Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Anthropic filing its S-1 👀
In today’s edition we’re covering house buying agents, website audits, synthetic populations, banana water and much more.
Let’s goooo 🚀
FYI: We’re running a workshop this Thursday with the team at Apollo on “How to Turn Claude + Apollo into an AI Sales Machine”. Link here to join (it’s gonna be epic).
P.S. We’re trying a new newsletter format this week. Same content, just a little shorter. If you have any thoughts drop us a reply, we’ll read every one!
🏡 Off-Market House Buying Agent
Letters of Intent
Available Domain: Keyturn.ai
👤 Source: Inspired by a classic Rory Sutherland clip (what a guy)
❓ Problem:
Buying a house has become a borderline fantasy. The median US home runs around $400k, it takes the average household roughly seven years to save a down payment (ouch), and the moment a decent listing appears, a Hunger Games-style battle emerges between bidders.
The real kicker? The homes you'd actually want never hit the open market. They get snapped up before you can refresh Zillow. Meanwhile, millions of owners would happily sell to the right buyer at the right price, but nobody's thought to ask them…yet.
✅ Solution:
A productised off-market house buying agent which contacts homeowners to see if they want to sell their homes to a willing buyer.
Users pin the specific homes they'd buy tomorrow, a propensity engine scores which owners are quietly ripe to sell, and each gets a personal, AI-drafted letter in the user's voice.
The moment one bites, the platform takes over and becomes a sales agent.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
🧠 Our Take: You could literally validate this in an afternoon: pick a street, send some letters, see who bites. Once you prove you can generate a sale, the whole thing just becomes a numbers game.
Read the Full Idea Breakdown (Business Model, Market Size, Risks + more)
🤖 Wix Paid $80m For This. Now It Works For You.
Six months after launch, Wix bought Base44 for $80m. What they paid for: 250,000 founders building real apps just by describing them in plain English. The same engine now powers Superagents.
Tell one to triage your inbox overnight or send a Monday metrics digest, and it builds the workflow, connects your tools and runs it 24/7. No code needed.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
⚒ Founder Tutorial: How to Audit Your Website in 10 Minutes Using Claude
Screenshot your homepage, upload it to Claude, and ask it to assess the page like a first-time user based on: headline clarity, value proposition, social proof, and CTA.
Have it produce a prioritised list of fixes ranked by impact and fix the highest-leverage thing first.
🆓 Playbook: A lot of successful YC startups are using this playbook to sell to Private Equity houses. Great way to secure the bag.
🤑 Money Shot: This company went from six months of runway to a $1.6B valuation and $100M+ ARR in just 24 months. Here's how.
P.S. Our Half Baked Founder Toolkit has playbooks, exclusive offers and much more for founders looking to start or scale their business. It’s 100% free.
📱 Your Phone Bill Shouldn't Grow Faster Than Your Team
You're hiring, and every new line, device and bill adds up. T-Mobile for Business grows with you: 10 lines for $200/mo, $20 each line after, plus a $150 bill credit per new line when you switch.
Five-year price guarantee, keep your numbers. US businesses only.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: AI Apply is an AI career agent that works 24/7 to find and apply to the best jobs online so you land more interviews, faster. Epic.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Synthetic population simulations are all the rage right now, letting researchers model how the future will play out. Very sci-fi, very cool.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Harj Taggar (Managing Partner at YC) breaks down his “breadth-first and depth-first” approach to finding startup ideas. He’s right on the money.
🧬 Science Corner: Google is seeking approval to release up to 32 million "specially treated" mosquitoes across California and Florida. Here's why.
👥 From the Community: Half Baked reader Andrew Cook is building Contingency, a travel app built for the moment something goes wrong. He’s looking for Play Store testers, give him a hand here if you can!
🍻 Drunk Business Idea: Banana Water
Love a banana but find the chewing exhausting? Wish you could just sip one through a straw?
Introducing Bananade™, the world's first canned water wrung directly out of bananas. We take 4 ripe bananas, run them through a proprietary "enzymatic process", and can the 330ml of cloudy yellow liquid that drips out. Delicious.
Bananade™ - It’s a peel-ing.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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