Reading up on entrepreneurship

Gave https://tellmeingrams.com a little Tailwind love. The previous version was pure Pico.css but I hit the limits of semantic styles. Also implemented affiliate links like ads a la @marclou and @robj3d3

@Shreedhan

Had a fascinating conversation with the owner of a local arcade/fun park...you know, those places with go karts, putt putt and the arcade games where you spend $1000 and win enough tickets to go home with an eraser. A few interesting things... Their most profitable game is a bass fishing arcade game. As in, $75,000-85,000 a year profitable. 🤯 For that one single game. They've had it for nearly 10 years and 100% of the time it completely destroys all the other games. The next closest game only does $20k a year. Go karts make nearly no money, need adult staff to run and require employing a mechanic. They have to replace the engines in every one every single year. But "go karts are what bring people in, games are how we keep them here". Essentially a loss-leader. The worst part about having putt putt isn't maintaining the turf, or any equipment...it's the landscaping. It basically has to be immaculately maintained like a prize yard...for little kids to make an absolute mess of every day. Spring/Summer is the holiday shopping season of fun parks. They make all their money April-August and then pray it lasts them through the Fall and Winter. It takes at minimum 6-8 people to staff the park, even on slow days. On really busy Saturdays it takes over 20. Staff turnover is intense as it's made up entirely of high school kids. Wanted to chat about the insanity of the tickets-to-prize ratio, but alas School House Rock Live started (we were sitting next to each other on a school field trip for our kids).

@Shpigford

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

He made enough to buy the latest MacBook Pro M5 full specs 💻✅ 37K visitors in 2 days btw https://trustmrr.com/startup/brandmymac

@marclou

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

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 16 Best Books About Marketing, Period.

@RyanHoliday

health insurance is instant depression juice. have looked at cost-sharing plans (@JoinCrowdHealth, etc) but they all have pre-existing condition lockouts that make them a no-go for our family.

@Shpigford

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

Never stop talking about your new projects until everyone finds out!

@levelsio

this guy is on track to make $30k/month if you have a mobile app, you can definitely learn something from this

@andilosing

We tell young people in our society that end of the rainbow is retirement at 65. We ought to tell them that "there is going to be this short but beautiful golden window from roughly age 3 to roughly age 12 where your kids are not only easy (comparatively to bottles & diapers), but are going to be these beautiful little creatures and it will pain your heart to be away from them for too long. So, prepare in your 20's, financially and career wise, to build that flexibility into that chapter of your life". You don't get another shot at living the "golden window". And, for me, leaning hard into that golden window has made everything else in my life feel fairly insignificant in comparison. I have made plenty of mistakes as a father, but what I won't have is the regret of having been distracted and absent from these formative years. In some cases, that has required financial sacrifices (declining a particular career opportunity that would have required relocation), but I personally have zero regrets. I also hear from some ambitious & successful people with a 4 year old that say "I've lost my ambition, I am so immersed in fatherhood". At least for me, and a number of my friends, it comes back. You can't keep an ambitious person down and if you have the fire, hanging at a playground on too many Tuesday afternoons is going to feel like torture after too long. My three boys are approaching 13, 11 & 9, and it's much different than 7, 5 & 3. This summer, for example, they slept until 11am and I hard an unencumbered 6am-12pm to work (being on PT helps), then got another great window 7-11pm, but was able to be present in the heart of the day, then weeks when they were at basketball camp, etc. It gets easier, your time frees up again (there's a sadness to that too), but I'm back to working as intensely as I did pre-kids just because my day to day presence requires fewer hours than it did before (also, my wife is just superbly wonderful). And that is the beautiful gift of entrepreneurship (or at least my sort of business), the ability to deliver still a high level of output but work that around your life rather than the opposite. TLDR, grind before, and grind after. Prepare for the golden window.

@FundamentEdge

i love that @jonathan_wilke has made nearly $100k on http://outbid.lol in less than 48 hours. you can be mad about it, try to copy it, say it's dumb or that it won't last. none of it matters. jonathan caught lightning in a bottle on a whim. the internet is amazing.

