Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Sam Altman’s “rough vibes“ memo 🧐
As part of the Half Baked x Bolt Hackathon we’ll be going live on X on Monday at 6PM GMT | 1PM ET | 10AM PT to give live feedback on some hackathon participants’ builds. RSVP here.
Let’s get into it 🚀
In today’s edition:
💡 A product piggybacking on a generational trend
📈 What Mixup tells us about the future of apps
🛠 How to prevent “vibe code” styling in your apps
🤑 How three friends built a $10B business
🍻 What can only be described as a “hairbrained“ idea
🏦 TurboTax for Small Business Exits
Setting sale
Available Domain: Exiteer.ai
The Problem: In the U.S. alone, an estimated $10 trillion in small businesses are expected to change hands as boomers retire and their millennial or Gen-Z kids take over for them. But what about the businesses no one wants to take over? They’ll be sold. Millions of them will be, to individual buyers, Private Equity funds, rollups etc., all of which will be looking for detailed financials, quality of earnings reports and lots of other analysis as part of a deal, something most of these businesses won’t have to hand. So why not create a platform to automatically generate this data for them? Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
In a line: An automated “exit readiness” platform that plugs into a small business’s financial stack, cleans and standardizes their numbers, and packages them into a broker/buyer-ready package.
Product:
🔌 The business owner signs up and securely connects their bank accounts and accounting software (like QuickBooks or Xero) via API to the platform.
🧹 The system uses AI to identify and isolate "add-backs" (personal expenses like cars or meals run through the business), instantly recasting the financials to show the true Seller Discretionary Earnings (SDE).
📈 A dashboard tracks a real-time "Exit Readiness Score" and provides a rough valuation, giving the owner a checklist of tasks needed to maximize their sale price.
🤝 Once the business hits a "Ready" status, the platform automatically shares the data with vetted brokers or lists the businesses on marketplaces.
Prototyping
Here’s the prompt we used to build it
Fork your own version of this app
Business Model: A monthly SaaS fee for the "Readiness Dashboard" ($99/mo) plus a 1% success fee or "referral commission" from the broker upon the final sale.
End Goal: Sell to an SMB marketplace (e.g. BizBuySell-type platforms) or a major broker network serving SMEs for a 7–10x revenue multiple
Rate this idea:
▶ Missed the Hackathon Launch Event? You’re in Luck
Last night we officially launched the 10-Day Founder Hackathon in association with Bolt! It was a great event, with over 1,200 people joining us live to hear Eric Simons (Bolt’s CEO) give us some insights into his entrepreneurial journey, roast some of our startup ideas and show off his favorite pair of sunglasses (they look great).
And if you missed the event that’s totally cool, we get it, life gets in the way sometimes.
That’s why we recorded the whole thing so all of you can watch it whenever you want. Enjoy!
🖼️ The Future of Apps Lies in Accessibility
The Trend: While AI capabilities are exploding, consumer adoption hasn’t kept pace. The bottleneck isn’t power, it’s accessibility. That’s why a whole wave of builders are focused on turning raw AI horsepower into interfaces normal humans can actually use. Mixup is a great example. It’s a Mad Libs-style image generator where you just fill in a few blanks with words, photos, or doodles. It’s a tiny interface tweak that instantly unlocks generative art for the masses. Clearly the real opportunity now sits with anyone who can take cutting-edge models and wrap them in simple, human-first interfaces.
Opportunities:
"Remixable" Merch Store: A print-on-demand service where users create a design using a "recipe," and the platform instantly mocks it up on hoodies/mugs, paying a royalty to the original "recipe" creator.
AI "Meme Maker" Social Network: A dedicated social network focusing purely on "Mixable" memes, where the template (text setup) stays fixed, and users compete to upload the funniest photo/doodle inserts to complete the joke.
🎨 How to Prevent “Vibe Code” Styling in Your Apps
The Tool: Tools like Bolt are unbelievably good at spinning up apps super quickly. But there’s a problem…a lot of these apps end up looking pretty similar. Here’s how to build an app that avoids the default “vibe code” styling.
Step-by-step:
Create your prompt to build your app as usual.
Add this text to the end of your prompt.
Make any other changes you need to the design by further prompting.
🔮 She called Bitcoin and Tesla Early... Hear What's Next.
Over 25,000 people will attend the Finimize Modern Investor Summit on December 2nd to 3rd. Join them – and world-class speakers – to explore the trends shaping wealth creation: AI, Big Tech, digital assets, and long-term investing.
Headliners Cathie Wood (CIO, ARK Invest) and Chris Hughes (Facebook cofounder) join 20+ expert speakers revealing how today’s biggest trends are shaping the future of wealth.
Attend online or in person in London.
💼 How Three Friends Built a $10B Business
The Idea: Joshua Reeves, Edward Kim, and Tomer London (three Stanford alumni) weren't exactly dreaming of tax forms and compliance codes. But while running previous startups, they all encountered the same nightmare: the antiquated, clunky, and frankly miserable experience of running payroll. It was an industry defined by fear, bureaucracy, and penalties. So they decided to do something about it. This was the beginning of Gusto.
The Execution:
2011: The trio moved into a house in Palo Alto (classic Silicon Valley style) and started building their product.
Winter 2012: The trio joined Y Combinator. They spent months obsessing over the MVP, focusing strictly on California initially to master the complex tax laws of just one state before scaling.
December 2012: They officially launched ZenPayroll. The "growth hack" was radical empathy and design. They made the "You got paid" email colorful and celebratory, rather than a dry receipt. It went viral among small business owners.
2013: They closed a massive $6.1M Seed round. Notably, they curated a "CEO Round," accepting money from the founders of Dropbox, Yelp, Stripe, and Instagram, plus celebs like Ashton Kutcher.
2015: A massive strategic shift. Realizing they wanted to cover the whole employee lifecycle (health insurance, benefits, HR), they rebranded from ZenPayroll to Gusto.
2021: Amidst the remote work boom, Gusto raised $175M at a nearly $10 billion valuation, cementing its status as a "decacorn."
2024: Gusto hasn’t gone public yet but is one of the most anticipated IPOs in tech. They now serve over 300,000 businesses and process hundreds of billions of dollars in payroll annually.
The lesson? Boring is beautiful. Gusto didn't invent a new technology, they took an unsexy, "solved" problem (payroll) that everyone hated and applied consumer-grade design and empathy to it. By focusing on delight in an industry known for dread, they built a multi-billion dollar empire.
🔍 Founder Finds
🛠️ AI Tool: Thunderbit is a zero-setup web scraper that extracts data from any site in two clicks. Very handy.
🚨 Raise Alert: Our friends over at Wispr just raised $25M from Noble Capital. Well done team!
📚 Must-Read: This 90 slide presentation on the AI industry from Benedict Evans is well worth reading.
🧬 Science Corner: This hydrogen-powered car concept is truly epic.
💬 Founder Quote: "I think you just have to work hard for about 10 years before you know what you're doing." Ben Chestnut (Mailchimp)
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Smart Hairbrush
Ever wonder how healthy your hair really is? Questioning whether those “just one more day” dry-shampoo decisions have finally caught up with you?
Meet ScanStrand™, the intelligent brush that doesn’t just detangle - it diagnoses. From hydration levels to overall damage control, get real-time data on your hair’s health with every stroke.
ScanStrand™ - Get to the root of your haircare problems.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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