Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as mind blowing as Mr Beast's leaked YouTube earnings 😳
In today's edition:
💡 An idea to take on the digital marketing cartel
🔋 Email validation, an anti-playbook, and a +$300M story
🔍 AI assistant, Claude guides, Uber's turnaround + more
🍻 Putting your footsteps to good use
Let's goooo 🚀
💡 Alternative Ad Inventory Marketplace
Ad Infinitum
👤 Source: The Monaco plane ad stunt (great idea) got me thinking about alternative ways brands are looking to advertise in 2026…
❌ Problem:
Meta, Google and Amazon are on track to own 62.3% of global digital ad spend in 2026. And that share keeps climbing while CACs rise, since everyone is pumping their ad dollars into these platforms.
But what about all of these other places where attention is undervalued? Think micro-influencers, X accounts, newsletters…even airplane banners (shoutout Monaco). Why can’t you easily buy ad space in all of these places?
Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A self-serve marketplace to buy ad slots across the entire long tail of attention (people, physical spaces, and niche-digital) in one campaign.
Inventory owners list any surface they control, brands filter the whole catalogue by audience, location and budget and launch it like a Meta campaign, and every slot ships with a unique QR or short link so even the airplane banner is measurable.
Start with micro and nano-influencers (already online, already trackable, already ignored by the big platforms), then expand "elsewhere" into the long tail of different ad opportunities like X accounts, newsletters and even more unconventional ad opportunities.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the Google AI Studio Demo
🧠 Our Take: We speak to dozens of tech companies every month in our business and it’s clear that they’re all looking for new, interesting, creative ways to deploy marketing spend. This could be the answer to that problem…
💳 Your vendors don't accept cards. Melio does.
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⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: How to Use Cold Email to Validate a Startup Idea
You can use Claude to validate a B2B startup idea before you write any code. Here’s how:
Use Claude to define your exact ICP, then build a list of 50 contacts using Apollo
Ask Claude to write a 5-line cold email ending with one question they can answer in one word
Track replies, complete the calls, then paste every call transcript into Claude to extract your product spec.
🆓 Playbook: This 12-step "how to guarantee your app fails" playbook is the best monetisation cheat sheet we've seen all week. Just do the opposite of every line.
🤑 Money Shot: This guy turned a single insight into a +$300M health business. Here’s how.
📱 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: Town is the AI assistant that learns you, connecting across your inbox, calendar, Slack and docs to do the work with you rather than waiting on prompts. One to watch.
📚 Must-Read: Ruben Hassid wrote 21+ Claude guides, then boiled them down to the only 7 you actually need, with a skim-summary of each.
🎧️ Must-Listen: Patrick O'Shaughnessy's conversation with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi on dragging Uber from losing $4.5B a year in 2017 to $10B in free cash flow is so, so good.
✖️ Trending Tweet: OpenAI is hinting at a big reveal with zero detail and maximum mystery. Annoyingly effective.
💬 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: Kinetic Charging Shoes
Tired of your phone dying mid-run and being left alone with your own thoughts for 3 miles? Wish technology could save you from that?
Introducing SoleCharge™, the world's first running shoe with a built-in piezo-electric generator that converts every foot strike into usable charge. Lace up, hit the pavement, and deliver a steady 5W of power directly to your phone.
SoleCharge™ - Every step counts.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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