@Shpigford

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

Built https://outbid.lol yesterday night as a fun project and the site got 4.5k visitors in the first 12 hours and made $1.4k revenue so far 🤯

@jonathan_wilke

I just hired @bot as my Entrepreneur in Residence for

@iannuttall

- Cool project goes live. - I move fast and sponsor it with https://founderstack.pro. - Elon Musk shares it. - The project goes viral. - I'm making 💸 Being an online entrepreneur is dope 🤩

@SimonHoiberg

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

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

If I got laid off tomorrow & had to replace my salary asap, here’s exactly what I’d do: 1. Go to Instagram and start a fresh account. Use a spare email. No one has to know.

@Alexie_Ai

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

@tibo_maker

One startup today was ready to give up because their idea wasn't working. I suggested they just start over from scratch with a new idea and defer to the next demo day. I sent them to have lunch and mull over potential new ideas and come back at the end of office hours.

@paulg

1 year ago I asked chat GPT how to build an app Today : - 2 Million Users - $1.3 Million MRR - 1 Billion Views answering all questions on distribution 🫡

@ColeKosco_

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

A very fun exercise is to export all your bank accounts (as CSV) both personal and business and stock broker And dump it all into Claude Code and ask it to make a little dashboard showing your spending It's hard to know how much you actually spend over lots of accounts so this can help you understand that You'll spend some time merging transactions (like company names change or their statement label changes), and categorizing, you can just do this by talking to Claude Code btw very easy, I also hooked it up to @xai Grok so it can use that to categorize mass transactions (very cheap) The best part isn't the dashboard it makes but that once you have all the data collected, you can ask Claude Code lots of questions directly about your finances and learn stuff, like I learned: - I was paying for some subscriptions for 2 years I forgot about ($$$) - My US stocks charge me withholding tax (30%) on dividends, which I knew but never realized how much $$$ it was (which is why non-US citizens should buy UCITS ETFs not US stocks!) - My pool remodeling was ridiculously expensive compared to the rest of the home remodeling and we got fleeced hard (that's life!), then the pool company caused a €9000 water leak that they won't pay (funny) - I spent $400K on domains over the years, I should probably stop spending money on them, it's an addiction @marckohlbrugge gave me and it's way more than my gf's shopping - My biggest monthly cost by far is AI at about $24K/month in GPU costs for Photo AI, but that's just how it is, I already got the cheapest rates possible, AI is pricey! - My 2nd biggest cost is taxes, who would have thought??? - Travel is quite expensive, flying business class, getting nice hotels and regularly traveling adds up a lot! - My business costs without AI (!) are extremely low, about $5K/month on revenue which is about 98% profit margin (!), with AI it goes up to $28K/mo or about 86% profit margin (still good!) - Lawyers become quite an expense in this part of my life, you buy a house you pay a lawyer and notary, you register trademarks for your business you pay a lawyer, but they're a great thing to spend money on I think because they protect you from losing much more money than they cost! - I started spending much more money since 2022 because of AI costs but also making much more money because of AI, so it's good - My spending has remained remarkably consistent as a percentage of my net worth at "just" 5%/year, which is close to FIRE which is always my goal (don't spend over 3%/year of your net worth), in my case it's different cause I actually have company income, so it's more of a fun goal to be responsible with my money - Around 2024 my life definitely switched from barely spending money and living as a digital nomad to buying a house and spending on that a lot, I knew a house was a money pit, but it's also a nice money pit and it helps me sleep better (great AC and bedroom), live healthier (home gym), and work better (coworking), so it's worth it - I barely have any personal subscriptions except Netflix, YouTube and Spotify, I asked it to built a "Recurring subscriptions" box too so I can see what subs I have and cancel them Try it!

