Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as juicy as Sam Altman's leaked texts to Mira Murati during the OpenAI coup 🍿
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to help us stop the scroll
🛠 How to manage your Meta ads using Claude
🔋 From $0 to $165M ARR in 26 months + more
🔍 OpenAI launch, Kalshi raise, Corgi unicorn + more
🍻 A product we’ve all wished we had once
Let’s goooo 🚀
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📲 Anti-Doomscroll App for X
X marks the spot
Source: Half Baked
The Problem: If you're a regular Half Baked reader, you know at least one thing about me…I spend an absurd amount of time on Twitter - fine, on "X". It's where we source a huge chunk of the ideas and content for this very newsletter. But like all socials, it's also a swamp of noise and nonsense. Reply guys waging war over trivial matters, famous founders airing their grievances in public, an endless conveyor belt of launch videos...the list goes on. I'd wager less than 10% of my time on there is actually productive. But it's 2026, and agents are starting to do everything for us now, right? So why not get an agent to scroll for me and extract only the information and content I care about? Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI agent that doomscrolls X for you 24/7, learns what actually moves the needle for your work and curiosity, and sends one daily push notification with the 5 to 10 posts you genuinely needed to see.
🛠️ Product:
Connect your X account, select the topics you care about and the agent follows the accounts you follow plus 500 adjacent accounts your interests imply. The agent reads ~2,000 posts a day per user and scores them on novelty, signal density, and fit to your stated interests.
Each morning you get a single push notification with 5 to 10 keepers and a 30-second TL;DR each. Tap any post to expand the full thread, the quote tweet chain, and the 3 best replies - no rabbit holes, no recommended posts trying to drag you back in.
A weekly digest flags "topics gaining momentum in your network" so you catch narrative shifts before everyone else does, and a "scroll budget" toggle locks you out of the app once you've read your daily brief.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $15/mo consumer (one daily brief, 10 posts max), $500/mo team for VC firms, growth teams, and competitor-watching use cases
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by a productivity or media company like Notion, Substack, or Beehiiv ($75M to $200M at 6-10x ARR), or by an enterprise media intelligence firm like Brandwatch, Meltwater, or Sprinklr
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🌐 Your Team Is in 6 Countries. Your HR Tools Were Built for One.
The average HR stack wasn't designed for distributed, global teams. It was designed for a single office in a single country. If you're scaling internationally, you're already working around your tools.
How Remote was built differently:
Global by default - local compliance, contracts, and payroll built into the platform
One relationship to manage instead of a different vendor per country
API for everything, so it connects cleanly with the tools you already use
Built for the way modern companies actually hire.
📲 How to Manage Your Meta Ads Using Claude
The Context: Meta Ads Manager is powerful but punishingly tedious - pulling reports, comparing ad sets, and writing weekly summaries for stakeholders eats hours. With the new official Meta Ads MCP plugged into Claude, you can do all of it through plain English. And it's free to set up.
Step-by-step:
Follow the official Meta Ads MCP setup guide on Heyoz to install the connector and authenticate your Meta Business account. Takes about 5 minutes once your Business Manager is verified.
Open Claude desktop and start asking questions in plain English: "Show me my top 5 campaigns by ROAS over the last 30 days" or "Which ad sets have CPA above $50?" Claude pulls live data, surfaces patterns, and writes reports you can paste straight into Slack.
Then put it to work: feed it your best ad and ask for 5 new angle variations to test, or ask it to recommend budget reallocations based on the last 14 days. Save the prompts that work into a Notion swipe file.
🔥 You're Running a Business. You Shouldn't Be Reconciling Expenses.
Between fundraising, hiring, and shipping - manually tracking who spent what is not a good use of your time. And a spreadsheet isn't an expense management system.
How BILL Spend & Expense fixes it:
Free software powered by a Visa business card - automate reports, set team budgets, see every transaction live
Customers save an average of $10k+ per month and 12 hours of finance admin
94% of users would recommend it to a friend
Right now, new customers get $500 back when they spend their first $500.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This company went from $0 to $165M+ ARR in just 26 months, making it one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies in history. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Stripe just invented a new job title - Forward Deployed AI Accelerator. Expect to see a lot more job postings like these in the future.
💬 Prompt Drop: This thread on the top 12 Claude MCPs is totally worth a quick read.
🆓 Founder Resource: These 10 tips for getting your first 100 users are gold.
💵 Founder Deal: Wispr Flow is the most-used AI tool at Half Baked. Get a 45-day free trial on us.
🔍 Founder Finds
🎙 OpenAI just launched GPT-Realtime-2, its most intelligent voice model yet, bringing GPT-5-class reasoning to voice agents.
💰 Kalshi just raised $1B at a $22B valuation - double its valuation from 5 months ago. Annualised trading volume is now $178B and prediction markets officially have institutional product-market fit.
🐶 Corgi hit a $1.3B valuation 4 months after its Series A, making it YC's latest unicorn. AI-native insurance for startups is officially a category.
🤖 David George at a16z believes the "AI Job Apocalypse" is a complete fantasy. His thread is the cleanest counter to AI doomerism we've seen in months.
😩 Sam Altman on why founders can't escape burnout the way everyone else does - one to come back to when you eventually burn out yourself (we've all done it).
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Roll Call
Ever run out of toilet paper at the absolute worst moment? Wish your bathroom could text you before disaster strikes?
Introducing Roll Call™, a tiny IoT sensor that mounts to your toilet paper holder, tracks every sheet you pull, and pings you on Slack when supplies are critically low. Auto-reorder via Amazon included, plus a "dad mode" that yells at teenagers who hog the 3-ply.
Roll Call™ - Every sheet counts.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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