Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as the fresh bombshells from Ilya’s deposition on Sam Altman’s 2023 firing 👀
💸 Weekly Giveaway: This week we’re teaming up with the wonderful folks over at Lindy to give away $1,000 to one of our readers. To enter all you need to do is:
Go to this link and check out Lindy (it’s a great tool, we use it ourselves)
Reply to this email with the word “Lindy“
Shoutout to last week’s T Mobile giveaway winner Noah Solomon (check your inbox Noah!) 💸
Let’s get into it 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to help service businesses save thousands each month
📈 The least shocking trend of all time (that’s still interesting)
🛠 Using AI to help validate your startup idea
🤑 Turning a WordPress blog into a +$100M business
🍻 A product to 10x the in-car dining experience
🕙 Last Minute Cancellation Marketplace
No Show? Let’s Go
Available Domain: Rebookd.co
The Problem: Local service businesses, like gyms, salons, physiotherapists, dentists, restaurants all suffer from the same big issue…last-minute cancellations. In the U.S. alone, missed appointments cost healthcare providers $150B a year, and the beauty industry loses up to 25% of daily revenue due to no-shows. Those empty slots rarely get refilled because they’re too short-notice to market. Meanwhile, plenty of people in the area would happily take a discounted appointment if they knew about it. That sounds like a marketplace idea to me. Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: A real-time marketplace where people can instantly book discounted last-minute cancellations from gyms, salons, and clinics nearby.
Product:
📱 Users download the app and set their interests - yoga classes, haircuts, massages, dental cleanings, etc.
🚨 Businesses sync their calendars (Fresha, MindBody, JaneApp, Calendly, etc.), and cancelled appointments automatically appear in the local feed. Each cancellation slot shows a dynamic discount (e.g. “50% off – starts in 1 hour”).
🔔 Users can “watch” their favorite places and get instant push alerts when a slot opens up.
Prototype:
💬 Get the prompt we used to build the demo
🧑💻 Take your own version of the app
Business Model: Commission on rebooked slots (10–15%) plus businesses pay a subscription to use the software
End Goal: Sell to a large booking or marketplace player (ClassPass, MindBody, Fresha etc.) for a 5–8x revenue multiple
Rate this idea:
⚒️ Using Lindy to Give Your Marketing Team Superpowers
What if your entire marketing workflow ran itself? With Lindy, it does. Their agents can research markets, analyze data, and generate creative that converts, all 100% automatically.
How it works:
Go to Lindy.ai and install their AI CMO agents - the Research Agent, Analysis Agent and Creative Agent
Once you’re in, follow each agent’s prompts, starting with the Research Agent
Sit back and relax while your marketing campaign comes together
Check out the full tutorial and claim $20 worth of free credits to try Lindy today.
🫠 Ads are Coming to LLMs
The Trend: As AI buildout costs continue to soar, the hyperscalers are scrambling for new ways to monetize their LLM products. And surprise surprise, that means ads are on the way. OpenAI is going to start advertising on ChatGPT in 2026 and Google is preparing to roll out ads inside Gemini too. Is this earth shattering news? Not really, because whether we like it or not, ads fund the future. We’ve all benefitted from free products and platforms for years now, subsidised almost entirely by ads. AI was never going to be any different.
Opportunities:
AI-Native Ad Agency: A new breed of advertising agency that specializes exclusively in creating, managing, and optimizing campaigns for conversational AI platforms.
"Ad-Block for AI" Subscription Service: A consumer-focused subscription service that acts as a unified, premium front-end ad blocker for multiple major LLMs.
✅ Using AI to Help Validate your Startup Idea
The Tool: Once you find a startup idea you’re excited about, the next step is to validate it. And while there are tonnes of ways to validate a startup idea, like running paid traffic to a landing page, talking to customers etc. the best first step is usually to talk to AI about your idea. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Go to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or whatever LLM you use.
Copy in this 7 step prompt and work through each step to unpack your idea, see whether it’s a good fit for you etc.
If you get positive feedback on the idea, move on to the next stage of validating your idea (talking to users, running FB ads to landing pages, etc.) and go from there
🧰 Less admin. More selling. Your new essential toolkit.
There’s no magic wand in sales, but the right tools come close. The Essential Apps for Sales collection features 14 easy to use apps that, paired with HubSpot, make selling easier, decisions smarter, and wins more repeatable.
Explore the list in the HubSpot Marketplace.
🎫 Turning a WordPress Blog into a +$100M Business
The Idea: Back in 2011 Jason Lemkin lived every founders dream. He sold his second company, EchoSign, to Adobe for a reported $400 million. But despite the life-changing exit, Jason felt a sense of emptiness around the deal. Despite the massive financial success, he missed the thrill and challenge of building and scaling a company. This void, combined with a genuine desire to share the hard-won lessons from his journey of scaling EchoSign from $0 to over $100 million in ARR, led him to start a simple WordPress blog in 2012 to share his thoughts. And thus, SaaStr was born.
The Execution:
2012: Jason starts SaaStr as a personal blog on WordPress, sharing his unfiltered experiences and advice on building a SaaS business.
2013-2014: The blog gains significant traction, and the growing online community's desire for real-life connection leads to the first SaaStr meetups.
2015: The first-ever SaaStr Annual conference is held, attracting over 1,000 attendees and featuring a stellar lineup of SaaS founders. This event solidifies SaaStr's position as a central hub for the SaaS industry.
2016: SaaStr expands its media presence by launching a podcast, which quickly becomes a must-listen for SaaS professionals. Jason also launches the SaaStr Fund, a $70 million venture fund to invest in promising SaaS startups from within the community.
2018: SaaStr introduces SaaStr Pro, an online learning platform offering courses and resources for SaaS founders. The SaaStr Annual conference continues its explosive growth, with over 12,000 attendees.
2023: SaaStr becomes the largest global community of SaaS founders, operators, and investors - with millions of followers and events across the U.S. and Europe.
The takeaway? It’s impossible to know where your business will end up. Jason never envisioned his small blog turning into a media giant, but that’s exactly what happened. You never quite know where an idea will take you. The only way to find out is to pursue it.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Napkin turns text into visuals so sharing your ideas is quick and effective. Cool tool.
📚 Must-Read: Brian Chesky (Airbnb) speaks about the hidden cost of his incredible success.
📹 Must-Watch: Sam Altman and Satya Nadella together on the BG2 Pod made for some…interesting viewing.
✖️ Trending Tweet: These 16 charts that explain the AI boom pretty well.
💬 Founder Quote: "Stop being patient and start asking yourself, how do I accomplish my 10 year plan in 6 months? You will probably fail, but you will be a lot further ahead of the person who simply accepted it was going to take 10 years.” Elon Musk
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Dip Clip
Enjoy the occasional (or not-so occasional) drive-thru adventure? Tired of having to choose between making a mess in your vehicle or consuming bland, sauce-free food?
Introducing the Dip Clip™, the revolutionary accessory that clips directly into your car's air vents, providing a secure and convenient holder for all your favorite fast-food dips. It's the pinnacle of sauce-securement technology.
The Dip Clip™ - get a grip on your dip.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
Before you go:
Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you asap.
What did you think of today's edition?
See you soon,