Greg Isenberg

RT Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 Interesting.

I didn't cover Claude Opus 4.8 on my pod because I don't think it's MEANINGFULLY better than GPT 5.5 as of May 29th. We're entering the era where model releases start to feel like iPhone releases. Remember when every new iPhone was a genuine leap? Now it's a slightly better camera and you can't really tell the difference. That's where models are heading. 4.6 to 4.7 to 4.8. Each one is a little different. Nobody can agree if it's better or worse. The benchmarks say one thing, the vibes say another. The thing that actually matters right now is what's happening around the models. Claude Code shipped dynamic workflows this same week and that genuinely changes what one person can build. Codex shipped a desktop app with an in app browser that combines coding and knowledge work in one surface. Those are the releases that move the needle for people. The model underneath is becoming interchangeable. I think we're maybe 6 months from nobody caring which model they're using the way nobody cares which engine is in their Uber. You just want to get where you're going. When something genuinely changes the game for builders, I'll cover it on @startupideaspod. Opus 4.8 wasn't that. Dynamic workflows was. I'd rather save you the hour.

How to use Obsidian with Claude in 61 seconds

Claude Code just dropped "dynamic workflows" and it's pretty cool. You type "create a workflow" or turn on "ultracode" in the effort menu and it spins up hundreds of parallel agents that check each other's work. The unit of work you can hand off jumps from a file to an entire codebase. Migrations, audits, rewrites, framework swaps, stuff you used to plan in sprints now finishes overnight. The part that got me:....the agents argue with each other before showing you the result. Independent attempts at the same problem, then adversarial agents trying to break the answer. It keeps iterating until they converge. That's how senior engineering teams work. Except this team runs at 3am and never gets tired. Also if the workflow gets interrupted, it picks up where it left off. That means you can kick off work that runs for days. Not sessions. Days. Fair warning though: this burns through tokens FAST. Anthropic says so themselves. But if the task is a codebase migration that would have taken a team 3 months, spending $500 in tokens to do it in a week is the best trade in software. The ceiling on what one person can build just moved again. Classic. Going to be playing with this all week. Pretty cool.

Every CEO layoff letter in 2026 follows the same template. "Hardest decision I've ever made. AI changed everything. New roles designed for AI-native work. We owe it to our customers. We're choosing to compete." I feel like I'm reading the same letter with different logos

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED. I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires. My takeaways: 1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices. 2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha. 3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda) 4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general. 5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million 6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works. 7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what t...

How to build a vertical AI agent cash-flowing startup: find painful workflow in a boring industry → talk to 10 people who do that workflow every day → map every step, every tool, every spreadsheet, every phone call → do the workflow manually first → be the agent before you build the agent → find the edge cases that break everything → document them in obsidian as structured markdown → set up your agent stack → hermes for the harness → obsidian vault as the knowledge base → composio for authentication across apps → build your first 1-3 skills that solve the core pain → use claude code or codex to build the product → use agents to set up other agents → use perplexity MCP and context7 for up-to-date docs → let the agent handle the scaffolding while you focus on the workflow logic → ship the agent to your first 5 customers for free → watch what they actually use it for → they will surprise you → the thing you built for isn't always the thing they need most → build content around the niche → not "building in public" content → useful content → the tips, the shortcuts, the pain points that only someone who does this workflow would know → become the person for that niche → charge per outcome not per seat → per lease renewed, per claim processed, per candidate sourced → the ROI conversation takes 10 seconds when it's tied to a result → set up watchdogs and alerts → your agent emails you when a cron job breaks or a skill fails → the customer should never have to tell you something is broken → connect to open router → see exact costs per model per task → use GPT 5.5 for tool calls → use open source for lightweight tasks → route the right model to the right job → watch your margins double → let hermes write to its own memory after every task → the agent compounds → the longer it runs the better it gets → that accumulated memory becomes your moat → a competitor can clone your product but they can't clone 6 months of context → expand the workflow → you started with one ...

Be like Lenny (@lennysan) 1. Find a niche you genuinely care about 2. Obsess over creating insanely useful content for that niche 3. Build products that solve their problems better than anyone else 4. Be really nice 5. Design a life you don’t need a vacation from

reminder

My "36 biggest startup opportunities" tweet went viral. I took the top 9 (AI, mobile apps, IRL) and did a full deep dive. Episode is live below http://youtu.be/IFLY6L3YPGo?si=dCjpbTBEy1rIUqex Happy building, I'm rooting for you

http://x.com/i/article/2056351240506974209

The 36 BIGGEST startup opportunities right now 1. biggest b2c: solving loneliness. third spaces, community apps, IRL 2. biggest b2b: managed AI employees for businesses 3. biggest overlooked: elder tech. 70 million boomers who want products that make them happier & healthier 4. biggest mobile: action apps that do things, not apps you stare at 5. biggest trades: matching platforms for electricians, plumbers, HVAC. supply shrinking 6. biggest consumer social: small social. group chats as products, no feeds, no ai slop 7. biggest ecommerce: agents that recommend products you'll like, shop, buy for you 8. biggest creator: live shows and unscripted content 9. biggest edtech: AI tutors that adapt through conversation 10. biggest SaaS: pay-per-outcome pricing 11. biggest auto: AI service advisor for dealerships. answers the same 15 questions 24/7 12. biggest talent: training non-technical people to operate agents 13. biggest boredom: curated offline experiences delivered to your door. kits, games, challenges. anti-screen products 14. biggest spiritual: the need for belonging is exploding, new formats of spiritual get togethers 15. biggest wellness: longevity biomarkers you actively manage 16. biggest mobile: action apps that do things, not apps you stare at 17. biggest one to solve ai slop: digital verification that you're a real human. every platform will need this within 2 years 18. biggest infrastructure: agent permissions, security, audit trails 19. biggest media: AI native media companies. build distribution, sell products later. 20. biggest parenting: family ops automation. forms, scheduling, logistics 21. biggest accounting: bookkeeping agents that charge per transaction 22. biggest fashion: brand-owned resale. every brand wants to control their secondary market 23.biggest hobbies: adult learning for joy. pottery, woodworking, drawing. 24. biggest skincare: at-home diagnostics. scan, get a protocol, track progress 25. biggest agriculture: pr...

How to make really good Claude skills (clearly explained in 42 seconds)

More AI agent observations below (I keep adding to the list): 1. Hermes agents write to their own memory after every task. Which means starting today versus starting in 6 months is an unfair advantage for you. 2. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now 3. The real reason local models matter for founders: you can ship a product where the AI runs entirely on the customer's device and you never touch their data. Zero privacy concerns. Zero server costs. Zero compliance headaches. That changes which industries you can sell to overnight. Healthcare, legal, finance, all the regulated verticals that won't send data to the cloud just opened up. 4. Every company needs to be rebuilt as a "second brain" before agents can be useful. That means every process, every decision, every piece of institutional knowledge has to exist in a format an agent can read. Most companies have none of this. 5. Agent costs are the new headcount. Won't be crazy for companies to spend 50%+ of their total headcount cost on tokens. 6. Agents are accidentally creating internal competition at companies. The marketing agent and the sales agent are optimizing for different metrics and working against each other without anyone realizing it. It took humans decades to develop cross-functional alignment. Nobody thought about it for agents. 7. The YAML config file is becoming the new org chart. Who reports to who, what permissions they have, what tools they access, all defined in a config file. The company's structure is literally a file you can version control, fork, and deploy. That's new. 8. The first agents that can smell a scam are going to be worth billions. Right now agents will happily wire money to a fake invoice because it matched the format. The trust layer is completely missing. 9. We're about to find out that most ...