@levelsio

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

My first product flopped. And it was 100% my fault. A couple months after launching Backlinko, I got overly excited and rushed out a course. I figured: I have an audience now, they like my stuff, time to monetize! Unfortunately, only around 8 people bought. Oops! Looking back, the course itself was actually halfway decent. But the big problem was: I didn't know my audience yet! I was GUESSING what my audience wanted. And I guessed wrong. So I did something that felt a little bit crazy at the time: I put monetization on the back burner. For almost a full YEAR, I focused 100% on building my audience. Published the best content I could Grew the email list Replied to hundreds of blog comments A funny thing happened when I actually listened to my audience for a full year: I heard the same questions over and over. (For me it was some version of "okay, but how do I actually get links?" about once a week.) So when I was ready to launch my next course I knew EXACTLY what to cover. That product (SEO That Works) ended up being the mega hit that transformed my business. (And my life tbh) 👍🏻

@BrianEDean

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

I only build 2 types of startups now: 1) AI-proof in 10 years. My startup marketplace (TrustMRR) can be cloned with a prompt, but a network of 20K buyers can’t. Trust compounds over time. 2) Trends. Anything hot on tech Twitter this month. GEO, new AI models, it can be anything, as long as people are actively talking about it. I also have a 3rd filter: I build products I’m curious about. Or, even better, products I use myself.

@marclou

Tomorrow was invented in the Last30Days. That's the idea behind the @slashlast30days podcast, launching today. Episode 1 is with @BillyM2k, the founder of Dogecoin. "I quit because I was making more money being an idiot online." He pulled up his X analytics live on the show: → The $177,000 X has paid him for posting memes "I don't know why I'm getting paid to post on X. It's not hard and it's stupid. This is just bonus money for posting stupid shit." → The time @elonmusk offered him a job "He did eventually ask if I wanted to work at X. I was like, probably not at the moment." → How he actually got into X HQ to meet him "I was wandering around asking, I have an appointment with Elon Musk. And they were like, he is not here. I'm like, okay, but he texted me." 📌 Watch now:

@mvanhorn

Palo Alto, 2010

@a16z

http://zoneless.com cost $1.2k, which I'm pretty happy with. ❤️.gg is still my favourite domain investment though!

@tinyprojectsdev

It might be because you're already rich You lose a bit of the (literal) hunger when you're not broke anymore and it changes your biology You could artificially constrain your money so you live like a broke guy and can only spend money you make from your new businesses Hard to do in practice with gf/wife and kids etc But you could do it on some micro scale like make a virtual bank account on Revolut or whatever, then every month put in an amount of money the same as you make on your new project's Stripe (only the profit of course) That might trick your brain into being incentivized

@levelsio

i make $40,000/month with my solo online business my friends @marclou, @levelsio, @robj3d3 all make a ton of money also from the internet but we almost all work in our own ways… different working hours, different goals, different people… so this is how i work

@jackfriks

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

If I were in my 30s or 40s right now and wanted to leverage AI to retire within 10 years, here's what I'd do: 1. Immediately form an LLC company. Not next month. Not once you're 'ready.' This week.

@TedCruz1072676

Just launch a new SEO project. I know, SEO should be dead for years. Take months to see any results and will be irrevalant in months. But, in the meantime, i keep pushing and printing money 😄

