Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as unbelievable as Anthropic passing OpenAI in revenue (apparently) 🔥
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to fix a farming faux pas
🛠 How to launch your SaaS across 100+ platforms
🔋 From MIT poker night to a $1B AI empire + more
🔍 Tech earnings, ElevenMusic, Google launch + more
🍻 A product for those who pour over their golf game
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x T-Mobile: This week we've partnered with T-Mobile for Business to offer one Half Baked reader a new MacBook Neo to support them on their founder journey. To be considered, just:
Go to T-Mobile and complete the sales request form
Reply to this email with what you’re building
Good luck!
🧬 AI Biopesticides for Agriculture
Pest in Peace
Source: Garry Tan
The Problem: YC just dropped their Summer 2026 Requests for Startups yesterday and unsurprisingly…a lot of them are AI. But among all of the ideas, one of them stood out to me…an idea from YC’s President and CEO Garry Tan. Garry believes there’s a huge opportunity for founders to use AI to make low-pesticide agriculture possible. So why did this idea stand out? Well because just this week David Friedberg broke down a fascinating paper on the All-In Podcast linking a specific pesticide to the recent rise in colon cancer rates in people aged 15-39 (up 80% over the last 20 years). Pesticides are a necessary evil, like checking your bank account after a holiday (yikes). Without them, global crop yields would collapse overnight and food prices would 5x. With them, we're slowly poisoning ourselves, our soil, and our water. But if AI can solve protein folding, it can solve this. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A generative biology platform that designs targeted biopesticides and sells the designs into large agribusiness R&D pipelines as a royalty-bearing IP layer.
🛠️ Product:
The design engine. A generative biology foundation model trained on insect, weed, and fungal genomes, plant-pest interaction data, and decades of trial results. An ag biotech team specifies a target and the model returns ranked candidates (dsRNA sequences, peptides, or microbial strains) with predicted field efficacy.
The trial layer. Top candidates flow into a partner network of contract research orgs and university field trial sites for synthesis, greenhouse testing, and small-plot deployment. Customers watch live efficacy dashboards and iterate on the brief mid-trial. Every result feeds back into the model.
The wedge. You can't shortcut EPA registration (3-5 years, no AI fixes that). What you can do is 10x the hit rate of what enters trials. Incumbents burn $200M+ per program on candidates that look great in Phase 1 and die in Phase 2 - cutting that failure rate in half is worth billions in saved R&D spend, captured as royalties on every molecule that ships.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the Google AI Studio demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Per-acre licensing for ag distributors and co-ops, royalty deals with seed companies bundling treatments, and direct enterprise contracts with the Big Four (Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva, BASF).
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva, or BASF for the IP library and pipeline (8-15x ARR), or IPO as the first AI-native crop protection company.
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📞 Your Field Team Can't Close Deals from a Dead Zone
Sales rep in rural territory. Technician on a job site. Driver on a remote route. If they drop off the network, your revenue drops with them. SuperMobile was built for this exact problem.
How SuperMobile helps:
Seamless satellite coverage when cell towers can't reach
Nationwide Network Slice prioritizes your team's data
Threat Protect built in, for simple, always-on protection
America's Best Network according to Ookla Speedtest. US businesses only.
🚀 How to Launch Your SaaS across 100+ Platforms
The Context: When most founders launch their SaaS businesses, they plan a big Product Hunt launch and call it a day. In fact, there are over 100 platforms you can launch and list your SaaS product on to get early users and that all-important SEO juice. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Go to Notion and steal this template we’ve made with 100+ platforms pre-loaded, tagged by audience, cost, dofollow status, and tier. Filter by your product type (AI, B2B SaaS, dev tool, indie) and the directory will surface only the platforms worth your time.
Work backwards from launch day. 14 days out, claim handles and line up a Product Hunt hunter. 7 days out, build your assets once - logo, GIF, taglines, gallery images - and store them in the Asset Library so you can paste them into every submission instead of redoing them 30 times.
Run the launch over 30 days, not one. Day 1 is Tier 1 only (PH, HN, BetaList, IH, Reddit). Days 2-7 hit one PH alternative per day. Days 8-30 are niche directories and long-tail SEO sites that pay you back months later when someone Googles "[your category] alternative".
P.S: Get a 3 month trial of Notion on us for free.
🤖 Build Autonomous Superagents with Base44
Create your own personal AI agent with Base44 Superagents.
Connect tools, automate tasks, and get updates automatically - no coding needed.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: These founders met at an MIT poker night, then went on to build a $1B AI empire. This is their story.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Two GLP-1 drugs are outperforming the entire AI startup ecosystem on revenue. The only trend bigger than AI in 2026.
💬 Prompt Drop: OpenAI just released their GPT-5.5 prompting guide.
🆓 Founder Resource: You can learn 95% of Codex in this 28-minute tutorial.
💵 Founder Deal: Granola captures action summaries for every meeting. They're giving Half Baked readers 100% off their first month!
🔍 Founder Finds
📊 Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon all report earnings after the close today. Combined AI capex for 2026 is north of $600B. The market wants to see these earnings…
🎼 ElevenLabs just launched ElevenMusic, a new platform to discover, remix, create, and earn from music.
🔥 Google just announced that you can create Docs, Sheets, Slides and PDFs directly in Gemini. About time!
🍇 Divine, the Jack Dorsey-backed Vine reboot, has just launched to the public.
🎯 Shayne Coplan, CEO of Polymarket, drops the founder advice every aspiring builder needs to hear. Worth the 90 seconds.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Keg Golf Bag
Enjoy the occasional brew during a round of golf? Wish your golf bag did more than haul around clubs you never use anyway?
Introducing KegBag™, the world's first golf bag with a built-in 5L pressurized keg, insulated tap pocket where the 7-iron used to live, and a few pint glasses for you and your friends. Perfect for the golfer who prefers taking a swig over taking a swing.
KegBag™ - The handi-tap.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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