Welcome to Fully Baked, our Sunday newsletter serving up startup ideas so validated, even Anthropic couldn't kill them (probably) 😵
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to help people unlock the potential of AI
🔬 We validated this idea - here's what we found
🚀 The go-to-market playbook to start and scale this business
🤑 Can you make any money doing this?
⚔️ How the competitive landscape looks
❓ Our verdict: is this a go or no-go idea
Let’s goooo 🚀
🎓 IRL AI Academy
Class is in session
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: Everyone is talking about AI. But only a tiny fraction of people are actually leveraging AI in their businesses, particularly outside of tech. Accountants, estate agents, HR managers, marketing teams, small business owners - they all know AI is changing their industry. They just don't know where to start, with 75% of workers saying they lack confidence in how to utilise AI at work, and learning it from YouTube isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. This is the learning opportunity of a lifetime, and we think someone needs to bring it offline. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An in-person AI training business that delivers practical, role-specific workshops teaching professionals how to actually use AI in their day-to-day work.
🛠️ Product:
An SME business owner or HR manager finds the workshop via a targeted Facebook or Google ad for their profession and city - books online, and turns up to a 3-hour hands-on session at a local WeWork or co-working space with 15-20 peers from their industry
The curriculum is vertical-specific and immediately practical: an accountant learns how to use AI for client reports, tax prep summaries, and internal comms; a marketing team learns prompt engineering, image generation, and AI-assisted campaign briefs - every participant leaves with a personalised prompt library they built in the room
You scale with a “Train the Trainer” model - once a curriculum is proven in one city for one profession, you package it into a facilitator kit and licence it to independent trainers in other cities, taking a revenue share while they handle local delivery
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
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🔬 Validation
🔍 Desktop Research (Googling, Reddit lurking, and our own experience running workshops)
The global L&D market is valued at over $350 billion, and 91% of companies plan to increase AI spending on training in 2026 - yet almost all of that flows to enterprise platforms. Nobody is serving the SME market with hands-on, in-person, role-specific training. The category is genuinely empty at the local level, but could start filling fast.
We've run AI masterclasses ourselves with thousands of attendees - the AI CFO Masterclass with Airwallex, a startup validation workshop - and the signal has been consistent: workshop attendees engage more, learn faster, and ask better questions than they ever do watching a recording. The demand for structured, human-led AI training is real and largely unmet outside of big enterprise.
📣 Smoke Test (€320 in Facebook ads over 5 days, targeting accountants New York aged 30-55)
21.4% click-to-booking-page rate. Hyper-specific professional targeting was the key - "AI workshop for accountants in Nashville" dramatically outperformed generic "AI training" creative
🚀 Go-to-Market
👥 Early Users
Hyper-targeted Facebook ads by profession and city: "AI workshop for [accountants / estate agents / HR managers] in [city] - 3 hours, walk away with skills you can use tomorrow." The specificity does the work. At €150/head and a 15-person minimum, a single €300 ad campaign that fills one workshop pays back 7x immediately.
Professional associations and trade bodies: Every profession has one. A single email to an association saying "we'll run a subsidised pilot workshop for your members" gets you in front of hundreds of your exact customers at zero cost - and their endorsement becomes your credibility engine.
📈 Scaling Acquisition
Train the Trainer: Once your curriculum is proven after 10+ workshops in one vertical, you package it into a facilitator kit and licence it. A freelance trainer pays €500 for the licence and keeps 70% of revenue. This is how you get to €1M+ in revenue
Corporate packages: The individual workshop is your proof of concept. The real money is the corporate sale - "AI literacy training for your 40-person team, €180/head." One corporate client per month and you have a serious business.
🤑 Business Model
🏷️ Pricing
Public workshops (€150-200/head, 15-20 people): 3-hour session, profession-specific curriculum, take-home prompt library. Net margin per workshop after venue and facilitator: €1,500-2,500.
Corporate package (€150-200/head, minimum 20 people): Delivered in-house at the client's office. No venue cost, higher volume, easier logistics - and this is where repeat business lives.
Facilitator licence (€500 + 30% revenue share): You package the curriculum, they deliver it locally. Scales revenue without scaling your time.
🧮 Unit Economics
Target CAC (cost to acquire a customer): €18-25 per attendee via targeted Facebook ads
Target LTV (lifetime value of a customer): €300-400 per individual; €3,000-8,000 per corporate client assuming 2-3 sessions annually
⚔️ Competitive Landscape
🏷️ Primary Competitors
Online Course Platforms e.g. LinkedIn Learning / Coursera for Business (~€25-40/month/user): Massive libraries, entirely self-directed and online. Completion rates hover around 10%. You're not competing with them - you're solving the problem they can't.
Online AI Bootcamps: Structured, cohort-based, and more rigorous than self-paced courses - but still entirely screen-based, still requires significant time commitment, and still built around people looking to upskill into a new career rather than apply AI to the job they already do.
🎯 The Gap
Practical, in-person, profession-specific AI training for SME professionals is a huge market. Online platforms are too passive, bootcamps are too expensive and time-intensive. Short, in-person sessions strike the perfect balance between them
The Train the Trainer model creates a defensible network - once you have certified facilitators in 10 cities, you're no longer a training business, you're a franchise.
✅ Verdict: GO
This could be a really tidy business for whoever builds this. This isn't a VC story where you’ll raise millions of dollars, but that's the point. A solo operator running public workshops, corporate packages, and a facilitator licence programme can realistically clear tens of thousands in revenue per month within 12 months. You can then scale the Train the Trainer model to 20+ facilitators across multiple professions and cities and you're looking at a €1M+ revenue business. That's the kind of outcome most founders spend years chasing through the VC route and never reach.
The window is open but closing fast. As AI tools get simpler, the "basics" workshop will commoditise fast. The businesses that last will be the ones that go deep on vertical expertise before the generalists crowd in.
Start narrow, go deep, move fast, and build an epic business.
👋 That’s All Folks!
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