November 2, 2026 | Read online | Listen to our podcast
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as who’s going to be the next James Bond 🔫
Welcome to the 349 new readers who joined yesterday. In today's edition we’re covering:
💡 A backup plan for when disaster cuts you off
🛠️ How to make viral videos for £0 and zero talent
🤑 They picked a $150bn giant to fight, and reached a $3B valuation
⛽️ An optician making $35k a month copying other apps + more
🍻 An idea to hoover your desktop clean
Let's goooo 🚀
💡 Disaster Relief Subscription
Help from above.
Name.com Domain: mannaaid.com
👤 Source: Cyan Banister wants drones delivering essentials during disasters. She’d pay monthly for it. Here’s the idea.
❌ Problem:
A flood blocks your road. Shops close, deliveries stop and you’re running low on essentials. That emergency kit you meant to buy suddenly feels like a good investment.
Getting supplies to individual households is difficult when roads are inaccessible. What if your backup plan was already in place?
✅ Solution:
Launch Manna Aid, a disaster relief subscription. Store essentials locally and partner with delivery operators to bring food, water and hygiene supplies to members, using drones where conditions allow.
Charge households or residential communities for coverage. Accept donations too, funding deliveries through relief partners in other parts of the world. Show donors exactly what their contributions provided. A useful business with real potential for social good.
🧪 How to Validate: Partner with one community and a delivery operator. Run a supply-delivery drill and test whether residents will pay for ongoing coverage.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: You’re selling peace of mind. The business depends on delivering when everyone needs you at once.
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🧩 Give Your AI The Missing Context
Your AI can write code. It still needs to know what's happening inside your product. Otherwise, it's a very confident new hire.
PostHog brings analytics, errors, session replays and business data into one context layer, so you and your agents can investigate real user behaviour before deciding what to build next.
🛠️ How to Make Viral Videos With Claude Code for $0
The Tutorial: A brand-new TikTok page’s very first video got 13.1M views. It was a 3D backyard cut open like a cake. Theo rebuilt that format, and nine others, as free Claude Code prompts. No video tools, no AI images, just code. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Pick a format from Theo’s list. The 3D backyard is the most proven, stickman survival stories keep viewers coming back, and the lecture explainer is the quickest win if you want to teach something.
Grab the free guide from his GitHub, save it as CLAUDE.md in an empty folder, then open Claude Code in that folder.
Type “make one video, you pick the topic” and walk away. Claude writes the script, records the voiceover and animates it in 1 to 3 hours.
🤑 They Picked a $150B Giant to Fight. Now They’re Worth $3B.
The Idea: Jake Stauch and Alex McLeod left Verkada to build Serval, an AI help desk taking direct aim at ServiceNow. Two and a half years in, Sequoia has just led a $150M Series C at a $3B valuation.
The Execution:
Before choosing a product, they listed the biggest enterprise software companies ever built and picked the one AI could topple.
Serval turns plain-English requests into IT automations, and ARR has doubled every quarter since its Series B.
With two Fortune 20 customers signed, it plans to hire 500+ people in the next year.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Software Idea: Point your phone at a lamp, say “lumos”, lights on. This DIY AR smart home controller is the one app every smart home actually needs. Pure magic.
📱 Mobile App Idea: Want an hour of TikTok? Go for a run first. We think this habit app that makes you earn your screen time is a winner.
💸 Side Hustle Idea: An optician with zero coding experience now runs 3 copycat apps making $35K a month. His one rule: only build what’s already working. Boring pays.
📘 Playbook: Every unfilled job is a company confessing what’s broken. Use this LinkedIn Jobs outreach playbook to pitch the fix before they hire.
P.S. Our Founder Pack has free deals, playbooks and exclusive content.
👥 Ten Lines. One Useful Cost Check.
Growing your team? Switch 10 lines to T-Mobile CoreMobile for $150/mo when you bring your own devices, plus taxes and fees and a $35 device connection charge per line.
Qualifying credit, a business account and 10 eligible lines required. Limited-time offer; bill credits may take 3-4 billing cycles. Terms apply.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Is AI search mentioning your business? OKARA tracks how AI assistants describe your product. Try it free, with no credit card needed.
📈 Trends-with-Benefits: Greg Isenberg reckons Claude Opus 5.5 means millions more people will start making videos in the next 24 months, no team or editing skills needed.
📺 Must-Watch: Sam Altman explains why a hard startup is easier than an easy one, and it takes him under a minute. Check it out.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Morning Brew co-founder Alex Lieberman asked which businesses get stronger as AI explodes, and the nine-part answer is a cheat sheet for what to build next. Spot on.
⭐️ Reader's Pick: Nick Di Fabio has 300+ books and over $1M in Amazon royalties under pen names. He didn’t write a single one. Here’s the blueprint. (Top pick from Friday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Desktop Vacuum
Is your desktop 400 screenshots deep? Wish someone else would deal with “q3-slides-ACTUALLY-final.pptx”?
Introducing Mopintosh™, the world’s first robot vacuum for your Mac desktop. It hoovers up stray screenshots, sorts your PDFs and docks beside the Bin when it’s done. Occasionally mistakes your tax return for crumbs.
Mopintosh™ - Bin there, done that.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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