Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as out of this world as Obama confirming aliens really exist? 👽
In today’s edition:
💡 Making angel investing more accessible to the masses
🛠 Using AI to talk to customers
🔋 From 43 failed projects to an OpenAI acquisition in 90 Days + more
🔍 OpenClaw acquired, world order breakdown, PG essay + more
🍻 An idea that’s completely for the birds
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!
💸 Part-time Angel Investor Platform
Check, please
Available Domain: Openangel.com
The Problem: Everyone’s an angel investor these days. The Chainsmokers. Jake Paul. Even Snoop Dogg (we all know what he’s investing in…). But the fastest growing category of angels? Operator-angels. These are former founders and execs at companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Stripe who want to back the next generation. But actually setting up a fund? Nightmare. You're looking at $8K+ per SPV on AngelList, weeks of legal paperwork, LLC formation and more…all before you've written a single check. The result? Thousands of potential angel investors sitting on the sidelines because the admin barrier is too high. It’s time to lower the barrier. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A turnkey platform that handles all the legal, compliance, and admin work so operators can go from "I want to angel invest" to "I just wrote my first check" in days, not months.
🛠️ Product:
Pick your fund structure (solo angel, SPV, or micro-fund), answer a few questions about your thesis and target check size, and the platform generates all your legal docs, files your LLC, and handles SEC compliance automatically.
A built-in deal room lets you share opportunities with co-investors, collect commitments, and manage cap tables - replacing the spreadsheet chaos most first-time angels default to.
A long-term portfolio dashboard tracks every investment's performance, valuations, follow-on rounds, and projected returns across all your angel vehicles in one place.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: One-time setup fee ($500-$2,000 per fund structure depending on complexity) and $99/month for portfolio monitoring, LP reporting, and deal room features.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by AngelList, Carta, or a fintech player looking to own the operator-to-investor pipeline. 8-15x revenue multiple.
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🔒 How to Protect Your Startup's Email in 5 Minutes
Your investor updates, term sheets, and client contracts are all sitting in an inbox that Google can read. Proton Mail fixes that with end-to-end encryption - no IT team required.
How it works:
🛠️ Sign up and migrate your existing email with Easy Switch
🌐 Use your own custom domain ([email protected])
🔐 Encrypt every email and attachment before it ever hits a server
Not even Proton can read your data. Trusted by 50,000+ businesses worldwide.
🗣 Using AI to Generate Customer Interview Questions
The Context: Talking to users is the single best way to validate an idea or improve your product - but most founders do it wrong. You ask leading questions, customers tell you what you want to hear, and you walk away thinking you've validated something you haven't. This prompt designs a 15-question interview guide that actually works.
Step-by-step:
List your product, target customer, and your top 3 assumptions about their problem.
Run the prompt below - it generates 15 behavioural questions, each tagged with what you're actually learning from the answer.
Use the guide in your next 5 customer calls and look for patterns in the responses, not individual opinions.
Re-run with updated assumptions after each batch of interviews to sharpen your questions.
Get the customer interview prompt
📈 What would you do with 7 extra hours a week?
That's what Wispr Flow users save on average. For founders, that's a full extra day every month to build, sell, or think.
The math:
4x faster than typing
Works across Mac, Windows, and iPhone
Learns your vocabulary, tone, and shortcuts over time
Time is your scarcest resource. Stop spending it on typing.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: From 43 Failed Projects to an OpenAI Acquisition in 90 Days. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Google and Microsoft just co-authored the spec that turns every website into an API for AI agents. The second-order effects here are massive.
💬 Prompt Drop: Check out these prompts that Anthropic, Google and OpenAI researchers use on the daily.
🆓 Founder Resource: Here’s a look behind the scene of how Anthropic's own marketing team uses Claude Code.
💵 Founder Deal: Startups get 90% off Intercom + 1 year of Fin free. A solid deal if you're scaling support.
🔍 Founder Finds
🤖 Peter Steinberger’s OpenClaw just got acquired by OpenAI. Altman called him "a genius."
🌍 Ray Dalio just declared the post-1945 world order officially dead. What comes next should worry all of us…
✍️ Paul Graham's essay on taste might be the most important thing you read this week, especially if you're building in the age of AI slop.
🎯 Robinhood's CEO built a $40B company on one simple product rule. Every founder should steal it.
📉 The K-shaped economy is splitting in real time. One chart that shows exactly where the money is going.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: AI Birdwatcher
Are you a budding ornithologist? Looking for a new hobby before AI pushes all of us into the permanent underclass?
Introducing WingMan™, the world's first AI-powered smart binoculars. For just $5,000 you can point it at any bird and it'll instantly tell you what species it is. It's incredible.
WingMan™ - Bird's the word.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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See you soon,