Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter dropping startup ideas like retailers are dropping their prices just before Thanksgiving 📉
In today’s edition:
💡 Bringing a return to some wasteful events
🔋 Unemployment, Black Friday deals, free Bolt codes…
🍻 A delicious way to get some early morning energy
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Weekly Giveaway: This week we’re teaming up with T-Mobile for Business to give away $1,000 to help one of you on your founder journey. In order to enter just:
Click here and see if your business qualifies for their new internet offer (takes 5 seconds)
Reply to this email with either “Yes“ or “No“.
Winner will be announced next Monday!
🤝 Conferences are (Pretty Much) a Waste of Time
Business conferences are where marketing budgets go to die. Companies spend an average of $1,200 to send an employee to these “networking events“, yet teams convert less than 2% of those leads into actual revenue. Exhausted sales reps return home with a pocket full of crumpled business cards, vague memories of conversations, and zero context to create meaningful follow-up.
Yet, despite this massive inefficiency, the global B2B events industry is a $1.5 trillion juggernaut. The money is there, but the ROI isn't. We believe the era of "spray and pray" networking is over. It’s time to build a product that bridges the gap between the handshake and a sale.
Here's what we're thinking.
❌ Break Up With Your Internet Provider. It's Not You, It's Them.
Bad internet is holding your business back. That’s why you need to switch to T-Mobile.
With T-Mobile, you get affordable business internet from the leader in 5G, with live 24/7/365 support whenever you need it.
Want to switch to fast, reliable business internet? Here’s what you do:
Go to this website
Enter your business address
Click “Check Availability”
That’s it. It takes 5 seconds to check, and it could be a game-changer for your business.
🤝 Leadcap.ai: Lead Capturing for Conferences
Take the lead
Available Domain: Leadcap.ai
💡 The Idea: A mobile platform that captures conference leads, enriches the data, and syncs everything into your CRM.
❓ Product:
A salespeople downloads the app and connects their CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.) with one-click OAuth integration.
At conferences, they capture leads via business card photos, QR code/badge scanning, or manual quick-entry forms, with AI extracting and validating all contact information in real-time.
Each lead is automatically enriched with company data (size, revenue, tech stack, funding), scored by priority, tagged with conversation notes via voice or text, and pushed to the CRM for instant follow-up while the connection is hot.
🧑💻 Prototyping
Here’s the code for the demo
Fork your own version of this app
💼 Business Model: Charge per user, $99/month for advanced data enrichment and team features, plus API access for enterprise at custom pricing.
⭐ End Goal: Sell to a major CRM platform (Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho) or sales enablement tool (Outreach, Salesloft, Gong) for an 8–12x revenue multiple as they expand their event marketing capabilities.
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🔋 Founder Fuel
📈 Trends with Benefits: Unemployed Americans with 4-year college degrees now make up a record 25.3% of total unemployment. Yikes.
🤖 AI Tutorial: You can find amazing Black Friday deals using ChatGPT’s new shopping tool. Here’s how.
💬 Prompt Drop: Nano Banana Pro is incredible at accurately upscaling low resolution images to 4K. Here’s how.
🆓 Deal of the Day: 10 more codes for 3 months free of Bolt just dropped. Get em before they’re gone!
🤑 The Money Shot: This company lost 98% of it’s value, only to rocket back to a $75B business. Full story here.
Invest in your highest-leverage asset: yourself. Learn a new language, fast - not another “maybe someday” side hustle.
In just 3 weeks, Babbel’s bite-sized lessons, intuitive grammar, podcasts you’ll actually want to binge, and real speaking practice make fluency feel doable.
Here’s the hack: This Black Friday, for a one-time payment of $199, you unlock unlimited access to every language, forever. No recurring billing.
It’s not just self-improvement - it’s building a skill you can monetize, leverage, and compound over time.
🔍 Founder Finds
📺 Blake Anderson just released the last video in his series “building a no code app and hitting $10K MRR”.
💰 Here are the 49 US startups that have raised over $100M in 2025.
📖 a16z just updated their iconic “Moats Before (Gross) Margins” article. Well worth a look!
📹 Peter Thiel says there are two areas that VCs and founders should avoid like the plague. Not the areas I would have thought…
💪 Kevin Dahlstrom’s (Bolt.health founder) list of 55 habits has gone mega viral this week (and for good reason, it’s a great list).
🎧 Acquired just dropped an episode on Coca Cola. And it’s only 4 hours long. Some easy listening over Thanksgiving.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Caffeinated Waffles
Ever feel like mornings are moving in slow motion? Wish breakfast could literally wake you up?
Introducing Wired Waffles™, the world's first caffeinated breakfast pastry packing 200mg of pure liquid motivation into every golden square. Finally, a waffle that works as hard as you pretend to before 9 AM.
Wired Waffles™ - Batter up.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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See you soon,