Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as stacked as Berkshire's record $397B war chest 💰
In today’s edition:
💡 The $40B paycheck problem nobody's solved
🛠 How to duplicate yourself into Claude in 2 hours
🔋 Turning 1,000 software companies nobody wanted into a $37B empire + more
🔍 Anthropic's $44B ARR, Meta robot M&A, Ben Horowitz masterclass + more
🍻 A device for all the looksmaxxers out there
Let’s goooo 🚀
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💸 Automated Paycheck Splitting
Sliced and Diced
Source: Chad Janis
The Problem: Few things in life feel as good as payday hitting. The deposit lands, you check the balance twice, and for a glorious 48 hours you feel like a billionaire. Then comes the slow bleed - a Friday night here, an "I deserve this" Amazon order there - and by the time the next paycheck rolls around, half the money you swore you'd set aside has evaporated. You're not alone - 68% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and most of them earn enough to save. This is a huge problem, and turns out it’s one that Chad Janis, Founder & CEO at Grüns (which he just sold for a billion dollars), has been thinking about a lot. He just appeared on my First Million where he shared an idea that he believes will solve this problem. Here’s the idea.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An automated distribution layer that sits between direct deposit and your checking account, slicing every paycheck into taxes, bills, savings, and investments before a single dollar of it becomes "spendable."
🛠️ Product:
User signs up, connects their payroll provider or bank, and sets allocation rules - percentages for taxes, bills, savings, investments, and walking-around money. The service issues a virtual deposit account that becomes their new direct deposit destination. Setup takes 5 minutes and the rules can be changed anytime.
Every paycheck hits the virtual account first and gets sliced within seconds - taxes auto-route to a high-yield holding account, investments fire straight into Wealthfront or Vanguard, bills queue up for autopay from a dedicated pot, savings drop into a 4%+ APY bucket, and only the spending slice flows into checking. A live dashboard shows every dollar's destination.
A built-in tax estimator adjusts the withholding pot quarterly using IRS data so users never get hit with a surprise bill in April. "Founder Mode" applies the Profit First framework for self-employed users - extracting a guaranteed profit slice before anything else gets paid.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Free tier with basic splits, $9/mo Pro for tax automation and investment routing, $29/mo Founder for self-employed users with Profit First extraction.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by a neobank (Chime, SoFi, Revolut), payroll provider (Gusto, Rippling), or fintech infrastructure player (Brex, Mercury) within 24 months. Target exit 10-15x ARR.
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🗺️ How to Hire, Pay, and Manage a Global Team From One Platform
Most founders scaling internationally end up with three separate tools for payroll, a different one for HR, another for contractor management - and nobody talking to each other. There's a cleaner way.
How Remote brings it all together:
One platform to hire employees and contractors in 180+ countries, compliantly
Unified payroll across every country you operate in - no switching between providers
All your HR data, contracts, and reporting in a single login
The HR and payroll engine for growing teams. No patchwork required.
🧬 How to Duplicate Yourself Into Claude in 2 Hours
The Context: Ruben Hassid (520k newsletter readers) just dropped a wild guide on how to compress your entire writing voice into a single .md file in Claude. It takes about 2 hours, runs in any AI, and you can hand it to your team or ghostwriter so they draft in your voice when you're off the clock. Here's how to do it.
Step-by-step:
Download the Claude desktop app, set Opus 4.7 as default with Extended Thinking turned on, create a "Voice" folder in Cowork, and install Wispr Flow (free) for voice dictation. Voice is faster than typing and pulls way more honest answers out of you.
Paste Ruben's first prompt into a fresh Claude chat to run yourself through 100 questions across 7 categories - beliefs, writing mechanics, aesthetic crimes, voice, structure, hard nos, and red flags. Then paste his second prompt in the same chat.
Drop the file into your Cowork folder so Claude reads it on every turn, then upload the same file to ChatGPT, Grok, or Gemini for identical voice across every AI. Edit it forever in Obsidian (free) as your taste shifts.
📰 All Your News, None of the Bias
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Every edition is researched, written, and edited by real humans - not bots. Their team scours 100+ sources daily and packages the most important stories into a 5-minute newsletter covering politics, business, science, sports, and culture. Just facts, no spin.
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🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This guy quietly built a $37B software empire by buying 1,000 companies nobody wanted. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Brain scans are revealing early dementia-like changes in kids and teens from heavy screen use. Yet another reason to avoid screens…
💬 Prompt Drop: This is the most effective Claude prompt structure out there (with a clean template you can lift directly). Worth a quick read.
🆓 Founder Resource: This Codex skill brutally stress-tests any startup idea before you spend a quarter building it. Very handy to get an insight into your idea.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 50% off Slack Pro for your first three months. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
💰 Anthropic has reportedly hit $44B in ARR, per SemiAnalysis. The most aggressive revenue ramp in software history keeps on going.
🤖 Meta just acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup building AI models for robots, as Zuck doubles down on humanoid hardware. Maybe Zuck wants some robot friends?
🎓 Ben Horowitz dropped a 49-minute Sequoia masterclass on what makes a great founder. It’s two months old but going viral again. Ben is the man.
🎙️ David Senra just sat down with Adam Foroughi (AppLovin CEO) for what's already being called one of the best Founders pod episodes ever.
🧑⚖️ MTS just built a Wiki from the transcripts of the Musk v. Altman trial so we can figure out what’s actually going on in the case. Super cool.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Looksmaxxing Mask
Tired of waking up with the same disappointing face you went to bed with? Wish your skincare routine came with a side of blunt force trauma?
Introducing MaxxMask™, a sleek face visor that straps on at bedtime and delivers 8 hours of "rhythmic micro-percussion" to your mandible, cheekbones, and brow ridge while you sleep. Hits like a hammer while you sleep like a baby.
MaxxMask™ - Snooze and bruise.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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