea
🏷️ Your Domain Is Part Of The Brand
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You’ve debated the logo. Rewritten the tagline. Asked six friends which shade of green looks more trustworthy. Give your domain the same attention. Search your next idea at name.com and choose a name you’d actually want on the pitch deck.
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🛠️ How to Validate an Idea in Under 2 Hours
The Tutorial: We tested a fiber supplement that didn’t exist yet in 106 minutes. Three days later it had an 18% landing page conversion rate, leads at $7 each and $50 in pre-sales. Here’s the framework we used.
Step-by-step:
Write a one-line validation statement: who has the problem and what they’ll pay for. Ours was “customers will pay a premium for a daily fiber supplement positioned as a morning ritual.”
Map out the test: where attention comes from (ads, Reddit, X), where you send people (a landing page), and your offer (e.g. early access).
Pick 2 or 3 numbers to measure, like conversion rate, sign-ups and cost per lead. Set your targets before you start (AI can tell you what “good” looks like), then let it run for 3 days.
🤑 Faking a Product to Hit $1M ARR in Six Day
The Background: David Im and Chase Huh built Sume, an AI video platform that charges exactly what the model makers do, with zero markup. Six days after launching, it crossed a $1M annualised run rate with a team of two.
The Execution:
After his advisor pulled his PhD research, David Im pivoted roughly ten times a month in a Korean hacker house, then teamed up with Chase Huh and faked a product to get into Founders Inc.
Early launches went viral but didn’t stick, until narrowing to AI video brought 20,000 users in eight weeks, almost all organic.
Rivals add up to 414% on model costs, so Sume launched a Higgsfield lookalike at 0% markup and plans to ship a new feature every week.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Software Idea: After his wife’s job hunt dragged on for 10 months, one Redditor built her an app that tailors every application for her. She landed a job, so he open-sourced it. Prime candidate for a paid, hosted version.
📱 Mobile App Idea: Interactive pop-up books built with AI keep landing on our radar, and this one’s pretty cool. The creator’s already asking how to print it. Personalised kids’ book app, anyone?
🛍️ E-commerce Idea: Subscribers pay for the box, brands pay to be in it. Our monthly health food discovery box gets paid twice, with an exit to Nestlé or Unilever as the endgame. A classic from the vault.
💸 Side Hustle Idea: Cameron England reckons the most underrated way to make money with AI is filling local business calendars, not building apps.
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.
🗂 A Small Ad For A Small Piece Of Paper
This is an ad for a small piece of paper. Specifically, one with your business on it.
MOO’s Business Cards come in a choice of papers and finishes. Pick your style, add your details and keep a few handy for meetings, events or a useful coffee queue. Your next business conversation could start in your pocket.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
💬 AI Prompt: The Grok prompt behind 21.4 million views in 30 days. It finds proven viral formats and writes drafts in your voice while you sleep. Very handy.
📚 Must-Read: Spawn is a team of ten that spent $3.1m on AI tokens last month and shipped 77,000 changes. Their founder explains exactly how. Wild stuff.
📺 Must-Watch: Mark Cuban explains to Steven Bartlett why people with a real edge never sell it, plus the three things that actually work instead.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Greg Isenberg reckons SaaS is about to go free, and the smart play is to give away the app and charge for the agent that does the work.
⭐️ Reader's Pick: Grab the single Claude Code prompt behind 5M-view AI reels. Copy, paste, go viral. (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Pigeon Chair
Tired of office chairs that look like every other office chair? Wish your home office had a bit more Times Square energy?
Introducing Coocliner™, the world’s first ergonomic swivel chair shaped like a pigeon. Iridescent neck headrest, wing armrests and a five-talon base. Available in Subway Grey and Dollar Slice Pink.
Coocliner™ - Wing it from home.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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