Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as Anthropic and SpaceX teaming up 🤯
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea inspired by a legendary tech founder
🛠 How to rank on ChatGPT in 100 days
🔋 The founder who turned 3 beverage brands into $8B in exits + more
🔍 OpenAI launch, SubQ launch, Bezos confession + more
🍻 A product to take the edge off on a tough workday
Let’s goooo 🚀
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⚡ Internal App Store Platform
App for grabs
Source: Half Baked
The Problem: Great startup ideas come from a lot of places - personal frustrations, drunken arguments in the pub, certain newsletters (cough cough). But some of the best startups have emerged from internal tools that companies have already built. Google ran internal prediction markets long before Polymarket existed. Slack started as an internal chat tool inside a failing video game studio. So when Alex Bouaziz, Founder of Deel, recently shared details on the internal AI app store they just shipped, I got excited. It took the company 1.5 weeks to build, they have 48 apps live, 1,000+ hours are saved every month and it’s all maintained by just one engineer. I think you can see where this is going…why not create a platform that allows any business to spin up their own internal app store in minutes? Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A turnkey internal app store for mid-market companies. Any employee describes a workflow in plain English, and AI ships a deployed, secured, SSO-wired app in under 5 minutes.
🛠️ Product:
The app store connects to your Google Workspace, Salesforce, HRIS, Notion, and Slack on day one. SSO, audit logs, role-based permissions, SOC 2 - the boring stuff is solved before anyone clicks "new app".
An employee types "I need a form that captures vendor info, validates the EIN, and pushes it to Coupa". The platform generates the app, infers the database, deploys it on a private subdomain, and puts it on the company's internal store for the next person who needs the same thing.
Marketplace mechanics inside your company - discover what your peers built, fork them, leave reviews, track hours saved. Plus a cross-company template gallery so a CFO at one company can install another CFO's expense classifier in two clicks.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the Google AI Studio demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $25/seat/month base, $99/app/month for production deployments with usage caps, $500/integration/month.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Atlassian (already gunning for the workplace OS), Salesforce, ServiceNow, or Zapier. 8-12x revenue at exit if AI tooling multiples hold.
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1️⃣ How to Consolidate Your Global HR Stack Without Breaking Anything
Migrating off multiple HR tools feels risky. But staying on them is costing you time, money, and compliance exposure every month. Here's how Remote makes the switch straightforward.
What you get on one platform:
HRIS for all your people data, workflows, and reporting
Global payroll that runs accurately across every country you're in
EOR, contractor management, and equity tools - all under one login
Designed for simplicity. Built with enterprise-grade compliance.
🤖 How to Rank on ChatGPT in 100 Days
The Context: Traditional SEO is dying. Meanwhile, AI search converts 23x higher than organic Google traffic - and LLM searches are projected to hit 25-28% of all queries by the end of 2026. Deno Hawari's 100-day framework has driven $1.8M+ in revenue for clients across the discovery curve, with one brand jumping 1,700% in organic visibility. Here's the playbook.
Step-by-step:
Days 1-30: Validate your answers. Mine sales calls, Reddit threads, and support tickets to find the real questions buyers are asking. Write 10-15 "answer-first" pieces - direct answer in the first 50 words, supporting detail next, FAQs at the end. By day 30 you'll have 3-5 clear winners to double down on.
Days 31-70: Cover the surface area. Take each winner and break it into definitions, comparisons, use cases, mistakes, and case studies. Build content clusters - one pillar page, multiple supporting pieces - and keep terminology identical across every piece. The goal: no matter how someone phrases the question, you're the answer.
Days 71-100: Build entity velocity. LLMs still ask "who should I trust?" - so get mentioned everywhere. Guest posts, podcasts, founder interviews. Publish referenceable assets (named frameworks, original data, contrarian takes) and keep messaging tight around one core topic.
🧠 Become an AI Expert in Just 5 Minutes
If you're a decision maker, you need to be on the bleeding edge of AI - but ain't nobody got time for seminars, conferences, and lunch 'n learns.
The Deep View condenses everything you need to know about the latest AI developments into a 5-minute daily read. It's free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This founder turned 3 beverage brands into $8B in exits. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says compute is becoming a new asset class - with its own futures market and price discovery, just like oil.
💬 Prompt Drop: Check out these 40 powerful AI prompts for Claude that produce expert-level results
🆓 Founder Resource: Check out this website to find DESIGN.md files to help you and your agents design killer websites.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 3 months of Notion free for your team. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
🤖 OpenAI is starting to roll out GPT-5.5 Instant in ChatGPT as of yesterday.
⚡ Subquadratic just shipped SubQ, and the benchmarks are almost hard to believe. In fact, a lot of people think they’re too good to be true. Time will tell.
🧠 John Collison breaks down the two types of people who'll thrive in the AI era over the next 10-20 years. We tend to agree with him.
😬 Jeff Bezos revealed the moment an early Amazon executive told him he had enough ideas to destroy Amazon. Brutal, but probably true for every founder past a certain stage.
🥊 Jake and Logan Paul are on track to become billionaires, and the playbook behind it is wild. Whatever you think of them, the audience-to-equity engine is kinda genius.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Scream Box
Looking to blow off some steam at work? Wish you could scream about Q3 numbers without HR getting involved?
Introducing Decibox™, a soundproof padded box you keep on your desk, press your face into, and scream as loudly as you want. The box absorbs 99.7% of sound. You absorb 100% of the catharsis.
Decibox™ - Improve your yell-being.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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