Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Claude's new model finally dropping 🤖
In today’s edition:
💡 Turning DTC dead stock into partnership gold
🛠 Using AI to calculate market size (TAM/SAM/SOM)
🔋 From stressed-out tech worker to a $100M beverage brand + more
🔍 OpenAI releases, Musk interview + more
🍻 A better way to kick a nasty habit
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!
🔄 Ecommerce Inventory Swap Network
Stock swap, don't drop.
Available Domain: Stockswaps.com
The Problem: DTC brands have a dirty secret. Most of them are sitting on lots of dead stock. Wrong sizes, seasonal leftovers, failed colorways, overruns. The current solution? Liquidate through TJ Maxx or Nordstrom Rack at 80% discounts, watching your brand value crumble alongside your margins. It's a lose-lose: you barely recoup costs and train customers to wait for the discount rack. But what if there was a better way, a way to put this stock to better use? Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A B2B swap network where e-commerce brands trade dead inventory with non-competing brands targeting similar demographics.
🛠️ Product:
Upload your dead stock with quantity, retail value, and target demo - the platform matches you with complementary brands (a women's activewear brand pairs with a skincare company, not a competitor).
Swap inventory 1:1 based on retail value - both brands include the swapped product as a "surprise gift" in customer orders, turning dead stock into a sampling opportunity.
Track redemption rates and customer feedback to see which brand partnerships actually drive cross-pollination and repeat purchases.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Freemium with a 5% matching fee on swap value for free users. Premium tier ($499/month) for unlimited swaps, priority matching, and analytics dashboard.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Shopify, Faire, or a logistics player like Flexport looking to own the DTC backend for a 6-10x revenue multiple.
Rate this idea
💰 Build a full-stack app in February. Win $5K.
Base44 is the fastest way to turn an idea into a working product - no coding required. Describe what you want, and their AI builds databases, APIs, and interfaces in minutes.
Here's the deal:
🛠️ Build a working product using Base44 by February 28
📹 Submit a 2-minute demo video showing what you built
💰 Win $5,000 cash (one winner, judged by the Half Baked team)
Whether it's a SaaS tool, marketplace, or internal dashboard - if you can describe it, Base44 can build it.
📐 Using AI to Calculate Market Size (TAM/SAM/SOM)
The Context: "What's your market size?" is a question that leads most founders to pull a number out of their…eh…out of thin air. Here's how to use AI to calculate your TAM/SAM/SOM using both top-down and bottoms-up approaches.
Step-by-step:
Define your ICP with razor-sharp specificity - not "small businesses" but "B2B SaaS companies with 10-50 employees in North America using spreadsheets for financial planning."
Run this prompt with your ICP and pricing model to generate both a top-down estimate and bottoms-up estimate.
Compare the two - if they're in the same ballpark, you've got a defensible range.
Get the market size prompt
🤖 Save 10+ Hours Per Week Using AI as Your Personal Assistant
Drowning in tasks while dreaming of a way to clone yourself? Your AI productivity breakthrough has arrived.
Get the exact templates used by top performers to delegate 80% of their routine work to AI
Access the "AI Assistant Command Center" - a ready-to-use system for managing all your AI tools
Master AI delegation in under 60 minutes with a step-by-step implementation guide
Leverage advanced prompts that turn ChatGPT into your 24/7 productivity partner
Over 10,000 professionals have already transformed their productivity using these templates.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: A stressed-out tech worker decided to build a $100M beverage brand. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Sequoia says 2026 is the year of specialized intelligence. Here’s what that means.
💬 Prompt Drop: Promptly.fyi has 500+ AI prompts that solve your daily problems and meet your prompting needs.
🆓 Founder Resource: YC's Guide to Seed Fundraising tells you everything you need to know about raising your first round.
💵 Founder Deal: You can claim $50 worth of free credits to use Claude’s latest model Opus 4.6. Details here.
🔍 Founder Finds
🚀 OpenAI just launched Frontier, a new platform for enterprises to build, deploy, and manage AI coworkers.
⌨️ OpenAI also just dropped GPT-5.3-Codex in Codex, their latest coding model for agentic software development.
🎙️ Dwarkesh Patel and John Collison just interviewed Elon Musk. You know you want to watch this one.
📰 Steven Sinofsky on why software isn't dying. Spoiler alert: AI changes what we build, not how much needs to be built.
📚 Dr Dominic Ng's piece on the neuroscience of post-work fatigue really hits home. Worth a read.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Quitting lighter
Sick of trying to quit smoking cold turkey? Wish your lighter could just... help you out a bit?
Introducing Quitbit™, the world's first smart lighter that tracks every cigarette you smoke. It syncs to an app showing your habits, lets you set daily limits, and can even lock itself once you've hit your quota. Built-in display shows time since your last smoke and how many you've got left today.
Quitbit™ - See the light.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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See you soon,