Reading up on startups

I am once again telling you that you can buy exact match domains one shot directory sites using Claude Code deploy them to vercel and get them indexed on google search console and they will get you free traffic of your target customer and you can run ads on them that promote your product

@codyschneider

0 to $500k revenue in 2 months building an AI native service company great read for those thinking about what company to build today

@Sohaibashraf97

Omarchy is blowing up. I've never been involved with anything in my career that has grown this fast. With Ruby on Rails, we had years to build solid institutions, teams, and relationships. With Omarchy, we've been forced to figure it all out in twelve days. It's exhausting, but also incredibly exciting. It was never sustainable with just Ryan and me running everything. That's how it was, more or less, up until Quattro. Lots of other contributors, but all the responsibility was on us to make sure the ship stayed afloat, the servers didn't crash, and fixes got pushed out quickly. Now it's time to build a proper institution. Durable, resilient, and competent. That's what we're doing here on Basecamp now. I'm spinning up teams for every facet of responsible distro management, and I'm getting an absolute outpouring of interest for all of them. Everyone wants to be part of this. We're winning hearts, minds, and volunteers at an astounding rate. Great! We need all of it to succeed. Because make no mistake: There are many people who'd love to see this rocket blow up before it reaches the moon. Aggrieved Linux users who don't like the sudden attention their exclusive hobby has received. Competing Linux distributions that are seeing our numbers explode. Mac stans who've sunk their identity into an apple. And, of course, any of the haters I've picked up in my quarter-century career speaking bluntly on the internet. They're not going to succeed. Because we've already become unstoppable. There's too much momentum, too much money, and too much support now backing this effort. We're living the Mandate From Heaven meme at the moment. And we are here to fulfill the prophecy: The Year of Linux on the Desktop! That has been a joke for two decades. But by the end of the year, nobody at Apple or Microsoft is going to be laughing. They're going to be scrambling. Because neither of these proud organizations currently has any method to counter the speed, vision, or ambition with which we're going to accelerate into the future of personal computing. This is the moment. This is the opening. This is our chance. For thirty years, we've been subject to one OS overlord or another. Dictating how we compute. Choking off competitors through platform malfeasance. Tollboothing the distribution. That ends now. Because Linux is going to win. And Linux is free. As in beer, speech, and source. But just because it's inevitable doesn't mean it's going to be easy. We have a lot of work in front of us if we actually want to make our mark. But there's never been a better time for this kind of delusional ambition. The age of agents is the unlocking factor. It sounds like a LinkedIn slogan, but it's true. Where the application of tokens goes, the innovation follows. We can fix everything. Let's do it together. Let's go. --- This is what I sent to the dozens of new volunteers who've signed up for teams within the new Omarchy organization yesterday. But we might as well broadcast our mission and intentions to the world too.

@dhh

When something you make get lots of irrational haters, usually you're on to something Omarchy by @DHH passes that test with flying colours 😂

@levelsio

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

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

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

Here's how I'm running my $4M/year SaaS with a $260/month executive team of Grok Bots: Inbox Triage - is logged into my email, Facebook, X, LinkedIn. It ignores/closes all emails and DMs that don't need a reply from me. It opens an inbox item in Trello with a link to the email or DM if it needs a reply. Assistant - helps me plan my day and week schedule. Has access to my calendar. I chat back and forth to plan out fitting lunch, gym, meetings, handling my inbox, and "creative time" boxes into my day. COO - is logged into Intercom and Slack to give me a report on any customer requests or project deadlines slipping. Daily News - summary of news for each of my stock investments ($RIVN, $QXO, $FLUT, $CHTR, and $TINY.TO), the latest Reddit or social media thing going viral in my business niche which is Ubiquiti stuff. CMO - this one hasn't been useful tbh because I don't trust it to give it access to social media accounts, blog, or website and as a thought partner it's not very intelligent. It seems to me that Grok Bots are for actually doing things, Grok direct is still best for strategy and thinking through ideas. CISO - I put it in a group chat with all the other bots and they were given instructions on what not to do by the CISO bot for security purposes. CFO - I give it access to QuickBooks, ProfitWell, and our internal reporting dashboards then ask it questions and bounce ideas. They're all running around logged into my accounts via a web browser in the Grok Bot provided VM. Zero APIs or integration setups needed.

