Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Anthropic's ridiculous $20B revenue run rate 🤯
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea straight from a $30M+ founder
🛠 The voice note playbook for LinkedIn outreach
🔋 Meet the $13.3B crypto founder building an AI unicorn + more
🔍 OpenAI leaked transcript, F1 deep dive, anti-spy tech + more
🍻 The ultimate solution to awkward tan lines…
Let's goooo 🚀
💸 Mac Mini Giveaway: We've teamed up with T-Mobile for Business to give away a Mac Mini to help one founder level up their business.
Go to this link and submit your details in the lead form (takes 7 seconds)
Reply to us with a screenshot of the confirmation.
Good luck!
🕸 AI-Powered Founder Network
Rejected, but not ejected
Available Domain: benchpath.co
Source: Sam Parr (We were at the New Media Summit in Austin and Sam told us he hasn’t figured out a way to monetise the 93% of founders that his business Hampton turns away. Mega opportunity!)
The Problem: If you're a founder doing between $1M-$3M in revenue, you're stuck in a dead zone. You're too far along for beginner communities and too early for Hampton. You apply, get rejected, and that's it - no feedback, no "here's what to work on," no "come back when you hit X." Just silence. Meanwhile, you're flying blind on the decisions that matter most. Is your 15% month-over-month growth impressive or mediocre for your stage? Should you raise or bootstrap? Hire that VP of Sales or keep doing it yourself? You have no benchmarks, no peer data, and no one at your level to pressure-test these calls with. Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A virtual founder community powered by AI agents
🛠️ Product:
Share your business and biggest current challenge, and get placed into a cohort of 20 founders at a similar revenue stage - your cohort gets a group chat moderated by an AI agent that sparks peer discussions and surfaces the right advice at the right time.
Every week your cohort attends a live virtual session hosted by an AI moderator that runs structured peer advisory meetings - hot seats, growth teardowns, accountability check-ins - like a YC group partner, minus the $500K equity check.
The AI tracks each founder's progress across sessions and knows exactly which cohort member has already solved the problem you're stuck on.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Free tier for basic benchmarks. Paid tier ($30/month) for the AI advisor, full path maps, and peer group matching. Back-end dataset licensed to VCs and acquirers who want visibility into the $500K-$3M founder market.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Hampton directly (natural bolt-on), a community platform like Circle or Mighty Networks, or a data player like PitchBook looking for private founder metrics. 5-10x revenue multiple.
💰 Pitch us: Want to get funded to start this idea? Fill out this form.
Rate this idea
📱 Switch to SuperMobile from T-Mobile. Get an iPhone 17 Pro on us.
SuperMobile from T-Mobile gives your business what it needs: unlimited premium data on America's largest 5G network, intelligent network performance, and a 5-year price guarantee.*
Plus if you switch to SuperMobile right now, you can get a free iPhone 17 Pro (with a qualifying plan) to run your business.
The best business plan on the best network.
*5-year price guarantee excludes taxes & fees. Full terms at T-Mobile.com
🧠 The Voice Note Playbook for LinkedIn Outreach
The Context: LinkedIn DMs have a 5-20% reply rate. Most get skimmed and forgotten. But there's one format that's quietly crushing it… voice notes. The difference isn't just "send audio instead of text." It's a specific structure, a timing sequence, and a targeting layer that works whether you have 50 followers or 50,000.
Step-by-step:
Most people start by messaging warm leads who already engage with their content. That works, but the real unlock is a cold targeting method that manufactures warmth before you ever hit send. The full breakdown is in the guide below.
Record a 30-45 second voice note with a specific 4-part structure. The order matters more than the content. Get it wrong and you sound like every other pitch. Get it right and you sound like a friend with an idea.
The voice note alone isn't enough. There's a follow-up text formula that 3x's your open rate on the audio. Plus a batching system to send 20+ personalized notes in under 30 minutes.
💰 Stop Paying for Clicks. Start Paying for Customers.
The best thing about a well-set-up affiliate channel? It compounds. Quietly. In the background. While you're doing everything else.
FirstPromoter is built for exactly that:
One platform for affiliates, influencers, and referral partners
Recurring commissions that stay in sync with your billing automatically
Mass payouts in one click - no chasing invoices, no PayPal chaos
Set it up this week. Benefit from it for years.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This founder went from crypto kittens to a $13.3B Valuation. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: These traffic stats for tech media companies are insane. AI has completely changed the traffic game.
💬 Prompt Drop: Check out this Claude Cowork Cheat Sheet, the complete guide to delegating real work to AI
🆓 Founder Resource: This gallery of UI components is an incredible resource for vibe coding.
💵 Founder Deal: Granola captures action summaries for every meeting. They’re giving Half Baked readers 100% off their first month!
🔍 Founder Finds
🤫 OpenAI's all-hands meeting on their Department of Defense contract just leaked, a rare unfiltered look inside one of the most consequential decisions the company has ever made.
💰 Eight Sleep raises at a $1.5B valuation in a round led by Tether Investments. The sleep tech company continues to prove that people will pay serious money to optimize their rest.
💻 Apple just dropped the MacBook Neo at $599. A18 Pro chip, 13-inch Liquid Retina display, 16-hour battery, four colours, 2.7 lbs. Starts shipping March 11.
🔒 Spectre I is the first smart device built to block unwanted audio recordings. Privacy hardware is quietly becoming a big category.
💰 This 24-year-old turned $225M into $5.5B in under 12 months, a truly epic story.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Reverse Tan
Sick of looking like a human checkerboard after every beach day? Tired of your farmer's tan making you look like you're wearing an invisible t-shirt 24/7?
Introducing ReverseTee™, the world's first shirt that tans your pale parts while blocking UV on your already-golden bits. Made with UV-transparent mesh panels it adapts to make sure you’re tanning only where you need to be.
ReverseTee™ - Get it while it’s hot.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
Before you go just a few public service announcements:
Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you asap.
See you soon,