The best startup ideas are the most obvious

Is DeepMind the greatest acquisition of all time? Google paid around $500M for it in 2014. That single acquisition gave them Gemini, Gemma, AlphaFold, and a huge chunk of their entire AI future. Everyone talks about YouTube at $1.5 billion as one of the greatest acquisitions. And it's up there. But not enough people are putting DeepMind in that same conversation. DeepMind gave Google the ability to compete in the most important technology race of the century. I just saw a Series A AI company that's a few months old raising at around that same valuation. Google got DeepMind for $500 million. For their next 30 years. That number looks cheaper every single month.

The hot theme each year is basically a talent and capital vacuum cleaner. It sucks all the smartest people and all the money into one room. Which means every other room is empty. The most valuable companies get built in the empty rooms. This chart is 10+ years of proof.

RT Jessi Cao Must read

My 30+ observations on the greatest opportunities in AI agents right now: And some ideas that are keeping me up at night. 1. The new buyer on the internet is an AI agent. Imagine billions of new customers showing up with money to spend but they only shop via MCP. That's what's happening. No MCP server means you're invisible to the fastest growing buyer on the internet. 2. Every franchise system in America (30,000+) needs an agent layer and none of them have one. One founder per franchise vertical. That's 30,000 businesses waiting. 3. Everyone said "distribution is the only moat" a year ago. Now I'd add that the only moat is distribution plus memory. The company that has your audience AND your agent's accumulated context is impossible to leave. 4. Consumer mobile is more interesting than it's been since 2012. Apps can finally DO things for you instead of showing you things. The next wave of $100M apps are being built right now. 5. The most interesting startup nobody has built is an agent marketplace where you rent access to someone else's trained agent. A recruiter spent 6 months training a sourcing agent on healthcare hiring. That agent is worth renting to every other healthcare recruiter on earth. The agent itself becomes the product. 6. A sorta strange phenomenon that's happening right now is agents are developing preferences. Give the same agent the same task 100 times and it starts developing patterns in how it approaches it. Nobody is studying this yet. But the agents that develop good patterns are worth more than the ones that don't. That's a new kind of asset. 7. Dead internet theory is about to become dead SaaS theory. Half the apps you use will quietly replace their support team, their onboarding team, and their content team with agents. You won't notice for months. Then you'll realize you haven't talked to a human at that company in a year. 8. The most valuable data in the world right now is sitting in the support tickets of small or mid tier Sa...

RT Roey | AI & Tech This is A must-watch. Honestly one of the most practical AI breakdowns I've seen this year.

I'm giving away a FULL course on how to build a managed AI agent business solo using Hermes Agent, Orgo, Obsidian, Codex, Claude Code etc. Here's everything (47 minutes): 1. The offer: unlimited agents, unlimited usage, all infrastructure and security included. The customer gets a digital employee. They never think about tokens or models. You handle everything. 2. Don't niche down too fast. Try marketing agencies, law firms, insurance, manufacturing, real estate. See where the market pulls you. Then go vertical. Diverge first, converge later. 3. Every executive has the same problems regardless of industry. Too many emails, too many meetings, too many follow-ups, too many open loops. Solve those first. Then layer in vertical-specific skills. 4. The stack: Hermes Agent for the agent harness. Codex or Claude Code desktop to build and configure. Orgo for cloud computers so every agent lives in its own sandbox. Composio for one-click authentication across thousands of apps. Agent Mail to give every agent its own email. Obsidian for the knowledge base. 5. Use agents to build agents. Don't stress about setup. Use Claude Code or Codex to install and configure Hermes inside a VM. Use Perplexity MCP, Context7, and Exa for up-to-date docs. Your agent sets up your customer's agents. 6. GPT 5.5 is the best model right now. Efficient with tool calls. Doesn't eat tokens like Opus 4.7. For cheaper tasks, GLM 5.1 from ZAI is the best open source option. 7. Set up watchdogs for gateway crashes so they auto-restore. Have agents email you when cron jobs break or skills fail. Your customer should never have to tell you something is broken. 8. Get customers through content. If someone jumps on a call and already knows who you are and what you sell, that's the position you want. Content is the most leveraged thing you can do in 2026. 9. Keep scope tight. One to two requests at a time, delivered in under 48 hours. Use Trello for customer-facing project management. Send Loom upda...

There's a strange inversion happening with trust. We used to trust institutions and distrust individuals. Now we trust individuals and distrust institutions. This is going to get more extreme as AI floods the internet with corporate sounding content and brands that all look the same because they're all trained on the same 200 references. The more polished and institutional something looks, the less people trust it because it pattern matches to "generated". The more raw, personal, and imperfect something feels, the more people trust it because it pattern matches to "real". I'm noticing this. Maybe you are too.

If you were the kid who carried every group project in school, you'll love the AI era. People let you down. Agents will too. They break, they hallucinate, they do the wrong thing at 3am. The difference is the feedback loop. When a person drops the ball, you have a conversation, wait a week, and hope it gets better. When an agent drops the ball, you fix the prompt and it's better in 5 minutes. Same frustration with 100x faster resolution. Not everyone will love working like this. But a lot of people will. I really like it.

7 tiny AI agent startup ideas you can start building today 1. The domain flipper agent. Monitors expired domain drops, scores them on backlinks and keywords, sends you a ranked list every morning. Buy for $10, flip for $3,000. I used to run this exact business manually with designers making logos for each domain. Now the whole thing is automated and 25x cheaper. 2. The local liquidation agent. Monitors restaurant closures and bankruptcy auctions in your city. Equipment worth $30k new sells for 10 cents on the dollar. Broker the deal for 15-30% fees with zero inventory risk. Works for dental, gym, and salon equipment too. 2. The hiring signal agent. Job postings are buying signals. Agent monitors boards daily, matches hiring patterns to what you sell, and sends draft outreach to your Slack every morning. Sell the leads to agencies or use them to build your own. 3. The sunset SaaS agent. Scans Product Hunt launches from 3-4 years ago that still have data and SEO traffic. Most founders have moved on and will be pumped to sell for cheap. Buy it. Rebuild the product as agent-first. 4. The dying app store agent. Finds apps that were top 100 three years ago, dropped to 500+, but still have 1,000+ reviews. Developer moved on. Product is validated. Acquire it. Relaunch with better monetization + AI features where it makes sense. 5. The competitive intel agent. Monitors 5 competitors while you sleep. Pricing changes, new pages, job postings, founder tweets. One-page brief by 7am. Sell as productized service or just use the intel. The idea framework behind all of these: 1. Think about any job where someone spends hours checking for updates or scanning listings 2. That's an agent 3. Build the agent that does the watching 4. You do the acting (or sell the watching to someone else) 5.Stack them. Each one is its own revenue stream. I built all of these using @genspark_ai Claw in under 20 minutes each. Been testing it for last few weeks. I show you how to do it too in tod...