@rchase

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

Talking about Omarchy Quattro STARTING IN 8 MINUTES https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1kKzDPzDplLJv

@ThePrimeagen

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

the models have no moat (OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI) the IDEs have no moat (Cursor, Windsurf) the harnesses have no moat (Cognition, Factory, LangChain) the app builders have no moat (Replit, Lovable, Bolt) the wrappers have no moat (Harvey, Abridge, OpenEvidence) the inference providers have no moat (Together, Fireworks, Groq) the voice layer has no moat (Sierra, Decagon, ElevenLabs) the data labeling companies have no moat (Scale, Surge, Mercor) the AI infrastructure has no moat (Baseten, Modal, Railway) the neoclouds have no moat (CoreWeave, Lambda, Crusoe) the generative media companies have no moat (Runway, Higgsfield, Suno) apparently nobody in AI has a moat except the venture firm ☠️

@nikunj

Many ways to win

@kepano

we've kicked off an internal @sesame hackathon this week and there's so many cool projects floating around. digging into a few ideas myself now. what would you like to see built with sesame? (for those unfamiliar: remarkably lifelike voice personal agents)

@Stammy

- 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

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

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

Congrats to @Fairphone on the launch today! A good day for repairable, long-lasting consumer electronics products.

@FrameworkPuter

Let us know what you think!

@bcherny

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

Wow making YouTube videos fully agentic is such a sick experience now. - Davinci Resolve + Fusion - Remotion - Blender - Seedance 2.5 - Elevenlabs Man you can make some cool videos! I'm about to launch a few new faceless channels with cool startup/technology documentaries. Being a solo founder in 2026 is the best.

@SimonHoiberg

I share because I care. I really don't need the money. So going to roll these four grand forward into the Omarchy ecosystem. It'll be the prize pot for a plugin competition to be announced next week!

@dhh

One person plus 20 agents working simultaneously can outperform an entire department of engineers at a magnificent 7 big tech co https://app.dealroom.co/news/note/garry-tan-on-the-new-rules-for-founders-the-2-4b-palantir-miss-and-why-a-markdown-file-is-an-employee

@garrytan

what an incredible move from Tally 🤯 (not affliated) they made their form builder (almost) 100% free i find it incredible smart because: - they become the obvious choice for ChatGPT to recommend - serious big buyers will still buy - occasional buyers won't but they was churning anyway i am impressed 👏

@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

Hello fellow founders, go to your investor's website and see if they still list you as a portfolio company. What you do with the information is up to you.

@PalmerLuckey

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

lol another one of the things i like most about openai is tibo

@sama

A brutal postmortem from an early Airtable employee You don’t often get this level of honesty from insiders Many said it’s still a good outcome but they didn’t invest 8 years of their lives and dreams of something bigger

@KenWattana

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'm selling one of my projects. I abandoned it but it still gets 30 signups per month, 90% from Google search.

@mddanishyusuf

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

@postsbyrhys

Probably the biggest startup announcement of the year (decade?) in terms of the calibre of founders. If I had to name the top 10 engineers currently or previously at Google in terms of impact it would be the two cofounders (Larry and Sergey) and all 4 of these folks:

@GergelyOrosz

Announcing the NYC AI Atlas! An open source 3D map of the top AI startups in New York City. http://nycaiatlas.com

@nutlope

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

This year is my 10th year as an entrepreneur. 10 random facts and thoughts: - It took me 2 years to make $1 - 88% of my projects failed - You never know when it’ll work - Once it works, everything is easier - Understand momentum. Ride the waves. - Product market fit, or No - It's a lonely journey - Doing is better than thinking - Failing is better than thinking - Sleep 8 hours. Exercise for 1 hour

@marclou

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) on X

@ycombinator

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

I don't really think it's due to people vibe-coding replacements to run on a $10 VPS so they can save $19. That argument never made sense to me. I think the trend is due to a combination of factors: - economy isn't doing great - massive amount of tech layoffs - summer is never good for B2B - less googling in general - Big AI more feature-ful - more competitors etc

@yongfook

What a great product launch. And the name is superb as well.

@fatih

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

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

I've started a new company: @superlogical! We're going to begin by building a terminal multiplexer. The entire vision is much larger, but the multiplexer is the foundation. Sign up for the newsletter to get beta access and devlogs (product updates only I promise).

@mitchellh

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

@tibo_maker