Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as divisive as Ferrari's new Jony Ive-designed EV 🤢
In today’s edition:
💡 An AI to predict how a launch will land
🛠 How to use Claude Design for prototyping and UX
🔋 Turning e-commerce logistics into a $425M business + more
🔍 SpaceX merger, Stord raise, OpenRouter unicorn + more
🍻 The protein source literally nobody asked for
Let’s goooo 🚀
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🚀 AI Launch Simulator
Don’t flop me now
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: If you happened to go on the internet today you probably saw that Ferrari just unveiled the Luce, its first ever EV, after five years of design work with Jony Ive and his team. And the reaction was…not great. Within minutes of the launch, socials were swarmed with people making fun of the car (rightfully so in my opinion) and Ferrari’s share price dropped 6% by Tuesday morning, wiping €3.7bn off the company's market cap overnight. That means that Ferrari have the honor of joining the list of other brand launches that flopped in recent times - Tropicana, Gap, Jaguar of course. So what if there was a tool that these brands (or actually any company) could use to predict how their launch will go? Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI platform that predicts how a brand or product launch will be received before it's announced, through synthetic personas and AI-conducted interviews with potential buyers.
🛠️ Product:
A brand uploads their unreleased design, campaign, or product alongside their audience profile.
The synthetic layer fires within a few hours - 10,000 AI personas calibrated to your actual buyer demographics react to the work, generating a predicted sentiment curve and surfacing any viral attack vectors.
The platform also layers in human verification, where AI conducts adaptive 15-minute voice/text interviews with hundreds of verified members of the brand’s target audience and returns a synthesised report in 48 hours.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo
💼 Business Model: Charge per launch by brand size. Indie/SMB launches at $2,500, mid-market at $15k, enterprise heritage brands at $50k+ with calibrated vertical models.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by a market research incumbent (Nielsen, Kantar, Qualtrics) or a social listening giant (Brandwatch, Sprinklr) looking to move from reactive monitoring into predictive intelligence. 6-10x revenue multiple.
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💵 Your International Payroll is Running on Spreadsheets and Hope.
Managing payroll manually across multiple countries - different currencies, different tax rules, different pay cycles - is one of the highest-risk tasks a scaling company takes on. The average compliance error costs $42k to fix.
How Remote Payroll fixes it:
Accurate, compliant payroll runs across every country you operate in - in local currency
Replaces your patchwork of providers, manual inputs, and reconciliation headaches
Built-in updates when local tax laws or regulations change, so you're never caught off guard
Built for companies that can't afford payroll mistakes.
🎨 How to Use Claude Design for Prototyping and UX
The Context: Claude Design lets product folks go from a feature idea to an interactive, working prototype in a single conversation. It's super useful when you want to test layouts or hand off cleanly to engineering without rebuilding from scratch. Here’s how to prototype using it.
Step-by-step:
Open Claude Design and describe the feature you want to prototype in plain language - e.g. "design a settings page for a SaaS app with sections for account, billing, notifications, and integrations". Be specific about screens, components, and the user actions you want to trigger.
Connect your codebase via GitHub or a local directory using the Import button. Claude now designs with your real components, styling, and architectural patterns - so the prototype lines up with what you actually ship.
Iterate inline. Ask Claude to generate 2-3 alternative approaches (card-based vs sidebar vs tabs), refine layouts, and show edge cases - empty states, errors, loading - before signing off on a direction.
Hand off to Claude Code by clicking Export → Hand off to Claude Code. The prototype, design decisions, and codebase context all transfer, so engineers build on your work instead of reinterpreting it from a Figma file.
✍️ How to Make AI Writing Actually Sound Like You
You're probably using AI to write emails, pitch decks, investor updates...and just about everything else. The problem? So is every other founder, and your readers can tell. Grammarly fixes that.
What it does:
Humanizer rewrites AI text to match your natural voice
Reader Reactions previews how your message lands before you hit send
Works across email, docs, and browser with zero tab switching
40M+ people use Grammarly and it’s 100% free to start.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This guy’s e-commerce logistics company just got acquired today for $425M. This is his story.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Software engineer job postings are rising rapidly, even with AI agents now writing huge chunks of production code. Big narrative violation.
💬 Prompt Drop: This prompt makes Claude brutally honest with you. Use when necessary.
🆓 Founder Resource: This one-pager on how to automate anything in your life using AI in <10 minutes is pretty cool.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 50% off the first three months of Slack Pro. Claim the deal.
🔍 Founder Finds
🚀 Elon Musk is reportedly considering merging SpaceX and Tesla after SpaceX's June 12th IPO. Combined value: $2.6 trillion. Ticker symbol “MUSK” I guess?
📦 Stord just raised $250M at a $3B valuation, doubling its valuation in just 12 months. Nice for some…
🤖 OpenRouter just raised a $113M Series B at a $1.3B valuation led by Alphabet's CapitalG. Everybody’s out here getting rich today wow.
👋 Drew Houston is stepping down as Dropbox CEO after nearly 20 years. Co-CEO Ashraf Alkarmi takes over while Houston eyes his next move - reportedly an AI startup (surprise surprise).
🧠 Paul Graham dropped a sharp take on startup ideas on X. PG is always worth listening to.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Chicken Shake
Struggling to hit your daily protein goal? Wish you could get your daily dose of protein in a single drink?
Introducing CluckBulk™, the world's first chicken-based protein drink. 150g of pure protein in every bottle made from 100% chicken. Tastes exactly how you'd expect.
CluckBulk™ - winner winner, chicken (shake) dinner.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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