Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as hotly anticipated as the Social Network sequel 🤩
Let’s get into it 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 Bringing more perks to the remote work world
📈 Why former founders are in huge demand
🛠 Get OpenAI’s prompts for different roles
🤑 From the CIA to a $1.7B coffee company
🍻 Bringing old technology into the new world
🎁 Remote Work Perk Platform
Perk it
The Problem: Tech companies are famous for their perks. Free snacks, ping pong tables, catered lunches…the list goes on. But now, with over 15% of US jobs being fully remote businesses are struggling to maintain team culture and keep employees engaged since many of these old office perks don’t really apply to remote workers. So, with 45% of remote workers feeling disconnected from their company's culture, businesses need a new way to show their employees they care. Here’s how they can.
The Solution:
A platform that allows companies to offer meaningful, localized perks to their remote employees.
A company sets a monthly perk budget for each employee and they can choose from a curated list of perk categories (e.g., coffee, lunch, wellness, co-working).
The platform issues a virtual credit card to each employee, making it easy to spend their perk budget without having to file expense reports.
Rate this idea:
🤑 Close Deals Faster with monday CRM
Running a startup means every deal counts, and you can’t afford to waste time wrestling with a clunky CRM. monday.com CRM gives founders a simple, powerful way to stay on top of their sales:
🚀 Automate follow-ups so you never drop the ball
📊 Build custom pipelines that scale with your vision
📬 Send mass emails and track every reply in one place
Less time wasting, more momentum, more success.
👔 Why Former Founders are in Huge Demand
The Trend: Former founders are the hottest commodity in Silicon Valley right now (aside from this $30K baby naming consultant apparently…). The team at Lovable just released an article on this topic, and Ramp famously hires a huge number of ex-founders. Why? Because former founders are some of the highest agency people out there. Sure they’re a little insane (let’s be honest), but if you can channel that insanity, they can move the needle inside companies.
Opportunities:
Founder Talent Marketplace: A recruiting platform specifically for matching former founders and serial entrepreneurs with companies
Founder Mindset Assessment: Tools that help companies identify and hire people who think like owners, regardless of their actual founding experience.
💬 Get OpenAI’s Prompts for Any Role
The Tool: AI is only as good as the prompts its fed. That’s why OpenAI has been compiling prompts for different roles which they recently decided to share. Here’s how to get them.
Step-by-step:
Go to this link and find your role (or just find it in the list below, we’ve made it super easy)
Use the time you’re saving at work to start a business.
Buy us a beer after you’ve made your first million
🩺 Your Health is Your Wealth
As a founder, you obsess over company's metrics. Revenue, run rate, churn. But what about your most valuable asset? Your health.
That's where Function Health comes in.
Function Health is a tech unicorn that offers a groundbreaking health membership that gives you access to 160+ lab tests and advanced, FDA-cleared MRI scans, all designed to detect diseases before symptoms appear for a few hundred dollars per year. Oh, and scans take just 22 minutes.
Because no amount of wealth matters without your health.
☕ From the CIA to a $1.7B Coffee Company
The Idea: Evan Hafer spent 20 years carrying a rifle for his country. First as a Green Beret, then through dozens of CIA deployments to the world's most dangerous places. But his real passion was brewing the perfect cup of coffee in impossible conditions. While his Special Forces buddies were home-brewing beer, Evan was obsessing over coffee beans, trying to figure out how to make great coffee on deployment or in the backcountry. He pictured owning a coffee shop with his kids underfoot. This was the inspiration for Black Rifle Coffee Company (BRCC).
The Execution:
2014: Evan founded BRCC in Salt Lake City with co-founders Mat Best (Army Ranger), Jarred Taylor (Air Force TACP), and Jeff Kirkham (Green Beret/CIA), starting with a one-pound roaster in his garage.
2016: Major crisis - fulfillment issues crippled the business, so every employee (including executives) worked 8-10 hours daily in fulfillment, shipping 24,000 boxes in 3 days to catch up.
2017: Gained national attention by pledging to hire 10,000 veterans in response to Starbucks controversy, establishing their pro-military brand positioning.
2019: Reached $80M revenue with 200+ employees (40% veterans), 1.25M Facebook followers, and viral videos throughout veteran/first responder communities.
2022: Completed $1.7B SPAC merger with SilverBox, raising $150M to accelerate growth and veteran hiring initiatives, becoming a publicly traded company.
Evan proved that mission-driven businesses can scale massively when they authentically serve their community. As military service is serving your country, entrepreneurship is serving your customers. Evan proves that.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Lovable just released Lovable Cloud, a way to build apps with complex AI and backend functionality.
📰 Headline: Claude just launched Claude Sonnet 4.5, the world’s leading coding model (according to them at least).
🎙️ Must-Listen: Daniel Ek (Spotify Founder) on David Senra’s podcast is a must-listen.
📚 Must-Read: When Julian Schrittwieser writes something, it’s worth reading.
💬 Founder Quote: “Don’t scale until you’re sure you have something worth scaling.” Des Traynor (Intercom)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Smart Headstone
Ever wish your legacy could be binge-watched? Tired of your story ending with just a slab of granite?
Meet TombHub™, the world’s first streaming platform for the afterlife. Friends, family, and overly curious strangers can subscribe to your eternal highlight reel, swipe through your best selfies, and even leave a comment that you’ll definitely never reply to.
TombHub™ - rest in pixels.
Vote
🔦 Reader Spotlight: Meet Zach
What are you building? Imagine never leaving your drink behind again. I’m building a smart drink tracking device that makes sure your bottle is always with you.
How did you come up with the idea? It started with me constantly abandoning coffee mugs in random offices. That frustration sparked the idea.
How can Half Baked readers help? Building hardware is tough. I’m deciding whether to create proprietary tech or adapt existing devices. Let me know if you have any connections which can help me with this task.
Connect with Zach: Zach on LinkedIn
P.S: If you want your startup or project featured, click here!
👋 That’s All Folks!
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