Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas faster than a juiced-up swimmer at the Enhanced Games 🏊
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to fix the conference networking lottery
🛠 How to calculate market size using Manus (TAM, SAM, SOM)
🔋 Turning banned substances into a $1.2B sports competition + more
🔍 Anthropic x The Vatican, xAI, tokenmaxxing + more
🍻 A product that really gets in your head
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x Remote: We've partnered with Remote to offer one Half Baked reader a brand new MacBook Neo. Here’s what you need to do:
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Shoutout to last week’s winner Andrew Rich.
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🤝 AI Networking Agent for Events
You schmooze, you don’t lose
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: Ever been to a conference before? I certainly have, and they can be very hit or miss. The problem? You pay a few thousand dollars for a ticket, fly across the country, and end up making three meaningful connections that mostly happen by accident. The 4,000 other people in the room - some of whom would actually be useful to know - stay invisible. The event apps don't really help. Brella, Grip, Swapcard and the rest all promise "AI matchmaking" but they live inside an event app that 80% of attendees never open. Meanwhile the people you actually want to meet are walking right past you. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An SMS-native AI agent that learns who you want to meet before an event, then quietly works the room for you while you're there.
🛠️ Product:
Before the event, you get a text from your agent. You tell it in plain English who you want to meet and what you want to achieve - "I'm looking for a VP Sales hire from a Series B SaaS company" or "I want to talk to anyone who's raised a seed round in fintech in the last 12 months". Takes 60 seconds. No app, no profile, no QR code.
During the event, the agent runs in the background. It cross-references your goals against the full attendee list, the session schedule, and real-time venue data, then proactively sets up meetings with the people you want to meet.
After the event, the agent drafts your follow-ups, schedules the meetings you said you wanted, and remembers everyone you met. Next conference you attend, it already knows your history, who you liked, who you owe a follow-up to, and quietly picks up where it left off.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio demo | Remix this build
💼 Business Model: Event organizers pay $10-20 per attendee for the networking layer. Sponsors pay extra to be prioritized in agent recommendations to relevant attendees. Post-event consumer subscription at $9.99/mo to keep the agent active between conferences.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Cvent, Hopin, LinkedIn, or a CRM player wanting to own the personal networking graph. 10-15x revenue multiple.
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🌍 How to Make Your First International Hire Without Setting Up a Legal Entity
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📊 How to Calculate Market Size Using Manus (TAM, SAM, SOM)
The Context: Every pitch deck needs a TAM/SAM/SOM slide, and most founders either pluck a "$50B market" number from thin air or…actually, that’s what pretty much all founders do. Here's how to size your market using AI in minutes.
Step-by-step:
Go to Manus (or Claude, ChatGPT, whatever you think)
Use this AI market size tool or use the prompt: Estimate the TAM, SAM, and SOM for [product or service] in [market]. Compare top-down and bottom-up approaches, show the major assumptions, and return a table plus a short recommendation memo.
The prompt calculates market sizes using both top-down and bottom-up approaches. Once it’s done drop the final three numbers straight onto your deck.
📶 How to Cut Your Team's Phone Bill Without Cutting Corners
You're adding headcount. Every new hire means another line, another device, another bill. Most carriers punish you for scaling. T-Mobile for Business doesn't.
How it works:
10 lines for $200/mo on the CoreMobile plan, each additional line just $20
$150 bill credit per new line when you switch, no limit
5-Year Price Guarantee on talk, text, and 5G data
Bring your own devices, keep your numbers. US businesses only.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This founder turned banned substances into a $1.2B public company in three years. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Chris Anderson makes the case that intelligence may be the first commodity in history with infinite demand. He’s probably right, you know…
💬 Prompt Drop: This prompt makes Codex audit your own work history for repetitive tasks and suggests useful automation for each.
🆓 Founder Resource: Here are 20 AI concepts that you need to understand in 2026.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 3 months of Notion free for your team (must create a business account) on us. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
⛪ Anthropic officially partnered with the Vatican to establish a structural, ethical framework for AI development. Dario is really racking up the wins.
🤖 xAI just confirmed its Grok V9-Medium model has finished training, with public release 2-3 weeks out. Big things expected there.
🧠 Y Combinator has some simple advice for AI-native companies: tokenmaxx, don't headcountmaxx. I think a bit of both works best.
👥 Bob McGrew reckons the AI future has only two jobs left: the Lone Genius and the Manager. Either you build alone with AI, or you orchestrate it at scale.
💵 Deel is running a $15M global pitch competition for founders. Worth a look if you’re in fundraising mode.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Bone-Conduction Toothbrush
Tired of choosing between brushing your teeth and listening to your morning playlist? Wish you could listen to music as you brushed?
Introducing ToothTunes™, the world's first electric toothbrush that pipes music straight into your head via bone conduction. No headphones, no speakers, just your skeleton doing the heavy lifting.
ToothTunes™ - It's all in your head.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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