Welcome to Fully Baked, our Sunday newsletter serving up startup ideas as validated as your inability to watch “just one more episode” 📺
In today’s edition:
💡 Capitalising on a professional epidemic
🔬 The steps we took to validate this idea
🚀 The go-to-market playbook to start and scale this business
🤑 What does the business model look like?
⚔️ Can you beat the competitors?
❓ The verdict on this idea (go or no-go)
Let’s goooo 🚀
🎓 AI Tutor for Professional Certifications
Certified banger
Available domain: Certifly.com
The Problem: There are plenty of professions - finance, accounting and law to name a few - where professional certifications are a must. And as you can imagine, there are few feelings worse than failing a professional exam. You've spent months studying, hundreds of hours grinding through practice questions, and hundreds of dollars on prep courses - only to see a big fat FAIL on your screen. And then comes the real gut punch: you have to pay to sit it again. Across the biggest professional certs (CPA, PMP, CISSP etc.) the average first-attempt failure rate is 40-50% and each retake costs $300-$600 in fees alone, before you factor in more prep materials and months of your life. The market leader's solution? Here's another 3,000 practice questions. Please try again. We think there’s a better way. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI-driven tutor specifically designed to help professionals pass notoriously challenging professional certification exams like CFA, CPA, and similar credentials
🛠️ Product:
A user starts by answering a few questions and taking a diagnostic test to assess their existing knowledge in the subject area and how ready they are for the exam.
They then get a custom study plan tailored to their strengths and weaknesses spread out over a set number of weeks to best prep them for the exam.
Over time the user takes adaptive mock exams to understand their progress and can use the AI tutor to clarify tricky concepts instantly. The AI doesn't just mark you right or wrong - it asks follow-up questions, spots the exact misconception in your reasoning, and walks you through it conversationally, mimicking what a one-on-one tutor actually does.
Their progress is tracked over time so they can see how they are tracking in the lead up to exam day
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo (built on Base44) | Get the demo prompt
💡 How to Win the Baked44 Challenge
We're giving away $5K to the best app built with Base44 this February. Here's how to make yours stand out:
Tips from builders who ship:
Start specific - "Build a client portal with invoicing and a dashboard" beats "build me something cool"
Iterate through chat - ask Base44 to tweak layouts, add features, change colors
Solve a real problem - tools you'd actually use tend to be tools others want too
Claim your free credits and you could have a working app by tonight.
👉 Claim your free credits and start building!
Note: To be eligible to win the prize, you must be on the Base44 Starter plan or higher. Sign up here.
🔬 Validation
🔍 Desktop Research (Googling, ChatGPTing, Reddit lurking, and reading competitor reviews)
The global exam prep and tutoring market is valued at $86.5B by 2029 at a 5.2% CAGR - professional certifications are the fastest growing segment. The biggest players (Kaplan, UWorld, Becker) charge $3,500-$4,100 for CPA prep alone, and all of them have added AI as a tacked-on feature rather than a core product.
Reddit communities like r/CPA (370k members), r/PMP (180k members), and r/CompTIA (500k members) are full of "I failed again" posts. The consistent complaint isn't a lack of practice questions - it's that people don't understand why they keep getting things wrong. We validated this by reading 100+ posts and reviews.
📋 Survey (112 responses via Pollfish, $1.80/response, ~$200 total)
78% of respondents said they felt underprepared in specific topic areas going into their most recent cert exam, despite using a paid prep course. Of those open to an AI tutor, 41% said they'd pay $20-$40 per month.
📣 LinkedIn Outbound (60 messages to working professionals studying for certs over 2 weeks)
Got 17 responses from 60 outreaches - a 28% response rate, strong for cold outreach. 6 said they'd sign up immediately for a free trial. The most common feedback: "I'm not failing because I don't have enough questions. I'm failing because nobody explains why I'm getting them wrong."
🚀 Go-to-Market
👥 Early Users
Own One Cert First: Don't try to boil the ocean. Pick CFA or CPA - the exams with the highest failure rates, the most desperate candidates, and the biggest communities. Become the go-to trusted resource for that one cert before expanding. r/CFA has 200k+ members and r/CPA has 370k+ - both are full of people asking "why do I keep failing?"
LinkedIn Outbound to Active Studiers: Target people posting "just started studying for my CFA L1" content. The pitch is simple: "Most people fail because they don't know their weak areas. We find them in 10 minutes, for free." Get them on the free tier and let the product convert them.
📈 Scaling Acquisition
B2B Licensing: Once you have pass rate data to point to, sell licenses to the employers who are paying for these certs anyway. Big 4 firms (Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG), banks, and consultancies spend heavily sending employees through CFA and CPA - pitch it as "we'll get your team certified faster, with better results." Enterprise CAC is higher but LTV is 10x.
🤑 Business Model
🏷️ Pricing
Consumer ($29/month or $249/year): Full access to AI tutor, adaptive mock exams, personalised study plan, and Predict My Pass Date
B2B Licensing ($X per employee/year): Sell directly to employers - Big 4 firms, banks, and consulting firms who are already funding their employees' cert journeys. They want pass rates, not just prep materials.
🧮 Unit Economics
Target CAC (cost to acquire a customer): $35-50 (Reddit organic and light paid search to start), $500-1,000 B2B (LinkedIn outbound + conferences).
Target LTV (lifetime value): $290-350 consumer (avg 12-month subscriber); $5,000-15,000 B2B (multi-seat annual license, high retention)
LTV:CAC ratio: 6-7x consumer; 10-15x B2B if you can crack enterprise sales
The big assumption: once someone passes their exam, they churn unless you've already got them lined up for their next qualification. Multi-cert progression has to be baked into the product from day one.
⚔️ Competitive Landscape
🏷️ Primary Competitors
Kaplan ($2,000-$3,200/course): The market leader with decades of brand trust. Added an AI tutor feature in 2024, but it's bolted onto a legacy platform with static content. Students still complain it doesn't explain why answers are wrong.
UWorld ($139-$4,100 depending on exam): The gold standard Qbank - brilliant rationales, genuinely loved. But it's a question bank, not a tutor. No adaptive dialogue, no personalisation loop. Students treat it as a supplement because it can't stand alone.
ExamTopics (free): Popular for IT certs with community-verified practice dumps. Zero AI, zero personalisation. It's free, which is a real moat - but it's also where certs go to get cheated on rather than learned.
🎯 The Gap
Nobody owns "AI-native cert tutor" - Kaplan and UWorld have AI as an afterthought, and ExamTopics is the wild west. There's no product built from day one around conversational tutoring across all cert categories.
The incumbents can't pivot without cannibalising their core content businesses - this is the innovator's dilemma playing out in real time across an $86B market.
Certifly can own "the cert tutor that actually teaches you" - purpose-built from day one, not a feature tacked onto a $3,000 course.
✅ Verdict: GO
The pain is quantifiable and the numbers don't lie - 40-50% first-attempt failure rates mean millions of people are failing exams and paying again every year. The incumbents have built their businesses around content, not comprehension, and they're too locked in to change.
The gap between "grinding practice questions" and "actually understanding the material" is exactly where an AI tutor lives, and nobody is credibly owning that space yet.
👋 That’s All Folks!
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