November 4, 2026 | Read online | Listen to our podcast
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas faster than Meta and OpenAI are acquiring startups 💰
Welcome to the 321 new readers who joined yesterday. In today's edition we’re covering:
💡 An idea for ghostwriters drowning in Google Docs
🛠️ How to win B2B customers in an unconventional way
🤑 From Door-Knocking to $50K+/Month
⛽️ Layoffs, road trips, AI toy + more
🍻 An idea to keep your packages safe
Let's goooo 🚀
💡 Ghost Writer Agency Software
Getting into the ghostwriting business.
Name.com Domain: Ghostpost.agency
👤 Source: Dan Koe reckons one-person creative agencies are a huge opportunity - using AI to help founders build their personal brands. I like it. But someone’s gotta build the software these agencies run on…
❌ Problem:
Founders know they should post online. They’ve got stories, opinions and things they’ve learned building their businesses. What they don’t have is time to turn all that into LinkedIn posts. So they pay someone else to do it.
But once they take on a few clients, suddenly they’re juggling interview recordings, Google Docs and WhatsApp messages saying “I’d never say that”. There’s a software business in sorting this mess out. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Launch Ghostpost, software for running a one-person content agency. Give each client a workspace with their past posts, interview transcripts, opinions and examples of how they actually speak.
Upload a client call and turn it into a batch of posts, newsletter drafts and video scripts. The agency owner edits everything, then sends it to the client for approval.
Clients leave feedback and approve posts in one place. Keep track of what’s ready, what’s scheduled and who you’re still waiting on.
🧪 How to Validate: Find five founder ghostwriters and run their next client interview through a basic prototype. See if they’ll pay to use it again…
🧑💻 Prototyping: Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: This feels like a selling picks and shovels in a gold rush idea. Could be super cool!
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.
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Use code HALFBAKED30 and get 30% discount for Omnisend paid plans.
🛠️ How to Land Your First Business Customer Using Postcards
The Context: Building B2B SaaS? Getting the attention of the businesses you’re selling to can be extremely difficult. Josh Pigford shared a pretty clever way to do it using postcards. Here’s how it works.
Step-by-step:
Pick one type of business that needs your product. Search Google Maps and build a list with their business names, websites and postal addresses.
Create something useful for each prospect, like a personalised demo or a report showing a problem your software could solve. Put it on a landing page and generate a QR code linking to it.
Use Lob to print and mail a postcard with the QR code, a short explanation and one clear next step, like booking a demo. Give them a reason to scan it beyond “please try my software”.
🤑 From Door-Knocking to $50K+/Month
The Idea: Tom Holliday had spent 10 years running a marketing agency and had never written a line of code. Local service businesses kept losing customers who were ready to book but had to phone or email instead, so he built Avenue, a booking widget for trades.
The Execution:
His brother and a friend helped him hack together an MVP in February 2025, all funded by leftover cash from the agency.
Skipping TikTok, UGC and building in public, he won his first 10 customers through a channel most founders avoid entirely.
Avenue now sits inside Google’s own Book Online button through a direct partnership, and revenue has hit AU$85K a month.
Tom just shared the sales playbook behind Avenue’s growth, the bet he calls a terrible idea and the one rule he’d give anyone starting out.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Software Idea: Canva’s layoffs are a reminder that 95% of laid-off staff get zero career support. That’s why someone should build this AI “Severance Agent” for job hunting. Ready to steal.
📱 Mobile App Idea: Every road-tripper wants the pretty route, yet no maps app offers it. We think this maps slider from Faster to Prettier could be a standalone app.
🦾 Hardware Idea: An AI toy for kids with no screen, no mic and no camera? Here’s how it works, and why investors just put $2M behind it. We need more builders in this space…
💸 Side Hustle Idea: Everyone’s worried about microplastics and air quality, but almost nobody knows what’s in their own home. Here’s a boring side hustle that could do millions a year. Low startup costs, too.
P.S. Our Founder Pack has free deals, playbooks and exclusive content.
💬 Catch Up Without Another Catch-Up
The decision was made. Finding it shouldn’t be another project.
Slack brings conversations, files and tools together, with AI summaries to help your team catch up on what they missed. Get 50% off Slack Pro for 3 months.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
💲 Founder Deal: OKARA audits your site and writes suggested fixes your team can review. Free trial, no credit card needed.
📰 Breaking News: INSEAD is running a free 10-week AI sprint for founders. No equity, no fees, fully virtual. Applications close 1 Dec.
📺 Must-Watch: Free users are easy, paying ones aren’t. Here’s the pricing playbook behind a $45K/month quit vaping app, straight from founder Steven Cravotta.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Pieter Levels gave Claude Code his bills and it found $34,000 a month in savings. His empire of apps now runs on just $300/mo. Incredible.
⭐️ Reader's Pick: Miles Deutscher just compiled a list of solopreneur AI business models that could make you a millionaire by 2030. (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Robotic Parcel Arms
Missing deliveries while you’re out? Wish your doorstep had hands and a questionable attitude towards reasonable force?
Introducing Armazon™, robotic arms mounted beside your front door that accept deliveries and hold onto them until you get home. Politely waves goodbye to the driver. Throws a right hook if someone else tries collecting.
Armazon™ - Same-day defence.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks
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