Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as often as Sam Altman and Elon Musk beef on Twitter 🥊
In today’s edition:
💡 The YC startup idea someone needs to build
🛠 The bullseye framework for finding traction
🔋 From selling everything to a $5.9B acquisition + more
🔍 Xcode, a $20M Series A + more
🍻 The kitchen appliance that's been missing your whole life
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!
🖱️ Cursor for Product Management
Build different
Available Domain: Userpath.ai
The Problem: YC just dropped their latest Request for Startups - ideas they're actively looking to fund. And one of them really caught our attention…"Cursor for Product Managers." Because as AI agents get more adept at coding, it seems like everyone is going to be a product manager in the future. Building is no longer the bottleneck, knowing what to build is. Today, product managers use AI in isolated pockets - transcribing interviews, summarising feedback - but there's no system for the full loop of product discovery. The output is still PRDs, Figma mock-ups, and Jira tickets designed for human engineers. It’s time for change. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI-native product management tool that helps teams figure out what to build
🛠️ Product:
Upload customer interviews, support tickets, and product usage data and the AI synthesises patterns across all your feedback to surface what users actually need, not just what they say they want.
Ask "what should we build next?" and get a prioritised feature outline complete with an explanation based on customer evidence as to why this change is worth making.
The tool proposes specific changes to your product's UI, data model, and workflows, then breaks down development tasks so they can be handed straight to your favourite coding agent.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo (built on Base44) | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Freemium for solo founders, $49/seat/month for teams with unlimited uploads and integrations. Enterprise tier at $199/seat includes custom AI training on your product domain.
⭐ End Goal: Acquisition by Atlassian, Figma, or Notion at 8-12x revenue as they race to own the full product development stack.
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🏆 The Baked44 Challenge: Win $5,000 for Building Your Best Idea
We're teaming up with Base44 to give away $5,000 cash to one founder who actually builds something this February.
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. Database, auth, hosting - all included.
Claim your free credits and start building today.
🎯 The Bullseye Framework for Traction
The Context: Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, developed this framework after realising most startups fail not because of product - but because of distribution. The Bullseye Framework helps you systematically find the one marketing channel that will actually move the needle for your business. It's the core methodology from his book Traction, and it's helped thousands of founders stop guessing and start growing. Here’s how it works.
Step-by-step:
Brainstorm at least one strategy for each of the 19 traction channels - viral marketing, PR, SEO, content, sales, partnerships, ads, etc. - without dismissing any upfront.
Rank your ideas into three rings: inner circle (most promising), middle ring (possible), and outer ring (long shots) based on your gut and any data you have.
Run cheap, fast tests on your top 3 inner-circle channels to see which actually gets results - spend no more than a few hundred dollars per test.
Double down on the one channel that's working and ignore everything else until it stops moving the needle.
Give it a try!
💰 Where Investors with $2M+ Sanity-Check Decisions Together
Some investing questions deserve a smarter room. Long Angle is a free, private community of 6,500+ verified members (typical net worth $2M–$100M) who share diligence, not sales pitches.
Unbiased Peer Insight: Sanity-check decisions with peers who have nothing to sell.
Institutional Deal Flow: Access member-vetted opportunities in private credit, search funds, and niche PE (over $404M AUM).
Real Relationships: Join regional dinners, workshops, and a confidential online forum.
Accredited investors only. No solicitors. No membership fees.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 The Money Shot: This founder sold his car and moved into a friend's guest bedroom to build a $5.9B business. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Could 2026 be the biggest year of M&A in history? This guy thinks so…
💬 Prompt Drop: This AI prompt helps you to think like a guy who manages $124B. Very cool.
🆓 Founder Resource: Everyone says "talk to users." Here's how to actually do it without wasting their time (or yours).
💵 Founder Deal: Get 12 months of Eleven Labs for free with an ElevenLabs grant.
🔍 Founder Finds
🍎 Apple's Xcode now has direct integration with the Claude Agent SDK, giving developers the full functionality of Claude Code for building on Apple platforms. Huge for iOS/macOS devs.
🚀 Day AI just raised $20M in a Series A led by Sequoia to build what they're calling "the Cursor of CRM." “Cursor for X” is really trending today…
🐒 Google is out here using AI to sequence animal genomes in just days to help save endangered species. AI will affect everything…
🏠 Brian Chesky on his vision for an AI-first world. The Airbnb founder sees AI agents booking your entire trip.
🎯 Marc Andreessen breaks down the 3 things he looks for when investing in a startup. Hint: it's not your TAM slide.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Reverse Microwave
Ever needed your drink cold right now? Tired of waiting 20 minutes for the freezer to do its job?
Introducing FreezEasy™, the world's first instant cooling appliance. Pop in your warm beer, melting ice cream, or anything else you like and in 30 seconds it's ice cold. It's like a microwave had a baby with an air conditioner.
FreezEasy™ - That's cold.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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