Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as incredible as a company with only one employee raising $30M 😱
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea for founders who hire through their socials
🛠 The 120-year-old copywriting framework Sam Parr swears by
🔋 From $0 to $100M ARR in 19 months + more
🔍 Meta launch, Oura IPO, ClickUp + more
🍻 A product to get you a little extra juice
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!
🐦 Social-Native Hiring Platform
Reply Guys, Hired
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: If you've spent any time on socials recently, you've seen this scene play out. A founder posts something like "we're hiring a growth lead, DMs open" and within the hour there are hundreds of replies from people saying "interested!" and "DMing now!". In the end the role gets filled, maybe by someone who commented, maybe by someone else, but regardless a bunch of people have just self selected that they’re looking for a particular role. Around 70% of a startup's early hiring happens this way - founder-led, network-driven, public-facing. But the hiring stack everyone uses (Greenhouse, Ashby, Gem) was built for 500-person companies with a full TA team, not for a founder trying to close 5 hires this quarter using their social reach. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A hiring platform built for founders who hire on social, replacing the entire ATS-plus-sourcing-plus-screening-plus-scheduling stack with one tool that starts the moment someone posts "we're hiring" on Twitter.
🛠️ Product:
The founder tags the platform on any "we're hiring" post (or installs a Chrome extension that captures it automatically) - the tweet becomes a public application page in 30 seconds, and every commenter gets auto-DM'd a frictionless 60-second mini-application: Loom video, 3 founder-set screener questions, links to past work.
An AI screening agent ranks every applicant against a 2-minute rubric the founder defined upfront, surfaces the top 10, sends one-way video interviews to the top 5, auto-schedules live calls with the top 3, and drops a 1-page candidate brief into the founder's inbox.
The platform then handles references, generates the offer letter, routes international hires through Deel or Remote, and pushes the new starter into the founder's HRIS. One product replaces an ATS, a sourcing tool, a scheduler, a screener, and a reference checker in one go. Nice.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio demo | Remix this build
💼 Business Model: $500/role posted plus a $2k success fee per closed hire (vs $15-25k for a recruiter). $2000/mo unlimited tier for serial hirers like venture studios, accelerators, and holdcos. $25k/yr enterprise tier for talent partners at VC firms.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired defensively by LinkedIn, or by Greenhouse, Ashby, or Rippling looking to move downmarket into founder-led hiring. Target exit 8-12x ARR.
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💰 $1,500 Back Just for Switching Your Phone Plan
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 money back for switching.
What you get:
$1,500+ in bill credits on SuperMobile activation
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Offer runs through June 10. US businesses only. Don't sit on it.
✍️ The 120-Year-Old Copywriting Framework Sam Parr Swears By
The Context: Most AI-written copy reads like sludge because it has no structure. Sam Parr, who sold The Hustle to HubSpot, calls copywriting the #1 skill behind everything he's built - and his go-to framework, AIDA, has been around for over 120 years. Here's how to use it to turn forgettable slop into copy that actually converts.
Step-by-step:
Attention - Open with a line that stops the scroll. Lead with a sharp problem or claim, not a welcome message. "Most founders waste 30 minutes a day figuring out what they missed overnight" beats "Welcome to our app" every single time.
Interest - Now keep them. Add the one relevant detail that makes the problem feel personal, like "and that 30 minutes is costing you a deal a week". Don't list every feature - give them the single fact that makes them think huh, that's me.
Desire - Turn features into outcomes. Don't sell "automated summaries", sell "close your laptop Friday, open it Monday already caught up". People don't want the tool, they want the after.
Action - One ask, zero ambiguity. "Get started" is dead air. "Send your first brief - takes 2 minutes" tells them exactly what happens and how little it costs. One CTA per piece. Ask for three things, get none.
Give it a try!
P.S - Use this prompt to rewrite any copy using the AIDA framework
🤖 Your next hire is an AI agent
Base44's Superagents build the apps, dashboards, and internal tools you've been avoiding all quarter - in plain English, no code, no engineer in the loop.
Thousands of founders are already shipping with them. Free to start.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This guy built the database behind Cursor, Anthropic, and Notion to a $100M run-rate with almost no funding. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Intelligence is getting much, much cheaper, according to research from a16z. This is Moore’s Law 2.0.
💬 Prompt Drop: Ruben Hassid just dropped 100 Claude prompt shortcut hacks. I had never heard of most of them…
🆓 Founder Resource: Dan Shipper automated everything at his company Every with AI agents. His essay on why AI makes experts more valuable, not less, is a must-read.
💵 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
📣 Meta just quietly launched Forum, a new Reddit-like app built around Facebook Groups. Interesting move from Zuck here…
💍 Oura just took its first formal step toward going public, filing IPO paperwork with the SEC.
🆓 Zeb Evans' article on why ClickUp reduced headcount by 22% is a must-read.
🎙️ Acquired dropped their latest episode, this time they cover Vanguard. Queue it up for the weekend.
🧑💻 Garry Tan (YC President) just dropped his simple secrets to agentic coding.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Phone Charging Water Bottle
Tired of lugging a water bottle and a power bank around at the same time? Wish you could charge your phone every time you hit the gym?
Introducing HydroPower™, the stainless steel water bottle with a built-in 10,000mAh power bank to charge your phone on the go. What a time to be alive.
HydroPower™ - Have some extra juice.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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