Welcome to Fully Baked, our Sunday newsletter serving up startup ideas more validated than your need for a 6 week all expenses paid vacation 🏝️
In today’s edition:
💡 Helping laid-off employees with their career transition
🔬 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 for Laid-Off Employees
A good goodbye
Available domain: Waypointer.com
The Problem: The job market is in a weird place right now. Unemployment sits at 4.4%, yet in 2025 alone, 783 tech companies conducted layoffs affecting nearly 246,000 people - around 674 people per day. Take Jack Dorsey laying off 40% of Square’s workforce last month. The cruel irony? For executives and VPs, being laid off isn't that bad. Companies routinely spend $3,000-$10,000 per head on outplacement services to help them land on their feet. But that's reserved for the top 5%. Everyone else gets a goodbye email and a month of severance. It's time to give companies a toolkit they can offer every departing employee - not just the ones with a corner office. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI-powered "Severance Agent" that companies buy for laid-off employees to rewrite their resumes, auto-apply to jobs, and help them find a new role in record time.
🛠️ Product:
Sign up with your LinkedIn profile or upload your resume, and within minutes the AI analyzes your career history, identifies transferable skills, and generates multiple tailored resume versions for different target roles - say a laid-off Salesforce engineer gets three versions: one for SaaS startups, one for enterprise, one for AI companies
Activate "Job Hunter Mode" to launch intelligent outbound campaigns - the platform identifies companies hiring for your roles, researches the hiring managers, crafts personalized outreach messages, and manages multi-touch sequences across LinkedIn and email automatically
Practice interviews with voice sessions simulating real conversations with your target companies, with instant AI feedback on content, delivery, and confidence - so when the real thing comes, you're not winging it
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
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🔬 Validation
🔍 Desktop Research (Googling, Reddit lurking, Clauding and Glassdoor reading)
The outplacement services market sits at $5.21B in 2025, growing to $7.39B by 2030 - and almost all of that spend goes to executive and group programs. Traditional providers like Careerminds and RiseSmart cost $1,000-$5,000 per employee, making mass deployment impossible for most companies. The individual contributor market is completely underserved.
We spent two hours in r/layoffs and r/cscareerquestions. The dominant complaint: "I got a LinkedIn Learning subscription and a goodbye email." AI-native tooling for the average laid-off worker barely exists.
📋 Survey (214 responses via Pollfish, $3.20/response, ~$685 total)
78% of respondents who'd been laid off in the past 24 months said they received no career transition support, or support they described as "not useful" - we targeted US adults aged 25-45 who'd experienced a layoff in the past two years.
61% said they'd have valued an AI job search tool, and 44% of those said they'd pay $20-$30/month out of pocket if their company hadn't provided one. Strong signal from people who'd been left with nothing.
📣 Smoke Test ($420 in LinkedIn ads over 7 days, targeting HR Directors and People Ops leaders at companies with 200-2,000 employees, using a "What do you give laid-off employees?" hook)
16.8% click-to-signup rate on the landing page - well above the 8-10% benchmark for B2B HR tools. The hook landed.
6 HR Directors replied to our follow-up email unprompted asking when this launches. Two asked about running a pilot. Super interesting!
🚀 Go-to-Market
👥 Early Users
HR communities: Spaces like People Geek, Lattice's community, and HR Open Source (HROS) are full of People Ops professionals sharing vendor recommendations. Get in early, share the problem framing (not the pitch), and let inbound do the work.
LinkedIn content targeting the HR buyer: Post the uncomfortable stat - "Your executives get $10,000 in outplacement. Your ICs get a goodbye email. Here's what we built to fix that." That kind of content travels fast in HR circles and puts you directly in front of your buyer.
📈 Scaling Acquisition
Outbound post-layoff announcement: Set up alerts for WARN Act filings (publicly available in the US) and Layoffs.fyi. Reach out to People Ops teams within 48 hours of a public announcement - your timing will never be better, and you're solving a problem they're actively staring down.
🤑 Business Model
🏷️ Pricing
Standard ($150/seat): 3 months of full platform access per departing employee, purchased in bulk by the company as part of severance packages
Premium ($300/seat): Everything in Standard plus a dedicated human career coach layer, 1:1 kick-off session, and employer brand reporting showing placement rates and time-to-hire metrics
Survey respondents rated $150 as "very reasonable" vs the $1,000-$5,000 they associate with traditional outplacement - clear room to own the category
🧮 Unit Economics
Target CAC (cost to acquire a customer): $800-$1,200 via outbound + community
Target LTV (lifetime value): $12,000+ assuming a mid-size company (100 employees) buys 5 seats/year at $150 and re-engages annually as a default offboarding vendor
LTV:CAC ratio: 10-15x if you can make annual re-purchasing the norm
The model lives or dies on habitual re-purchase - not just one-time crisis buying.
⚔️ Competitive Landscape
🏷️ Primary Competitors
Lee Hecht Harrison / LHH (custom pricing, typically $2,000-$5,000/employee): Part of The Adecco Group and the world's largest outplacement network, with 8,000+ coaches across 66 countries. Built for enterprise and executive transitions. Their floor is your ceiling.
Randstad RiseSmart ($1,000-$3,000/employee): A modern global platform with AI-driven job matching and support in 80+ countries. Strong tech layer, but still priced well out of reach for companies wanting to support every departing employee - and it's a coaching product, not a job execution agent.
Careerminds ($1,000-$5,000/employee): One-on-one coaching with no time limits, resume tools, and job search trackers. Human-led, not AI-native, which means it can't compress to $150/seat without gutting margin.
🎯 The Gap
Nobody owns the $100-$200/seat mass-market outplacement category - the entire market is priced for executives, leaving 95% of laid-off employees without meaningful support.
Incumbents are structurally unable to compete at $150/seat without cannibalizing their core business. An AI-native challenger can undercut them permanently, not just tactically.
✅ Verdict: GO
The pain is real and the numbers back it up - 78% of recently laid-off employees received no useful support, and HR leaders don’t feel great about that. The market is $5.21B and growing, incumbents can't compete at $150/seat, and our smoke test showed genuine pull from buyers before the product existed.
The biggest risk here isn't demand - it's sales cycle length. HR budgets get locked months before layoffs happen, which means you're often pitching reactively. You need a frictionless self-serve purchasing option (credit card, instant deployment) for companies in crisis mode.
But overall this could be a super compelling business for someone go build.
👋 That’s All Folks!
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