Reading up on startups

Selling software is pointless now

@saeed_vz

My serverless fairytale: I used to pay AWS $7800/m. Last month I paid them $68. And paid Hetzner around $300. That's +$7000/m extra I can now spend on marketing and distribution.

@SimonHoiberg

If your company or startup is running engineering with everyone using their own license of Codex/CC then you're going to be completely left behind by fast moving teams who are using cloud-based agents. Local dev is like banging rocks together and grunting versus being on a rocket. Seriously, just pay the money for something like @DevinAI, @AmpCode, @FactoryAI, etc. Do NOT try to build your own "code factory". Props to @DaleSpoonemore for taking @HelloUntangle to the next level on this. Fun to watch.

@ryancarson

Mercury is running a free bookstore for SF tech week and to celebrate our AI-accounting system (@Mercury Books). My recommendation was “Beginning of Infinity”. 201 Jackson St today and tomorrow.

@immad

It took me 5 minutes to get into the Claude Startups program And you don't need VC funding anymore What you get: - A year of Claude Team - API credits - Priority rate limits - Deals on the tools a startup runs on How to apply: - Create a Claude Console account (the API one, not the app) - Use a company email, not Gmail - Go to

@adriamatz

Linear designer getting absolutely mogged by US Chief Design Officer wasn't on my bingo card. Excruciatingly bullish on National Design Studio

@joshmanders

you know this feeling when you see everyone doing amazing things, and it just drains all your energy as you feel so behind well, today I did a customer interview I showed a new feature, she was blown away people on X are like "meh" real people out there are blown away it refueled my energy 200%, and I now want to ship 10x X is a bubble, remember to get out from time to time and remember 👉 talk more to real people

@tibo_maker

I'm begging you: • Go on google trends • Find problem people are struggling with • Turn those problems into digital assets • Without revealing your name • Without showing your face I shared this with a bartender, he made $31K in a single month. Here's how it works:

@TommiPedruzzi

BREAKING NEWS: @rauchg , CEO of Vercel, has just published his first public skill Which tech CEO will be next to skill-ify themselves? https://www.skills.sh/rauchg/skills/ui-recording-timeline

@andrewqu

this is how Nikita Bier builds viral apps

@tibo_maker

I literally can't think of a better risk/reward bet right now than building a ChatGPT plugin and getting in front of their 1.2 billion weekly users. As of yesterday, ChatGPT recommends plugins in the middle of conversations. Millions of questions get asked every day with no plugin to recommend. Each one is an empty slot. Facebook apps in 2007. iPhone apps in 2008. TikTok in 2019. Every big platform has a few months where distribution is free, and most people miss it. I saw this firsthand when I lived in SF building venture backed companies. They are sacred times! If I were starting this week: 1. Find a tool or workflow people already Google for or do by hand every week (PDF to Excel, invoice generator, weekly client reports) 2. Build it as a ChatGPT plugin 3. Write the description using the exact phrases people type into ChatGPT 4. Ship 5 of them and see which ones get picked up 5. Double down on the one with the most traction In 12 months these slots will be crowded but right now they're pretty empty. Most people will realize ChatGPT plugins were the biggest free distribution channel of 2026 sometime in 2027.

@gregisenberg

There is always a .com you can get for $5k that's better the tryblurgh.‌ai you're currently using. The reason you don't see it is (a) lack of imagination and (b) because you're attached to Blurgh, which you shouldn't be, because it's not that great anyway.

@paulg

the revenue from the past 48 hours emphatically says yes. absolutely wild for a tweet I sent out on a whim on a Friday afternoon as I was finishing up for the week. 🎉

@Shpigford

Why I'm Building Muse

@alexandr_wang

a YC partner who closed millions in founder-led sales just laid out her 8 rules for cold email

@tibo_maker

You should put a pixel-perfect version of your app on your homepage Why? 1. Signing up for new things is annoying if the UI sucks 2. People exaggerate agent-friendliness 3. They just want to do a thing Show a common use case being done with an agent. If your app is not bad, this will increase your conversion rate. This used to be hard to build and maintain, now it is easy. You should probably do it.

@frantzfries

Muse is cool, I'm a fan... but what's been on my mind lately is less about tech. We've created two big inventions over the last few thousand years: societal and physical. Democracy, markets, institutions, culture, shared values vs cars, planes, fire, etc... AI is about to massively level up individual capability. massively. This Muse post is exactly it. It's all about the individual. We can likely make anything physical soon. The best brains + dollars on the planet are pilling on. But when individuals become dramatically more powerful, more autonomous, and less dependent on each other, what new societal inventions do we need? What replaces the institutions, rituals and communities that evolved for a world where humans needed each other much more than they may in the future? Or is this "build me a society upgrade with..." prompt running in a backroom somewhere?