RT Henok This might be one of the most important articles for you to read this decade

There are more startup ideas in a single 100,000+ person subreddit than in every Y Combinator batch combined. r/accounting, r/realtors, r/dentistry, r/insurance etc. Every post that starts with "is there a better way to do this" is a product waiting to be built with AI.

http://x.com/i/article/2053837926690148352

Your mom used to say “reach for your dreams” Build a company Anything is possible

Livestream talking AI business models/ideas + Q&A https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1nKOLEwmMkwGR

My entire feed is Hantavirus This was the best (most clear) read on Hantavirus right now

how to use Google's NEW open source Design.md + AI Skills to make your startup look like a $100 million company in 1 hour: 1. Design.md is an open source file from Google that captures the soul of a design. Typography, colors, spacing, all in one markdown file. You attach it to your prompt and your agent builds beautiful things every time. 2. Think of it this way. The HTML is the finished dish. The design.md is the recipe. The skills are the ingredients. Put them together and everything you build looks consistent and professional. 3. Don't create a design system from scratch. Find a brand you love. Linear, Stripe, Vercel, whatever resonates. Study it. Use ChatGPT or Claude to help you extract the design language into your own design.md file. 4. Build skills on top of your design.md. A landing page skill. A mobile app skill. A motion design skill. A slide deck skill. Each one references the same design.md so everything looks like it came from the same designer. 5. The biggest mistake people make: they nail one screen and then everything else looks generic. Design.md solves this. One file keeps every page, every format, every medium consistent. 6. Use it across everything. Your landing page. Your app. Your pitch deck. Your promo videos. Same DNA. Same taste. Same system. That's what separates a startup that looks real from one that looks vibe-coded. 7. Build a second brain for design inspiration. When you see something beautiful in the real world or online, capture it. Save it. When you're building something new, reference it. Taste is developed, not downloaded. 8. It's obvious but the difference between a product people trust and a product people bounce from is how it looks and feels. Design.md gives you that edge. you can watch below https://youtu.be/oLu32YpiIJw?si=1YoYhkymvoQYJk-U shoutout to @mengto for coming on @startupideaspod and walking through his full workflow. if you want to use AI to actually build gorgeous designs, you'll want to use see this...

Call me crazy but I think nerfing AI models should be illegal. Imagine buying a car and the manufacturer remotely downgrading your engine 6 months later. Not cool.

The entire AI-native opportunity map in a 2x2 matrix. Most people build in the wrong quadrant. Top left is too simple, already commoditized. Bottom left isn't painful enough. Bottom right is complex but doesn't repeat. The money is top right. High repetition. High complexity. Insurance, recruiting, compliance, legal intake. That's where agents win. Tomorrow I'll break it down for 60 minutes at 12p EST. Last time, we ran out of room. Grab a spot. http://ideabrowser.com/workshop/build-a-business-in-ai-world-may-7 We are at the very beginning of the very beginning. The opportunities are endless right now. Let's go.

The truth is there are probably ONLY 1,000 truly AI-native companies on earth making $5 million ARR or more. What does truly AI-native actually mean? It means everything in the business is structured so agents can consume it. Every customer record. Every SOP. Every email template. Every pricing rule. All of it indexable. All of it readable by an agent. Agents do the support. Agents do the outreach. Agents do the research. Agents draft the contracts. Agents process the claims. Humans review, approve, and steer. And there are only about 1,000 of them. On the entire planet. If that doesn't make you want to go build one right now, I don't know what will. Most people think they're AI-native because they use ChatGPT at work. That's like saying you're a chef because you own a microwave. There's so much opportunity in actually being AI-native because almost nobody is doing it yet. 1,000 companies out of millions. Despite what you read....the field is empty.

Coinbase is now testing 1 person teams + AI agents and announced laying off 700 employees. Other companies doing this (layoffs + AI): 1. Shopify: No new headcount unless you prove AI can’t do the job. 2. Block: Cutting ~4,000 roles (~40%); Dorsey says AI lets much smaller teams do more. 3. Klarna: Its AI assistant now does work equivalent to about 700 support roles. 4. Duolingo: Went “AI‑first,” telling teams to rebuild workflows around AI before hiring. 5. Salesforce: Paused new engineering hires after AI tools boosted dev productivity ~30%. 6. Amazon: Cutting about 16,000 corporate jobs this year in an efficiency/automation push. 7. Meta: Cutting ~10% of staff and freezing thousands of open roles as it doubles down on AI. 882 jobs per day disappearing in tech. This is the pace right now. And I think that's going to accelerate and move beyond tech. My POV: Every single one of these companies is telling you the same thing: one person with AI can do what used to take a team. They're literally saying it with their org charts. If you're employed, build a 1 person team on the side. If you're laid off, build one today. The tools that made your role redundant are the same tools that let you build your own company. The biggest wave of new startups is going to come from people who got restructured out of exactly these announcements.

RT Andrew Wilkinson Fun pod with @gregisenberg on everything I’m doing and with AI + how I’m chasing the Openclaw dragon (70% debugging / 30% productivity bliss 😂)

cringe is just the entrance fee to doing anything interesting cringe mountain looks different for everyone. for some it's posting. for some it's cold DMing. for some it's charging money for the first time. same mountain. climb it.

Andrew Wilkinson owns 40+ businesses. He just showed me how he's using OpenClaw, Claude Code and AI agents to run latest business, start new ones, and automate everything. Here's what I learned: 1. In December 2025, something clicked. He started waking up at 3AM with a smile, sitting in terminal with 10 Claude Code tabs open. He hasn't stopped since. He calls it chasing the dragon. 2.He built a full SaaS product called Deep Personality. A 40-minute personality test that generates a 100-page report written like Robert Greene. $20 000 in revenue. Zero employees. The entire business runs on AI agents. 3. He has agents for support, marketing, and dev. When a support ticket comes in, the agent either handles it or sends it to the dev agent. If it's critical, the agent fixes the bug and merges the PR before he wakes up. Then it emails the customer back. 4. His marketing agent is connected to PostHog, manages Meta and Reddit ads, creates ad creative, runs multivariate tests, and sets budgets. He's about to give it a $100 k/month ad budget and see what happens. 5. He forgot his laptop on a trip to Arizona. He ran his entire business from the back of Ubers using OpenClaw. Nobody picked up that every single email was written by AI. 6. His take on vibe coding: the worst part about business is people. Between your vision and execution are 100 people you have to convince. Vibe coding removes all of them. For the first time he can do every part of building a product himself. 7. He was trying to build OpenClaw before OpenClaw existed. Now he uses a tool called Harbor, which is basically a GUI for managing multiple agents. You can see all your agents, their status, knowledge bases, and databases in one place. 8. He built a custom AI for his relationship. He and his girlfriend took 15 psychological tests, put the results into ChatGPT, and asked it to analyze their relationship. It nailed every fight they've ever had. That became the product idea for Deep Personality. 9. ...

The best startup ideas are the ones that make you say "why does this not already exist?"

