Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as talked about as Keith Rabois going off on Airwallex on X 😬
In today’s edition:
💡 Solving a cash flow problem for app developers
🛠 How to grow an app with no marketing spend
🔋 Building a $10M revenue business (while beating cancer) + more
🔍 OpenAI x Thrive Capital, Runway Gen-4.5 + more
🍻 The best way to deal with snow this winter
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 $1,000 Giveaway: We’re partnering with Warp this week to give away $1,000 to support one of you on your founder journey. To enter just:
Check out Warp, the #1 AI terminal, and give it a try if you’re a developer!
Reply to this email if you’re currently a Warp user or not
Winner will be announced next Monday. Good luck!
💸 Financing for App Developers
More cache-flow
Available Domain: Swiftpay.com
The Problem: We're in the middle of a mobile app gold rush. AI tools have made development faster, TikTok has made distribution easier, and indie developers are scaling apps to seven figures in months instead of years. But there's a hidden tax on their growth…and it's not Apple's 30% cut. It's their payment terms. Apple pays developers 33 days after the fiscal month closes, so if you sell a $100 in-app purchase on October 1st, you wait until November 2nd for the month to end, then another 33 days until December 5th to actually see that money. That's 65 days of your revenue sitting in Apple's bank account while you're paying for ads, hiring contractors, and trying to scale. It’s time to free that cash. Here’s how.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A fintech that advances developers up to 90% of their pending Apple App Store revenue within 24 hours, turning their 45-65 day wait into immediate working capital.
🛠️ Product:
Developers connect their App Store Connect account to the platform, allowing it to see real-time revenue data and verify pending payments from Apple
Once approved, developers can request advances against their verified pending App Store revenue, receiving funds directly to their bank account within 24 hours at a transparent flat fee. The advance is automatically repaid when Apple processes the original payment.
The dashboard also provides cash flow forecasting tools, available advance capacity, and optimal times to take advances
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt | Build your own version
💼 Business Model: Charge a 2-4% flat fee on each advance, generating revenue from the spread between the cost of capital on the debt you raise to fund payouts and the fee you charge.
⭐ End Goal: Exit to a larger fintech platform (like Stripe, Square, or PayPal) for 3-5x revenue multiple.
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👨💻 How to Ship Faster by Triggering Warp Agents From Anywhere
Technical founders wear every hat — engineer, PM, designer — and all the small product bugs and improvements pile up fast. Now you can tag @warp on any Slack thread or Linear ticket, just like you would a teammate, and Warp will pick up the task.
Tag @warp: Delegate a bug or improvement by tagging @Warp in a thread or assigning a ticket.
Let it run: Warp spins up an agent, pulling context from the thread and your codebase.
Review & Ship: Warp posts updates as it works, and opens a PR with a clean summary for you to review and merge.
📈 How to Grow an App with No Marketing Spend
The Guide: Jack Fricks is a legend in the indie hacker community. And recently he launched a mobile app called lovelee that allows couples to send widgets to each other. The app is 1.5 months old and is about to pass 100,000 downloads, all by driving free traffic from TikTok and Instagram. Here’s his strategy.
Step-by-step:
Open a new Instagram or Tiktok account and warm up the account by scrolling on it for 15 mins per day for 2 days, following, commenting and liking posts that are relevant to your app.
On day 3, start making content inspired by top performing content in your niche. Make 1 post per day for the next few weeks, focusing on content that drives comments and watch time (which the algorithms love).
Once you find a winning format, double down on it. Post multiple times per day using that format and start posting the same format to other accounts too. Then simply repeat the process to find more winning formats.
😨 Stop Being Scared of Your Internet Bill
Scared to look at your internet bill every month? Us too. Luckily, T-Mobile will lock in your business' internet rate for the next 5 years. No more surprises.
To see if you qualify all you have to do is:
Go to this website
Enter your business address
Click “Check Availability”
That’s it. It takes 5 seconds, and could save your business some money.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 The Money Shot: This founder came back from 12 failed ideas and cancer to build a $10M revenue business. What an inspiration. Full story here.
📈 Trends with Benefits: LED bulbs are being called this generation’s “asbestos”. Huge opportunity to build in this space.
💬 Prompt Drop: These 10 prompts are as good as hiring a business consultant.
🆓 Free Resource: We wrote a $0 - $10K E-commerce Playbook for Shopify this year. You can have it today for free.
💵 Deal of the Day: Get a 30-day free trial of Wispr Flow (#1 voice dictation software) on us.
🔍 Founder Finds
🤝 OpenAI and Thrive Capital just announced a partnership. Sam Altman really is the King of dealmaking.
📹 Runway just launched their new frontier video model, Runway Gen-4.5. Is this the Nano Banana moment for video?
🚀 This guy launched “Cursor for video editing” in about 15 minutes. AI is insane man.
✖️ Vlad Tenev’s (Robinhood founder) other startup Harmonic just proved a problem that’s been open for nearly 30 years. Vibe proofs are here.
🏎️ Ben Lang just shared a list of the top accelerators for early stage founders right now. Great list!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Snow Melting Robot
Tired of shoveling snow at 6 AM to get your car out of the driveway? Wish you could combine the convenience of a Roomba with the raw power of a flamethrower?
Introducing the Ignis™, the autonomous snow-melting robot that clears your driveway in seconds. Watch through your window as it glides across the ice, leaving nothing but dry pavement (and the smell of burning) behind.
Ignis™ - in a tale of ice and fire…fire wins.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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