@xavier_coiffard

The biggest opportunities right now: 1. build for solving loneliness (the more AI floods everything, the more people crave real human connection, IRL and small social) 2. build for agents that need to spend money (they're getting virtual cards and budgets, someone builds the spend controls, fraud protection, receipts) 3. build for people drowning in AI output (everyone generates infinite drafts now, the bottleneck moved to reviewing and choosing, build the judgment layer) 4. build for the burnout economy (everyone is expected to always be on and always optimizing, and the backlash toward rest, slowness, and enough is building) 5. build for verifying humans (deepfakes broke trust, every dating app, marketplace, and video call needs proof-of-human within 2 years) 6. build for the physical world (the trades, hardware, robots that AI is finally reaching) 7. build for the agent that answers the phone (every local business misses calls after 5pm, a voice agent that books the job is worth thousands a month) 8. build for the aging (70M+ boomers who want to stay healthy, sharp, and connected) 9. build for the LLM-search land grab (being the cited answer is the new SEO) 10. build for the newly automated (the paralegal, the analyst, the marketer whose job just changed and needs to reskill fast) 11. build for the seat-pricing collapse (software repricing from $50/seat to per-outcome, whoever nails outcome billing wins a category) 12. build for AI enablement (95% of businesses use nothing beyond ChatGPT, someone has to onboard the other 95%) 13. build for the agency everyone resents (businesses pay $1k/mo to agencies they hate, an agent that does 80% of it undercuts the model) 14. build for verticals on 2011 software (dentists, HOAs, contractors, all overdue for an AI-native rebuild) 15. build for reviving dead software (thousands of abandoned apps with real users, agents can maintain what a team couldn't, buy and revive) 16. build for markets too small to matter before (500 lobster fishermen was never worth a team, now it's a weekend and a real business) 17. build for agents hiring agents (a shadow economy is forming, it needs escrow, reputation, and dispute resolution for machines) 18. build for the anti-AI premium (as everything gets generated, human-made and analog become status symbols people pay up for) 19. build for distribution-first (anyone can build the product now, so the audience is the moat, media company first, product second) 20. build for the reinvention of college (what does an MBA even mean anymore) 21. build for a world with more free time than it knows what to do with (if AI takes the busywork, the question becomes what people do with the hours, and that's a civilization sized market) note: more trends/ideas @ideabrowser (free to sign up) 22. build for the return to the physical (screens fill with slop, people crave the real world, the hands-on, the local, the analog) 23. build for the caregiving wave. The population is aging fast, tens of millions are caring for parents, and the whole burden is landing on families with no support. 24. build for the longevity shift (people want to live to 100 healthy, and a whole industry is forming around actively managing your own biology) 25. build for the housing and rootlessness problem (people can't afford to settle down, and the whole idea of a stable home base is up for grabs) 26. build for spiritual hunger (as institutions hollow out, the need for meaning, ritual, and belonging is exploding into new forms) KEEP BUILDING

@gregisenberg

Today @fireship_dev covered this: - Indie hackers may be the first type of developer to go extinct - The classic indie hacking playbook (last decade): learn to code → find a niche → ship a micro-SaaS → build in public → post MRR screenshots after failures → repeat until it works - Coding used to be hard and expensive, so execution mattered far more than ideas - That equation has flipped: execution now costs ~$20/month, so anyone can build personal software instead of paying for SaaS - Example: Why pay $29/month for a product when Claude Code can recreate a better version in 20 minutes? - Building in public on X makes it easy for others to steal your idea/roadmap - AI raises the ceiling (indie hackers become far more productive) but also lowers the floor (the space is now crowded with normies who can vibe-code their own tools) - This trend will accelerate as AI gets cheaper and smarter - Silver lining: the disruption can "fertilize the soil" for those who master distribution, branding, or proprietary data

@levelsio

very cool to see aidan launch

@Stammy

I'm friends with this fella so I'm not picking a fight. But I don't get how people are concluding "SaaS is dead" and "indiehacking is dead" from me saying my google referrals are decreasing. My video was just me saying I need to try new marketing channels. SaaS is not dead.

@yongfook

Fun to be featured in the @WSJ as a million dollar, one employee founder. @chatprd - the little wrapper that could!

@clairevo

from $600/mo to $3000/mo here are 5 tactics that worked

@DanKulkov

just found out about a new way people make $10k / month it's high effort, but low risk and imo, safe from AI ruining it > some people are setting it up @MCHQ_AI for local businesses as non-tech businesses, they have no idea how to start but once they see it, they feel the value we're talking of hair salons, renovation companies, and other physical businesses that are still pretty far from the AI world they sit with the owner, look at how the business works, then move the repetitive parts into Mission Control: - new enquiries - quotes - scheduling - follow-ups - customer updates - admin they pay for Mission Control, customize the setup, and charge each client around $200 to $500/month to run it 10 clients and this starts adding up fast. 20 clients and you're close to a $10k/month business. for the local business owner, the setup can remove enough manual work to avoid hiring another employee for the person setting it up, it's recurring revenue tied to something the client can clearly see and understand i didn't expect this use case to appear this quickly very impressed by what people are building with Mission Control HQ if you're already doing this, send me your setup. I want to see the weirdest local business workflow you've moved into it

