November 6, 2026 | Read online | Listen to our podcast
Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas faster than the Yangwang U9 hit 300+ miles per hour 🏎️
Welcome to the 301 new readers who joined yesterday. In today's edition we’re covering:
💡 An idea to find the humans who still beat the robots
🛠️ How to stop Grok Bot eating your credits by Tuesday
🤑 Rejected from every finance job, now making $100k a month
⛽️ The app niche printing $55m a month, and it isn’t AI + more
🍻 An idea to nap at your desk without anyone noticing
Let's goooo 🚀
💡 Human Talent Benchmark Platform
A different kind of model employee.
👤 Source: WONO’s experiment testing humans against AI at predicting YouTube thumbnail clicks got me thinking about this.
❌ Problem:
This week, I accidentally became a lab rat. How? By taking part in a quiz where I tried to predict what YouTube videos would get the most clicks from a list. It was super fun, but in the test, Opus 5.5 outperformed 98% of the 7,030 participants at predicting audience preferences. Ooft.
But interestingly, those 2% that are better than AI at making these predictions are much, much better than AI at it. So what if we could identify these outliers across a wide variety of tasks and jobs and turn that into a business? Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Launch Humark, a human talent benchmark platform where people take practical challenges against AI. Predict the winning ad, choose the strongest thumbnail or spot where users will struggle with a checkout. Score answers against real audience behaviour and test results.
Participants build profiles showing which skills they excel at and which AI models they outperform. Retest them on fresh challenges to separate ability from luck. You monetize by charging recruiters and companies to find and hire candidates who opt into the talent pool.
🧪 How to Validate: Build a similar quiz to the above in a new vertical, find people to take it and you’re off to the races.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: Super bullish on this area - human benchmarking against each other and against AI feels like a space with huge potential.
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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 Get 10x More Out of Grok Bot
The Tutorial: Grok Bot is one of the best AI agents around right now, but most people burn through their usage in days. Alex Finn found 7 ways to make it last much longer. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Clear out the clutter. Delete bots you don’t use, cut back scheduled routines and disconnect plugins you never touch. They all use up tokens in the background.
Kill agent group chats and trim your skills down to the essentials, so every message isn’t loading context it doesn’t need.
Hand off the heavy lifting. Let your bot pass coding to the Claude Code CLI, and use other tools for voice and shopping. Or send Alex’s video straight to your Grok Bot and let it make the changes for you.
🤑 Rejected From Every Finance Job, He Built a $100K/Month Height App
The Idea: Last summer, Michael Que, a 20-year-old finance student at NYU, got turned down for every job he wanted. Scrolling Acquire, he spotted a height predictor app listed for $20K and remembered Googling “height calculator” himself at 13, so he built his own: GoTall.
The Execution:
He made his first sale two days after launch, then posted relentlessly on TikTok until one format finally clicked.
His real demand signal came from a place most founders scroll straight past, and soon he was getting 10 to 20 DMs a day.
GoTall now has 1M+ downloads and averages $100K a month, behind a paywall 91% of users reach.
Michael just shared the growth playbook behind it: the one TikTok format that did the heavy lifting, how he cloned it across creators for cheap and why he says you have to climb Cringe Mountain.
⛽️ Fuel for Taking Action
💡 Software Idea: We love this one. Ben Tossell pulled every Kindle book he’s read since 2014 and turned it into a scrollable bookshelf. Someone should productise this for every reader on the planet.
📱 Mobile App Idea: 20 app niches printing money in 2026, ranked by monthly revenue per app. The top earner pulls up to $55M a month, and it’s not AI.
🛍️ E-commerce Idea: AG1 built a cult following among humans. We reckon there’s room for the same play in pet wellness, complete with a subscription model and a clear exit route. Dig in.
💸 Side Hustle Idea: Here are seven side hustles worth starting in 2027, plus a playbook for launching each one. Pick one this weekend.
P.S. Our Founder Pack has free deals, playbooks and exclusive content.
💬 Keep The Conversation Moving
A customer call ends. The questions keep coming.
Zoom’s continuous meeting chat keeps the conversation going before, during and after the call. Share context ahead of time and follow up in the same channel. Useful when your sales team is you, a co-founder and a spreadsheet with strong opinions.
*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: Claude now plugs into your bank accounts to answer money questions from your real balances. US beta.
🎧️ Must-Listen: Riley Brown found a way to let your AI agent search millions of podcast transcripts before it gets to work. Game changer.
📺 Must-Watch: Mark Cuban was asked what he’d build if he graduated today. His answer is a $100k-a-month playbook any founder could start tomorrow.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Think you’ve missed the boat? Stanford’s Ilya Strebulaev tracked 1,540 US unicorns to find when the typical founder actually starts. The oldest was 85. Never say never.
⭐️ Reader's Pick: Paul Gotea reckons five unglamorous problems could get you to $15k/mo before Christmas. None of them are what you’d guess. (Top link from yesterday’s edition)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Desk Tent
Tired of spending your lunch break hunched over a sad meal deal? Wish you could clock out without ever leaving your desk?
Introducing Cubicamp™, the world’s first pop-up nap tent that clamps straight onto your office desk in 4 seconds. Blackout nylon, a built-in neck pillow, and a mesh window for spotting your manager. Your out-of-office switches on the second you zip up.
Cubicamp™ - Things just got in-tents.
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👋 That’s All Folks
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