HOMEBAKED

Valerie Uy had been thinking about Homebaked for a while. The idea was simple but underserved: a marketplace connecting home bakers with their local communities — giving talented hobbyist bakers a way to turn their craft into income, and giving customers access to fresh, locally-made baked goods they couldn't find anywhere else.

The vision was clear. The path to getting there was not.

Like most first-time founders, Valerie ran into the early-stage paradox almost immediately. To attract co-founders she needed more than a deck; to get useful feedback she needed something users could interact with; to open investor conversations she needed proof the idea was more than a concept.

But to build any of that, the traditional path meant hiring developers, spending $20,000–$50,000, and waiting three to four months for an MVP — all before knowing whether the core idea even resonated. The classic problem: she needed traction to build the product, and the product to get traction.

“I had this idea I believed in, but every conversation hit the same wall. People wanted to see it. And I didn’t have anything to show them.”

Valerie reached out to Jarrett at OneChair to talk through her options. The pitch: instead of months and tens of thousands of dollars on an MVP that might miss the mark, what if she had a fully interactive prototype in five days — realistic enough to run user tests, pitch investors, and recruit co-founders?

Flat price. Guaranteed timeline. Late by even a day and every dollar comes back.

Valerie signed on.

In five days, OneChair delivered a fully interactive prototype of the Homebaked marketplace, covering the core experience end-to-end:

• Baker profiles and storefronts
• Product discovery and browsing
• The ordering and checkout flow
• The baker onboarding and sign-up journey
• Customer-facing search and filtering

High-fidelity and clickable — close enough to a real product that users would forget it wasn’t a live app — and exportable so Valerie could share it with anyone. The goal wasn’t to build software; it was to build certainty.

User testing that shaped the product

Valerie ran the prototype past home bakers and potential customers, watching how they navigated the experience and where they got stuck. The sign-up flow needed simplification; bakers needed more flexibility presenting their offerings; discovery needed to lean on locality and trust signals. These were insights that would have cost weeks of developer time to course-correct if she’d built first and tested later. Instead, she had directional clarity before any production code was written.

Forming a founding team

The prototype became Valerie’s recruitment tool. A deck describes a vision; a working prototype demonstrates one. When she showed potential co-founders what Homebaked could look and feel like, the conversation shifted: “would you be interested in this idea?” became “would you want to build this?” The Homebaked founding team came together off those conversations.

Generating investor interest

With a tangible product to demo, investor meetings stopped being theoretical. The prototype let Valerie walk early-stage investors through the actual user experience — the same one real users had already tested. Instead of investors asking “is this idea real?” they were asking “how does this scale?” — a much better question to be fielding.

In the weeks after the 5-day sprint, Homebaked moved from concept to active venture:

• A validated product direction, grounded in real user feedback
• A founding team, recruited with the prototype as the centerpiece
• Active investor conversations and tangible momentum
• Tens of thousands of dollars in development costs deferred until the right time
• Months of build time avoided

The deeper outcome: every conversation about Homebaked was now anchored in a tangible thing instead of a description of one.

The cost of being wrong about your product has only gone up. The cost of finding out whether you’re right has dropped dramatically.

Five days and a fixed fee gave Valerie what would have taken two months and $30,000+ to learn the old way: whether the idea was worth building, what shape it should take, and who should help her build it. That’s not just cost savings. That’s optionality. That’s momentum. That’s the difference between an idea that stalls and one that gets off the ground.