Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas so secretive, a bunch of them were declassified in the UFO files 🛸
In today’s edition:
💡 Turning every employee into a salesperson
🛠 How to browse on Google Chrome with Codex
🔋 From the micromobility apocalypse to a $2 billion IPO + more
🔍 Isomorphic raise, Ramp $40B, Demis Hassabis talk + more
🍻 A hair-raising idea for a product
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x Remote: This week we've partnered with Remote to offer one Half Baked reader a brand new pair of AirPods. To be considered, just:
Check out Remote here
Reply to this email with where you're based
Good luck!
💼 Commission-Based Employee Advocacy
Linked Income
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: Companies ask a lot of their employees. They want your time, your energy, and for you to pretend that a few slices of pizza every few weeks makes up for being underpaid and under-appreciated. But worst of all, more and more companies now want their employees to become brand evangelists - posting all over their socials about how amazing it is to work there. The entire "employee advocacy" category exists to get this done - tools like EveryoneSocial and GaggleAMP have raised north of $100M to bribe employees into posting with points, badges, and the occasional Starbucks gift card. Meanwhile, if a salesperson sources a lead or closes a deal they get paid in cold hard cash. What gives? Why not let everyone earn commission for driving deal flow? Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A commission-based employee advocacy platform where every employee gets paid commissions for driving leads and sales, just like salespeople.
🛠️ Product:
Every employee gets unique trackable links to any company asset - signup form, demo booking, pricing page, blog post - which they drop into their own LinkedIn threads, comments, podcast bios, or newsletters.
First-click attribution flows straight into the company CRM. When that traffic converts, the employee gets paid automatically - either a flat fee per qualified lead or 1-3% of first-year ACV, with 1099 payout rails handled out of the box.
Employees get paid out their commissions through payroll each month.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: SaaS platform fee at $20-50 per seat per month, plus a 10-15% take-rate on commission payouts processed through the platform.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by PartnerStack, HubSpot or similar for 8-10x ARR exit multiple
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💸 Setting Up a Legal Entity Abroad Costs $74k. There's a Much Cheaper Way In.
When you find the right hire in another country, the instinct is to set up a local entity. That's $74k, months of legal work, and an ongoing compliance burden - before you've even made your first payroll run.
Why fast-moving companies use Remote instead:
Remote acts as the legal employer in 180+ countries so you don't have to
One relationship, one platform, one invoice - no local lawyers or accountants to manage
Scale to new markets in days, not quarters
Expand globally without the entity headache.
🌐 How to Browse on Google Chrome with Codex
The Context: A few months ago OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, their attempt at a full AI browser. Remember that? Me neither. Thankfully they came to their senses and just launched a Codex plugin for Chrome instead - meaning Codex can now use your actual browser. Here's how to set it up.
Step-by-step:
Open the Codex app and go to Plugins, then search for and add the Chrome plugin.
Follow the setup flow - it walks you through installing the Chrome extension, signing in, and approving Chrome's permission prompts. Once done, open Chrome and confirm the Codex extension shows "Connected" in the toolbar.
Start a new Codex thread and invoke Chrome directly in any prompt using
@Chrome. Codex will spin up its own isolated tab group so it doesn't hijack the browser session you're working in.Try it with a real task to see the magic - something like
@Chrome open Salesforce and update the account record for [Customer Name] using these call notes.
🤖 1,000+ ChatGPT Prompts to Help You Work 10X Faster
ChatGPT is insanely powerful. But most people waste 90% of its potential by using it like Google.
These 1,000+ proven ChatGPT prompts fix that:
1,000+ ready-to-use prompts to solve problems in minutes instead of hours - tested by 1M+ professionals
Plus the Superhuman AI newsletter (3 mins daily) so you keep learning new AI tools and stay ahead in your career
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: While every other scooter company went bankrupt, these guys hit $886M in revenue and just filed for an IPO. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: AI is going mobile incredibly quickly, with a16z's chart showing AI-native mobile apps eating a chunk of the App Store top charts in just 12 months.
💬 Prompt Drop: Stop writing 500-word prompts that don't work. This 35-word prompt writes better than all of them.
🆓 Founder Resource: This guy built 10 apps in 10 months and now makes $800k/yr. Here’s how.
💵 Founder Deal: Granola captures action summaries for every meeting. They're giving Half Baked readers 100% off their first month. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
💰 Isomorphic Labs is in advanced talks to raise $2B+ led by Thrive Capital, just 14 months after its $600M debut round. Demis Hassabis’ side hustle seems to be going well…
📈 Ramp is in talks to raise funding at a $40B valuation, an $8B bump in just 6 months. Epic run.
🎙️ Demis Hassabis sat down with Garry Tan on How to Build the Future to talk DeepMind, AlphaFold, and the path to AGI. Demis is the goat.
🎥 Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel break down the founder's guide to selling your company - acqui-hires, corp dev, term sheets, and what actually happens in the room.
🧠 This article on first principles thinking (one of the most overused and least understood terms in startup land) is really great, worth a quick read.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Man Mower
Tired of your back hair developing its own ecosystem? Wish you could maintain your body hair the same way you maintain your lawn?
Introducing ManMower™, the world's first mini lawnmower designed for the human body. Adjustable blade height for chest, back, and beyond. It’s like a Roomba and a Gillette razor had a baby.
ManMower™ - It's mow time.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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