Hey, it's Payton. 👋

These are five half-baked ideas because my Notes app is overflowing and one person’s idea is….well….whatever you make of it.

Why it matters: Between January and June this year, nearly 560,000 new apps went up on the App Store. That's double the first half of last year, and Apple's on pace to clear a million in 2026, which would beat the record they set back in 2016.

Downloads over that same stretch went up 2%.

Those two numbers next to each other are the why I'm sharing ideas instead of hoarding them. Making things stopped being the hard part somewhere around eighteen months ago.

So let’s get the gears turning with some ideas you could take across the finish line next week!

A faceless documentary channel about the world behind the Bible. Not the stories we have memorized, but everything around them. The streets, the money, what the fish market smelled like at dawn, what it cost a man to sit in a tax booth on the Galilee road while everybody he grew up with walked past it. Second person, ten minutes an episode. You know the stories, you don't know the world.

I actually kicked this off myself, wrote a season of scripts and even posted a couple episodes on YouTube. Here is the thumbnail I used for one of the episodes.

This model can work. Bright Side runs this exact structure on secular trivia for 44 million subscribers. Nobody is pointing it at first-century Galilee.

So start smaller than your ego wants. Two-minute episodes instead of ten, vertical instead of wide, run as Shorts for a month so the cheap format can tell you whether anybody cares before you spend real money finding out.

Back in December, Gloo put 807 curated questions to the leading frontier models and scored every answer from 1 to 100, where 90 and up counts as good.

The models averaged 61 across all the dimensions they tested. On Faith specifically, they averaged 48. Worst category on the board, and it isn't close.

In Gloo's own words, unless you prompt it hard toward Christian context, the model will "avoid theological specificity, replacing Christian language with broad spiritual or secular terms such as 'higher power' for God, 'mindfulness' for prayer or 'values' for virtue."

So it never argues with you. It just sands you down about three degrees at a time, and vague always reads as smoother, so you accept the edit and move on.

Same thing the Cornell study found three weeks ago: people's opinions drifted toward their autocomplete, and even warning them first didn't help.

Apologist.ai is the closest anyone's gotten as a free, donor-funded chatbot built for people asking real questions about God. But it's a place you have to go to ask. It doesn't ride shotgun while you write.

Build the checker, but please don’t make another chatbot. You paste your draft and the AI's rewrite side by side, and it flags every load-bearing word that got swapped on the way through. God —> higher power. Sin —> shortcoming. Repentance —> growth. Ship it as a browser extension and a Google Docs add-on and charge six bucks a month.

Picture the pattern: somebody builds an app over a weekend with Lovable or Replit. It works. It picks up actual users and actual revenue. Then the infrastructure bill spikes, or a customer's data leaks, and it turns out nobody at the company can read the code that's running their business.

Secondread connects to the repo and hands back a briefing in plain founder language. What's quietly draining money. What breaks at the next scale threshold. Where the login is held together with tape. Forty-nine dollars for a one-time snapshot, $199 a month to keep watching. Then partner with Lovable and Replit directly and become the trusted second opinion on their own output.

560,000 apps in six months (remember that number?). A serious chunk of those were built by people who can't read what they shipped and are sending their credit limits to the moon.

The wedge I'd use is every church and small nonprofit that let a volunteer vibe-code their giving page this year. They have this problem right now and they'll pay somebody they trust to tell them the truth about it.

Most founders benchmark themselves against LinkedIn.

Peerpods drops you into a private pod of eight founders at roughly your stage and in roughly your industry, meeting once a month. You pick your own transparency level, and the highest one is a read-only Stripe connection, which means the revenue in that room is verified instead of remembered. Pods that keep performing graduate up a tier, so whatever you're measuring yourself against stays a step ahead of you instead of behind.

Hampton charges $8,500 a year for founder peer groups and YPO runs 35,000 members at premium pricing, and both of them price out almost everybody reading this. The opening is every founder underneath that bar.

Christians have been running small groups for two thousand years. We are genuinely world-class at getting eight people in a room to tell each other the truth on a schedule and keep showing up.

Start with one pod you're personally in, run it free for six months, and only build software once you're sure the format works without it.

It started as CopyQuest. Sixty days of copywriting drills dressed up as a medieval campaign, where you start as a peasant and work your way up through squire and knight to king. Six regions, each one run by a master: Hopkins, Ogilvy, Halbert, Abraham, Schwartz.

I built it for a selfish reason, which is that I wanted to sharpen my own copy again and a daily practice was the only format that has ever stuck to me.

I realized the copywriting was the least interesting part.

The engine is the actual idea. One to five minutes a day, one discipline, thirty to sixty days, all of it wrapped inside a story you're moving through rather than a curriculum you're completing. Two months later you've been soaked in a new skill.

Then you fan it out. Storytelling. Marketing. AI integration. Courage. Integrity. Character. Faithfulness. Every one of those is sixty micro-lessons plus a container, and the container swaps.

Medieval was just the first one I happened to build. Space odyssey, Western, noir, pick whatever fits the discipline you're teaching. A whole library of them.

Bottom line: An idea that dies in your notes app and an idea that never occurred to you are worth exactly the same.

Everything that used to gate us is gone now, or close enough to free that price stopped being a real reason. The rendering, the code, the illustration, the research, the distribution. Poof 💨

What’s your half-baked idea?

Until next time,

—Payton ✌️

🗑️ Bonus Idea for Bottom Readers

A devotional app that texts you a verse the moment your screen-time report says you're doom-scrolling. Love it? Hate it?

What's your half-baked idea? Good ones, bad ones. Reply and tell me.