@jmwind

Probably the coziest place I’ve worked at - they really did a good job with the yc night cafe

@mariagorskikh

Very, very excited for this.

@excid3

💰 Passed $10M/y in revenue + investment gains this year I've always been aggressively increasing my profit margins to as high as possible, especially the last few years, and especially this year where I've reduced my SaaS dependencies to just a handful of companies by vibecoding my own replacements It's now about 94.5% profit! Spend less -> lower costs -> more profit -> more money saved -> more money to invest -> more % returns on investments And at some point that investment return starts to pass by your business revenue which it has for me for about a year now Most of my investments have been simple ETFs like Vanguard S&P500, but also a few lucky stock and startup bets that worked out: Back in 2022, I couldn't get any available GPUs, so I thought it might be smart to buy Nvidia if there's such a shortage and that was a good bet too Then back in 2023 @dannypostma recommended me to invest in the companies we used for our AI inference for our photo AI apps, so I did that too. First I invested in @replicate and then also @FAL From then I just asked every app/service I used if I could invest, like @cursor_ai in 2025 which then got acquired by @spacex recently! My business revenue has remained very stable at about $200K-$250K/mo, but even with that investment returns have now surpassed that Investments fluctuate a lot so some years it's up some years it might be down a lot (who isn't expecting a big crash at some point?), and most investment gains are unrealized (I never sell!), so keep that with a big grain of salt! I keep my revenue/gains together with my profit margin and my sleep score in my situation monitor dashboard, as those are equally important :D Many people in the last decade told me to spend all my money, either personally or with my business to grow it, we don't know how that would have ended up, maybe my companies would be bigger, but I'm happy I did it in my own lean profitable healthy way and it ended up great I think! 🙏😊

@levelsio

we've made some significant breakthroughs and now have a pathway to becoming the best inference provider outside of openai and anthropic a true provider, not passing through to others gonna take longer than i'd like but it's going to be worth the effort

@thdxr

the main thing i was excited about launching this week will be next week instead, but imo worth the wait!

@sama

Just had a long-term multi-year customer cancel their plan. They are also a SaaS company. I pretty much just shrugged and figured, "makes sense, they probably vibe coded a replacement". Don't target developers!

@yongfook

Very very happy to make money with a project that's not reselling AI tokens again! Seems more moat-ey

@levelsio

we are so back.

@joeyabanks

One of these days the frontier labs will casually add social media scheduling to their agent capabilities and the entire indiehacker economy will collapse.

@yongfook

everything about that instinct company smells weird

@thdxr

Woz is back! I am his first customer. He got my career started. I stuffed so many of his motherboards as a kid. While we sat around and watched TV. My dad built custom holders so we could stuff them while sitting on the couch. And a custom set of wires to take away any static electricity. I once got to interview Woz in front of UC Berkeley’s business school. Said they had fewer failures than the ones built in its own factory. What we didn’t discuss is how much love we put into them. They were technology from an alien world. There wasn’t anything else like it in my life. Woz is still the nicest founder I have ever met. And the original nerd. As I get older I realize how special those few hundred hours spent with him were. Not to mention he gave me $40,000 worth of Mac’s to run the school paper on. And I remember thinking to myself, as we sat in the cafeteria of West Valley Community College, “can’t get that kind of education at Stanford.” When @elonmusk talks about putting love into his products, I get that deeply.

@Scobleizer

11pm on a Tuesday, big startup energy

@thsottiaux

Any remote companies paying well? ($400k+) Seems like all big salaries are in office these days.

@noahkagan

SaaS is not dead. yet. Give it another 6 months.

@yongfook

fantastic product (!!)- you're hitting on something bigger than Instinct: it's not just the giants who can eat your lunch anymore. anyone can. three years ago, building something was grabbing a couple of people, raise a little seed, put your head down, and ship in three or four months. That window was the moat. Three or four months of creativity with a little wind at my back, enough to build momentum so that by the time anyone cloned us, we were already two steps ahead. Now, two things scare the shit out of me. first, (online)social connectivity is at an all-time high. ideas propagate wider and faster than they ever have, and they reach the right people. second, AI has 10-20x'd output, and it did it without seed capital. seed money was its own barrier. you had to know high-net-worth people, pitch them, and close the round - now I can point AI agents at any app, catalog every feature, and have a working clone in a day or two max. and we're at the very beginning. what takes AI days today will take hours in a few months. so where's the moat? brand. trust and loyalty, and most likely to individuals rather than companies. If @tferriss launches a productivity app, you take it seriously in a way you never would with a random App Store listing. If @hubermanlab ships a longevity tracker, you're checking it out. In the short term, brand trumps everything. which brings it back to Instinct. there's no question every major AI player has already spun up teams to build a competitor e.g. Muse. that's what makes this moment so exciting: the barrier to entry is next to nothing. It's also what makes it terrifying: the barrier to entry is next to nothing.