I don't know why more people aren't buying dead SaaS companies and turning them into AI agent companies. 1. Use OpenClaw, Hermes, Perplexity Computer etc to build an automation that scans Product Hunt, Acquire, and app stores for dead SaaS products. Filter for ones that launched 2019-2024, had real customers, and went quiet. 2. Reach out to the founder on X. Most of them will respond within a day because they've been wanting to sell for a year and nobody asked. 3. Buy it. $5-30k. Sometimes less. 4. Export the database. Feed it to Claude or GPT. Map every workflow their customers were trying to do. 5. Read the support tickets. This is the goldmine. 200 strangers already told the last founder exactly what they needed and he couldn't deliver it. 6. Build an agent-native version that actually does those workflows instead of giving people a dashboard to do them manually. 7. Upload the old email list to Meta. Build a lookalike audience. Those old customers have moved on. You're not selling to them (realistically). You're using their data to find the next them. 8. Run $20/day ads targeting people who look exactly like the customers who already validated this market for you. 9. Build content around the exact pain points you found in the support tickets. Post on X. Post on YT. You already know what to say. 10. You now have the customer profile, the pain points, the pricing sensitivity, the churn reasons, and a lookalike audience. Your competitor who's starting from scratch has a landing page and a guess. The dead SaaS acquisition playbook is going to be one of the biggest quiet wealth builders of the next 5 years. Most SaaS products are a collection of workflows that can be rewritten as agent skills. Many will die. The top ones will pivot to agent companies. Build agent companies.

THIS HARVARD STUDY JUST PUT AN LLM AHEAD OF ER DOCTORS Beth Israel gave o1 and real doctors the same 76 ER triage cases. o1: 67%. Doctors: 50-55%. We're in this weird moment where the AI outperforms the doctor but the doctor is still legally required to ignore it. The study itself says there's no accountability framework. Which means a hospital could have a tool that saves more lives and their lawyers would tell them not to use it. An AI that's right 67% of the time gets called dangerous. A doctor that's right 55% of the time gets called board certified. Whoever figures out how to use AI in healthcare and deal with the liability problem is sitting on a generational company.

I actually think the whole "permanent underclass" narrative is wrong. I think we're about to see the largest EXPLOSION of entrepreneurship in human history. I get why the fear exists. Jobs are getting cut. AI researchers are privately saying most people are screwed. The models are getting ridiculously better and faster than anyone expected. Project that forward linearly and yeah, it looks BLEAK. But linear projections are usually wrong during platform shifts. Nobody projected that the internet would create 50 million small businesses. They projected Walmart would eat everything. Nobody projected that mobile would create a million app developers. They projected phones were just phones. What actually happens is intelligence gets cheap and a flood of new builders enter the market with domain knowledge the incumbents never had. Millions will get laid off or just never hired over the next 24-36 months. Those jobs are not coming back. So they become entrepreneurs. Out of necessity at first. Then out of opportunity. The underclass idea is VIRAL because it confirms something people have been feeling for a decade. That the ground is shifting and nobody at the top is reaching down. And they're right. But the interesting thing about this particular technology is that it doesn't check your resume or your zip code. The same tool that eliminates your position hands you the ability to build the thing that replaces it. The weapon and the escape hatch are the same object. We're about to see more new companies started in the next 5 years than in the previous 50. And I think we're going to look back at this moment the way we look back at 1995. Everyone was scared. Everyone was right to be. And the people who built anyway became the next generation of owners. I know you might be reading about the permanent underclass and it's scary. Who wants to "get stuck in the permanent underclass no one. My POV is the permanent underclass isn't a foregone conclusion. I know some peo...

How to build an entire company with AI agents using Paperclip

RT Howie Liu Spent an hour with @gregisenberg on the agent economy. The thing I keep saying out loud that people don't yet believe: a fleet of agents on the right platform can run a real company. Not a hobby. A real one. We did 3 live builds on Hyperagent during the pod: → A hyperlocal real estate report product — research, business case, working V1, one thread → A "Greg Isenberg contrarian AI" skill that learns Greg's voice and gets sharper every run → A Twilio voice + SMS skill from zero — picks up the phone and books restaurant reservations No infra setup. No API plumbing. No Mac mini in your closet. Cloud-native, deployable into Slack as a coworker in one click. Greg and I think this is the biggest opportunity of our lifetimes and most builders are still wildly underestimating it. $1K in credits for the first 1,000 SIP listeners. Go build a $100M company with 5 people — and post what you make.

I sat down with Howie Liu, the CEO of Airtable ($500M+ revenue, 1 billion in the bank) and asked him: is there really 1 trillion up for grabs in AI agents? His answer: it's way more than that. It's the entire GDP of white collar labor. Tens of trillions. Here's what stood out: 1. Howie runs 30 Claude Code instances in parallel on HyperAgent. Each one is coupled to a browser, fully autonomous. They review each other's PRs. That's how the CEO of a $10 billion company develops software right now. 2. He wrote his most recent board memo with AI agents. His best investors told him it was the best memo he'd ever written. It cost him $150 in tokens and 10x less time. 3. His take on why people aren't building: they're still using agents like chatbots. They ask "who's going to win the next election" instead of giving it a real multi-hour task. Using is believing. You have to spend a full weekend going deep. 4. AI agents are at less than 10% penetration in most industries. Software engineering is at 50% but even that's an overestimate because most devs are still in "tab autocomplete" mode. The frontier has moved way past that. 5. He revealed HyperAgent. Think of it as the visual agent builder that gives you a low floor and a high ceiling. You can prototype fast and also scale to running serious operations with a fleet of agents. 6. Howie's philosophy/POV: HyperAgent is to agents what the iPhone was to computing. The power was already there. The accessibility is what changes everything. Good news Howie is giving $1,000 in free HyperAgent credits to the first 1,000 people who sign up. $1 million committed to listeners @startupideaspod. You get Opus, frontier models, real agent workflows. You just gotta click the link in the description of the YT vid (share this with a friend to give them the $1000 too before it runs out!) https://youtu.be/nyO60uzTnP4 episode is live on @startupideaspod and thanks to Howie for supporting the community/channel. @howietl is rooting f...

The last 18 months changed more than the previous 10 years. The world is moving at an unprecedented speed I stopped making plans longer than 90 days in a world where new AI models/tools are dropping like rain That's the pace of AI/tech right now I think it's only accelerating

THE 64 MINUTE OPENAI CODEX MASTERCLASS IS HERE if you've been meaning to learn Codex, this is the episode for you, we cover: 1/ Claude vs Codex (what's better?) 2/How to run Claude Code inside Codex (really cool) 3/Why GPT 5.5 changed everything for browser agents 4/How to create skills (reusable agents you build once and call by name forever) 5/How to connect Notion with surgical permissions (one database, not the whole workspace) 6/How to use Remotion inside Codex to create videos 7/ How to one-shot full mobile apps in Swift 8/The 4 projects to run on day one to get up to speed fast shoutout to @rileybrown for coming onto @startupideaspod for the 5th time. every episode he delivers. this one is the Codex masterclass. if you've been meaning to learn Codex, this is the episode. 100% free i just want to see you build your ideas. http://youtube.com/watch?v=LWx4FGam2aQ&t=1804s watch

Will be in SF in a few weeks Got a few slots open to hang out Reply and let me know if you're around

