Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Tom Brady launching his “Good Nut” drink (Not even kidding) 👀
In today’s edition:
💡 Using AI to solve small businesses’ biggest problem
🔋 Mining X for ideas, the fastest unicorn in US history + more
🔍 "Dopamine sites", agentic hacks, Codex hunger games + more
🍺 An idea that feels straight out of a movie
Let’s goooo 🚀
📞 Invoice-Chasing Voice Agent
Dual Diligence
👤 Source: I read about The Guinndex a few weeks back, got me thinking about what else you could get AI agents to do…
❌ Problem:
Small businesses are sitting on a mountain of money they've already earned but can't get hold of. In the US, 56% are owed on unpaid invoices, an average of $17,500 each, with 47% carrying invoices more than 30 days overdue.
The real kicker? The cash rarely vanishes because the customer flat-out won't pay. It festers because nobody wants to make the awkward call. It’s time to use AI agents to fix that. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A voice AI agent that rings your past-due accounts for you to try to collect payments.
Connect your accounting tool, it pulls the overdue list, calls each customer in a natural voice, reminds them what's owed, takes the payment or sets up a plan right there on the call, and logs the lot straight back to your books.
The product primarily consists of two different agents - one very polite which chases up slightly overdue payments. A second, much tougher agent is used when bills are past due.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: You're not really selling software here, you're selling recovered cash, so price it on contingency and take a small cut of whatever it collects. The ROI speaks for itself.
🧠 How We Run Our Entire Business Using Notion + AI
Here at Half Baked we use Notion for absolutely everything. We run a 125k-subscriber newsletter, a media business and a full sponsor CRM out of one Notion workspace.
This live masterclass opens up the exact build, AI workflows included, screen by screen: how research gets done, how sponsors move through the pipeline, how the week gets planned. Every system shown is one you can copy the same day.
Come hang out and learn how you can make your business AI-first too.
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
⚒ Founder Tutorial: How to Mine X for Business Ideas Using Hermes
The Context: People love to talk about their problems on X. That’s why you can point an AI agent at the platform and let it dig up problems people are actually willing to pay to fix. Here's how.
Step-by-step:
Set up Hermes and connect it to the X API via developer.x.com. If the API setup trips you up, Hermes can do that part for you too.
Ask Hermes to run a 9am daily cron that scans X for the top challenges people are hitting in your niche, then returns three ideas plus a build recommendation for each.
🆓 Playbook: Building the app is the easy part. Here's the 7-channel playbook to actually get it downloaded.
🤑 Money Shot: First, he built a $10B real estate giant. Then he copied the playbook and built the fastest unicorn America had ever seen. Here's how.
🤖 All the Best AI Models for $20/mo
Here's the deal. Bluehost's AI All-Access Pack gives you ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok in one dashboard for $20 a month. Those same four models cost $100+ separately. Cool, right?
Pick the right model for each job and save yourself some cash.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Anthropic just released Fable 5 and Mythos 5, their most powerful models ever. The future starts today…
📈 Trends with Benefits: South Koreans are flocking to so-called "dopamine sites" to relieve stress. There’s definitely a startup idea in this…
📚 Must-Read: OpenAI laid out its vision for the future of AI, arguing the power should be spread widely, not hoarded by a few. A noble thought to publish the same day you file to go public.
📺 Must-Watch: Marc Andreessen tells David Senra that we need to drastically increase the number of founders in the world. We couldn’t agree more
✖️ Trending Tweet: OpenAI's Tibo will reward one Codex user a day with 10X usage. The hunger games for build limits has officially begun.
🍻 Drunk Business Idea: Translation Collar
Worried your dog's been talking behind your back? Wish you could finally know whether it loves you, or just tolerates you for the kibble?
Introducing Rosetta Bone™, the world's first AI collar that translates barks, whines, and full-body side-eye into plain English with 95% accuracy. Onboard mics and motion sensors feed a neural net trained on 40 million woofs, decoding every yap into one of 12,000 phrases beamed straight to your phone. 94% of translations are just "feed me."
Rosetta Bone™ - Who's barking now?
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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