Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as unhinged as the JPMorgan exec lawsuit 🍿
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to license the world's most valuable faces
🛠 Building a Slack digest agent in 5 minutes with Base44
🔋 The $2.1B subscription empire that almost died on a phone call + more
🔍 Manus Cloud Computer, Sam Altman, scaling roadmap + more
🍻 A wearable that’s always on…literally
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 the word “T-Mobile“
Good luck!
🎬 Creator Likeness Licensing Platform
License, Camera, Action
Source: Half Baked
The Problem: A wise man recently said "the two highest leverage people right now are great engineers and great creators." Okay fine, it wasn't a wise man, I said it on Twitter. But the point stands. AI has turned 10x engineers into one-person armies, and the resulting flood of software means great creators with real reach are worth more than ever. Top creators charge $1M-$4M per brand integration. Even a mid-tier creator with 2M followers wants $15k for a single sponsored post that takes weeks to film. AI UGC platforms like Arcads and MakeUGC solved the volume problem with 150+ stock avatars who all look like extras from a Hims commercial. Nobody buys protein powder because Generic Smiling Man #47 endorsed it. What if real creators could license their face once and let brands generate unlimited AI UGC variants? Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A creator likeness marketplace where celebrities, influencers, and creators license their face, voice, and mannerisms once, and brands generate unlimited AI UGC variants at a fraction of the cost of a single sponsored post.
🛠️ Product:
Creators onboard with a 90-minute capture session (multi-angle video, voice samples, 50 reference clips), then set their licensing tier, blackout categories (no crypto, no gambling, no politics), and a 24-hour approval queue with full creator veto.
Brands subscribe to a creator's likeness from $500/mo (rising stars) to $50k/mo (top 0.1%), then generate unlimited script variants, A/B test in-platform, and ship watermarked ads straight to Meta and TikTok in minutes.
Every output passes the creator's approval and a brand-safety classifier before render. Creators earn the flat license fee plus per-impression royalties, and a public ledger shows exactly which brands they're working with so their audience never feels duped.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: 30% take rate on creator licensing (the Cameo precedent), tiered brand subs from $500 to $50k/mo, plus $0.10 to $1.00 per render at scale. A creator earning $2M/yr on the platform nets the company $600k.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by Meta, TikTok, or YouTube wanting first-party UGC ad infrastructure ($500M-$2B), or rolled up into a creator economy holdco like Spotter or Patreon at 10-15x ARR ($300M-$1B).
Rate this idea
🎁 Small Business Month: $1,500 Back for Switching to SuperMobile
It's Small Business Month, and T-Mobile for Business is putting $100 back per line into founders' pockets when they activate 15+ voice lines on SuperMobile. No contest, no lottery, just credit back for switching.
What you get:
$1,500+ in bill credits on SuperMobile activation
Unlimited premium data, Threat Protect, and satellite coverage
5-Year Price Guarantee with no annual contracts
💻 Build a Slack Digest Agent in 5 Minutes with Base44
The Context: Most founders waste 30 minutes a day scrolling Slack to figure out what they missed overnight. Today we're using Base44 to build a Superagent that reads your Slack every morning and tells you what you need to prioritize. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Go to base44.com, sign up for a free account, and click Create Superagent. In the prompt box, type: "Every weekday at 8am, read everything that happened overnight in our team Slack and send me a digest with key decisions made, open questions waiting on someone, and anything that needs my input as the founder."
When prompted, connect your Slack workspace and select which channels the agent should monitor - pick #general, #team, #product, and #customers, and skip the noisy ones like #random.
Connect WhatsApp (or Telegram) as your delivery channel so the digest lands where you actually live during the day, not buried in another inbox you'll forget to check.
🤖 How to Launch an Online Store Without Building One
Most people assume starting an ecommerce business means weeks of setup. BuildYourStore from AutoDS cuts store creation down to 2 minutes. AutoDS handles everything that comes after.
Here's how it works:
Choose a niche and BuildYourStore from AutoDS instantly generates a fully designed, ready-to-sell Shopify store
AutoDS connects your store to 30+ suppliers and a marketplace of 500M+ products
Fulfilled by AutoDS handles every order automatically - you never touch the logistics
Free to start on both platforms. Takes about 2 minutes to launch.
Get started with BuildYourStore today.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This founder bootstrapped his Shopify side project to a $2.1B business (after a phone call almost killed it). Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: “Scarce assets” are the big hedge trade in this AI supercycle (sports teams, art, prime real estate), according to Packy McCormick at least. Good take.
💬 Prompt Drop: Tom Bilyeu (Quest Nutrition Founder) shares the exact 5-person AI team he'd hire on day one. Steal his prompts.
🆓 Founder Resource: Another day, more requests for startups, this time from AD Ventures.
💵 Founder Deal: Wispr Flow is our most-used AI tool at Half Baked. Get a 45-day free trial on us.
🔍 Founder Finds
☁️ Manus just launched Cloud Computer, an always-on machine in the cloud so anything you build keeps running 24/7, even when your laptop is off. The agent era now comes with rent.
💰 Founders Fund just closed Growth Fund IV at $6 billion, its largest haul ever. That’s a lot of founders getting funded.
🧠 Sam Altman dropped his take on the next big moment to come in AI. Worth a read if you're building anything in the space.
📊 Daniel Fazio mapped out the 17-step roadmap to scaling a business from $0 to $500K/month in 2026.
🏥 Mayo Clinic just released an AI model that spots pancreatic cancer on routine CT scans up to 3 years before diagnosis, nearly doubling specialist detection rates. One of the biggest stories of the year.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: AI Necklace
Tired of relying on your memory like some kind of caveman? Wish you could outsource it to your necklace?
Introducing Looket™, the AI necklace that quietly records every interaction you have all day long and beams it to a searchable private cloud only you can access. Your barista, your therapist, your first date, the stranger you sat next to on the plane - all now co-starring in your personal Truman Show.
Looket™ - Locket and loaded
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,