Follow AI Builders — Not Influencers

the best startup founders in 2026 won't be the best coders they'll be the best Product Managers here's the full playbook: 1. pick a problem you personally have. you need to understand your user better than anyone else, and the easiest way to do that is to be your own user 2. spin up a landing page with AI fast. make it about the pain and the fix, no fluff. and make signup 2 clicks max, remove every possible friction 3. learn to write specs, describe features and explain edge cases. that's all you really need now 4. let AI build the first version. your job is to direct, not develop 5. use whatever stack you're most comfortable with. just ship. don't overthink the tech decision - that's not your job anymore 6. host on the simplest platform possible - Vercel, Railway, whatever - don't touch servers 7. test thoroughly - especially edge cases. you're a QA now 8. charge from day 0. free users give you nothing but false hope 9. list your product on every directory you can find. it compounds your SEO and builds DR over time 10. start building in public. share the micro wins, the losses, everything. invite people to try it through DMs. I did this for all my products 11. do customer support yourself, always. redirect questions to your socials, never automate this. every support request is a product insight - that's why you do it yourself, always (I still do this for all 5 of my products) 12. automate everything else you do more than twice 13. improve one thing in your product every single day once users start coming in. watch your competitors' G2 and Trustpilot reviews closely for ideas 14. a PM's most important skill is deciding what NOT to build. for every feature request you get, say no to 9 of them - build less, but build it right 15. every week, build one free tool targeting a keyword that benefits you. it compounds over time 16. work your SEO early. build your affiliate setup early. only run paid acquisition after you're sure about PMF every day your ...

these days we focus so much on the speed things move, but I love exercises like these to step back and look for parallels in history

first funding round, over one billion not valuation, but amount raised yann lecun

haha the @runwayml real-time characters is great. i just spent 2 minutes pitching a ghibli version of myself a bladeless blender startup it's only a 2 min demo, but the questions and tone are pretty solid. one question even threw me off a bit (the cleaning). asking which round was unnecessary. it got a little weird at the end right before it cut off, which is due to a 2 min limit when testing on site(which seems unnecessary since they're charging me for the api - why not let me talk longer?) at current pricing, this would be roughly ~$6 for a 30 min call or $12 an hour. this doesn't include the cost of running an extraction prompt in the background to store this data, but llm tokens are so cheap. very expensive compared to mean vc (free, since it's in gpt marketplace) or even a self-hosted chat agent, but it's way cheaper than an associate. while it has downsides like not being a real person, there's also benefits like having consistent and unbiased information gathering, being available 24/7, being able to talk to founders in parallel, and consistent note taking. and it will likely get cheaper (sorry my audio volume is low, i'm testing while everyone else in the house is asleep)

Someone built a cool tool with Perplexity Computer to port a Spotify Playlist to Youtube Music automatically by just pasting a playlist URL. Cross service migrations are going to be seamless with tools like Computer.

RT Gabbar It will eat my job :) Ask any founder, finding a great performance marketing expert who doesn’t fleece you is such a pain. So why not just build one? Perplexity Computer just replaced the entire marketing dept 🥲. Such stuff is a boon for a bootstrapped startup founder. Focus on the core product, leave everything else to AI👍 Original tweet: https://x.com/GabbbarSingh/status/2031222631417131120

RT Teng Yan · Chain of Thought AI "the pre-Claude era of building software (starting with a PRD) is gone." it won't ever come back again. adapt or die. good read. Original tweet: https://x.com/tengyanAI/status/2031219718460420200

A look at the future/present