November 3, 2026 | Read online | Listen to our podcast
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas while everyone else refreshes the election results 🗳️
Welcome to the 333 new readers who joined yesterday. In today's edition we’re covering:
💡 An idea for the second device everyone could soon be carrying
🛠️ A little-known way to find proven business ideas hiding in plain sight
🤑 How an 18-year-old college dropout built an app closing in on $60K/month
⛽️ Palmer Luckey’s big idea, vibe coding’s security hole + more
🍻 An idea you’ll love the sound of
Let's goooo 🚀
💡 Agentic Work Device
Getting down to blokness.
👤 Source: I’ve become totally agent-pilled in the last few months, so much so I think I need a dedicated AI agent device. Let me explain…
❌ Problem:
I always thought the smartphone was the final form of personal computing. It’s powerful, has apps for everything, and every single one of us has one. But opening your inbox also puts you one tap away from an hour of Instagram, TikTok, and countless other distractions.
That’s why I think I need a dedicated device just for work. No social media access, just me barking orders at my AI agents to do my bidding. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Launch Blok, a pocket-sized device for coordinating AI agents. Connect Claude, ChatGPT, your email, calendar and documents.
Speak to delegate. Each agent gets a cloud computer to work on your behalf. Review and approve results on screen.
Customise the software, interface and workflows however you like. Sell the device with a monthly subscription for cloud computers and agent services.
🧪 How to Validate: Set up a landing page with product renders created in ChatGPT. Build a waiting list to test demand before building the hardware.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: A second device earns its place by helping you put the first one down. Reliable execution is what gets it into someone’s pocket every morning.
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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 Find Proven Business Ideas Using Marketplaces
The Context: Finding exciting, unique business ideas ain’t always easy (trust me…I get it). But marketplaces are full of proven ideas you can “take inspiration from”. Here's how.
Step-by-step:
Dig into the listings that catch your eye: what the product does, who it’s for and where its traffic comes from.
Pick one with clear demand and build a better version. Add the features its customers are missing, then win traffic with SEO.
🤑 From College Dropout to $60K/Month at 18
The Idea: At 18, Lino Leighton was a college dropout who’d never written a line of code. After his gym friends kept arguing over whose abs were better, he spotted an opportunity - to create an app dedicated to helping people get a six-pack. AbMaxx was born.
The Execution:
He kept the app focused on one goal: helping users get visible abs through personalised workout plans. No fluff, super simple.
Six months in, AbMaxx had 3,000+ paying customers and 16,000 downloads in the previous 28 days.
Lino just shared the marketing playbook behind his growth, one costly mistake and what he’d do differently if he started again today.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
🦄 Unicorn Idea: Palmer Luckey (founder of Anduril) just revealed the startup he’d build today if he wasn’t building Anduril. And it’s a pretty wild idea…
💡 Software Idea: Vibe coding has a security hole. Researchers found exposed data across thousands of Lovable-built apps, with passport details and private chats among the examples. There’s a huge opportunity in securing these apps.
📱 Mobile App Idea: a16z just surveyed 500 Americans and found that half of them would pay for this app if it existed. Someone’s gotta build it…
💸 Side Hustle Idea: Miles Deutscher just compiled a list of solopreneur AI business models that could make you a millionaire by 2030. Any of these could work.
P.S. Our Founder Pack has free deals, playbooks and exclusive content.
🧩 Keep Your Team’s Work Together
Your team’s ideas shouldn’t need a guided tour of six apps.
Zoom Workplace brings meetings, chat, docs and whiteboards together, so you can discuss the launch, develop the plan and keep questions moving in one platform. Less hunting for context. More getting the thing out the door.
*Offer valid on annual plans only. Discount applies to a one-time purchase and cannot be combined with other promotions or offers. Offer expires 10/22/2027. Terms apply.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
🛠 AI Tool: Switching between AI models? Composio lets you save skills and reuse them across your connected AI assistants. Total game-changer.
📚 Must-Read: Can’t decide which problem to build around? Justin Skycak has written a one-page guide to picking a problem worth solving, including the two traps to avoid…
📊 Big Deck Energy: Kalshi just raised $1B at a $40B valuation, so Sequoia’s Alfred Lin just shared the Series A deck that won them over back in 2020. Very cool.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Someone squeezed Paul Graham’s startup wisdom into a single-page cheat sheet and it’s going viral. Easy to see why…
⭐️ Reader's Pick: An optician with zero coding experience now runs 3 copycat apps making $35K a month. His one rule: only build what’s already working. (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Ear Cleaning Earbuds
Constantly walking around listening to music? Wish your earphones could deep clean your ears while they play?
Introducing WaxPods™, the world’s first wired earbuds that clean your ears while you listen to music. Every bass drop fires a 30psi jet of warm water straight down your ear canal. Spare eardrums sold separately.
WaxPods™ - Earrigation station.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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