Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as incredible as OpenAI adding $1B in revenue in a single month 💰
In today’s edition:
💡 A new spin on Product Hunt that flips the script
🛠 The Eisenhower Matrix for founder productivity
🔋 From a Twitter fight to a $5B exit + more
🔍 OpenAI controversy, $100M & $600M raises + more
🍻 An incredible product for people who hate leaving their desk
Let’s goooo 🚀
💻 MacBook Competition: Wispr Flow (the incredible voice dictation product) is giving one Half Baked reader with a MacBook this week.
To enter:
Check out & download Wispr Flow (if you're already a user, that's cool!)
Reply to this email with "Wispr"
May the odds be in your favor.
🎯 Marketplace for Problems
Houston, we have a problem.
Available Domain: Problemhunt.co
The Problem: Product Hunt has launched over 500,000 products since 2013 - but here's the thing: most of them are solutions looking for problems. Founders build what they think people want, launch it into the void, and pray someone cares. Meanwhile, millions of people are sitting on real, painful problems they'd pay money to solve - but they have no way to signal that demand to builders. It's a massive disconnect. The people with problems can't find builders, and builders can't find validated problems. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A reverse Product Hunt where people post problems they want solved, and builders compete to solve them.
🛠️ Product:
Users post problems with a description, how much they'd pay for a solution, and upvote problems they share - creating a real-time demand signal for builders.
Builders browse trending problems, submit solution proposals, and get direct access to a waitlist of paying customers before writing a single line of code.
Top problems get featured weekly, and successful builder-problem matches earn both sides reputation scores - turning the platform into a talent and idea discovery engine.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Freemium for posting problems. Builders pay $29/month for unlimited problem access and direct messaging. Take a 5% success fee on any transactions that originate from the platform.
⭐ End Goal: Acquisition by Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, or a venture studio at a 5-8x revenue multiple.
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🗣️ The AI Tool We Use Every Single Day
We use AI to supercharge our workflows at Half Baked. And there's no tool we use more than Wispr Flow.
How we use it:
Dictate in any app - Slack, Gmail, Notion, ChatGPT
Voice gets converted to clean, formatted text - 4x faster than typing
Save 5-7 hours every week
If you're a founder trying to move fast, this is worth a look.
📋 The Eisenhower Matrix for Founder Productivity
The Context: Dwight Eisenhower ran the Allied Forces in WWII and served two terms as US President - the man knew a thing or two about prioritization. His secret? A simple 2x2 matrix that separates what feels urgent from what's actually important. For founders drowning in tasks, this framework is a lifesaver.
Step-by-step:
Draw a 2x2 grid with "Urgent" and "Not Urgent" across the top, and "Important" and "Not Important" down the side - then dump every task on your plate into one of the four quadrants.
Do the "Urgent + Important" tasks immediately - these are fires like a server going down, a key customer churning, or a funding deadline.
Schedule the "Not Urgent + Important" tasks - these are the things that actually move the needle like strategic planning, relationship building, and product vision, but they'll never happen unless you block time for them.
Delegate the "Urgent + Not Important" tasks and delete the "Not Urgent + Not Important" ones entirely - most of your inbox and Slack notifications live here.
Give it a try!
⚡ 47 tabs open. Zero idea where anything is.
Neo fixes that. The AI-native browser auto-organizes your workflow, summarizes content on the fly, and has a Magic Bar that combines search, chat, and action. All with privacy-first security.
Stop managing your browser. Start using it.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 The Money Shot: This duo of teenage hackers turned a Twitter argument into a $5B exit. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Self-driving cars are coming, and so is next-gen insurance. This will be a multibillion-dollar industry as liability shifts from drivers to manufacturers.
💬 Prompt Drop: Here are 200+ viral Nano Banana prompts for every use case imaginable, from content creation to business strategy.
🆓 Free Resource: Check out the best practices for using Claude Code from Anthropic themselves.
💵 Founder Deal: Get $20 off a design competition on 99Designs until January 31st. Learn more.
🔍 Founder Finds
💰 OpenAI CFO hints they could take a cut of customer revenue from inventions built with their models. "Outcome-based pricing" is coming.
☁️ Railway just raised $100M in a Series B to build "the world's first intelligent cloud provider." Peaceful, powerful infrastructure.
🚁 Zipline just raised $600M at a $7.6B valuation to bring drone delivery to Houston, Phoenix, and beyond. From Rwanda blood deliveries to 2M+ deliveries last year.
📱 Ryan Thorpe shares how he built a 40-app portfolio with 50M+ downloads and hit #1 on the App Store twice. The playbook is gold.
📝 Paul Graham on Founder Mode, why the conventional wisdom about running companies is wrong, and what Brian Chesky figured out instead.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Motorized Office Chair
Sick of walking to meetings? Tired of standing up just to grab a coffee from the break room?
Introducing Traverse™, the motorized office chair that lets you cruise the cubicles at 8 mph. Whisper-quiet motor for stealth mode. Built-in turn signals for hallway etiquette. Lumbar support meets horsepower.
Traverse™ - Be a roll model.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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