Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Meta’s first wave of layoffs 🫠
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea to give CEOs an ear on the ground
🛠 How to build prototypes with Claude Design
🔋 From 7 failed pivots to a $500M business + more
🔍 Codex update, Sequoia fund, Slash raise + more
🍻 A product for when coffee just takes too long
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x BILL: This week we've partnered with BILL to offer one Half Baked reader a new MacBook Neo, Mac Mini or Airpods Max to support them on their founder journey. To be considered, just:
Check out BILL here (it really helps us out)
Reply to this email with which device we should send you
Good luck!
🧠 AI Agent for Operational Intelligence
(C)-Suite dreams
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: Every CEO thinks they know how their company works. They don't. They know the org chart, the KPIs, and the version of reality that survived three layers of middle-management polishing on the way up to the board deck. What they don't know is that the onboarding process actually takes 23 days because of a spreadsheet Karen maintains manually, or that half the sales team has quietly stopped using the CRM, or that the "approval workflow" is really just Dave on WhatsApp. 80% of operational knowledge is tacit - trapped in employees' heads, absent from every SOP, and completely invisible to leadership. Which is why 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots are flopping: you can't automate what you don't actually understand. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI agent that figures out exactly how an enterprise actually works by interviewing employees directly, watching them walk through their workflows, and turning it all into a living operational map leadership can finally query.
🛠️ Product:
A leader submits a question their last business review couldn't answer ("why does onboarding take 23 days?") and Fathom auto-identifies the 15-40 employees to interview, then runs 20-minute AI voice conversations that probe, follow up, and surface what surveys never catch.
During each interview, employees can opt into sharing their screen to walk through how they actually do the work - narrating edge cases, workarounds, and "the system doesn't let me do X so I have to..." moments that pure observation tools like Celonis or UiPath would completely miss.
Everything gets compiled into a living operational map of the company - with process flows, automation opportunities, and an MCP-compatible context layer leadership can query directly ("where are our biggest bottlenecks?") and that every AI tool in the company can plug into for 10x more accurate outputs.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Land large enterprise contracts with a one-off fee to map how the business actually works, then recurring annual fees to keep the map live, feed in new processes, and give leadership ongoing query access etc.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Microsoft, ServiceNow or Celonis once the context layer becomes load-bearing infrastructure for enterprise AI.
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🔥 You're Running a Business. You Shouldn't Be Reconciling Expenses.
Between fundraising, hiring, and shipping - manually tracking who spent what is not a good use of your time. And a spreadsheet isn't an expense management system.
How BILL Spend & Expense fixes it:
Free software powered by a Visa business card - automate reports, set team budgets, see every transaction live
Customers save an average of $10k+ per month and 12 hours of finance admin
94% of users would recommend it to a friend
Right now, new customers get $500 back when they spend their first $500.
🎨 How to Build Prototypes With Claude Design
The Context: Anthropic Labs just launched Claude Design - a new way to make prototypes, slides, and one-pagers just by talking to Claude. It's powered by Claude Opus 4.7 (Anthropic's most capable vision model) and is rolling out today. Here's how to use it to ship your first prototype before lunch.
Step-by-step:
Go to this link, and describe what you want in plain English - "a landing page for a dog-walking app with a booking flow and testimonial section." Claude builds the first version in seconds. No code, no Figma, no tutorials.
Refine the design the way you'd refine a doc - drop inline comments on any element, make direct edits yourself, or use the custom sliders to tweak spacing, colour, and hierarchy. Every change updates the underlying design live and stays consistent across pages.
Once the design clicks, export to Canva for polishing, export as PDF or PPTX for stakeholders, or hand off straight to Claude Code to turn it into shippable React.
🤖 The Help Center that Never Goes Out of Date
Create stunning, SEO and AI optimized help docs that stay up to date on autopilot with Ferndesk.
Their AI agent:
Writes your help docs
Takes annotated screenshots for you
Responds to your customers while you sleep
Use code HALFBAKED30 at checkout to get 30% off your first month with Ferndesk.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: These two Cornell grads went through 7 failed pivots before building a $500M documentation business. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: “Contracted ARR” is a new, slightly sketchy way that a lot of startups are using to measure revenue right now. Is Contracted ARR the new “community-adjusted EBITDA”?
💬 Prompt Drop: This vibe coding prompt gives really good structure to help you build exactly what you want.
🆓 Founder Resource: As a founder you need to be building your personal brand. Here’s how to create a content scheduling system to build yours.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 3 months of Notion free for your team. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
🧠 OpenAI just shipped a major Codex update, bringing new agentic capabilities to its coding platform.
💰 Sequoia just raised $7B for its new expansion fund - nearly double their last one.
💳 Slash, a Ramp competitor started by teenagers, just raised $100M at a $1.4B valuation. The kids are alright apparently.
👥 Eigen just raised $15M from Benchmark to build a "mutual friend" that helps you belong and grow together. Social app summer is officially here.
🛠️ Alex Vacca just published the playbook on how to build a services-as-software business. If you're building in AI, this is worth a look.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Chewable Coffee
Running late and no time for a coffee? Wish your caffeine fix came without the stained teeth and 3pm crash?
Introducing Chewppuccino™, the world's first pre-ground coffee chewing gum that delivers 80mg of caffeine in 5 minutes of chewing. Comes in Espresso, Oat Milk Latte and Mocha flavours.
Chewppuccino™ - Grounds for celebration.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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