@kevinrose

Still processing from yesterday's event (one of the most meaningful days of my life)— more to come—but a few quick things for now: 1. Thank you to everyone who came. You are what made it special. 2. There's so much need for IRL community. I've rarely felt this kind of pull for anything I've done. Wow. 3. All of the talks will be posted to my YT channel in the coming weeks. Get excited. 4. An unbelievable thank-you to the @Stripe team for helping me put this event on. It takes something special to create an event with 1,000+ PMs that has such great vibes. If you think they're great at payments infra, they might be even better at design and event production. High talent density over there. It's no coincidence that I've had more people from Stripe on my podcast than any other company. Thank you, Stripe. (A few photos from the event, more to come.)

@lennysan

Bending Spoons is the best thing that has happened to overvalued ZIRP companies. They give an off-ramp to founders who will never hit previous valuations with less of a reputational hit than selling to private equity.

@austin_rief

https://nomads.com/mcp https://hoodmaps.com/mcp https://hotelist.com/mcp https://levels.io/mcp

@levelsio

I've got some big news to share: https://ma.tt/2026/09/mirene/

@photomatt

The point is that it catches attention (and makes money) and it's controversial as you can see from the 100+ replies in the post below (which catches even more attention) You have to become a master of getting attention in this time Now that building anything has become quite trivial, catching attention is now the most important skill I think He's creative, the opposite of boring, thinks out of the box, isn't scared of controversy and ships fast and so he has the perfect skillset right now All the attention for these projects also funnel back to him (as followers) and his projects (like TrustMRR) which help to increase revenue later 10/10

@levelsio

It's beyond impressive who Anthropic and OpenAI are able to recruit Just as amazing: folks they reject. Obv cannot say names, but know plenty of highly sought after engineers, rejected from OAI / Ant after v long processes, yet no problem getting offers any other place

@GergelyOrosz

TL;DR: Owning assets is no longer optional. You have about 3 to 4 years to stack wealth and build real distribution. Once AI takes over half of cognitive work, selling your hours on a laptop won't protect you. In an AI economy, pure salaries get crushed while asset owners capture the entire upside. Own equity, businesses, or real-world reach before the window shuts.

@shiri_shh

Herdr has raised a $6M seed round led by @BessemerVP, with @ycombinator, @e2mindset, and angels including @tobi, @dok2001 , and @gorkem. Oh, and we're also hiring 👇 https://herdr.dev/blog/herdr-raised-a-seed/

@herdrdev

We (@mercury) are pushing the envelope on agentic banking. Already have agentic cards, MCP and Command (our AI agent). What other features would people like to see us build?

@immad

Anyone that works in AI is working the hardest they've ever worked in their lives. On the surface it's somewhat ironic (AI should give us back time!), but the reality is that it's the most fun, fascinating and empowering epoch in human history. The intelligence revolution.

@rauchg

If you're building a startup here are the 10 best GitHub repos that can save you dozens of hours and thousands of dollars: 1. gstack by Garry Tran Use Garry Tan’s Claude Code setup: 23 tools for CEO, Design, Eng, Release, Docs, and QA.

@hasantoxr

life update: after 4 incredible years at Vercel leading the Next.js and React teams, I’m joining OpenAI to work on Codex as an IC. ChatGPT and Codex have completely changed how I build. Getting the chance to help shape where this goes next was too exciting to pass up. I learned an absurd amount at Vercel, and I’m excited to bring some of it with me. onwards :)

@feedthejim

working on OpenCode Go has been the hardest thing i've ever worked on - most competitive space on the planet - massive levels of fraud - trying to achieve impossible economics there's a 3% chance we make it all work and if we do everyone will talk about it like it was always inevitable and only a handful of people will ever understand how it very much was not

@thdxr

No kids. No girlfriend.. I cook 7 days a week. I manage teams of agents. I don’t code Sold the house. Sold the company. Tiny temp furnished box in Montréal. Not broke. Just bored. Laptop. Agents. A robot. A car. Money. French. English enough. Dopamine is my fuel. Dubai? Singapore? Shenzhen? Silicon Valley? Texas? Louisiana? 53 on paper. 35 in my head. If you were me, where do you go?

@paz_al3x

Ok, THIS is wild, never expected anything like this: Uber exited Nigeria… no warning, just shut down the app, on the spot. When riders were mid-trip ?!! This is what a startup that just went bankrupt would do, not a $150B corporation. Uber operated in Nigeria since 2014 (!!)

@GergelyOrosz

I just bought a new domain. https://maible.io stay tuned.

@jonathan_wilke