Reading up on business-strategy

before selling Tweet Hunter for $10m, I had a long talk with @levelsio he almost convinced me not to do it his main reasoning: - getting this money at once is unhealthy - I could get more by not setting both ended up being true so I wonder why he did it with RemoteOk I really hope he goes public with this

@tibo_maker

Lots of startup founders+CEOs love the idea of going on a large podcast. For distribution, fame, status or whatever else. So they hire a marketing team or PR agency to make it happen. Those PR people send an almost identical AI-generated email to me, this: It won't work. I now get closer to 50 pitches like this per month. What works: build something epic, that people (e.g. devs) love. Put your focus there, not on a marketing team spamming every ranked tech podcast on the planet. I used to not send any response to these, but now I'm sending a link to this blog post with more of my thoughts:

@GergelyOrosz

New - Billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller tells me "of course" he used AI to write op-ed on Bessent & bond market "There's a reason I moved from an English major to being an economics major," he says, "I'm not embarrassed by it" No response from WSJ https://www.notus.org/media/stanley-druckenmillers-wsj-op-ed-bessent-ai

@jstein_notus

Most "digital transformation" was BS by consultants. Most "AI transformation" will be the same BS. There are very, very few exceptions, when it's not a consultant selling stuff they never did, but someone sharing how THEY did it. Like @clairevo. Who is the real deal, I confirm:

@GergelyOrosz

The first three commitments for Omacom Foundation sponsorships have been gathered up on a dedicated page. We have a lot more in the pipeline. Some of them will SHOCK you 😄 https://omarchy.org/sponsorships/

@dhh

The 16 Best Books About Marketing, Period.

@RyanHoliday

Friend just showed me how he's using a small army of voice agents with fake resumes to knock out expert network calls @ $1500/hr. The old world is unprepared for the new world.

@ChrisJBakke

This is what they told @drewhouston about Dropbox back in 2007. This is what they're saying about Omarchy now. You could just spend hundreds of hours setting everything up yourself?! Nerds may know computers, but they rarely know markets 😂

@dhh

The more capable AI agents become, the more SaaS they eat, the more I think SaaS as we know it will consolidate around System of Record software. AI doesn't replace a CMS / CRM. I expect to see those spaces get even more competitive, and even more niched down.

@yongfook

I emailed Steve Jobs once and he sent me a vegan cake recipe. Later on, I briefly introduced myself at a WWDC and mentioned his cake recipe was good. He got annoyed and walked away. Mentioning cake recipes is low agency, I guess. 🙃

@codejake

just paid $12,000 to outbid others with Outrank now let's see if I just lost my money 👀

@tibo_maker

I see a lot of these ad-first websites pop up these days. - http://canivibecodeit.com ($10k) - http://outbid.lol ($42k) - http://trustmrr.com ($200k) (+many more I forgot) It shows that distribution is now the real moat.

@marclou

Sometimes I feel like I'm overcomplicating my life trying to build a SaaS company when you can just build a directory site and make like $25,000 in one day lol

@yongfook

Many ways to win

@kepano

Idea for SaaS: AI agent that observes your competitors "feature comparison with <your app>" lists. Builds the features they say you don't have. Then auto files a trade libel dispute requiring them to remove false information. Comparison lists are dumb in a post AI world.

@yongfook

for its entire existence, the creation of software has been an incredibly unreliable endeavor most projects ran late, over budget, and still missed user needs if you were an SMB, you simply couldn't get good software built for you this is the promise of the 'software factory'

@trq212

I don’t know how Wispr Flow is a business in 2027. Literally weeks away from not needing to exist. I have never seen a clearer example of Feature Not a Product.

@awilkinson

weird that there's a "make a lot of money" button and nobody's pressing it (take your SaaS, make it headless, let agents use it, charge per interaction esp for enterprises)

@trq212

Over a year ago, I essentially stopped posting on YouTube and social media. I crossed 100k subscribers on YouTube, but I never explained why I "quit" until today... First, I sold my company Link Whisper over a year ago in a significant exit and I no longer needed to "hustle".

