Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as eye-watering as Google raising $80bn to fund its AI spending push 👀
In today's edition we're covering DM outreach, pitch deck teardowns, billion-dollar comebacks, AI harnesses, 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!
📩 Managed Instagram DM Outreach
Slide into sales
👤 Source: I spotted a tweet from Cody Schneider (Founder at Graphed) the other day where he said that he'd give a $5K bounty to anyone who built this idea. Let's make one of you $5K richer…
❓ Problem:
Nobody has built a great, production-ready Instagram creator outreach product yet, and you can get $5K if you build it.
Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A managed, API-first product that runs Instagram creator outreach end to end - you send a list of profiles and a message, it handles everything else.
A user posts a campaign with a target list, a message template and send limits, and the platform assigns sender accounts, warms them up, sends the messages and monitors account health on an ongoing basis.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
🧠 Our Take: The moat here is actually operational reliability, not code. You are selling "it keeps working when Instagram changes," which is the exact part buyers refuse to build themselves.
Read the Full Idea Breakdown (Business Model, Market Size, Risks + more)
🛰️ 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, no bolt-on security tools needed
America's best network according to Ookla Speedtest. US businesses only.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: Get Feedback on Your Pitch Deck in Seconds
Drop your deck into Evalyze (free signup) and let it grade each slide against what investors actually scan for: problem, market size, traction, team, and the ask.
Read the weakest-scoring slides first, rework those slides, run it back through, and keep iterating until every slide earns its place.
🆓 Playbook: First Round just published the exact framework email app Superhuman used to engineer product-market fit before running out of runway.
🤑 Money Shot: Most companies never recover from a 66% down round. This one came back and sold to Uber for $1.2bn. Here's how.
P.S. Our Half Baked Founder Toolkit has playbooks, exclusive offers and more for founders looking to take action and start or scale their business. 100% free.
🎁 We Got You Access to Every Top AI Model for $20
Here's the deal - at Half Baked we partner with companies to hook you up with deals that save you money while you build. And today's a doozy.
Bluehost's AI All-Access Pack gives you ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok in one dashboard for $20 a month. That's it, no catch.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Genpire is an AI operating system for developing consumer goods 10x faster. Wild.
📚 Must-Read: The Harness Is Everything argues the gap between teams shipping a million lines with three engineers and everyone else isn't the model, it's the "harness" built around it. Sharp analysis.
🎧 Must-Listen: Jensen Huang just broke down the #1 skill that'll matter most in 2026. He’s been right a lot lately…
✖️ Trending Tweet: Greg Isenberg lists 17 startup ideas now possible because of GPT Realtime 2.0. Pick one and get building.
💬 From the Community: Half Baked reader Marciela Ross is building Playdate Pulse, an app for coordinating playdates. You love to see it.
🍻 Drunk Business Idea: Fake Book
Ever feel guilty doom-scrolling in front of your kids? Wish you could rot your brain without teaching them to rot theirs?
Introducing Spineless™, the hardcover decoy that hides your phone inside a respectable-looking novel. To your toddler, you're a thoughtful parent quietly enjoying Tolstoy. In reality, you're three hours deep on TikTok and memes.
Spineless™ - You’re covered.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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