Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as Anthropic suing the US Government 🧑⚖
In today’s edition:
💡 Helping product teams decide what to build next
🛠 How to make killer slides with Claude and Gamma
🔋 From a bedroom blog to a $320M car marketplace + more
🔍 Meta acquisition, $1B raise, MIT reading guide + more
🍻 Getting some peace and quiet from your four-legged friend
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Macbook Neo Giveaway: This week we’re teaming up with Apollo to give away one of our readers a free MacBook Neo to help them on their founder journey. In order to enter simply:
Sign up to our Masterclass tomorrow
Reply to this email with the word “Masterclass“
Good luck!
🎯 Product Feature Prioritization Engine
Hear, hear
Source: Ben Wallace, Chief of Staff at Kibu
The Problem: Building a software product usually has three stages. Stage 1 is the "What tf do we build?" phase where you're drowning in feedback from Slack messages, customer calls, team ideas, error logs and more. Stage 2 is the "We know what to build, let's scope it", where you move to Linear or Jira to prioritize. Stage 3 finally is the "let’s build it" phase where you start shipping features. While you’re spoilt for choice for stages 2 and 3, almost nothing helps with stage 1 - the messy, unstructured chaos of figuring out what actually matters. Your customers are complaining in Slack, Sentry errors are screaming, and buried somewhere in your Granola meeting notes is that one feature three different users asked for last week. But what if you could solve stage 1 by actually hearing what users are telling you across every channel? Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A platform that aggregates every feedback channel, active (Slack, meetings, support) and passive (Sentry, logs, session recordings), to help product teams decide what to build.
🛠️ Product:
Connect your existing tools in minutes. Slack, Intercom, Sentry, Granola, whatever you use. The platform starts ingesting feedback from every active and passive channel automatically.
AI identifies patterns across channels, linking a Slack complaint to a Sentry error to a support ticket, then ranks issues by business impact so you know exactly what to build next.
When you're ready for stage 2, one click exports scoped, prioritized tickets straight to Linear or Jira - turning months of messy feedback into a clear roadmap in minutes.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Freemium with usage-based pricing. Free for up to 3 channels and 1,000 feedback events/month. Pro ($149/month) for unlimited channels, AI triage, and integrations.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by a product analytics company (Amplitude, Mixpanel) or a customer success platform (Gainsight, Totango) at 10-15x revenue multiple.
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📬 Live Masterclass for Founders Who Need Customers (Or Want More of Them)
Selling is something every founder needs to do. And right now, if you're not using AI to sell, you're going to get left behind.
That's why tomorrow we've recruited one of the top sales educators in the world, James O'Sullivan from Apollo, to walk you through how to build an AI-powered outbound system from scratch - from finding the right prospects to automating outreach.
Whether you've never done outbound before or you're a seasoned vet, this session will give you a clear system you can implement right away.
And we're only doing it once, so register your spot now. Seats are limited!
📅 Wednesday (tomorrow) at 6pm GMT / 2pm ET / 11am PT
🎨 How to Make Slides with Claude and Gamma
The Context: Most founders spend hours wrestling with slide decks when they should be building. Ruben Hassid just shared a 9-step framework for using Claude and Gamma together to go from idea to polished presentation in minutes. The key insight? Don't let AI jump straight to slides. Make it research and outline first.
Step-by-step:
Define your task and success criteria, then upload context files (brand guidelines, expertise docs) so Claude has the full picture before it starts.
Upload a reference deck you like and tell Claude to research the topic with at least 5 varied searches before touching a single slide.
Have Claude create a slide brief where each slide gets a title, 3 key points, and specific data from the research - and review it before generating.
Pass the approved outline to Gamma with your brand theme, and let it handle the final design.
📋 Tax Season Doesn't Care That You're Building a Startup
You've got a W-9 from a new contractor, a 1099-NEC to file, and your accountant just emailed three forms that need your signature by Friday. Welcome to founder tax season.
pdfFiller makes it painless:
Find, fill, and eSign IRS tax forms directly from their online library
Edit any PDF from your browser or phone. No printing, no scanning
Send docs to your accountant or co-founder for signature in minutes
56 million users trust pdfFiller with their documents. Tax season included.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This bedroom blogger built a $320M car marketplace. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: The next $1T company might be a software company masquerading as a services firm. Learn more
💬 Prompt Drop: If you want to build AI agents using OpenClaw, this prompt is for you.
🆓 Founder Resource: Check out Anthropic’a AI Jobs Report, a 17-page deep-dive on how AI is reshaping jobs across industries.
💵 Founder Deal: Get a 45-day free trial of Wispr Flow, our most-used AI tool at Half Baked.
🔍 Founder Finds
🦞 Meta just acquired Moltbook, the social network for AI agents. Not sure what to make of this one…
🧠 AMI just raised $1B to build AI systems with persistent memory, reasoning, and planning capabilities. One of the biggest AI rounds we've seen this year.
💼 Legora, the legal AI startup, just raised $550M at a $5.5B valuation to speed up US expansion.
🤖 Figure showed off Helix 02 tidying an entire room autonomously. Humanoid robots just went from demo to domestic.
📚 MIT recently dropped a guide on how to remember everything you read. Great founders read a lot. The best founders remember everything they read.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Sound-proof Kennel
Does your dog bark at everything? The mailman, a leaf, its own reflection? Trying to get some peace and quiet?
Introducing Zennel™, the world's first noise-canceling kennel. It shields your dog from the thunderstorms and fireworks that turn them into a trembling mess, AND shields you from the barking that's definitely not helping your deep work sessions.
Zennel™ - Bark to the future.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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