@nichepursuits

My SEO setup so far: • sitemap.xml submitted and cleaned up • robots.txt configured • Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster connected • Meta titles and descriptions • Canonical issues fixed • Duplicate/redirect issues cleaned up • www → non-www 301 redirect fixed • Cloudflare DNS / SSL issue resolved • Internal links cleaned up • Structured data / JSON-LD added • Page speed + Core Web Vitals optimized • llms.txt + openapi.json added • Pillar pages + content clusters • Crawl depth under 4 + thin content check • Entity optimization • Quality backlinks What else am I missing?

@TeeDevh

If I were in my 35s or 45s right now and wanted to leverage AI to retire within 8-10 years, here's what I'd do: 1/ Immediately form an LLC company. Not next month. Not once you're 'ready.' This week.

@ethancoder0

Notes on building products people love when software gets cheap

@hnshah

In 2018, I was working 10 hours a day on my SaaS, and it was making $3K/month. I remember my employee friends working 6 hours a day, with higher salaries, paid vacation, and holidays. A thought crossed my mind: Why do I even bother? It wasn’t until four years later, in 2022, that I realized my startup was an asset I could sell for ~3× its annual revenue. If your product makes $3K/month, congrats. You are sitting on $100,000.

@marclou

When someday people ask how Cloudflare got into tax prep…

@eastdakota

how to get your first 100 users, in 1:30 min by Sam Altman still solid

@tibo_maker

@mkriiv Using http://piqo.app the best analytics tool

@mddanishyusuf

AI-driven SEO. From onboarding to growth tasks in 30 minutes. No agency. No consultant. Just AI. $9/mo → http://cogny.com

@CognyAI

We just published our internal 37signals Manager Playbook.

@jasonfried

Apple TV has maybe figured out the SECRET that no other streaming service has figured out This one factor that sets them apart from the rest: uh, really good content and not treating customers like shit Yeah pretty much they just threw a bunch of money at really competent directors and insanely thoroughly vetted screenplays until they amassed a frankly insane list of banger programming And then they kept making it. Even if basically nobody watched a show they would renew it to give the showrunners a chance to tell their full story. This is genius on several levels > the audience gets to see the full story play out > the directors and screenwriters working with Apple TV know they have much greater support to tell their stories > actors who sign with Apple TV know they won’t be suddenly dropped on a dime It’s not a coincidence that Brett Goldstein has appeared in, written and produced multiple Apple TV shows. It’s the entire strategy Apple TV wants to be the best place for the best storytellers to tell the best stories. That’s the business model. Will it work? I don’t know. But it’s a great experience so far

@LukeMiani

My SaaS portfolio will become fully self-hostable. And like also fully open-source too. It's something we're working on. And I've been thinking about what I would actually charge for if I open-sourced my SaaS products. I don't think I would feature gate them. So my options are basically narrowed down to: - Hosting I'm all for self-hosting, and I'd absolutely encourage users to self-host my products. But some people will still want the convenience of a one-click setup with managed backups, monitoring and updates. Offering hosting to those users is probably the easiest revenue model. Ghost has built a great business around exactly this. - Enterprise Maybe we get bigger customers. They'll need SSO, permissions, audit logs and compliance. That's basically the n8n enterprise model. - Support If a company depends on the software, having an SLA and somebody to call when stuff breaks is worth real money. Red Hat has done this for decades. - Integrations WordPress is the obvious example here. Selling integrations/plugins. Right now, all my products are heavily gated. Closed-sourced, paywall gated, and little accessible. But honestly, I'd happily give away the code if it meant more people adopted the product. Software is getting cheaper to build and easier to copy anyway. Quick overview 👇

@SimonHoiberg

SaaS is dead? SaaS has always been dead. If... Your product doesn't fit. Your product is too expensive. Your messaging is a maze. You built a feature and called it a company. You raised a round instead of a customer base. Your costs are too high, your company too big. You sound like everyone else. You made buying hard. SaaS ain't dead unless it was already dead.

@jasonfried

if I had to start a new startup from scratch, I'd pick a very boring infra problem. boring problems are owned by lazy giants. and lazy giants have legacy SDKs and confusing docs. in an agent's eyes, that's the whole product.

