Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as the NYC café that lets you take your AI chatbot on a date 💕
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea you can really sink your teeth into
🛠 Building a marketplace with Base44 (mini course day 5)
🔋 From a basement in Amsterdam to a $50B payments giant + more
🔍 Figure release, Dario interview, retention loops + more
🍻 Weather tech that's got you covered
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!
🍽️ GLP-1 Meal Prep Platform
The weight is over
Available Domain: Mealcycle.co
The Problem: Celebrities are obsessed with two things: staying relevant and staying thin. Which is why every A, B, and even C-lister seems to be on a GLP-1 drug right now. The latest fad drug is retatrutide, which Huberman just called a "trillion-dollar drug" after trials showed up to one-third body weight loss in just six months. But here's the thing: these drugs can wreck your stomach, crush your appetite, all while your body is crying out for high-protein, nutrient-dense food to prevent muscle loss (fun fact: nearly 40% of weight lost on semaglutide comes from lean mass). Factor, BistroMD, Trifecta - they've all slapped a "GLP-1 friendly" label on existing meal plans. None are purpose-built for these patients. So let's build one. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A meal prep delivery service built specifically for GLP-1 patients, portioned for suppressed appetites, packed with protein, and designed to minimize common side effects.
🛠️ Product:
Sign up by selecting your medication (Ozempic, Mounjaro, retatrutide), dosage stage, and dietary preferences - the AI builds a personalized weekly meal plan around your changing appetite and nutritional needs.
Every meal is 30g+ protein, portion-controlled for suppressed appetites, and made with ingredients that minimize GI side effects like nausea - the most common reason people quit these drugs.
Built-in tracking syncs with your weight loss journey, showing protein intake vs. lean mass preservation and nudging you when you're under-eating (a huge problem on these drugs).
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Subscription meal delivery at $12-15/meal, with a premium tier ($19/meal) that includes dietitian consultations and personalized macro tracking.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by a health/pharma-adjacent player - Hims & Hers (already prescribing GLP-1s), Ro, or even Eli Lilly/Novo Nordisk as they build out patient support ecosystems. 8-12x revenue multiple.
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💻 Building a Marketplace with Base44 (5-Day Mini Course)
The Context: Final day. You've learned the basics, frontend, backend, and built a SaaS product with payments. Today we're tackling the most complex project - a two-sided marketplace. We're building a platform for buying and selling unused SaaS subscriptions (from edition #326). Sellers list, buyers browse, and we handle the transaction flow. Let's finish strong.
Step-by-step:
Start with: "Build a marketplace called SaaSWap where users can list unused SaaS subscriptions for sale. Buyers browse listings, contact sellers, and complete transactions."
Add the marketplace logic: "Users can be both buyers and sellers. Listings include: tool name, subscription tier, remaining months, original price, asking price, and proof screenshot. Add search and filtering."
Build the transaction flow: "Buyer clicks 'I Want This', seller accepts or declines. Track transaction status: requested, accepted, completed. Add a review system after completion."
Connect a custom domain: Go to Settings > Domain, add your domain, configure DNS, and publish your marketplace to a professional URL.
P.S. That's a wrap on our 5-day Base44 course! You've gone from basics to building full SaaS products and marketplaces. Now go ship something. Full course available here.
🗣️ The AI Tool We Use Every Single Day
We use AI to supercharge our workflows at Half Baked. And there's no tool we use more than Wispr Flow.
How we use it:
Dictate in any app - Slack, Gmail, Notion, ChatGPT
Voice gets converted to clean, formatted text - 4x faster than typing
Save 5-7 hours every week
If you're a founder trying to move fast, this one's a no-brainer.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: These guys went from a basement in Amsterdam to a $50B payments giant. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Spotify says its best developers haven’t written a line of code since December, thanks to AI. This is the future of programming.
💬 Prompt Drop: This AI prompt uses a proven FBI interrogation tactic to win any negotiation. Worth a bookmark!
🆓 Founder Resource: Sam Altman wrote the ultimate startup playbook. If you haven't read it yet, now's the time.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 12 months of ElevenLabs for free with their startup grant program. Perfect for founders building voice AI products.
🔍 Founder Finds
🦾 Figure just teased their 7th generation Figure hand, a robot hand that appears to achieve parity with a human hand.
🎙️ Dario Amodei sat down with Dwarkesh Patel and said we're near the end of the exponential. A must-listen for anyone building in AI.
🛠 Tanay Kothari (founder of Wispr) wrote a piece on how to build a product people can't stop using. A great primer on retention loops.
📚 MIT Sloan just created a business model framework for the AI era showing how businesses evolve to become outcome-oriented and enabled by autonomous AI.
💰 This chart showing the four types of people at every company is a banger. Which one are you?
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Smart Umbrella
Always forget your umbrella? Or worse, carry it on a sunny day like a paranoid weather enthusiast?
Introducing Oombrella™, the smart umbrella that syncs with your phone to ping you before it rains - and alerts you if you leave it behind. Basically, it's the responsible friend you never had.
Oombrella™ - it rains supreme.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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See you soon,