Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as OpenAI’s newly revealed (but controversial) corporate structure 🥴
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In today’s edition:
💡 Bringing some Meta ads magic to old media
📈 Some crazy data coming out of OpenAI today
🛠 Using Gemini for detailed stock research
🤑 Turning a spreadsheet into a $10B business
🍻 A wheely, wheely good idea…
🗞️ Meta Ads for Newsletters
Scale mail
Available Domain: Mailbids.com
The Problem: Here at Half Baked, we don’t know much about…well…most things. But one thing we know a hell of a lot about is buying and selling newsletter ads. They’re the lifeblood of our business (cough cough…please support our sponsors TY). But for brands, buying newsletter ads is a manual, opaque process. Ad inventory is fragmented across Substack, Beehiiv, ConvertKit etc., so advertisers end up juggling screenshots and spreadsheets, with limited ability to target specific audiences. Contrast that with Meta ads, where you can sign up and target exactly who you want to anywhere in the world in minutes. It’s time to bring some of that Meta magic to newsletters. Here’s how.
The Solution:
In a line: A self-serve, Meta-style ad platform to discover, buy, optimize, and attribute ads across thousands of newsletters.
Product:
✍️ A brand signs up as an advertiser, sets their primary goal (traffic, leads, purchases) and sets out what audience they want to target (by topic, audience size, geography etc.)
📥 They upload creatives (text, image, native) and their ads are auto-inserted via publisher snippets/SDKs or platform integrations (Substack/Beehiiv/ConvertKit).
📊 Brands can see unified reporting (impressions, opens, clicks, CPA/ROAS) and enable auto-optimization that reallocates spend toward top-performing newsletters.
Business Model: 10–20% take rate on media spend
End Goal: Scale into a cross-channel creator ad exchange (newsletters → blogs/podcasts) and exit to an ESP (like Mailchimp) for 5–7× ARR once volume and data moats are defensible.
Rate this idea:
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🧠 When Algorithms and Mental Anguish Meet
The Trend: An alarming number of individuals, over 1.2 million each week according to OpenAI, are turning to ChatGPT to discuss their mental health problems. This reflects a broader societal trend where people, particularly younger generations, are seeking immediate, anonymous, and non-judgmental outlets for their deepest distress. While the AI is designed to direct users to professional help, it fails in an estimated 9% of cases, revealing a critical and dangerous gap between technology's reach and its ability to safely manage high-stakes mental health crises.
Opportunities:
AI Mental Health Safety Auditing: Establish a third-party auditing firm to rigorously test and certify the safety of commercial AI models for mental health scenarios.
Crisis Response Training Simulators: An educational tool that uses AI to create realistic, interactive simulations for training mental health first responders, hotline volunteers, and even school counselors.
🔍 Using Gemini for Detailed Stock Research
The Tool: Whether you’re investing in public stocks now or plan to in the future, learning how to evaluate companies is a skill that compounds. Here’s how you can use Gemini to break down any stock like a seasoned analyst.
Step-by-step:
Go to Gemini (make sure you’re signed into your Google account.)
Use this prompt filling out the company name/ticker symbol of the business you want to analyze
Ask follow-up questions like: “Summarize their latest earnings call” or “Compare [Company] to [Competitor] on valuation and growth.”
Optional: Request Gemini to generate a bull vs. bear case to help you form a balanced view.
🤖 Connect All Your Work Apps with Lutra
You’re juggling countless apps like Gmail, Google Sheets, Outlook, Slack, CRMs… copying/pasting between them, wasting hours everyday. Lutra AI is the first productivity agent to connect all your work apps so you can automate your repetitive work processes.
With Lutra AI you can:
Extract data from websites
Send personalized emails at scale
Enrich contacts to help you close more deals
And do much, much more all in a single interface.
🏦 Turning a Spreadsheet into a $10B Business
The Idea: Michael Katchen wasn't your typical finance bro. After selling his first startup, 1000memories, to Ancestry.com in 2012, he and his co-founders suddenly had a new problem: what to do with the money? His friends, all brilliant tech minds, were surprisingly clueless when it came to investing. So, Michael did what any good friend would do - he built them a spreadsheet. They loved it so much they wanted him to manage their money for them. That's when the lightbulb went off. If his smart, successful friends found investing complicated and intimidating, how many other people felt the same way? This was the beginning of Wealthsimple.
The Execution:
2014: Michael, along with co-founders Brett Huneycutt and Rudy Adler, officially launched Wealthsimple in September. The MVP wasn't a fancy app, but a refined version of that original spreadsheet. They proved the demand was real, securing $1.9 million in seed funding in May before the official launch.
2015: The company raised a $30 million Series A round led by Power Financial Corporation, a major strategic partner that would fuel their growth for years to come.
2017: Wealthsimple hit a major milestone, reaching $1 billion in assets under management. The rapid growth validated their mission to make investing accessible to everyone, not just the wealthy.
2018: The product suite expanded with the launch of Wealthsimple Save, a high-interest savings account, offering a simple alternative to the low rates at traditional banks.
2019: This was a pivotal year. Wealthsimple launched Wealthsimple Trade, Canada's first commission-free stock trading app.
2021: With the business firing on all cylinders, Wealthsimple raised a massive $750 million funding round, valuing the company at $5 billion. The round brought in a roster of celebrity investors including Drake, Ryan Reynolds, and Michael J. Fox.
2025: The company continued its relentless expansion, launching its first credit card and line of credit. In October, they announced another $750 million funding round at a staggering $10 billion valuation, having doubled their assets under administration to $100 billion in just one year.
All of which goes to prove that you don't need a revolutionary, complex idea to build a massive business. Sometimes, the best ideas come from solving a simple, relatable problem for the people around you.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Claude just launched “Claude for Excel”. Join the waitlist if you’re interested!
📚 Must-Read: Alex Bouaziz (Deel founder) just shared his principles for work. This guy knows his stuff.
🚀 Just Launched: Neo, the world’s first consumer-ready humanoid robot, is now available for pre-order. $20K. Epic.
🆓 Founder Freebie: Get a $20 reward for creating a free account on Granola, the AI meeting tool (we use it every day).
💬 Founder Quote: “Agency > Intelligence” Andrej Karpathy.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Trunk Plunge
Ever find yourself stuck in gridlock traffic with a desperate need to literally chill out?
Introducing the Trunk Plunge™, the world's first portable cold plunge pool designed specifically for the trunk of your car. Now you can experience the invigorating shock of an ice bath anytime, anywhere.
Trunk Plunge™ - giving a new meaning to “junk in the trunk“.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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