@tibo_maker

is SaaS dead or not? the state of indie hacking in 2026 🫣 ft. @marclou & @levelsio

@tibo_maker

met a guy making $51,000/month by scraping reddit for the phrase "anyone got recommendations for" and emailing the posters within 2 hours not joking he opens reddit every morning runs a search on 8 subreddits in his niche finds people who just publicly asked for exactly what he sells and emails them while the post is still on the front page reply rate: 23% average cold email: 0.3% his is 76x higher because these people literally just raised their hand in public saying "please take my money" heres the exact phrases he searches every morning: "anyone got recommendations for [service]" "alternative to [competitor]" "looking for a good [service]" "got burned by [company], where do i go now" "has anyone used [company] — are they worth it" every one of these is a public declaration of buying intent with a timestamp on it someone posted this 4 hours ago in r/[niche]: "I need [service] urgently. Budget is $15K. Prefer someone who actually knows what theyre doing and isnt sketchy" he saw the post at 9am pulled the username cross referenced linkedin found the email sent this at 10am: "hey [name], saw your post in r/[sub] about needing [service] urgently. we do exactly that — last client we booked 34 qualified calls in a month. free 15 min call?" reply at 10:11am call at 2pm signed $15K contract by 4pm 7 hours from public reddit post to signed deal from reading reddit in the morning this is the process: step 1: find the 5-10 subreddits where your buyers hang out step 2: run searches for "recommendation" "alternative to" "looking for" "anyone use" in those subreddits every morning step 3: filter for posts under 4 hours old with clear buying intent step 4: pull the username → cross reference linkedin → find their email step 5: send a 2 line email referencing their EXACT post step 6: warm call every positive reply within 30 minutes thats it last month: - 187 reddit posts scraped - 164 emails found (90% find rate) - 38 positive replies - 24 booked calls - 11 closes - $4,600 average deal - $50,600 in revenue from reading reddit while eating breakfast heres why this layers perfectly on top of a normal cold email system: your main campaigns are emailing 4,500 cold leads a day building pipeline at scale reddit is a surgical strike on top of that the guy on reddit literally JUST declared their problem hours ago the declaration is the qualifier theres no discovering pain points they posted the problem you showed up with the solution the sales conversation is already 90% done before the call starts its the highest intent cold email you can send because it might not even feel cold they had the problem at 9am you showed up at 10am thats not a cold email thats a well timed introduction and heres the part that should make every cold emailer sick: every single person on this app is scraping apollo fighting over the same 50 million contacts meanwhile reddit has 500 million monthly users posting their exact buying requests in public timestamped organised by niche completely uncontested free nobody in cold email is scraping reddit because nobody thinks of reddit as a lead source they think of it as a place to post memes while angry buyers are literally typing their credit card out loud every single day one of the most profitable lead source on the internet has been sitting there for 15 years organising itself timestamping itself qualifying itself telling you their budget telling you their pain telling you what they just got burned by and agency owners are still writing "hey firstname hope this finds you well" to marketing directors on apollo go open reddit search one of those phrases in a subreddit in your niche youll find 10 hand raisers before your coffee gets cold simples p.s. if youre an agency owner with a proven offer and want us to setup a cold email system that books you 10-30 calls per month - DM me "EMAIL" (you ONLY pay for qualified calls actually booked onto your calendar)

@scaling_shields

sent issue 1 of my newsletter to 60,906 people. 25.4% opened it. 3.7% clicked. that list is 10 years old and colder than I wanted to admit. posting the numbers anyway because that's the whole point of doing this in public

@iamAlexTurnbull

This single video changed my business. → +$35K in MRR → 1M+ views across social media → Hundreds of reposts And now? We’re running it as a Facebook ad at $1,000/day. Planning to scale to $10,000/day soon. It is bringing tons of clients daily. One great video can completely change the trajectory of your SaaS.

@Dylan_txa_

perfect response to people who've never had to actually build anything at scale. businesses are built in the weeds.