"When one thing becomes abundant and cheap, another thing becomes scarce and valuable" - Marc Andreessen (@pmarca)

a post called "the west forgot how to code" is going viral among devs. the thesis: AI assisted devs ship faster but understand nothing. the next generation will be illiterate at the layer that matters. tbh, this panic happens every single decade. - assembly devs said C devs were illiterate. - C devs said java devs were illiterate. - java devs said react devs were illiterate. - react devs said no-code builders were illiterate. every single one of them was correct. every single one of them was also irrelevant within 10 years. the pattern is always the same. the new generation abstracts away the thing the old generation spent a career mastering. the old generation calls it dangerous. the new generation ships 10x faster & doesn't care. the market rewards speed. the cycle repeats. what's interesting is that the "illiterate" generation always wins. they win because they ship faster, build with less ego, & don't carry the baggage of what code is supposed to look like. they haven't been taught what's "proper." so they just build what works. the mass commoditization of coding is the mass democratization of building. the thing that used to take a team of 10 and $2 million now takes one person and a weekend. this means more competition. but it also means more weird, specific, niche products that never would have existed because the cost to build was too high. a million micro-products serving a million micro-audiences. the entire long tail of software just got unlocked. the people writing these posts are mourning a world where knowing how to code was a moat. it was. for decades. knowing how to code meant you had leverage that most people didn't have. that leverage is evaporating and it's uncomfortable. and I get it. I studied computer science at university. but the thing that replaced it is way more interesting. the new leverage is knowing what to build, who to build it for, and how to get it in front of them. that's harder to learn from a tutorial. that's harder t...

agreed that the the modern computer probably has to be reinvented 12 "tiny" startup ideas that ride that wave: 1. a "where did I put that" app. you describe what you're looking for in plain english and it searches across every app, folder, email, and slack message you've ever used. no more remembering where things live. 2. a "did this actually work" tracker for AI agent outputs. every time an agent does something for you, you thumbs up or thumbs down it. over time it builds a quality score per agent per task. right now nobody knows which of their agents are actually good and which ones are quietly wasting money. 3. a screen recorder that watches you work and builds SOPs automatically. you do the task once. it writes the playbook. now an agent can do it forever. 4. an AI-native contacts app. it remembers every interaction, every context, every promise made across email, slack, texts, and calls. you say "what did I tell jake last week" and it knows. 5. a "daily briefing" app that reads your calendar, email, slack, and docs overnight and texts you a 60 second summary of what matters today before you open anything. 6. an intent-based screenshot tool. you screenshot anything on the internet and tell it what you want done with it. "order this." "remember this." "send this to my designer." one screenshot, one sentence. basically cleanshotx for mac but actually does the work not just captures the moment (i love this idea who wants to build it?) note: i used @ideabrowser to validate some of these ideas 7. a permissions manager for your AI agents. which agents can access which accounts, what's the spending limit, what requires your approval. nobody is building this and everyone is going to need it. 8. a "rewind for work" that logs every tab, doc, and conversation from your workday and lets you search it like memory. "what was that article I read tuesday about pricing?" found. 9. a dead simple app that sits between you and all your AI agents and tracks what they're ...

The replies are interesting

What are the best businesses to be in a post-AGI world?

startup idea for you use postiz (20k+ github stars project) to sell AI social media content/management to 1 niche of SMBs. what's postiz? it's an open source social media scheduler with AI built in. basically buffer + AI and free to download. 1. self-host postiz. use codex/claude code to help you figure this out in an afternoon. 2. pick one niche. dentists, realtors, lawyers. can even go a subniche like orthodentists vs dentists. family law over of lawyers. 2. wrap it in their language. "AI social media for dental practices" 3. add "we write your captions with AI" as the hook. that's what they're actually paying for. 4. plug it into n8n, make, or zapier so posting, scheduling, and approvals run on autopilot. the client approves with one tap. everything else is handled. 5. charge $50/mo-$100 per seat. that's nothing to a business paying $2,000/mo for a social media freelancer. you're 25x cheaper and 10x more reliable because the system runs whether you're awake or not. win-win for everyone. 6. build one landing page. run one onboarding call. that's the whole sales motion. 7. build media to attract customers. post tips for that niche on X, tiktok, youtube. become the "social media for dentists" person. 8. reinvest profits to build other tools that serve that same niche. scheduling, reviews, patient intake. build those tools or plug in more open source projects. now you own the vertical. these businesses KNOW they need to post. they hate doing it. they will never find postiz on github. they will google "someone please handle my social media." that's you open source is the new wholesale. the code is free. the customer relationship is where the margin lives. you can do this as one person. you can do this as a two person team. you don't need funding. you don't need an office. you need a laptop, a niche, and the willingness to start. someone is going to do this. might as well be you.

wake up because this is the GREATEST time in history to start a company with TRILLIONS of dollars up for grabs over the next 10 years 1. consumer mobile is INTERESTING again for the first time since like 2017. apps can actually do things now. do things. real things. book the flight, draft the contract, follow up with the lead, negotiate the rate, do things. we went from "tap to view" to "tap to deploy." the entire interaction model of software just flipped & most people haven't even registered it yet. OH, and the cost to create these apps is 1/100th of 2017. 2. HARDWARE is back on the table because you can shove Gemma 4 or DeepSeek onto a device that costs less than dinner & it runs locally with zero cloud costs. a year ago that sentence would have sounded insane. you can ship a physical product with a real brain in it now. the last time hardware was this accessible was the early smartphone era & that created a trillion dollar app economy from scratch. 3. literally EVERY category is open to be rebuilt AI-first. the incumbents know it & they're paralyzed. they can't move fast because moving fast because incumbents move slower than you (usually). that paralysis is your opportunity. build the app. build the SaaS. build the AI agent 4. distribution is FREE. you can go from zero audience to 10,000 people who trust you in 90 days on X or YT or IG your first 100 customers are sitting in your replies right now. the old playbook of "raise money, hire sales team, buy ads" is being lapped by a solo founder with a twitter account & a working demo. Oh, and you can use AI to automate a lot of it (ideas, research, AI avatars etc) 5. Idk about you but it feels like companies are doing LAYOFFS like it's the great depression and it's only getting started. No job is secure. So, building a side project that could turn into the main project is more important than ever. 6. the ENTIRE economy is being repriced in real time. the surface area for new companies has never been wider...

there are a bunch of people who talk to claude more than their mom, co-workers, cousins or best friends they just sit there prompt after prompt after prompt

You ever notice that some people say "lifestyle business" like it's some sorta slur?? One that pays well, gives you time back, and doesn't require you to sacrifice your health and relationships for a 0.1% chance at an IPO. How embarrassing. A small team, maybe 3 to 5 people, doing maybe $2 to $5 million a year, profitable from day 1, that you can sell one day for $10 million and set yourself and your kids up forever. Yeah, a business designed around your actual life. And who knows, can give you the flexibility to swing for the fences if you want. Gross!

The best way to build a business is with blinders on. Focus on adding value to customers lives, building distribution and staying healthy to ship everyday. Reminder, be this horse.

