Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as groundbreaking as OpenAI and Amazon’s new $10B deal 💸
In today’s edition:
💡 A startup idea inspired by a wild news story
🛠 Using “fake features” to make product decisions
🔋 The $40B pivot, AI hackers, pitch deck inspo + more
🔍 Lovable connectors, Gemini 3 Flash, $100B Waymo deal + more
🍻 An innovation that’s an all-around winner
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 $1,000 Giveaway: We weren’t planning on doing a giveaway this week, until T-Mobile stepped up to help us give one of you $1,000 to help you with your business. Let’s call it a Christmas miracle. To enter all you have to do is:
Click here and see if your business qualifies for their new internet offer (takes 5 seconds)
Reply to this email with either “Yes“ or “No“ so we know if you qualify or not.
Winner will be announced next Monday. Good luck!
🔍 Automated Startup Due Diligence
Sheets getting real
Available Domain: Dilroom.co
The Problem: If you haven’t read the story about Shiloh Luckey…you need to. Long story short, she’s a popular TikToker who founded a tax-compliance startup that raised millions from investors, only for her to use the money to buy a house, go to the Super Bowl and pay for her destination wedding in the Caribbean. How did she pull this off? It’s simple…she lied. She told investors revenues had grown from $2,500 in November 2020 to over $250,000 by September 2022, all the while revenues never exceeded more than $620 per month. That’s not a typo. $620. Wild. This is an extreme example of course but in the end founders will stretch the truth to get a VC to sign a term sheet. They’ll massage the MRR, play down churn and sometimes just outright lie. That’s why we need to bring some trust back into the fundraising game. Here’s how.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A platform where startups connect their financial and operational data sources to automatically verify claims for investors during fundraising due diligence.
🛠️ Product:
Founders sign up and securely connect their banking (Plaid), accounting (Xero, QuickBooks), payments (Stripe), and cap table (Carta, Pulley) platforms through pre-built integrations, granting read-only access that can be shared with prospective investors.
The platform automatically generates a verified "data room" that cross-references connected sources - confirming revenue figures match bank deposits and that burn rate calculations are accurate - flagging any discrepancies for review.
Investors can access a real-time dashboard showing verified metrics with confidence scores, audit trails, and the ability to drill down into source data, dramatically reducing manual verification work and accelerating deal timelines.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Startups can use the dashboard for free to track their own metrics, then they pay a monthly subscription to generate shareable interactive dashboards for investors.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by AngelList, Carta, or another business in the fundraising space for 10-12x ARR.
Rate this idea
📶 Business is Unpredictable. Your Internet Shouldn’t Be
Running a business means dealing with constant uncertainty. But one thing you can control is your internet provider.
That’s why we’re teaming up with T-Mobile for Business. Their 5G business internet gives companies a way to simplify connectivity and keeps teams running smoothly.
With T-Mobile for Business, you get:
Fast, dependable 5G internet built on America’s largest 5G network
Connectivity that scales easily as you add locations or devices
Real support from real experts, available 24/7/365
👉 See if your business qualifies (it takes 5 seconds).
🥸 Using “Fake Features” to Make Product Decisions
The Context: If you’ve ever built a software product you’ll know that users, invariably, lie. Not on purpose, but they’ll swear they need a specific feature, then never touch it once you’ve build it. That’s how you end up spending 3 weeks building that "PDF Export" tool only to find out nobody cares. Here’s how you can save yourself weeks of development.
Step-by-step:
Pick a feature you want to implement and add a button for it to your UI e.g. Add the "Export to PDF" button to your dashboard. Make it look real.
When a user clicks on the button, show a nice tooltip: "Coming next week! I'll email you when it's live." Log that click as an event.
Look at the click data to see how many users wanted to use that feature. If 5 people click it, ignore it. If 500 people click it, build it immediately.
Give it a go!
🎁 This Season, Give Yourself the Gift of Compliance Done Right
Delve’s AI Copilot handles SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO end to end while reading your policies, completing evidence, and automating the tasks that usually slow teams down during Q4.
Instead of spending weeks gathering documents or chasing approvals, Copilot keeps every requirement moving in the background so your audit stays on track even during the holiday rush.
The outcomes tell the story.
Lovable achieved SOC 2 in just 20 hours.
Wisprflow closed Mercury and Superhuman in one month.
11x unlocked 1.2 million dollars in ARR through accelerated compliance.
This season, skip the stress and let Copilot deliver the cleanest audit you have ever had.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 The Money Shot: This company pulled off one of the biggest pivots in history. Here’s how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: In this paper, Stanford professors just showed that AI can outperform human hackers in the real world. AI cybersecurity is gonna be a huge space.
💬 Prompt Drop: Steal this prompt to create high-converting copy using the well-known “AIDA” framework.
🆓 Free Resource: Looking for inspiration for your pitch deck from some of the best ever made? Look no further.
💵 Deal of the Day: Eleven Labs is still giving away 25 exclusive deals from top AI companies in the run up to Christmas. We love that.
🔍 Founder Finds
🚀 Lovable just launched connectors, allowing builders to connect their projects to Perplexity, ElevenLabs, Firecrawl, and other tools for richer features in their apps.
⚡ Google just launched Gemini 3 Flash, their latest, fastest model.
🤑 Waymo is in talks to raise $15B at a +$100B valuation in a round led by…you guessed it…Alphabet.
📈 Roman sold his first SaaS for 7 figures after only 6 months of monetization. Here’s how he did it.
🎓 Replit is launching a University to educate the next billion software creators. Great initiative!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Circle Phone
Sick of your boring, rectangular smartphone? Looking to switch things up?
Introducing the Cyrcle Phone™ - the world's first perfectly round smartphone. With its groundbreaking, non-rectangular display (that totally doesn’t make it look like a makeup compact), this is the smartphone you need in your life.
Cyrcle Phone™ - think outside the box.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
Before you go just a few public service announcements:
Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you asap.
See you soon,