Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as often as Forbes 30 Under 30 founders commit fraud (it happened again…) 🚨
In today’s edition:
💡 Helping solopreneurs escape spreadsheet hell
🛠 Using the RICE framework to prioritize product features
🔋 From backyard bootcamps to a $400M exit + more
🔍 xAI acquired, Codex release, Sonnet 5 drop + more
🍻 The travel accessory everybody needs (but nobody asked for)
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 The Baked44 Challenge: We've teamed up with Base44 to give away $5K to one founder who ships their product this February. More details here and later in the newsletter.
Happy building!
🧮 AI-Powered Solo Accountant
Get your sheet together
Available Domain: Solobooks.ai
The Problem: There are now over 76 million freelancers in the US alone, contributing $1.5 trillion to the economy annually. And every single one of them has the same Sunday night ritual: staring at a mess of receipts, invoices, and bank statements wondering if that coffee was a business expense or just a cry for help. Traditional accounting software like QuickBooks was built for businesses with accountants on staff - not for the solo designer juggling client work, tax deadlines, and that mysterious Stripe fee from three months ago. The result? 64% of solopreneurs admit they're winging it when it comes to their books, and most only find out they've messed up when the taxman comes knocking. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI accounting platform for solopreneurs that connects to your bank, categorizing expenses in plain English, and tells you exactly what you owe (and what you can write off).
🛠️ Product:
Connect your bank and invoicing tools in 60 seconds - the AI immediately scans your transaction history and builds a picture of your business without you lifting a finger.
Ask questions in plain English like "Can I afford to take December off?" or "How much should I set aside for taxes this quarter?" and get instant, accurate answers based on your actual numbers.
Get proactive nudges before deadlines - the AI spots patterns, flags unusual expenses, and reminds you about quarterly payments so nothing slips through the cracks.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo (built on Base44) | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Freemium with $15/month Pro tier for unlimited questions and integrations. Premium tier at $49/month includes AI-generated quarterly reports and tax prep summaries.
⭐ End Goal: Acquisition by Intuit, Block, or Mercury at 8-12x revenue as they race to own the solopreneur finance stack.
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🏆 Win $5,000 for Building Your Best Idea
We're teaming up with Base44 to reward one founder who ships something this February. We’re calling it the “Baked44” Challenge, and here’s how it works.
The challenge:
Use Base44 to build an app - a tool, a portal, an MVP, whatever you've been putting off
Submit your live link by the end of February
The best build wins $5K
Base44 lets you build full-stack apps just by describing what you want, no code required, and they are giving all of our readers credits to use for their builds.
Check out the competition
📊 Using the RICE Framework to Prioritize Product Features
The Context: Deciding what features to build is always difficult for founders and product teams. That’s why the Intercom team developed RICE. It stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort - four factors that, when scored and combined, give you a single number to rank any feature, project, or idea. Here’s how it works.
Step-by-step:
Score Reach by estimating how many people will be affected by this project in a given time period (e.g. 500 users per quarter).
Score Impact on a scale of 0.25 (minimal) to 3 (massive) based on how much this will move the needle for each person reached.
Score Confidence as a percentage reflecting how sure you are about your Reach and Impact estimates - 100% for hard data, 50% for educated guesses.
Score Effort in person-months, estimating the total work required from all team members to ship it.
Calculate your RICE score: (Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort - the higher the score, the higher the priority.
🧑✈ Your copilot for compliance is here
Ever been tired, stuck, and miserably documenting something it feels like AI was born to do? AI finally delivered.
Delve's AI copilot understands your entire tech stack and tells you exactly what to do next. Just ask it "What's my next step? Take me there" and watch Copilot read your screen and start doing tasks for you. Congrats, you've found the light at the end of the tunnel. Join Wisprflow, 11x, Bland, and more in the future of compliance with Delve.
Book a demo here to get $1,500 off compliance and see Copilot in action.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 The Money Shot: This Aussie personal trainer went from backyard bootcamps to a $400M exit. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: a16z data shows that ARR per employee has skyrocketed at startups. Lean teams are winning.
💬 Prompt Drop: Here’s the only Claude prompt you need to generate $10k-$100k app ideas. Worth bookmarking.
🆓 Founder Resource: YC just dropped their Spring 2026 request for startups. See what they're betting on.
💵 Founder Deal: Startups get 90% off Intercom + 1 year of Fin as a bonus. A solid deal if you're scaling support!
🔍 Founder Finds
🚀 SpaceX and xAI are merging ahead of a $1.25T IPO. Musk confirmed it himself. The conglomerate era is back.
🤖 OpenAI just launched the Codex app, their dedicated coding assistant/Cursor killer.
🧠 Anthropic is reportedly dropping Claude Sonnet 5 tomorrow, codenamed "Fennec". Big if true.
🚗 Waymo has just raised a $16B funding round at a $126B valuation.
💬 Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber CEO) shared his blunt advice to founders. Worth a watch.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Head Hammock
Tired of waking up with neck pain after falling asleep on a flight? Sick of drooling on a stranger's shoulder during a road trip?
Introducing NodPod™, the world's first suspended cranial support system. It's a tiny hammock that hangs from your car roof or airplane seat, cradling your head like a newborn while you snooze upright. Finally, sleep like a baby in economy class.
NodPod™ - Hang in there.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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See you soon,