Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Anthropic launching Sonnet 4.6 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 A platform that helps you bet on yourself (literally)
🛠 How to solve any problem as a founder
🔋 From $1 Sodas to a $100M business + more
🔍 Manus agents, $10B raise, YC rejections + more
🍻 A picture that’s worth a thousand words (or even a thousand bucks?)
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 shipping!
🎓 Staked Learning Platform
An educated bet
Available domain: Stakecademy.com
The Problem: The world is moving faster than ever. AI is rewriting job descriptions overnight, new frameworks drop weekly, and the skills you learned two months ago are already collecting dust. The solution? Online courses of course. Except they have a problem…a 90% dropout rate. People sign up for Coursera, buy Udemy bundles, and start coding bootcamps with the best of intentions. Three weeks later? Ghost town. The problem isn't access to education, there's never been more of it. The problem is there's zero cost to quitting. No skin in the game. No consequence for bailing on yourself. We need to raise the stakes - literally. And there's no better way to do that than putting real money on the line. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A platform where learners stake real money on completing specific learning goals, and either get paid out when they finish, or lose their stake if they quit.
🛠️ Product:
Pick a learning goal (finish a Python course, ship a side project, pass an AWS cert), set your deadline, and stake anywhere from $20 to $500. Your money goes into escrow the moment you commit.
The platform verifies completion through integrations with major learning platforms (Coursera, Udemy, GitHub commits, certification databases) and releases your stake back plus a bonus from the pool of quitters' forfeited funds.
Leaderboards, streaks, and group challenges let you stake alongside friends or coworkers - turning solo learning into a competitive, social experience with real consequences.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Platform takes a 15-20% cut of all forfeited stakes. Premium tier ($9.99/month) for group challenges, advanced analytics, and employer-sponsored learning pools.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by a major learning platform (Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, Duolingo) or an HR tech player looking to add gamified accountability to their L&D stack. 8-12x revenue multiple.
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📬 Your Emails are One Breach Away from Becoming Headlines
Data breaches cost companies $4.44 million on average in 2025. For a startup, that's not a setback - that's game over. And regular email? It's the #1 attack vector.
Why founders are switching to Proton Mail:
End-to-end encryption on every message and attachment
Phishing protection built in to catch scam emails before they land
Swiss privacy laws protect your data - outside US jurisdiction
Your cap table, your IP, your client list - all protected. Finally.
🔁 How To Solve Any Problem As A Founder
The Context: Being a founder is basically being a professional problem solver. Product broken? Solve it. Users churning? Solve it. The founders who win aren't smarter - they just solve problems faster. George Mack has a framework you can use to solve any problem called the Boom Loop. Here's how it works.
Step-by-step:
Guess - Make a specific bet about your problem. Not "I think people want this" but "50 people in this subreddit will pay $20/month for X." If your guess can't be proven wrong, it's not a guess - it's a wish.
Test - Run a logic test (does this contradict what I already know?) and a reality test (put it in front of real users). Pre-sell it, build a landing page, run a smoke test. Don't look for confirmation - look for what breaks.
Correct - If the test fails, don't ignore it. Kill the bad guess, learn from the error, and loop again. Most founders get stuck here - they deny reality instead of updating their approach. The loop only works if you actually loop.
🏆 LinkedIn Is Now The Top Growth Channel For CEOs
Playbookz builds top CEO & exec brands without you lifting a finger. Ghostwriting, lead magnets, ads, and a human setter - all done-for-you.
Most teams see 150k reach, 300+ leads, and 9 new clients in the first 90 days.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This mom of five turned $1 sodas into a $100 million business. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: YC recently coined the term "20X company". Here's how to build one.
💬 Prompt Drop: Here's how you can generate industry trend reports for any sector in seconds.
🆓 Founder Resource: Check out this free Startup Financial Model Template for SaaS businesses to project revenue, burn rate, runway, and more.
💵 Founder Deal: Get $100,000 in AWS credits for free with Amazon's AWS Activate Startup Program.
🔍 Founder Finds
🤖 Manus (owned by Meta) just launched personal agents, their answer to OpenClaw. Not the first time Zuck has been “inspired“ by another product…
💰 Thrive Capital, led by Joshua Kushner, just raised a $10B fund. The era of the mega fund is upon us.
📚 Sam Parr breaks down every level of business from $10K to $100M, what changes at each stage and what stays the same.
🤖 Agibot is China's latest humanoid robot, and here it is kicking through a pane of glass. AGI confirmed.
🚀 This founder got rejected from YC 3 times before finally getting in. The lesson? Keep applying.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Talking Pictures
Tired of your photos just sitting there? Wish they had a bit more life to them?
Introducing FrameChat™, the world's first AI-powered photo frame that talks to you. Upload a photo of anyone - living or dead - and the frame generates a voice and personality based on the person in the picture. They're like the moving pictures in Harry Potter, no magic needed.
FrameChat™ - A new frame of reference.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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