I have 3 open guest spots on @startupideaspod If you could sit in on a conversation between me and anyone in the AI or startup world, who would it be? Tag them below. The more the better. The best guests come from you guys. Every time.

chatgpt images 2.0 has been live for 24h so let's dig in how to use ChatGPT Images 2.0 to create product photos, brand books, UI mockups, and ad creative that actually looks real: 1. GPT Images 2.0 now does 2K resolution, 3:1 aspect ratios, and spits out 8 images per prompt. text rendering is way better across multiple languages. it also has thinking mode where it searches the web before generating. 2. the biggest lesson with images 2.0: you have to be extremely specific. if you give it a lazy prompt you get stock photos. give it camera type, lighting conditions, color palette, and subject details and it cooks. 3. product photography is where it shines. I created a full brand shoot for a skincare line. golden hour lighting, Mediterranean aesthetic, slight imperfections in the subjects. every image looked like a real photo shoot. 4. use it to create visual directions before you make video ads. I prompted 8 directions for the same Shopify ad story. Wes Anderson, Nike, cinematic, Apple shot on iPhone. the cinematic and Nike styles were the strongest. 5. UI mockups work now. give it your app, a feature description, the resolution, and say you want realistic data in every cell. it gave me four clean variations of a leaderboard screen. 6. apparel and merch: generate photorealistic product shots before you print anything. test if people would buy it before you spend money on production. 7. illustrations got a massive upgrade. editorial style, flat vector, limited color palettes. use these to make proposals, one-pagers, and decks look professional. 8. every business has four creative bottlenecks: marketing content, internal docs and decks, explaining things visually, and testing before building. Images 2.0 helps with all four. 9. five things you need in every prompt: context (what is this for), style references (name specific brands or aesthetics), palette (use hex codes), real copy (no lorem ipsum), and aspect ratios so it drops into production without rework. 1...

You know what fires me up? That this is the greatest time ever to build a company (thanks to AI). My first startup I built in college took 1.5 years to build the prototype. When I hit 100 users I was so happy i was literally in shock. Today, you can hack a product in 24 hours and wake up to 1000+ strangers already using it. You can post a stray thought, record a selfie vid and millions might see it. Words, code, distribution. It all feels like a giant multiplayer game. The rules are clear, the moves repeatable, the rewards compounding if you keep playing. Kinda feels like a treasure hunt. One post can change your career. One prototype can become a company. One company can snowball into a movement. All in a few clicks. You rack up points. Except now the points are customers, revenue, and freedom. It doesn't matter where you come from, what school you went to, what jobs you had. As long as you got fast internet, you can play. Startups used to be for the privileged and now they're for the persistent. And that fires me up. Maybe you too. Pretty amazing.

I'll have some big news to share when I can share But for now, I just booked a trip to SF May 18th-25th Reply if you want to hang out

It feels pretty obvious at this point that someone’s going to make billions building a social app that’s just for friends, no AI slop, no brainrot, calm design, chronological feed and no concept of followers

You can be EXTREMELY popular on the internet by just "taking the other side" Especially when it's negative. Make fun of people, trash talk every new product, ratio anyone who's trying. I won't name names, but you often see this on X. It builds an audience that only shows up when you're tearing something down. The times i've posted something negative like a reply or a tweet, i always wished i hadn't. Building ANYTHING is already the hardest thing most people will ever do. And we never really know what someone is going through. The least we can do is not make it harder from the sidelines.

how to set up hermes agent step by step. built-in memory, 40+ tools, works on your phone, and what to think of hermes vs openclaw: 1. hermes is a personal AI agent that runs in your terminal. think of it like open claw but with built-in memory, 40+ tools out of the box, and 90% cheaper token costs. you install it with one command. 2. the 3 problems with open claw that hermes solves: no memory (you keep repeating yourself), constant gateway restarts, and zero visibility into what you're spending on tokens. 3. hermes remembers everything. every completed task gets saved to memory. it searches through past logs to find solutions. over time it literally gets smarter at your specific workflows. 4. connect it to open router. you see exact costs per model per task. free models rotate weekly. one founder went from $130 every five days on open claw to $10 on hermes. same output. 5. it comes preloaded with skills. apple notes, imessage, find my, browser, web search, image generation, cron jobs. no hunting for plugins. 6. connect it to obsidian so it reads your entire vault. connect it to gstack for your dev environment. create custom skills for your specific workflows. 7. the biggest money saver: have it write code once for recurring tasks. then it runs without burning tokens every time. stop paying an LLM to do the same scrape or report daily. 8. run it on android via telegram. name your agents. talk to them like coworkers. in this episode imran shows you how to set this up. 9. you can run it bare metal, in docker, or serverless on modal. pick your risk level. i begged @imranye to come on @startupideaspod and walk through the full installation live. he made it impossibly clear. if you've heard of Hermes Agent and want the clearest explanation of how to get set up like a pro let me know what you want me to cover on the next ep this is the best personal agent setup video on the internet right now. watch

This is why cybersecurity is the best startup category to build in right now Every major platform is getting breached in 2026. vercel, snowflake, the list keeps growing. companies are mass migrating to cloud and AI infrastructure faster than security teams can keep up If you're building a cybersecurity startup right now, your timing is perfect The attack surface is expanding every single day and the buyers have never been more plentiful Be safe out there

If you want to know EXACTLY where CLAUDE DESIGN is incredible and where it falls short, you should probably watch this -Wireframing = 9/10 -Mobile app design = 8.5/10 -Deck research & design = 8.7/10 -Video creation - 4.5/10 fully unscripted episode of @startupideaspod no one is showing you the failures they are just saying "RIP designers" watch the real truth below

Let's Try Claude Design Together https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1rGmqozBkyMGy

I used Claude Design and I kinda hate how good it is Have you tried it?

a walkie talkie for an AI agent shouldn't exist. it also made me stop scrolling immediately. more people should build "weird" software like this, that's where the opportunity is btw weird sells and weird stops your scroll microsoft isn't building this. someone at 2am is

We'll soon see the rise of the "Chief Clipping Officers" at companies The person who figures out the 47 second moment inside the 2 hour podcast that gets 10M views Probably will be the highest paid marketing hire of 2027

There’s $1T up for grabs for agent-first startups and this window is WIDE open. Probably 10,000+ niches. How it plays out: 1. Every SaaS company follows salesforce and goes headless within 18 months 2. a new category of "agent-native" startups emerges that treat salesforce, HubSpot, workday etc as dumb backends. the startup IS the agent. the SaaS is just the database. 3. the entire consulting/services industry around enterprise SaaS gets compressed into software. the agent replaces the implementation team. 4. outcome-based pricing becomes default. nobody pays per seat when the "seat" is an agent making 10,000 API calls a minute. you pay when revenue hits your account. 5. the winning founders are ex-operators who understand a vertical workflow cold. the code is the easy part. knowing that a property manager spends 14 hours a week on lease renewals? that's the insight worth $100M. 6. distribution becomes the moat. when anyone can wire agents to APIs, the company with the audience and the brand wins. media + agents is the new SaaS. There’s a rush to incubate live/short form shows. 7. Silicon Valley goes all influencer. Roy lee gets this. Pat Walls gets this. Sam Parr gets this. 8. the first $1B agent-native company in each vertical will look nothing like the SaaS it replaced. smaller team, higher margins, no implementation cost, no churn from bad UX because there is no UX. the fastest path to wealth right now: find an industry that still runs on dashboards, phone calls, and spreadsheets. build the agent-native version. charge per outcome. own the workflow end-to-end. someone reading this right now is going to build a $100M company off this exact shift. tell me about it on the @startupideaspod when you do. Im rooting for you. Less reading, less bookmarking, more building. the last wave rewarded people who built pretty interfaces on top of ugly data. I think this wave rewards people who build smart agents on top of exposed APIs. Or who just build the APIs...

