Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as in demand as SpaceX shares today 🤑
In today’s edition:
💡 A platform to scale a complex marketing channel
⛽ Competitor backlinks, prompting Fable 5 + more
🔍 Agentic payments, the end of AI subs + more
🍺 A delicious treat with a little extra kick
Let’s goooo 🚀
🎁 Gift Marketing Platform
Present Value
👤 Source: Sam Blond, co-founder of Monaco (the all-in-one revenue platform) tweeted about the incredible ROI on gifting campaigns, but how they’re operationally a nightmare to undertake. Sounds like a startup waiting to be built to me.
❌ Problem:
B2B software companies will do literally anything to get leads. They pay agencies, buy lists of email addresses, host events…and of course throw ungodly amounts of money at Meta/Google. But is that really the best they can do?
Sam Blond just broke down the economics of gifting campaigns - sending a $100 gift with a handwritten note to your top 100 prospects for example - and how insane the ROI is on these types of campaigns.
The reason nobody does it? It's an operational nightmare - gift sourcing, address enrichment, handwritten notes, repackaging, shipping, delivery-day follow-up. So what if you built a company to make it 10X easier to do these campaigns at scale? Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
An AI-powered gifting platform that operationalizes large-scale gifting campaigns for brands
The platform identifies your highest-value prospects from your CRM and ICP, enriches their shipping addresses and personal details (LinkedIn activity, interests, recent wins), and even suggests the gifts most likely to land.
The service then handles the rest: curating the gift, sourcing handwritten notes, packaging, delivery, and syncs with the company’s CRM to follow-up once the gift has been received.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this Build
💡 The Half Baked Take: Funny story - we used this exact technique to score a meeting with Sam Parr last year. We sent him a gift box for him and his wife and jumped on a call with him like 2 days later. This really works.
👀 Want to See Behind the Curtain?
Ever wondered how a daily newsletter going out to 100,000+ founders actually gets made? Earlier this week we recorded exactly that - a full behind-the-scenes of how we run the entire Half Baked business on Notion and AI. The replay is live now.
Here's what we showed:
The exact Notion build that runs Half Baked end to end
How we use custom Claude skills to spin up tailored proposals for potential ad partners in minutes
How we turned Notion into our entire back office
We’re also giving Half Baked readers 3 months of Notion free (must be business users).
⛽ Fuel for Taking Action
⚒️ Founder Tutorial: How to Steal Your Competitors' Backlinks
The Context: Want to steal backlinks from your competitors using the “skyscraper” method? Here's how you can:
Find a piece of content a competitor ranks page one for, read it, and spot the gaps (outdated stats, shallow answers, no examples). Then write the genuinely better version, the one you'd link to yourself.
Pull every site that links to the original (Ahrefs or the free Backlink Checker does this), then email or DM each one, point to the link they already have, and pitch yours as the upgrade.
🆓 Playbook: Here’s the ultimate guide on how to prompt Claude Fable 5, straight from the people who built it.
🤑 Money Shot: This founder turned a doomscrolling habit into 1M+ users and $1,000,000 in the bank. Here's how.
📈 You’re Scaling Faster Than Your Carrier Can Keep Up
You hired 15 people this year. You'll hire 20 more next. Every carrier quote hides a "promotional rate" that expires the second you sign.
T-Mobile for Business locks talk, text and 5G data pricing for 5 years, no annual contracts, on America's best network per Ookla. US businesses only.
🔍 Everything Else from Today
🛠️ AI Tool: Need a slick launch video? Hera is a YC-backed AI motion designer that turns a text prompt into studio-quality animations.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Mastercard just launched Agent Pay for Machines, a payment rail letting AI agents pay each other directly. I wonder if agents will start tipping each other…
📚 Must-Read: Serial entrepreneur Matt Van Horn lists out his 22 agentic engineering hacks. There’s some proper gold in here.
🎧️ Must-Listen: Sequoia's Konstantine Buhler sat down with Jensen Huang to discuss the future of AI and human purpose. Heavy stuff, but worth a listen.
✖️ Trending Tweet: Are AI subscriptions dead? With Claude’s Fable 5 model leaving Anthropic's plans on June 22, one founder thinks they might be…
🍻 Drunk Business Idea: Caffeine Ice Cream
Enjoy the occasional ice cream? Wish you could combine your love of ice cream with your constant need for energy?
Introducing Whirrl™, the world's first ice cream with added caffeine. One scoop delivers the equivalent of a double espresso, which means dessert is no longer the thing that puts you on the couch…it's the thing that gets you off it.
Whirrl™ - I scream, you scream, we all scream for…caffeine.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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