Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Meta shutting down their Metaverse (time for a name change I think…) 🥴
In today’s edition:
💡 Bringing an epic Claude feature to the rest of the software world
🛠 How to find a product idea people will actually pay for
🔋 From playlists to a $1.8B health unicorn + more
🔍 Nvidia, Anthropic, Paraform raise + more
🍻 The ultimate “fitness” wearable
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x Airwallex: This week we've partnered with Airwallex to offer one Half Baked reader a complimentary expert call on Intro.co (worth up to a thousand dollars) matched to wherever you are on your founder journey.
To be considered, just:
Check out Airwallex
Reply to this email with the word “Intro”
Good luck!
🧠 Verticalized Planning Mode Agent
We love it when a plan comes together
Source: Shravan Reddy, Partner @ Pear VC
The Problem: As you’ve probably noticed from the newsletter lately, we at Half Baked have become totally “Claudepilled”. Claude CoWork, Claude Code, if it’s got to do with Claude we’re probably using it. But the best thing about Claude? Planning mode in Claude Code. "Plan mode" forces the agent to iterate on an approach with the developer before writing a single line of code, dramatically improving output by surfacing bad assumptions upfront. The chatbots most knowledge workers use today have no equivalent. Ask ChatGPT to build a financial model and it happily produces something polished but 60-70% of the way there - built on unchallenged assumptions nobody thought to question. That’s why Shravan Reddy, Partner @ Pear VC, sees an opportunity here. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A vertical AI agent that brings the “plan-then-execute” paradigm to domains like sales, marketing, and finance
🛠️ Product:
Connect your CRM, docs, and prior work, then describe what you're trying to do. The agent doesn't immediately produce output. Instead it asks clarifying questions, flags what's missing, and proposes a structured plan of attack before touching execution.
Once you've pressure-tested the approach together - agreed on the audience, the constraints, the goal - the agent executes against a brief you've both aligned on, not one it invented on your behalf.
Every plan, assumption, and decision gets logged as it goes. The tool becomes the institutional memory for how your team makes decisions - and the natural next step is the agent executing autonomously, with a track record you actually trust.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $50-100/user/month per vertical (sales, marketing, finance). Enterprise plans unlock cross-functional access and full decision audit trails.
⭐ End Goal: Acquisition by Salesforce, HubSpot, or Microsoft in the $500M-$1B range - they need the planning layer their AI copilots are missing.
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🎬 Today's AI CFO Masterclass Was…Pretty Epic
A lot of founders have no idea how to track their company’s performance. Today, we fixed that - live, in real time, with AI.
What we built:
A 6-month Cash P&L from a raw bank export - in minutes
A weekly CFO dashboard that updates itself
A 13-week cash flow forecast that tells you exactly when you'll run out of money
Due to popular demand we’ve uploaded a replay of the session here, check it out if you’re interested (and get all the prompts for the masterclass here for free).
Airwallex sponsored the session and is giving Half Baked readers their first $50K of FX completely free.
Check out Airwallex.
📊 How to Find a Product Idea People Will Actually Pay For
The Context: Most founders sit down to "come up with an idea" - and that's exactly the problem. The ideas worth building come from observation, not imagination. Here's the framework.
Step-by-step:
Stop brainstorming, start observing - write down problems you hit daily, tasks that clearly should be automated, and complaints you hear repeatedly.
Go where ideas already live - scan Product Hunt, Reddit (r/SideProject), YC's Requests for Startups, and X. You're looking for what people are already asking for.
Validate before building - does a similar product exist? Are people paying for it? Competitors already existing is a green light, not a red one.
Find your angle - you don't need to beat the market leader. Find a narrower audience you can serve 10x better, or a gap they're ignoring.
Test before you write code - post about it on X, DM potential customers, offer to solve the problem manually for 3-5 people first. No engagement = wrong idea.
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Plus you get:
America's largest 5G network with a 5-year price guarantee (exclusions like taxes & fees apply)
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Your team's growing. Your phone bill doesn't have to. Learn more on T-Mobile's website.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: These guys went from playlists to building a $1.8B Health Unicorn. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Nothing CEO Carl Pei says smartphone apps will disappear as AI agents take their place. He could be onto something…
💬 Prompt Drop: Thariq Shihipar just shared his lessons from building Claude Code. Required reading if you're building anything with AI agents right now…
🆓 Founder Resource: Anthropic just invited Claude users to share how they use AI, what they dream it could make possible, and what they fear it might do. This is fascinating.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 12 months of ElevenLabs free with their startup grant program. Perfect for founders building voice AI products.
🔍 Founder Finds
💰 Nvidia is quietly building a multibillion-dollar behemoth to rival its chips business. That’s what’s up.
🚀 Anthropic just launched a new feature in Claude Cowork called Dispatch, one persistent conversation with Claude that runs on your computer.
🫰 Paraform just raised $65M to build an agentic hiring platform that makes hiring as easy as pressing a button.
📈 Deel just hit $1.4B in ARR. The global payroll and HR platform keeps printing cash.
🃏 Polymarket just launched The Situation Room, the world's first bar dedicated to “monitoring the situation”. I wanna go…
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Whoop for Drinking
Have a few too many drinks for Paddy’s Day? Wish you could know exactly how drunk you are at any given time?
Introducing BoozeBand™, the world's first Whoop-for-drinking. It’s a wristband that monitors your blood alcohol level through your skin in real time, buzzes at key thresholds, and tells you if you're sober enough to drive (or at least coherent enough to order food).
BoozeBand™ - Blood, sweat, and beers.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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