Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as Andrej Karpathy joining Anthropic 🤯
In today’s edition:
💡 One of Codie Sanchez's most overlooked AI opportunities
🛠 How to build a brand identity with Google Pomelli
🔋 Building a $75M business by paying people to scroll + more
🔍 Gemini Omni, Viktor's $75M, OpenAI Guaranteed Capacity + more
🍻 A wave of inspiration for the surfers out there
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x T-Mobile for Business: We're giving one lucky reader a $500 grant to build their startup, courtesy of T-Mobile. How to enter:
Fill out this 30-second form to enter
Reply to this email with the startup idea you'd spend the $500 building
Good luck!
📞 Voice Agents for Boring Businesses
Hold the line
Source: Codie Sanchez
The Problem: It's 8:47pm on a Tuesday and your boiler just gave up the ghost. You panic-Google "emergency plumber" and start ringing down the list. Four go to voicemail. The fifth picks up - and just earned themselves a $600 callout fee. This little drama plays out millions of times a year across America's $543B home services market, where 42% of HVAC calls and 47% of home service inquiries come in after standard business hours, 80% of those callers hang up without leaving a message, and 85% of voicemails never get called back. Codie Sanchez - the boring-business investor who built a 1M+ following teaching people to buy laundromats and car washes - recently called this "one of the most overlooked AI opportunities in the next 24 months." Voice AI is now indistinguishable from a real human, costs about 20 cents a minute, and most owners have never even heard of it. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A done-for-you AI voice agent for boring businesses (HVAC, plumbing, pest control etc.) that answers every call 24/7, qualifies the job, and books it straight into their existing dispatch software.
🛠️ Product:
Onboard in a single 20-minute call where the agent ingests your service area, pricing tiers, dispatch hours, common job types, and what counts as an emergency. By the end of the call you have a fully trained AI receptionist live on your existing business number - no phone system swap, no IT guy, no app for your customers to download.
When a customer calls, the agent picks up before the second ring with your exact greeting, qualifies the job (emergency vs scheduled, residential vs commercial, in-area vs out-of-zone), books it directly into ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, or Jobber, and texts the owner a clean summary. After-hours emergencies trigger an instant SMS to whoever's on call.
Every Monday morning the owner gets a "Missed Money" report showing exactly how many jobs the AI captured outside business hours, what those jobs were worth in pipeline revenue, and what their voicemail-only baseline used to cost them. That single report sells the renewal every month.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio demo | Remix the build
💼 Business Model: $399/mo flat per location (no per-minute billing because owner-operators despise variable bills), $799/mo for multi-location operators, and $5k+/mo white-label for franchise systems and trade associations. Annual contracts standard.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, or Thryv for $300M-$800M once it hits 5,000 paying contractors. Or kept private as a quietly enormous cash machine - 5,000 contractors at $399/mo is $24M ARR at near-zero churn.
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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 Build a Brand Identity with Google Pomelli
The Context: Most founders are great at building product and terrible at building brand. Pomelli is Google Labs' new AI brand agent (built with DeepMind) that solves this by extracting a complete brand identity from a few inputs and turning it into ready-to-use marketing assets. It's free, in public beta, and disturbingly good.
Step-by-step:
Open Pomelli and either drop in your website URL or, if you're pre-launch, upload reference photos and a short doc describing your idea. The agent builds your "Business DNA" - tone of voice, fonts, colors, imagery style - the source of truth for everything you generate from here.
Chat with the agent to refine the DNA before you generate anything. Tell it to make the tone punchier, swap the palette, or anchor the style to a reference brand. Garbage DNA in, garbage assets out.
Ask Pomelli for campaign ideas tied to a specific goal (launch, waitlist, sale), pick one, and let it generate the full asset pack - social posts, ad creatives, captions, web visuals - all on-brand. Edit, download, ship.
💵 Your International Payroll is Running on Spreadsheets and Hope. Here's What That's Costing You.
Managing payroll manually across multiple countries - different currencies, different tax rules, different pay cycles - is one of the highest-risk tasks a scaling company takes on. The average compliance error costs $42k to fix.
How Remote Payroll fixes it:
Accurate, compliant payroll runs across every country you operate in - in local currency
Replaces your patchwork of providers, manual inputs, and reconciliation headaches
Built-in updates when local tax laws or regulations change, so you're never caught off guard
Built for companies that can't afford payroll mistakes.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This guy paid people to use their phones, and built a $75M business along the way. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Immersive Social Entertainment (interactive worlds you actually live inside) is the next frontier in social networking. Fascinating.
💬 Prompt Drop: OpenAI Codex PM Derrick Choi shared a brilliant breakdown of how to set up Goals in Codex so your agent stays coherent over multi-hour runs. Worth a save.
🆓 Founder Resource: Anthropic just dropped The Founder's Playbook: Building an AI-Native Startup - a free 35-page guide remapping the Idea → MVP → Launch → Scale arc for the AI era.
💵 Founder Deal: Wispr Flow is the most-used AI tool at Half Baked. Get a 45-day free trial on us.
🔍 Founder Finds
📹 Google officially launched Gemini Omni at I/O 2026, a multimodal model that turns any combo of images, audio, video, and text into one consistent video. The first true unified omni-model from a frontier lab.
💰 Viktor raised a $75M Series A from Accel for its AI coworker that lives inside Slack and Teams - the largest Series A ever raised by a Polish-founded company.
⚡ OpenAI launched Guaranteed Capacity, a new offering that lets customers lock in long-term access to OpenAI compute via 1-3 year commitments with discounts that scale with spend.
🤖 Google also unveiled Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal AI agent that handles your digital life - drafting plans, sending reminders, populating Sheets - even when your laptop is closed.
📚 Jeff Bezos explains exactly how he decided to quit his Wall Street job and start Amazon. A 2-minute clip that's basically a masterclass in the regret-minimization framework.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Electric Surfboard
Wish you could get out and surf more often? Sick of waiting for the perfect waves before you can shred?
Introducing Wattboard™, the world's first electric surfboard that lets you carve through any body of water at 35mph - lake, pond, hotel pool, that puddle outside your office. Built-in lithium battery for 90 minutes of throttle-twisting glory. Available in three colors: Tron Black, Lifeguard Red, and "Are You Insane" Yellow.
Wattboard™ - Watt's up dude.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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