@zenorocha

Spotify has run this exact play before. In March 2020 they open sourced Backstage, the internal portal their engineers built to manage 14,000 software components. It became the industry standard for developer portals. Over 3,400 companies adopted it, including Netflix, American Airlines, and Expedia. Then Spotify built a paid enterprise product, Portal, on top of the free standard they created. Xirp is the sequel, aimed at a bigger prize. Look at what it actually does. Every agent session runs in its own git worktree, so 50+ agents can work on the same codebase in parallel without touching each other. And context lives outside the agent itself, so you can switch from Claude Code to Codex to Gemini mid-project and the full working state carries over. That second part is the whole strategy. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are spending billions to make their agent the one your team depends on. Xirp makes them interchangeable. Your dependency moves up a layer, to the environment holding your sessions, your service catalog, and your architectural decisions. Which happens to plug into Portal, the product Spotify sells. The model vendors are fighting to own the agent. Spotify is betting the agent becomes the commodity and the context becomes the product. Last time they made that bet, 3,400 companies took the free version and Spotify sold them the enterprise one. The music streamer from Stockholm is quietly building one of the better dev tools businesses in the industry, and almost nobody noticed the first time.

@aakashgupta

14 products flopped before the 15th sold for $8m. 1st: almost $0 2nd: a handful of sales 3rd: $10 ... 15th: acquired nobody screenshots the hard part

@tibo_maker

Zuck with a 14-page memo on AI this am. https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/

@shaneparrish

as someone who spends more than $300,000 / month in AI models, I can tell you: you're being scammed Seedance 2.5 costs about $0.10 per second of video, bare minimum. that's the price WE pay. before upscaling, storage, retries, and all the generations you throw away. one 30-second video = ~$3 in pure model cost a normal creator iterates 3-10 times to get one so one good video = $15-30 now do "unlimited" at $59/month. two good videos and they're losing money. the math never works. so when you see "unlimited", it's always one of these: 1. a silent throttle (your 5-min renders become 60-min renders) 2. a quiet rename ("unlimited" becomes "enhanced fast" after you paid) 3. a moving start date (you were promised 7 days, you actually get 1) and it's likely all 3. I'd love to sell unlimited too. it would print signups. but I pay the model providers every month, and I'd rather show you a real price than rename your plan after checkout. if the math can't work, you're not looking at a price, you're looking at a scam

@tibo_maker

@lennysan meanwhile, every launch team is staring at a blank brief http://yougtm.com is where the brief starts moving

@postsbyrhys

Five months ago we gave the Claude agents a brand new $50,000 portfolio and one instruction: beat the S&P 500 So far mission accomplished • Up 19.04% since March 3 vs 12.24% for the S&P • $27 million now copying the trades • Every position and every trade public

@theaiportfolios

A sad thing I see is when companies start becoming reactive over proactive. Its a clear external sign that the leadership has lost vision. They make decisions they feel are safe instead of through conviction of a future. The problem is that "safe" almost always means following someone else. This isn't a clear sign of death, but it is a very difficult position to be in... For me personally, I hate seeing it because so many companies start with a genuinely interesting vision. Then the world changes, they lose confidence in that vision, and instead of finding a new way to adapt and express it, they start chasing whatever everyone else is doing. It happens during every major secular shift. AI is the obvious current example. A lot of companies that looked exciting just a few years ago now feel like they're playing catch-up instead of leading. Its a tough thing to watch.

@mitchellh

I just realized I'm completely sleeping on email marketing for @supastarter. I have 5437 subscribers on my supastarter mailing list and I have not send an email in months. Any email marketing experts out here?

@jonathan_wilke

Wow. Airtable, founded in 2012 and once valued at $11.7B, is getting acquired by Bending Spoons, founded 2013, at 2.7x ARR. A once hot startup; now an unfortunate victim of the SaaS bust. It raised $1.4B only to be sold for $1.285B EV ($2.25B equity value), just clearing its preference stack. That implies common and early holders split the remaining ~$850M, a ~10x haircut from peak.

@deedydas

Is SaaS dead? This guy made $20K in 30 days with a 65% profit margin. +918% MoM growth. And he only has 380 followers. Congrats on being the #3 fastest-growing startup of the week on TrustMRR @bogdan_ai 👏 https://trustmrr.com/startup/getebook-ai

@marclou