@Shpigford

If you work on the right thing, you only have to work one hour a week If you work on the wrong thing, you have to work 10 hours a day

@shl

affiliates made me $30,000 in the last 30 days sounds like the easiest channel in the world, it's not writing about it in today's newsletter: > the mistake almost everyone makes > what a great affiliate actually looks like > the exact commission structure I use > the two scams that steal your revenue > how we keep affiliates active this will be useful if you are building a company. subscribe to get the email later today: 👇

@tibo_maker

People are like "You're just running a lifestyle business." “Yeah I have a business and a lifestyle and my lifestyle happens to include a fucking yellow Lamborghini.”

@davidsenra

Marc Andreessen says his new life coach is a YouTuber with 100 videos about “retardmaxxing”: "There's this guy on YouTube who has basically a hundred videos on retardmaxxing." "He's like my new life coach. I haven't met him, but from a distance." "It's basically just—retardmaxx. Go to work, do a good job, come home, it's fine. Start a company, it succeeds, it fails, it's fine. Have too much to eat one night at dinner, it's fine. Go to the gym, don't count your reps, it's fine. Ask a girl if she wants to go out with you, if she says no, it's fine." "It's like 100 30-minute videos about retardmaxxing. And you would think that after the first two minutes, he kind of covered it. But no." "And by the way, they're all hysterical. They're all absolutely fantastic. It's literally him on his porch in the middle of nowhere with a cigar, and it's like a half hour." "It's just absolutely spectacular." @pmarca with @HarryStebbings

@guilleflorvs

10 months ago I built a paid community to $30K MRR in a few weeks as a side project. it's at $5K now since I went all in on Helply and basically stopped showing up for it. turned into a distraction vs. much bigger opportunities with Helply. Its' a dope concept though. think insider access to the co. weekly as we grow Helply from zero to 10m. 177 slack members currently. It will continue to die unless someone wants to run it. Would be down for a big rev share with the right person. You run it, get a big piece. could probably be $1M side project for right person.

@iamAlexTurnbull

my first proof-of-concept just instantly flagged an 1,800-review "handmade" shop that's actually just reselling $6 necklaces from Alibaba for $75!!!!!!!! this is about to get *nasty*.

@Shpigford

The thing I'm learning about business nowadays: to survive, you need to constantly reorient. You used to build a business, hit product-market fit, and then kind of coast. Now you hit PMF and the ground shifts 3 months later. New AI models, new algorithms, new tools that change what's possible. So you reorient, and reorient again, it's pretty constant. I'm noticing even companies doing $100M to $1B in revenue are sweating these days. They feel it too. But the cool part is if you reorient right, you get rewarded massively. That's kinda the trade. The stability is gone, but so is the ceiling. I've been reorienting my own companies more this year than in the last five combined. And weirdly, it's the most alive I've felt building. It's a good time to be a founder if you can move on a dime. For the experimenters out there, the people who actually like the constant change... I think this has gotta be the greatest time to be building there's ever been.

@gregisenberg

when the internet first happened a ton of businesses popped up to help companies sell stuff online these companies made a lot of money, building e-commerce systems for existing giants but the absolute best thing you could have been working on during this era was shopify you see this again with a ton of ai companies that are doing the forward deployed engineer model and super proud of it and printing large revenue numbers it's not like they'll fail or anything but it's not very fun and doesn't result in a forever company that gets to be involved in the next thing

@thdxr

That's how you do it. This is exactly what entrepreneurship is all about. "Ok, that gives me an idea" and then you do it. You see what someone else would miss, you do what no one would give you permission to do. Pure. It's not about the money, it's about the sign. IYKYK.

@jasonfried

Hey @marclou, I've been driving decent traffic to my site

@matthieumatical

Very interesting guy to follow because he's one of the people who started the open startup movement with companies sharing their revenue, it was unheard of 10 years ago! @iamAlexTurnbull

@levelsio

To my loyal subscribers... please share what you're working on below. to my 1.5m followers, please take a look at the top .1% of my followers who are donating $1 to chartiy every month with me!