Seedance 2.0 is finally here

Boston?? Prediction: Lovable gets acquired by Hubspot within 12 months

http://x.com/i/article/2014350409473662976

This is the problem with AI right now in ONE screenshot. LLMs are TOO agreeable. and that's actually a billion dollar opportunity. There are MULTIPLE billion dollar companies hiding in plain sight here. the entire concept is just: AI that pushes back. If AI is your employee... Well, your best employee isn't the one who says "great idea boss" to everything. it's the one who tells you your idea sucks before you waste 6 months on it. Brutally honest AI for fitness coaching. Dating profiles. Financial planning. Copywriting. Design feedback. Hiring decisions. Etc etc. The niches are endless and nobody's building for them yet. Someone please go build this

AI has a serious branding problem Probably worse than web3/crypto/NFTs if you ask the average person in the streets, they probably fear and hate AI

5 tips for openclaw in 51 seconds

What happens to open source when AI is writing 100% of the code? I've been thinking about this a lot. Like… the whole system was built around humans valuing the act of contribution. You learned, you struggled, you submitted a PR, you got feedback, you got better. That loop created engineers. It created community. It created ownership. If AI writes the PR, who owns it? Who learned from it? Who's gonna stay up at 2am debugging the thing they shipped because they actually care? The cool part about OSS is that no one owns it. As a consumer, you could always look under the hood, fork it, take it somewhere else. I don't think open source dies. But I genuinely don't know what it becomes... Any ideas?

agents are the new apps the dirty secret of the SaaS era is that the software never actually worked. it was always 70% product, 30% the specific person in your company who knew how to make it behave. that person was called a "power user" they were actually just a human patch agents replace the patch and suddenly everyone realizes the software was broken the whole time what's cool is how much opportunity there is right now so pick a niche. any niche that you believe 1% of the market is $5M ARR+ there the leader in that space has a 20 year old codebase and a customer base that only stayed because switching was painful and that pain just got a lot easier to swallow agents are the new apps are you building yet

it would be funny if Allbirds shoes become back in style in Silicon Valley The shoes become high status and hard to get "HoW DiD yOu GeT thOse BiRDs" Now, shoes go for $20+ on eBay "The most entertaining outcome is the most likely"

So, Allbirds pivots from a wool footwear brand to an AI compute company and stock is up 653% in 1 day It would be funny if all of a SUDDEN Allbirds shoes become back in style in SF They become super hard to get and prices 3x "The most entertaining outcome is the most likely"

claude code just shipped routines you tell it what to do, point it at your project, set a trigger, and it runs 24/7 on their servers with your laptop closed i immediately thought of larry ellison: "the money is never in the technology, it's in the infrastructure the technology runs on" the model is the commodity. the trigger is the product. and whoever maps the most valuable real world events to the most specific industry workflows is going to build something massive here's what i mean by trigger.... a permit gets filed. a customer's usage drops 40% in a week. a competitor launches a feature. a deal sits in your pipeline untouched for 14 days. a contract hits 90 days before renewal. a stripe payment fails. these are all triggers. some public, some inside your own tools and every single one is a moment where an AI agent can step in and do something valuable before a human gets around to it the playbook is like this: map every trigger that matters in one industry → wire an AI agent to each one → sell the outcome. the person who shows up first with exactly what someone needs at exactly the right moment wins the deal every time and the people who go embarrassingly deep on one industry's trigger map are going to build generational companies that's the entire game right now for people reading this tweet. claude routines, openclaw, hermes etc... the infrastructure is all here. just pick your niche build audiences/content to get awareness wire the agents to triggers start selling and pinch yourself that this is the greatest time in history to be starting a company let's go

SOMEONE built an AI agent that sells pool installations on autopilot 10 "boring" cash-flowing startup ideas YOU can build on autopilot using the OpenClaw/Hermes etc: 1. find commercial buildings with flat roofs in sunny states and calculate their solar savings, render the install, mail the building owner a custom ROI report. become the broker between building owners and solar installers, take a cut of every deal or charge $$ 2. find shopify stores doing $1M+/yr with no international shipping and build them a localized storefront for their top non-US traffic countries, pitch a rev share to unlock revenue they're leaving on the table 3. find businesses paying for 10+ SaaS tools via public job postings and tech stack data and build a custom "consolidation audit" showing how to cut 40% of their software spend, sell the migration as a service 4. find commercial properties with high water bills using public utility data and render a xeriscaping or rainwater capture plan with projected savings, sell to property management companies at scale 5. find ecom brands running meta ads to products with 1-2 star reviews and build a better version of their top SKU with a manufacturer, launch against them with their own keyword data 6. find small banks and credit unions with websites from 2012 and render a modern site + mobile app with their branding, pitch it as a turnkey digital transformation. they have budget but no one's calling on them 7. find warehouses and industrial spaces near EV corridors with no charging infrastructure and model the revenue from installing chargers, pitch landlords a lease + install package 8. find franchisees posting complaints in public forums about their franchisor's tech and build a shadow operating system (POS, scheduling, inventory) that plugs into their existing franchise, sell directly to franchisees 9. find medical practices billing under specific CPT codes with low reimbursement rates and build an AI billing optimization engine that re...

7 things i learned talking to David Senra (Founders podcast) for 2 hours: 1. Dan Carlin from hardcore history reads 30 books then records a single podcast episode over 9 months. that's why it sounds scripted but isn't 2. Bill Burr's early "podcast" was literally him calling a phone number, leaving a voicemail, and a service converting it to an MP3 3. a "tofu name" is a podcast name with no flavor. he renamed his pod to something searchable and it 3x'd in 90 days 4. Larry Ellison texted Elon "a billion, whatever you want" with a thumbs up emoji when asked to invest in buying Twitter. Elon talked him UP to $2B 5. Daniel Ek told him during the Rogan controversy, Spotify added 2 million subscribers. turns out when someone's heard you talk for 1000+ hours, a 2-minute news clip can't change their mind 6. david's startup idea: the best one is whatever you're already doing. just do it until you die 7. the founder of Perdue chicken ($10B+ poultry company) wanted to start selling hot dogs. someone asked him how it was going. he said "i haven't found my Mr. Hot Dog yet" meaning: the guy who goes to bed thinking about chicken hot dogs and wakes up thinking about chicken hot dogs that's the whole game. find the thing you can't stop thinking about this was recorded 18 months ago on @startupideaspod (thanks @davidsenra - come back on soon!) easily one of my favorite conversations ever

how to use claude code + 3 MCPs + 2 AI tools to go from cold idea to live A/B test in 1 session (full workflow): 1. connect ideabrowser as an MCP. pull your project context like ICP, positioning, offer, growth strategy directly into the terminal. 2. use ideabrowser skills to generate a lead magnet concept tailored to your niche. it builds the strategy doc and saves it as a file. 3. open paper (connected to claude code). design your landing page visually and iterate on hero, sections, components. design and code stay in sync. dont necessarily need figma here. 4. deploy the landing page. wire up humblytics for analytics like traffic, scroll depth, heat maps, funnel tracking, full attribution. 5. run a no-code A/B experiment directly from claude code. it dynamically swaps your headline on the live site. 6. store the results back into @ideabrowser (pro plan) so your agent compounds context over time. every future decision is informed by past data. 7. everyone can build landing pages now. the gap is knowing what to test, how to get customers, and how to optimize. this stack/workflowcloses that gap. @amirmxt showed me this live and i can't stop thinking about the arbitrage. 99.999% of people don't know this stack exists. it's like when 5 cent facebook ads were around, arbritrage is all over again. episode is finally live on @startupideaspod (full demo there) this one is different. send it to a friend who likes ideas and automating businesses. 100% free to watch this and get your creative juices flowing (let me know what you want me to cover next) watch

NEW DISTRIBUTION HACK I never noticed this until today I was googling something random and saw Google now has 2 NEW dedicated tabs for "Forums" and "Short Video" Short video is "show me someone actually doing this" Forums are "show me someone who's actually been through this" It took me a second to clock why this felt significant. Google spent 25 years indexing pages and now they're indexing people Which accidentally creates the best distribution opportunity I've seen in years I'd start both today if you haven't. No brainer.

