Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as Jeff Bezos raising a new $100B AI fund 🤯
In today’s edition:
💡 Turning employees into content machines
🛠 How to “vibe design” with Google Stitch 2.0
🔋 From $0 to $6.7M ARR and an acquisition + more
🔍 OpenAI sued, AI Studio upgrade, Lovable launch + more
🍻 A product to get you fully beach ready this summer
Let’s goooo 🚀
🤝 Half Baked x Airwallex: This week we've partnered with Airwallex to offer one Half Baked reader a complimentary expert call on Intro.co (worth up to a thousand dollars) matched to wherever you are on your founder journey.
To be considered, just:
Check out Airwallex
Reply to this email with the word “Intro“
Good luck!
📣 Employee Advocacy OS
Linked and loaded.
Idea Source: Half Baked Team
The Problem: LinkedIn reach is at an all-time high and people are posting every day, racking up millions of impressions, and turning their personal brands into inbound lead machines. Meanwhile, most company LinkedIn pages have 150 followers and their posts get like 12 likes. The dirty secret of LinkedIn is that personal accounts get 5-10x the reach of company pages, which means for companies their biggest untapped marketing channel is sitting right inside their buildings. The average B2B company has 50-500 employees who collectively know thousands of potential customers, investors, and hires - and almost none of them are posting. Not because they don't want to. Because it's hard, awkward, and nobody has made it stupidly easy (or pays them to do it). Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An employee advocacy platform that turns your entire company into a coordinated LinkedIn content army
🛠️ Product:
Connect your company Slack, Notion and other resources and the AI generates personalised post drafts for each employee based on their role, seniority, and past writing style. Employees can approve in one tap or managers batch-distribute one piece of content as subtly varied posts across the whole team for maximum reach.
When anyone on the team publishes, the platform pings colleagues with a one-click engage prompt, flooding the post with early likes and comments that rocket it up the LinkedIn algorithm.
A real-time leaderboard tracks impressions per employee each month, with the company's prize pool paid out automatically to the top performers, turning LinkedIn into a competitive sport.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: SaaS at $15-25/month per active poster. Enterprise tier with custom voice training, prize pool management, and Salesforce integration at $2,000-5,000/month.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or LinkedIn itself. 10-15x revenue multiple.
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💸 You're Losing Money Every Time You Pay Someone Abroad
You built a global team. You sell in multiple markets. But every time you send money across a border, your bank takes a cut you never agreed to.
Hidden FX markups. Slow settlements. A different tool for every country you operate in. It adds up fast.
Here's how Airwallex fixes it:
Interbank FX rates across 150+ countries - no hidden markups
95% of transfers arrive same day
Multi-currency accounts in 20+ currencies - stop converting money you don't need to
Get started with Airwallex in minutes and put your global payments, FX, and spend management on autopilot.
🎨 How to "Vibe Design" with Google Stitch
The Context: Stitch, a free AI design tool from Google Labs that generates high-fidelity UI from text, voice, or images, just got a big upgrade. Today’s update added an infinite design canvas, instant prototyping, and a portable DESIGN.md format. Here’s how to use it to design a slick mobile or web app.
Step-by-step:
Go to stitch.withgoogle.com (free, no waitlist) and describe what you're building - how you want users to feel, or paste in a screenshot of something inspiring. This is the "vibe" part.
Stitch generates multiple design directions. Pick your favourite or just say out loud "show me this in dark mode" or "give me three different nav layouts".
Stitch screens together into a prototype with one click, then hit Play to walk through the full user flow. The AI auto-generates logical next screens as you click through.
Export your DESIGN.md to lock in your design system - colours, fonts, component rules - and import it into your next project so you're never rebuilding from scratch.
⚡ The Business Phone Plan We'd Actually Use
Most business cell plans are just consumer plans with a different price tag. SuperMobile from T-Mobile for Business is built differently.
Why it works for startups:
First business plan combining 5G performance + satellite coverage + built-in security
Your critical apps stay prioritized when networks get congested
Threat Protect secures every connection - even coffee shop WiFi
America's best network, actually designed for how teams work today. Starts at $42/line/mo.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: These two founders built and sold a $6.7M ARR app. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Burnout just hit a 6-year high in the US, meanwhile the global wellness market is on track to hit $9 trillion by 2028. This is a great space to be building in.
💬 Prompt Drop: This one prompt that sped up OpenClaw by 95%. Very cool.
🆓 Founder Resource: Tibo just analyzed 129 founder interviews and 19 patterns that actually lead to success. Super interesting data here!
💵 Founder Deal: Granola captures AI action summaries for every meeting. Half Baked readers get 100% off their first month.
🔍 Founder Finds
👨⚖️ Microsoft is reportedly considering legal action over OpenAI’s $50 billion cloud deal with Amazon. Name a better duo than OpenAI and lawsuits?
💻 Google AI Studio just got a major update with new features rolling out to make it even easier for developers to build and prototype with Gemini models. Google have been cooking.
🚀 Lovable is expanding beyond dev tools into more general-purpose AI tasks. The no-code builder is going after a much bigger market than just vibe coding.
📚 Jerry Neumann wrote the essay every founder should read, exploring why 25 years of entrepreneurship content hasn't moved the needle on startup survival rates one bit. A fascinating read.
📖 Packy McCormick just did a deep dive into World Models. Super long piece, well worth looking through though.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Foot Tanner
Worried about flip-flop tan lines ruining your look this summer? Worried your feet have never actually seen the sun?
Introducing SolaFeet™, the world's most specific tanning device. Just slide your feet into the glowing UV holes under your desk, wait 15 minutes, and emerge with feet that look like they've been to Ibiza.
SolaFeet™ - sole glow, guaranteed.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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