@Jason

making an app with a buy button is super easy nowadays, the hard part is marketing it... so me and my best french friend @marclou built an app that feeds you to the sharks if you don't do marketing introducing: MARKETING OR DIE 4 ways to do marketing, each with a 30 day guided roadmap to actually get you to do it. - short form content (by me) - SEO (by @illyism) - paid Ads (by @nico_jeannen) - viral launching (by marc) pick your marketing channel and try it for your product, keep marketing until you find what works. if you fail to give a valid effort? you will be kicked forever and publicly called out. each marketing mission has its own set of milestones so we can verify if you did the work, or if you procrastinated on doing marketing (again). P.S. this whole thing started cause 2 months ago we launched @shipordie_ where 293 people shipped, 36 got thrown overboard, and 57 earned their first $1 however me and marc felt something was missing, a very KEY PART after shipping... getting people aware that you exist (by doing marketing). P.P.S we also have some HUGE AWESOME NEWS: ship or die is now sponsored by @stripe !!! :D so cool Iinks and more info below ↓

@jackfriks

My friend Corey makes $1,000/hour doing the simplest AI business I've seen all year. Only 5% of businesses use AI beyond ChatGPT, the other 95% need you. He sits with a small business owner for 45 minutes, finds where they lose 5-10 hours a week, and prescribes off-the-shelf AI tools that fix it. He charges $999 for that assessment. He's a doctor writing prescriptions. The tools already exist. He just knows which ones. Everyone wins. 50% of his clients then hire him to implement it, and that's where the $1,000/hour work comes from. Corey came on the podcast @startupideaspod and gave away a full course for free. Like actually the full way you can copy his system and run it yourself on your own: - The exact offer (with a money-back guarantee that makes it a no-brainer) - The 4-phase system to deliver it - A template you can download and use today - 6 things to upsell after the assessment - 7 ways to get clients with zero audience and zero capital Even if you never start this exact business, watching @coreyganim break it down will get your brain working on your own productized AI service. That's the real reason to press play. Link:

@gregisenberg

last week I launched my community and we sold out in 36 hours 🤩 Slack access, monthly live q&a with me, a smaller room to talk and connect writing about it in tomorrow's newsletter: the launch strategies that actually worked, the mistakes I made with the launch, and 5 things I'd tell anyone launching something soon subscribe below to get the email 👇

@tibo_maker

Imagine being looked on badly because you're NOT in YC but claim to be lol.

@jasonkneen

@tibo_maker I have always struggled promoting my startups in reddit, posts getting blocked or accounts disabled. Would definitely be interested for this

@geobotsar

All you guys almost unanimously recommended @SMB_Attorney when I asked for a startup lawyer ~6 months ago A really really cool guy to work with, very funny, informal, nice and fast He's also very pro-AI which I like so I'd check documents first with Claude quickly, let it write up some notes and send to him and then he'd review that speeding both of us up If you have some legal stuff you need I can recommend him 😊