THE BEST DISTRIBUTION HACK RIGHT NOW I never noticed this until today I was googling something random and saw Google now has 2 NEW dedicated tabs for "Forums" and "Short Video" Short video is "show me someone actually doing this" Forums are "show me someone who's actually been through this" It took me a second to clock why this felt significant. Google spent 25 years indexing pages and now they're indexing people Which accidentally creates the best distribution opportunity I've seen in years I'd start both today if you haven't.

In case you missed it... This 58 min video is the clearest introduction to AI agents, agent skills, md files, building AI employees on the internet and it's 100% free

Will AI agents ruin the internet? Old: M̶a̶r̶k̶e̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ ruin everything New: AI Agents ruin everything Imagine if everyone on earth could knock on your door simultaneously That's what AI agents do to your inbox, social feeds, DMs etc So what actually works in a world where every channel is spam? Communities that require real membership to enter Reputation that takes years to build and can't be faked Content so raw it feels super human Relationships where both people chose each other Will be interesting to see how this unfolds

M̶a̶r̶k̶e̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ ruin everything AI Agents ruin everything

/ultraplan looks legit

I wonder how many people are using Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Perplexity Computer etc to file their taxes this year

Sometime in the next 2-3 years agents will be using the internet more than humans We designed the whole thing for human eyes, human emotions, human attention spans Agents do not have any of that The internet as we know it was built for the wrong user The opportunity is rebuilding everything for the new user Agent-native search. Agent-native commerce. Agent-native discovery Every category is open again I can't stop thinking about it.

Our kids will think we were crazy for how we handled passwords "so you reused the same password everywhere, answered what's your mother's maiden name to prove it was you, got phished by an email that looked exactly like your fav social app" Yeah, I know my son, it was wild

The best thing ANY engineer/programmer can do right now is learn how to become a top 1% marketer For 20 years, the engineer was the most important person in the room. They had the rarest skill. They could build the thing. Everyone else had to wait for them. Claude Mythos and the models coming after it are ending that era The new scarcity is the person who can look at a human being and understand exactly what they need to hear to take action. What makes someone click buy at 11pm. What makes someone tell a friend. What makes a stranger feel like a product was built specifically for them That is a completely different muscle than writing code or architecting systems Study why TBPN built a brand silicon valley is obsessed with. Learn why the headline is 80 cents of every dollar. Figure out why one subject line gets 40% open rates and the next one gets ignored Most engineers have never trained this muscle. They are world class at clearly defined problems. Marketing is the opposite. Fuzzy. Emotional. Irrational. The engineer who trains it becomes the most dangerous person in any room The CTO/CMO combo is the most valuable human in tech right now and almost nobody has both Computer Science school in 2026 should basically be part technical knowledge/part marketing knowledge I really think that... The best thing any engineer can do right now is learn how to become a top 1% marketer

this video is the CLEAREST explanation of how claude skills + AI agents work and how to use them most people set up an AI agent and wonder why it keeps disappointing them. the context window is everything context is what the model assembles before it takes any action. think of it like everything the agent needs to read before it does anything. the quality of what goes in determines the quality of what comes out. the models are genuinely really good right now. claude and gpt are exceptional. the variable is almost always the context you give them. 1. agent.md files are mostly unnecessary every single line you put in an agent.md file gets added to every single conversation you have with your agent. a 1000 line file is around 7000 tokens burning on every run. the model already knows to use react. it can read your codebase. save the agent.md for proprietary information specific to your company that the model genuinely cannot know on its own. 2. skills are the actual unlock a skill.md file works differently. what loads into context is only the name and description, around 50 tokens. the full instructions only appear when the agent recognizes it needs that skill. so instead of 7000 tokens on every run you have 50. and the agent stays sharp because the context window stays lean. the closer you get to filling the context window the worse the agent performs, same way you perform worse when someone dumps 10 things on you at once. 3. here is how to actually build a skill the right way most people identify a workflow and immediately try to write the skill. what you want to do instead is run the workflow by hand with the agent first. walk it through every single step. tell it what to check, what good looks like, what bad looks like. correct it in real time. once you have had a full successful run from start to finish, tell the agent to review everything it just did and write the skill itself. it writes a better skill than you will because it has the full context of wha...

THE CLEAREST PATH TO A $10M+ SOFTWARE EXIT in 2 YEARS (with AI and agents) building an agency right now is one of the most interesting business moves the productized agency had its moment in 2022. it collapsed because scaling humans is a nightmare. inconsistent output, people quitting, margins getting crushed. most of the founders (and creators) who tried it got burned and moved on but the thesis was right. the labor problem is just solved now with AI, claude code, openclaw etc. here's the actual playbook i'd run today: pick one painful deliverable for one specific buyer. like SEO content for e-commerce brands doing $1M+ but not "marketing." or like ad creatives for DTC brands spending $50k/month on meta. one thing. one customer. that's it then you build the AI workflow behind it. you're selling an outcome on a monthly retainer. $3-5k/month. 80%+ margins because your cost is compute and a few hours of QA "BuT tHaT'S nOt a BiG bUsInnesS" okay but you're still swinging for the fences because the agency IS the research and development for your agent SaaS every client is paying you to figure out what to automate. you're learning what breaks, what scales, what customers actually want. by month 4 you know exactly what to productize. you build the software on top of the workflow you've already proven works and already have customers paying for agency funds the agent SaaS. SaaS scales without the agency overhead. the clients become your first software customers now let's talk about what this actually looks like financially year 1: 10 clients at $4k/month. $480k revenue. 2 people. maybe $80k in costs including compute, tools, one part time VA. you're taking home $400k between two people while building the software in the background year 2: you launch the software. your 10 agency clients are the first to convert. they already trust you. they've seen the output. you charge $800/month for the software version. now you have recurring software revenue AND the...

i did some research why anthropic won't release their best AI model ever Claude Mythos to everyone just yet tldr; it's too good at hacking it escaped sandboxes, found zero-days in every major OS, and posted exploit logs on random public websites just because it could FYI only a few vetted partners have access as to Claude Mythos of now a lot more to unpack here probably over the next 90 days will keep you posted crazy times

i did some research why anthropic won't release their best AI model ever Claude Mythos to everyone just yet tldr; it's too good at hacking it escaped sandboxes, found zero-days in every major OS, and posted exploit logs on random public websites just because it could only a few vetted partners have access as of now a lot more to unpack here (source: anthropic's mythos preview card https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/53566bf5440a10affd749724787c8913a2ae0841.pdf) will keep you posted as more news drops crazy times am i right