Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as wild as what people are building with Claude’s new model 😮💨
In today's edition:
💡 An idea that every one of us can relate to
⛽ Finding $100k app ideas, a $164M company with zero employees + more
🔍 Anthropic essay, YC's "unfair tricks", SpaceX satellites + more
🍺 An idea that barely holds water
Let’s goooo 🚀
💬 Group Chat Coordination Agent
Cut the coord
👤 Source: Logan Kilpatrick (Member of Technical Staff at Google) tweeted a while back that he has 100% conviction that text messaging with AI is the next form factor to hit a billion users. Got me thinking about how agents can interact in this medium.
❌ Problem:
Messaging is the form factor everyone lives in: WhatsApp alone has over 3 billion monthly users firing off 140 billion messages a day.
But while messaging as a form factor is alive and well, ironically all of our group chats are where plans go to die. They’re all graveyards of trips and dinners that got a "we should totally do this", then complete silence. It’s time for an AI intervention. Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
A coordination agent you simply add to the group chat (iMessage, WhatsApp, the lot) that turns "we should hang out" into an actual booked plan, without anyone leaving the thread.
@ mention it and it reads the chat, proposes a few dates, runs a one-tap poll, locks the winning slot, suggests a venue, splits the bill and fires the reminders, all inline as just another member of the group.
From there it quietly becomes the group's permanent organizer: booking the table, chasing the stragglers, tracking who's paid and planning the big trip. Can be used for bachelor parties, weddings or even in general group chats where you could create in-chat challenges, prediction markets…the possibilities are endless here.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo
💡 The Half Baked Take: The key to this business working (or not working) is the k-factor (or viral coefficient), i.e. the number of new users generated by existing users. This is all about scale, monetisation will be tricky, so cheap growth will make or break this.
🧾 Still Writing Checks to Vendors by Hand?
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⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: How to Find $100k App Ideas Before Everyone Else
Search Creator Search Insights in TikTok (Google Trends, but in-app) and find a specific problem keyword doing 100k+ weekly searches.
Run it through Sensor Tower to check that apps in that niche are already making money, then mine their reviews for what's missing and go from there.
🆓 Playbook: Everyone on Twitter is talking about "loops" this week. Here's the lowdown on what they are…
🤑 Money Shot: These two brothers built a $164M business with zero employees. Here’s how.
🚀 The $80m Vibe-Coding Tool Now Builds Superagents
Base44 went from side project to an $80m Wix acquisition in six months, with 250,000 founders building apps from plain English. Now it does the same for AI agents.
Tell a Superagent to triage your inbox overnight, chase every new lead, or send a Monday metrics digest, and it builds the workflow, connects your tools and runs it 24/7.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Magic Patterns turns a plain-English idea into editable UI and prototypes in minutes. Validate before you build.
📚 Must-Read: Anthropic just wrote an article on how policy needs to be approached in the world of exponential AI.
📺 Must-Watch: The first trailer for the sequel to The Social Network just dropped. The Social Network is a top 5 film for me easily, super pumped to see this.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Need your first 100 customers? Finn Mallery rounded up the eight ‘unfair tricks’ YC drills into founders to get them fast.
🧬 Science Corner: SpaceX just unveiled a satellite whose only job is to run AI. Not internet. Not GPS. Just compute, floating in orbit. The way it works is mind blowing…
🍻 Drunk Business Idea: Wrist Water Bottle
Tired of running with a water bottle sloshing around in your sweaty hand? Wish you could carry your hydration anywhere else?
Introducing WristSip™, the world's first wrist-mounted hydration system that straps a 50ml reservoir to your wrist and frees up your hands for more important things, like flailing. Twist the gear-cap, raise your wrist to your mouth at a full sprint, and enjoy a refreshing thimble of lukewarm water.
WristSip™ - Get “sip-faced”.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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