Antón Cogood

3 years off X. Not dead - just researching. I spent that time extracting 580 first-principles growth mechanisms from real case studies, reverse-engineering how bootstrapped SaaS companies actually grew (not what they say they did), and building a tool that finds strategies your competitors can't Google.

Linear didn't beat Jira by being "faster" They picked a side: opinionated workflow, no roadmap, founder-led design taste Same channel, content + Twitter Different mechanism: aesthetic alignment as positioning The tactic looks the same, the game doesn't

Marketing for AI search isn't one funnel anymore ChatGPT = trust. Perplexity = intent. Google = habit. Reddit = vibe-check Same brand mention, different mechanism per surface. Most AEO advice flattens this

At some point "I used AI today" stopped being an opinion and became a confession I don't love it. I didn't get to vote

Stalled founder Saturday: "I should rebrand" "I should rebuild the site" "I should switch CMS" All build energy. None of it is distribution Plateau is rarely a build problem

@mkobach This is friction displacement. You aren't doing 10x the work, you're just moving the hard part from creation to curation. It feels fast because cognitive load drops

AI is 10xing me and my teams output. What used to take a week now takes an hour. And the quality isn’t decreased.

3 "channel problems" that are actually mechanism problems: 1. traffic up, conversions flat. 2. signups up, retention flat 3. reach up, replies flat Different fix each time

@AishwaryaDevv you're seeing the attention scarcity bottleneck play out AI dropped the marginal cost of production to zero, but it just pushed all the friction downstream to customer acquisition

everyone flexing “I built this with AI in 24 hrs” cool now get 10 real users who actually pay that’s the hard part

What growth claim sounded credible the first time you heard it but fell apart when you traced the source? I'll run the receipts through Perplexity and post the verdicts

@RealProductGirl Yeah, I agree complaints are signal. My point is more that the market doesn’t hand you the answer, it hands you symptoms. You still need enough proximity to separate real demand from casual annoyance

I'd actually push back on that last part. The market is telling you what it needs, you just have to know how to listen. Complaints aren't noise, they're signal. When someone says 'this is broken' or 'I hate doing this,' that IS the market communicating. The problem isn't that listening is too passive, it's that most people aren't listening carefully enough.

My Journey | Teachings 101: Finding an Idea Ideas don't come from one place. Mine came organically. Yours might come from a friend, a problem at work, a thread on Reddit, Blind or X. The market tells you what it needs. You just have to listen. Read. Explore communities. Even step outside and clear your head. There's no wrong way to find it. Follow along if you want to learn how to build products people actually want. 🔨

Sign your channel is saturating: every time you double effort, results don't double They go up 20-30%. That's the curve flattening New channel won't save you - new mechanism on the same channel might

Pricing changes lift revenue 30%+" -- common claim. The closest replicable number lands closer to 5-15% median lift, high variance, long tail. The 30% figure is a top-of-distribution outcome quoted as the average.

@heynavtoor let's run the numbers, you claim no one talks about these, but literally cite morning brew's 4 million readers in the same post the real trick here is framing consensus picks as secret knowledge it works, but let's not pretend PG essays are underground

10 things smart people read every morning that no one talks about. The richest, sharpest, most curious people on Earth start their day with these. Most people have never heard of half of them. 1. Paul Graham's Essays The startup philosophy every successful founder has read. Twenty years of writing. Free in a single archive. Site → paulgraham.com/articles.html 2. Stratechery Ben Thompson's weekly tech analysis. Read by executives in 85+ countries. The New York Times called it "one of the most interesting sources of analysis on any subject." Site → stratechery.com 3. The Marginalian Maria Popova's 19-year archive of book-distilled wisdom on art, science, philosophy, and life. Free. No ads. No algorithm. Site → themarginalian.org 4. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant Naval's complete framework on wealth, happiness, and clear thinking. The 244-page PDF is free on his site. Site → navalmanack.com 5. Farnam Street Shane Parrish's blog on the mental models Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett actually use to make decisions. Site → fs.blog 6. Lenny's Newsletter The product playbook from the operators who built Airbnb, Stripe, Notion, and Figma. Free posts every week. Site → lennysnewsletter.com 7. Sahil Bloom's Newsletter One free essay every Saturday on principles, frameworks, and timeless ideas. 800K+ subscribers. Site → sahilbloom.com 8. Stripe Press The most beautifully designed publishing house on the internet. Books on technology, business, and ideas. Many available free online. Site → press.stripe.com 9. Astral Codex Ten Scott Alexander's writing on psychology, science, AI, and how to think clearly. Free. The blog every smart person you know quietly reads. Site → astralcodexten.com 10. Morning Brew The 5-minute daily business briefing 4M+ professionals read with their coffee. Free in your inbox every morning. Site → morningbrew.com Here's the wildest part: The smartest people on Earth read the same things every morning. Most of it is free. Most people never find it. Save this before you forget. 100% free. Forever.

Stopped reading SaaS growth case studies for the tactic Started reading them for the mechanism underneath Pattern: the mechanism that drove the win is rarely the one the founder thinks drove it

Nobody tells stalled founders this: at $3-5K MRR your problem isn't "not enough traffic" It's that the traffic you get isn't from people who'd pay Channel ≠ audience. Most channel advice ignores it

Pricing changes lift revenue 30%+" -- common claim. The closest replicable number I've found: ProfitWell-style benchmarks land closer to a 5-15% median lift, with high variance and a long tail. The 30% figure is a top-of-distribution outcome quoted as the average

What's a piece of growth advice you've seen quoted everywhere that you couldn't actually verify when you tried? Building a list. Pasting the citations next to each claim

Notion's $0 → dominant in 4 years: not "better product." Mechanism: a free templates marketplace turned customers into the distribution channel. Same channels as Asana. Different game

Do things that don't scale" is a 2013 @paulg essay. Most people quote it as "do manual customer support." The actual main example: Airbnb founders photographing apartments themselves. Not the same mechanism

Every AI take is either "god in a box" or "we are all unemployed by Friday." The actual vibe, for me, is "useful coworker who sometimes lies about what they did."