Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as impressive as Nvidia's $68 billion quarter (the AI boom is still on) 📈
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to really focus on
🛠 The "five whys" customer interview framework
🔋 From zero to $4.5B in two years + more
🔍 Perplexity Computer, Suno's milestone, third era of AI + more
🍻 Making gains by the glass
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 simply:
Go to this link and check out the e-book
Reply to this email with one thing the word “toolkit”
Get after it!
🎯 AI Focus Group Platform
Group Think
Available domain: Candid.ai
The Problem: Every year, companies spend $80 billion on market research. And a big chunk of that goes to focus groups, where companies rent a beige conference room in a business park, recruit 8 strangers who gorge on the free food, and watching them tell you why your product sucks. This scene in Silicon Valley pretty much nails what they’re like. Amazingly, the average focus group costs $15,000-$50,000 per study, takes 6 weeks to organise, and produces insights that are often completely wrong because of one fatal flaw: people lie when other people are watching. One loud guy in the room says he loves the new logo and suddenly everyone loves the new logo. $30,000 well spent. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI platform that conducts qualitative research interviews at scale - recruiting real participants, interviewing them conversationally, and synthesising findings into boardroom-ready reports in 48 hours for a fraction of the cost.
🛠️ Product:
Companies define their target customer profile and research objective, and Candid recruits matched participants from a vetted panel of 100,000+ consumers (who get paid to participate)
The AI conducts natural, adaptive one-on-one voice interviews - probing deeper on interesting answers, skipping irrelevant questions, and capturing nuance that a checkbox survey never could
Findings are automatically synthesised into structured insight reports with sentiment analysis, theme clustering, and direct quote evidence - delivered in 48 hours, not 6 weeks
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo (built on Base44) | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: SaaS + usage pricing. $499/month base for up to 3 studies, plus a fee per participant. Enterprise plans for agencies and research teams.
⭐ End Goal: Acquisition by a major market research firm (Nielsen, Kantar, Qualtrics) looking to AI-enable their offering. 5-8x revenue multiple.
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🔮 Is your Startup Exposed to Future Disruptions?
Inflation. Supply chain chaos. Changing regulations. The business landscape keeps shifting - and the founders who come out ahead are the ones building resilient operations right now.
BILL's free toolkit helps you prepare:
Assess your startup's resiliency
Use automation to future-proof your financial ops
Build trust with investors & vendors as you scale
Download it free today.
🎯 The "Five Whys" Customer Interview Framework
The Context: Most founders walk into customer interviews and ask leading questions like "Would you pay for a tool that does X?" - then celebrate when people say yes. Spoiler: people are polite. They'll say yes to almost anything. The Five Whys method, originally developed by Toyota to find root causes of manufacturing defects, forces you to dig past surface-level answers until you hit the real pain point. Here’s how it works.
Step-by-step:
Find 5-10 people who fit your target customer profile (LinkedIn, Reddit, Slack communities) and ask for a 15-minute call - don't mention your idea, just say you're researching how they handle [problem area].
Start with one open question like "Tell me about the last time you dealt with [problem]" - then every time they give an answer, ask "Why?" or "Why was that a problem?" five times to drill past the symptom and into the root cause.
Listen for emotional language ("it's so frustrating", "I dread doing this", "I've tried everything") - that's where the real pain lives. If they describe the problem calmly with no urgency, it's a nice-to-have, not a must-have.
After all interviews, look for patterns - if 3+ people independently describe the same root pain in similar emotional terms, you've found a problem worth building for.
Give it a try!
🏗️ Build your Affiliate Program Once. Let it Run Forever.
The best thing about a well-set-up affiliate channel? It compounds. Quietly. In the background. While you're doing everything else.
FirstPromoter is built for exactly that:
One platform for affiliates, influencers, and referral partners
Recurring commissions that stay in sync with your billing automatically
Mass payouts in one click - no chasing invoices, no PayPal chaos
Set it up this week. Benefit from it for years.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: These guys went from zero to $4.5B in two years. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: We are witnessing the biggest explosion in software creation in history. These charts from the FT are insane.
💬 Prompt Drop: Steal this Claude mega prompt that writes viral YouTube Shorts scripts
🆓 Founder Resource: Your pitch deck has 90 seconds to survive the VC skim test. Here's a free template that helps it make the cut. Steal it, fill it, go build.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 12 months of ElevenLabs for free with their startup grant program.
🔍 Founder Finds
🚀 Perplexity just launched Computer, their super agent orchestrates 19 AI models to handle entire workflows seamlessly. This is epic.
💰 Suno, the AI music creation platform, just hit 2M paid subscribers and $300M ARR, making it one of the fastest growing products in the world.
💰 Michael Truell, Cursor’s founder, says we've entered the third era of AI software development, and if he's right, the next wave of tools hasn't been built yet.
📚 Steve Jobs gave this lecture at MIT in 1992, and it will teach you more about product and sales than most MBA programs.
🔮 Ray Kurzweil is doubling down on his AGI by 2029 prediction. at this point it's getting harder to bet against him.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Protein Wine
Sick of choosing between gains and a glass of red? Tired of your nutritionist judging your Friday night?
Introducing Protein Vin™, the world's first protein-fortified wine. 25g of whey protein per bottle, zero guilt, and it pairs beautifully with a post-leg-day cheat meal. Available in Merlot and Chardonnay.
Protein Vin™ - Pinot gainsio.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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