Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as often as Chinese labs are copying their US competitors 👀
Also… don’t forget to check out our validation workshop we’re hosting tomorrow. It’s gonna be epic. RSVP here.
In today’s edition:
💡 An AI product for top sales talent
🛠 How to calculate how much investment to raise
🔋 From $5,000 in parking tickets to a $118M Uber acquisition + more
🔍 Google acquisition, Stripe's annual letter, Elon's masterclass + more
🍻 A real sign of the times (quite literally)
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 $1,000 Giveaway: We've teamed up with Bill.com to give away $1,000 to support one of you this week. In order to enter (you can enter daily by the way) simply:
Go to this link and download the e-book
Reply to this email with the word "toolkit"
Good luck and get after it!
🤝 AI Relationship Manager for Salespeople
Relation-ship it
Available Domain: Rappore.co
The Problem: Sales is all about relationships. Not cold emails, not ad spend, not sending out endless LinkedIn connection requests. The best salespeople in the world are the ones who remember that a prospect just had a kid, check in on a client after a rough quarter, or send a bottle of wine when a deal finally closes. But here's the problem: when you're managing 50, 100, 200 relationships at once, the personal touch becomes impossible to maintain. Things fall through the cracks, and by the time you remember to follow up, they've already signed with your competitor. So why not use AI to give every customer the white glove treatment? Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI-powered relationship manager that ensures salespeople never let an important contact go cold by automatically tracking interactions, surfacing timely reminders, and even sending personalised messages and gifts on their behalf.
🛠️ Product:
Connect your email, calendar, and CRM and the AI builds a live relationship map of every contact - scoring warmth, flagging contacts going cold, and surfacing who needs attention today.
Set "relationship rules" for your most important contacts - check in every 30 days, acknowledge birthdays, send a follow-up after every meeting - and the AI drafts the message or orders the gift automatically.
One-click approval means you stay in control without doing the work - review, personalise if you want, hit send, and move on.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo (built on Base44) | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $49-99/month per seat. Enterprise plans for sales teams with CRM integrations and shared relationship intelligence across reps.
⭐ End Goal: Acquisition by Salesforce, HubSpot, or LinkedIn as the relationship layer every CRM is missing. 8-15x revenue multiple.
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🤝 Why trust = growth for startups
For startups competing in fast-moving markets, credibility is currency. Reliable financial operations signal that your business is disciplined and ready to scale.
BILL put together a free toolkit to help you get there:
Strengthen vendor & investor trust
Reduce errors and costly mistakes
Improve spend visibility and much, much more
7 chapters of takeaways, tips, and insights for making your job easier. Especially as you scale.
💸 The Formula for Calculating How Much Investment to Raise
The Context: Most first-time founders either over-raise (diluting themselves into oblivion) or under-raise (running out of runway before their next milestone). The answer isn't a gut feel - it's a formula. Here’s how it works.
Step-by-step:
Define your "fundable milestone" - the one thing that, if you hit it, would make your next round a near-certainty.
Estimate your monthly burn across every cost to hit that milestone - salaries, tools, marketing, legal. Be honest, not optimistic.
Multiply monthly burn by months to milestone, then add a 20% buffer. That's your number.
Run this prompt below to pressure-test your raise and check if your dilution expectations are realistic.
🔗 The Easiest Revenue Channel You're Not Using
Most SaaS founders pour money into ads. But your happiest customers? They're free salespeople who just need a nudge.
FirstPromoter lets you launch a fully-branded affiliate and referral program in minutes:
Plugs straight into Stripe, Paddle, or Chargebee - no dev time needed
Tracks every renewal, upgrade, churn, and refund automatically
Pays your affiliates in one click via PayPal
Affiliate-led growth is one of the highest-ROI channels out there. Time to turn it on.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: These guys went from $5,000 in parking tickets to a $118M Uber acquisition. Here's how. (P.S. here's yesterday's Money Shot with the correct link, my bad!)
📈 Trends with Benefits: We're hitting what people are calling the software death cross. Here's what it means for founders.
💬 Prompt Drop: This prompt library has more than 1300 prompts across different domains. Very cool.
🆓 Founder Resource: Here's the complete guide to building skills on Claude, something we're doing a lot of at Half Baked right now.
💵 Founder Deal: Startups get 90% off Intercom + 1 year of Fin free
🔍 Founder Finds
📰 Producer AI is officially joining Google Labs. Google rarely makes acquisitions, so this is a super interesting move.
📰 Stripe just published their annual letter. Their 5 levels of agentic commerce framing is particularly interesting.
💰 Elon Musk gave a 45-minute masterclass on building companies from nothing back in 2003. Still hits today.
📚 Shyam Sankar, Palantir's CTO, is one of tech's most interesting operators. This deep dive is fascinating.
💰 Ever wonder what it costs to get your brand featured on an F1 car? I certainly did. This article breaks it down beautifully.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Chat Light
Sick of colleagues interrupting you mid-flow to ask if you're busy? Spoiler: you are.
Introducing Beacon™, a small light you attach to your laptop that syncs with your calendar and focus apps to broadcast your status in real time. Green means come chat, red means back away slowly. Ignore it at your peril.
Beacon™ - Light work.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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