@levelsio

How I'd make $10 million with AI agents

@gregisenberg

Validation is a mirage. “How do you validate if it’s going to work?” “How do you know if people will buy it to not?” “How do you validate product market fit?” “How do you validate if a feature is worth building?” “How do you validate a design?” You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. I mean you can, but not in spirit of the questions being asked. What people are asking about is certainty ahead of time. But time doesn’t start when you start working on something, or when you have a piece of the whole ready. It starts when the whole thing hits the market. How do you know if what you’re doing is right while you’re doing it? You can’t be. You can only have a hunch, a feeling, a belief. And if the only way to tell if you’ve completely missed the mark is to ask other people and wait for them to tell you, then you’re likely too far lost from the start. If you make products, you better have a sense of where you’re heading without having to ask for directions. There’s really only one real way to get as close to certain as possible. That’s to build the actual thing and make it actually available for anyone to try, use, and buy. Real usage on real things on real days during the course of real work is the only way to validate anything. And even then, it’s barely validation since there are so many other variables at play. Timing, marketing, pricing, messaging, etc. Truth is, you don’t know, you won’t know, you’ll never know until you know and reflect back on something real. And the best way to find out, is to believe in it, make it, and put it out there. You do your best, you promote it the best you can, you prepare yourself the best way you know how. And then you literally cross your fingers. I’m not kidding. You can’t validate something that doesn’t exist. You can’t validate an idea. You can’t validate someone’s guess. You can’t validate an abstraction. You can’t validate a sketch, or a wireframe, or an MVP that isn’t the actual product. When I hear MVP, I don’t think Minimum Viable Product. I think Minimum Viable Pie. The food kind. A slice of pie is all you need to evaluate the whole pie. It’s homogenous. But that’s not how products work. Products are a collection of interwoven parts, one dependent on another, one leading to another, one integrating with another. You can’t take a slice a product, ask people how they like it, and deduce they’ll like the rest of the product once you’ve completed it. All you learn is that they like or don’t like the slice you gave them. If you want to see if something works, make it. The whole thing. The simplest version of the whole thing – that’s what version 1.0 is supposed to be. But make that, put it out there, and learn. If you want answers, you have to ask the question, and the question is: Market, what do you think of this completed version 1.0 of our product? Don’t mistake an impression of a piece of your product as a proxy for the whole truth. When you give someone a slice of something that isn’t homogenous, you’re asking them to guess. You can’t base certainty on that. That said, there’s one common way to uncertainty: That’s to ask one more person their opinion. It’s easy to think the more opinions you have, the more certain you’ll be, but in practice it’s quite the opposite. If you ever want to be less sure of yourself, less confident in the outcome, just ask someone else what they think. It works every time.

@jasonfried

I do an exercise called “fear-setting” at least once a quarter, often once a month. It is the most powerful exercise I do. Fear-setting has produced my biggest business and personal successes, as well as repeatedly helped me to avoid catastrophic mistakes.

@tferriss

Jake, who built a $50K/month alarm app in 4 months, says the most valuable skill right now isn't building it's... "Focus on top of funnel only. That is the most valuable skill right now is marketing. There's so many people that can build an app and it's so easy with AI, but there's not so many people that know how to market and know how to get views." "If nobody knows about your app, it doesn't exist. You can build as many features as you want." "Building doesn't really matter so much. You got to build a good product, of course. But getting views is more of the unknown."

@starter_story

my wife thinks i'm obsessed...but I will keep repeating this. Claude Fable 5 + SEO is going to create more “self made millionaires” this year than the last decade combined. don't bookmark this if it crosses your timeline. just paste this entire thing into Claude Fable 5. thank me later.

@bloggersarvesh

If I was starting a new company today, I'd start a small pie shop on the corner somewhere. Counter service with some stools, incandescent lighting, just a few pie choices in a rotating display, and a mug for coffee. Probably call it "A piece of pie and a coffee, please". One flat price. Coffee and a slice of pie included. Don't want the coffee? Don't drink it. Don't want the pie? Don't eat it.

@jasonfried

I'm building an app to make $10,000/Month and I'll record everything... I want to document my WHOLE journey building an app, marketing it, and making money off of it. Is it really that easy? How hard is it? I've been seeing so many X users online talking about how easy it is to make money online with AI now. I want to test it and show people the reality of making a business online.

@jomatech

Almost ten years since @mijustin wrote a (really good) blog post about why he bought my product! 😁 https://justinjackson.ca/software-saas-product-marketing

@petersuhm

This is the most exciting time in history to be a solopreneur: - Claude Code to build - Stripe to monetize - Fastlane to market - Posthog to understand usage This is insane 👇

@gauravsbuilding

My favorite thing @om wrote was actually an interview with Brunello Cucinelli in 2015. And to this day, I think it’s the single best thing you can read on running a business. Better than any book, better than any article. Read it: https://om.co/2015/04/27/brunello-cucinelli-2/

@jasonfried

I built Polsia into a $250M company in under 3 months. Solo + AI. Zero employees. Everyone asks me how I did it. Introducing aisloP, a docu-series on how I build Polsia. Episode 1: The Launch. How I orchestrated the biggest Twitter launch of 2026.

@Bencera

.@mntruell launched Cursor 8 times, and nobody cared. Don't give up.

@marclou

Owning vs. Renting Intelligence

@lqiao