Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as hotly anticipated as OpenAI’s DevDay 2025 👀
Let’s get into it 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 Bringing meeting assistants to the next level
📈 The trend that has Tinseltown terrified
🛠 How to generate professional headshots using Gemini
🤑 How a quirky idea became a +$3B business
🍻 A product for all the coffee addicts out there (so everyone pretty much)
🔊 AI Personas for Meetings
Bot Up or Shut Up
Available Domain: Polysonas.com
The Problem: Tech companies are obsessed with meetings. Sure, they all claim to hate meetings, but why is it that every single time I join a meeting today about 5 of my apps fight to record it? Then when I do join I get hit with about 20 AI meeting recorders joining the call from other people. It’s chaos. But while it’s kinda cool to get these meetings recorded, it doesn’t really help us during the call, right? Wouldn’t it be great if instead of passively listening, AI was actively involved in these calls, challenging the team's thinking in real-time? We think so. Here’s how.
The Solution:
An AI that joins your meetings as a particular persona, providing their authentic perspectives and challenging your team's thinking in real-time.
You download the software and before a meeting starts you select what persona you want to join (e.g. the Devil’s Advocate who questions everything, the Optimist who always sees upside, the Pragmatic Operator who focuses on execution and so on). The AI then literally joins your call, listens in real-time, and chimes in with thoughtful commentary.
The goal is to sell to Zoom or Slack as a differentiation feature for 7–10x ARR multiple.
Rate this idea:
🚀 Expect more from your CRM with monday.com
Your CRM should do more than just hold contacts. It should help you move faster and close more and more deals.
Monday Sales CRM gives founders the power and flexibility they need to win deals. You can easily create real-time dashboards, send mass emails, generate quotes and invoices, and build custom pipelines, speeding up your sales process.
This isn’t just another CRM. It’s the one designed to fuel growth.
🎬 Sooo…AI Celebrities are a Thing Now?
The Trend: Tilly Norwood is the latest actress that’s been the talk of Tinseltown. The catch? She’s not real. That’s right Tilly, a so-called "synthetic performer", was first unveiled by Eline Van der Velden, CEO of Particle 6 studios, at the Zurich Summit last month. The pros of AI talent are obvious…they’re available 24/7, never age, and can be in multiple productions simultaneously. In fact multiple studios have already expressed interest in signing Tilly AI. But Hollywood isn’t happy about this. Looks like LA and SF are heading for a showdown…
Opportunities:
AI Talent Agency: Represent and manage AI-generated performers, handling their "careers," brand partnerships, and licensing deals across multiple productions.
Synthetic Performer Marketplace: studios and creators browse a roster of AI actors to cast.
👔 How to Generate Professional Headshots Using Gemini
The Tool: Everyone needs a professional headshot at some point in their life. Could be for LinkedIn. Could be for a fundraising announcement. Who knows. And there are tons of businesses charging a pretty penny for this service to make us look pretty. Here’s how you can use Gemini to do it for free.
Step-by-step:
Go to Gemini and toggle on "Create Images"
Upload your selfie and paste in this prompt: "Transform my selfie into a fresh but professional image suitable for a social media profile. The lighting should be natural, flattering, and multi-dimensional. My head is slightly tilted so it doesn't look stiff, and it should look like I'm in a modern, bright office with a blurred background"
Review the result and tweak the prompt if needed
Download your finished headshot to use
Check out Gemini
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💳 How a Quirky Idea Became a +$3B Business
The Idea: Back in 2008, David Barrett was running a different startup when he stumbled across an annoying pain point: expense reports. Everyone hated doing them, and the existing software on the market was clunky, mainly built for accountants rather than employees. Which gave David an interesting idea…why not build a prepaid debit card that would automatically track purchases and create expense reports. When he pitched this, people weren’t interested in the card at all. But they were interested in the software he could build around it. That was the “aha” moment that led to Expensify.
The Execution:
2008: Expensify is founded in San Francisco. David launches the prepaid debit card MVP but pivots quickly when feedback reveals the real demand: receipt scanning + expense management.
2009: Official product launch at TechCrunch50, where Expensify pitches “Expense reports that don’t suck.” The bold tagline sticks.
2010–2012: Growth hacks include word-of-mouth, viral sharing inside companies, and targeting employees directly instead of CFOs. Users adopt it bottom-up, forcing companies to roll it out more widely.
2014: Raises $3.5M in Series A from Redpoint Ventures after bootstrapping for years. By now, they’ve signed up thousands of businesses.
2017: Expensify scales globally, processing billions in expenses annually. They introduce Expensify Card and push automation even further.
2021: Expensify goes public on the Nasdaq under ticker EXFY, valuing the company at around $3B. The team celebrates by throwing a wild launch party with Snoop Dogg headlining. Today however the company is worth just $160M, quite a fall from its peak.
The lesson? Follow the pull of the market. No matter how good you think your idea is, the market will tell you what to build. As long as you listen.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Comet, Perplexity’s AI-powered browser, is now available to all of us. Huzza!
🚨 Raise Alert: Supabase just raised $100M at a $5B valuation, four months after hitting a $2B valuation. Insane growth.
📹 Must-Watch: Looks like Jeff Bezos thinks AI is a bubble too…
🎁 Exclusive Offer: Protect your personal information from cybercriminals. Get 50% off the top-rated password manager today.
💬 Founder Quote: “Entrepreneurship is about being relentlessly resourceful. It’s not about having all the answers - it’s about never running out of questions.” Marc Lore (Jet.com)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Coffee Phone Case
Struggling to keep up with your caffeine addiction? Wish you had a coffee machine on you at all times?
Introducing BrewCase™ - the phone case that doubles as a mini espresso brewing machine. It's like putting a tiny Italian café directly next to your most fragile, electronic possession.
BrewCase™ - get Brew-tooth connected.
Vote
🔦 Reader Spotlight: Meet Joshua & Lola
What are you building? Living Well Daily, a bite-sized daily newsletter with science-backed mental well-being and longevity tips you can apply right away.
How did you come up with the idea? We’ve worked in wellness for years and saw people still struggling after the pandemic, so we made a simple way to share helpful tools every day.
How can Half Baked readers help? Growing our subscriber base through ads and optimizing our sign-up page for conversions. If you have experience with this, we’d love to connect!
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
👋 That’s All Folks!
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