Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as unexpected as the White House dropping alien government files 👽
In today’s edition:
💡 A platform to help 76 million Americans solve a pressing problem
🛠 AI photoshoots for free with your phone
🔋 How a side project became a $800M business + more
🔍 OpenAI mafia, data centers, Naval podcast + more
🍻 A product for people who need a reality check
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. Get shipping!
👨💻 Benefits Stack for Freelancers
Freelancers with benefits
Available domain: Perkstak.com
The Problem: Freelancing is the future of work - and 76 million Americans have already made the leap. No boss, no commute, no fluorescent lighting. But being a freelancer comes with a big problem nobody warns you about. When you work for yourself, you lose the invisible stack of protections your employer was running in the background - health insurance, pension contributions, liability cover, legal support. All of it, gone. Freelancers have to rebuild that entire stack from scratch, across 6-8 different providers, with zero group purchasing power and zero guidance. Most don't bother, which means millions of Americans (many earning serious money) are walking around massively underinsured and underserved. Someone needs to fix this. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A single subscription that gives freelancers everything a full-time employee gets from their HR department - health, retirement, liability, legal and tax support - in one dashboard.
🛠️ Product:
Sign up in minutes, answer a few questions about your work type and income, and get a personalised benefits stack built for your situation - not a generic plan designed for a 1950s factory worker.
One monthly payment covers negotiated group-rate health insurance, E&O liability cover, a Solo 401k with auto-contributions, and quarterly tax filing support - all managed from a single dashboard.
As your freelance income grows, your benefits stack scales with you - unlocking higher coverage tiers, legal contract support, and dedicated financial planning from advisors who actually understand irregular income.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo (built on Base44) | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Tiered subscription - Starter ($49/month), Pro ($99/month), Premium ($149/month) depending on coverage level. Additional revenue share from insurance and financial product partners.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by a major insurance group, HR software player (Rippling, Gusto), or fintech looking to own the independent worker segment. 8-15x revenue multiple.
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🛡️ The Email 50,000+ Businesses Actually Trust
When you're a startup, your email carries everything - investor comms, hiring offers, product roadmaps, client contracts. That's a lot riding on an inbox with zero encryption.
Why founders love Proton Mail:
End-to-end encryption on every email, attachment, and calendar event
Open-source and independently audited - no black boxes
Part of a full encrypted suite (Mail, Drive, Calendar, VPN, Pass)
Your startup's data deserves better than Big Tech's inbox.
📸 Using AI to Create Product Photoshoots for Free
The Context: Professional product photography can cost thousands - studio hire, photographers, lighting rigs, half a day of your life. Google’s Pomelli tool just fixed that with Photoshoot, a feature that lets you create high-quality, customised product shots from a single image of your product. For early-stage founders trying to look polished on a bootstrap budget, this is a game changer. Here’s how it works.
Step-by-step:
Head to Pomelli and upload a single clean image of your product - phone photo works fine.
Select the Photoshoot feature and choose your scene, background, and styling preferences.
Let Pomelli generate a set of customised product shots tailored to your brand aesthetic.
Download and drop straight into your website, ads, or social - no edits needed.
Try Pomelli
💡 How to Win the Baked44 Challenge
We're giving away $5K to the best app built with Base44 this February. Here's how to make yours stand out:
Tips from builders who ship:
Start specific - "Build a client portal with invoicing and a dashboard" beats "build me something cool"
Iterate through chat - ask Base44 to tweak layouts, add features, change colors
Solve a real problem - tools you'd actually use tend to be tools others want too
Claim your free credits and you could have a working app by tonight.
👉 Claim your free credits and start building!
Note: To be eligible to win the prize, you must be on the Base44 Starter plan or higher. Sign up here.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This guy turned a side project into an $800 million business. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: The number of academic papers being submitted has skyrocketed in recent years. The problem? Most of its AI slop. A worrying trend for the future of research…
💬 Prompt Drop: Check out these three frameworks for prompting in 2026, because how you talk to AI is becoming a core founder skill.
🆓 Founder Resource: Check out the only article you need to master prompt engineering in 2026.
💵 Founder Deal: Get $100,000 in AWS credits for free with Amazon's AWS Activate Startup Program.
🔍 Founder Finds
💸 OpenAI alum have launched more than 18 startups. They’re giving the PayPal Mafia a run for their money…
💰 Meta just broke ground on a $10B data center in Indiana, a 1 gigawatt facility the size of 70 football fields which is coming online in 2027.
📚 Naval Ravikant just dropped a new podcast episode called "a motorcycle for the mind." Always worth a listen!
📼 Replit just unveiled Animation, letting users create polished videos from natural language prompts right in the coding platform.
🚀 Rork just launched Rork Max, a major upgrade to its mobile app builder. Beating Apple at their own game…
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: AI Mirror
Ever stood in front of your mirror wondering if your outfit is actually good? Wish you had a way to get some immediate, unbiased feedback?
Introducing Fitchek™, the world's first AI-powered mirror that rates your outfit in real time. Simply stand in front of your mirror and it'll give you a rating on the spot, flagging what's working and roasting what isn't.
Fitchek™ - Something to reflect on.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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