Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Trump’s $2k tariff dividend 💵
This week we’re teaming up with Google (yes, the Google) to give our readers 20% off for Google Workspace for 12 months. Grab your unique discount code here.
Let’s get into it 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea inspired by a recent tweet
📈 What McKinsey’s latest report tells us about AI
🛠 Using Gemini to prepare for sales calls
🤑 Turning a painful experience into a $75B business
🍻 The kitchen gadget you never knew you needed
🔍 Pre-Diligence Platform for Jobseekers
Recon-sidering your options
Available Domain: Prevett.ai
The Problem: Deciding what company to work for is a huge, huge decision. That’s why 86% of candidates now research a company’s reviews and reputation before even applying. But where do they look and what do they actually learn? Take this guy who wrote a scathing tweet about a company he went to work for, but quit after one day. You’re not seeing that on Glassdoor. So why not combine insights like this with other publicly available information like money raised, changes in headcount from LinkedIn, and more to provide a fuller view of a potential future employer? Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: A platform that aggregates real-world signals like funding, financial proxies, headcount trends, sentiment, and risk flags so jobseekers can diligence their potential future employers.
Product:
📈 A user signs up and searches for a company, instantly accessing a comprehensive dashboard.
📊 The platform displays key business health metrics, including financial performance, money raised, headcount changes from LinkedIn or recent news on the business.
🗣️ It also uses AI to scan and analyze social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and professional forums to surface real-time, unfiltered employee sentiment and discussions.
Prototyping:
Here’s the prompt we used to build it
Fork your own version of this app
Business Model: Run ads on the platform and charge businesses to claim their profiles ($5k–$25k/yr).
End Goal: Sell to LinkedIn/Glassdoor/Indeed at 7–10× ARR.
Rate this idea:
🍪 Why We Run Half Baked on Google Workspace
When we started Half Baked, like most founders, we had no idea where to start. So what was the very first thing we did? Before designing the logo, building the website or writing a single word, we set up Google Workspace.
Because when you’re starting something new, you don’t need a dozen tools and a pile of logins. You need a suite of tools that work together.
Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Drive are the tools we use most at Half Baked - with a little magic from Gemini, Google’s AI, sprinkled in to make it all run faster.
So if you’re just getting started like we were, we’ve got you covered with 20% off your Google Workspace Standard plan for the first 12 months.
📕 McKinsey’s AI Reality Check
The Trend: McKinsey just dropped a report called “The state of AI in 2025.” There’s a lot of super interesting stuff in there, but what’s the TL;DR on it? It’s simple actually - AI adoption is nearly universal, but impact isn’t. 88% of companies use AI somewhere, but just 6% see significant EBIT (profit) impact. The gap between those pilots and real profit is where the next unicorns will be built.
Opportunities:
SMB AI Starter Pack: An all-in-one subscription service for small businesses that bundles several pre-configured AI tools for marketing, sales, and operations, providing an affordable and accessible entry point to AI adoption.
AI Talent Placement & Upskilling Agency: A recruitment and training firm specializing in sourcing AI talent and upskilling existing employees to fill the AI skills gap within organizations.
📞 Using Gemini to Prepare for Sales Calls
The Tool: Gemini just got a lit more powerful. Because now Gemini's Deep Research can now work with your Google files by connecting to Gmail, Search, Google Drive, and Google Chat. Here’s how you can use that to prep for sales calls.
Step-by-step:
Go to Gemini, select Tools and “Deep Research”
In the dropdown labelled “sources” toggle on Search, Gmail, Drive and/or Chat.
Prompt Gemini asking something like: "Catch me up on our relationship with [Client Name]. Summarize all email conversations with them, find the latest version of their contract in Drive, and review any support issues mentioned in our team chats. What are their main pain points and open action items?”
Use this analysis to prep for your call.
Pro-tip: you can also use this feature to combine your own docs/context with external findings for things like competitor research, market sizing analysis, SWOT analysis…the list goes on.
👀 We’re the AI company that doesn't have churn
We actually have a 127% Net Revenue Retention (our voice agents are pretty good). They sound human, run 24/7, and never ask for PTO.
If you want to see for yourself, you can try Bland’s Voice AI for completely free.
Or for large businesses, you can book a call directly here.
🏦 Turning a Painful Experience into a $75B Business
The Idea: When Colombian-born David Vélez moved to São Paulo in 2012 to help Sequoia expand into Latin America, he did the first thing we all do when we move to a new country…he opened a bank account. Or more accurately, he tried to. What should’ve been a routine task turned into a bureaucratic nightmare - long lines, endless paperwork and unending frustration. David was so annoyed by the whole process that he decided to do something about it. So he teamed up with Cristina Junqueira (a former Itaú banker) and Edward Wible (a Stanford-trained engineer), and they set out to build something radically simpler: a digital-only bank that made banking simple. That was the idea for Nubank.
The Execution:
2013: They founded the business in São Paulo in 2013. Their MVP? A purple, no-fee credit card managed entirely through an app. No branches, no paperwork.
2014: Word spread fast via invite-only signups - a hack that created exclusivity and viral growth. Nubank secured $14 million in Series A from Sequoia and Kaszek.
2016: Nubank launched a free digital bank account product. Customer support became a differentiator, where lightning-fast replies via chat built cult loyalty.
2018: Surpassed 5 million customers, raised $150 million from DST Global. Began expanding across Latin America.
2020: Reached 25 million customers and a valuation north of $10 billion, making it the world’s largest independent digital bank.
December 2021: IPO on NYSE (NU), valuing Nubank at around $41 billion, making it Latin America’s most valuable financial institution at the time.
2024: Nubank hit over 100 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia - roughly half of Brazil’s adult population.
2025: Today Nubank has a market cap of $76B and is profitable. Beast of a business.
The lesson? Turn pain into progress. Wherever you find something broken, be it a product or a service, think to yourself “”how could I fix this?”. Therein could lie your own billion-dollar idea.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: This tool is like ChatGPT, but it can make calls, email, and finish tasks for you.
🎁 Free Resource: Google just dropped a 50-page guide on their “Introduction to AI Agents”.
📚 Must-Read: OpenAI’s blog post on “AI progress and recommendations” is a must-read.
✖️ Trending Tweet: This thread from Mike Maples, Jr is one of the best things I’ve ever read about entrepreneurship.
💬 Founder Quote: “Great CEOs face the pain” Ben Horowitz (a16z)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Egg Cuber
Ever looked at a hard-boiled egg and thought, “that’s way too round”? I mean we’ve all had that thought, right?
Meet the Egg Cuber™ - the culinary innovation nobody asked for but everyone secretly (like, really secretly) wants. Simply insert your egg, twist, and behold: a perfect cube of protein appears.
Egg Cuber™ - eggspand your horizons.
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