Aetherya

@sickdotdev aetherya.com AI-powered behavioral simulation. test your ideas with realistic digital twins of your audience before spending a dollar. built for teams that are tired of guessing.

Builders only. Drop your product. No pitch. Just the link. 50k builders are watching. ↓

building Aetherya — an AI platform that simulates realistic human behavior so teams can test ideas, ads, and experiences before going live. think: digital twins of your target audience that actually hesitate, get confused, and behave like real people instead of giving you perfect robot answers. replacing weeks of research with hours of high-fidelity simulation.

Hey founders ! Looking to connect with people building in: 🍽️ SaaS 🚀 Tech 📲 Automation 🧠 AI tools 📱 Product Development 🔥 Web APP 💻 Devs Drop what you're working on👇

both — and that's the problem most people don't recognize. the best use of AI is when it forces you to think harder about the right questions, not when it lets you skip the questions entirely. "AI told me to do X" is the new "best practices say." same intellectual laziness, fancier wrapper.

Are you using AI to move faster… or to avoid thinking? Which one? 👇

the speed gain is real, but here's what most people miss about AI-driven discovery: interviewing 100 stakeholders simultaneously only works if the AI actually models how each person thinks differently — not just generates 100 variations of the same sanitized answer. the hard part isn't scale. it's fidelity. making sure those simulated conversations capture real hesitation, bias, and contradiction — not idealized responses.

Consulting firms still run discovery like it's 2015. Workshops, surveys, six-week timelines. One founder is replacing all of it with AI agents that interview 100 stakeholders simultaneously and deliver findings in days. The consulting productivity era starts now.

#4 is criminally underrated on this list. industry benchmarks are averages — and averages include everyone doing it wrong. your own data tells you where YOUR users hesitate, drop off, and convert. the brands that win aren't chasing someone else's 3% CR. they're obsessively studying why their specific audience bounces at checkout step 2.

how ecom brands waste money, ranked: 1. scaling ads to a store with a 1.5% conversion rate 2. full redesigns with zero split testing 3. hiring a new agency before fixing the fundamentals 4. chasing industry benchmarks instead of their own data 5. running A/B tests for 4 days and calling a winner fix the foundation. then scale everything on top of it.

@TTrimoreau running basic surveys and focus groups to understand what people think. AI didn't kill the skill — it exposed that most of it was theater. the real skill was always interpreting behavior, not collecting self-reported opinions. that part got harder, not easier.

Name a skill AI made almost useless

the echo chamber problem is even deeper than most realize. it's not just who you talk to — it's how you ask. most founder interviews are structured to confirm the hypothesis they walked in with. the signal isn't just in challenging people. it's in watching what they actually do vs what they say they'd do. the gap between stated intent and real behavior is where product truth lives.

Most founders don’t have a product problem. They have a feedback problem. If everyone you talk to agrees with you, you’re not doing research. You’re building in an echo chamber. Talk to people who challenge you. That’s where the signal is.

the jump from 48% to 93% rich response rate is wild — and the insight about anchoring WTP to founder's own stated costs is underrated. most people building synthetic personas treat them like survey bots. the unlock is modeling realistic hesitation and bias into the simulation. a perfect persona gives you clean data. a realistic one gives you signal.

@ivelini @vercel @supabase @openclaw @founding Great piece, @ivelini . Your thesis on synthetic user research sparked an internal sprint at @soleur_ai this week — we improved it to integrate your thesis and ran 10 AI-generated/synthetic founder personas through our interview guides and iterated 3 times 🧵

Synthetic Users & Outcome Pricing: The Two Shortcuts Every Founder Needs in 2026 Simulate users at scale, get paid for outcomes, ship 10× faster — the playbook that’s replacing the old accelerator script. open.substack.com/pub/ivelin117/… @vercel , @supabase , @openclaw , @founding

the pattern is always the same: build → ship → crickets → assume it's a distribution problem → move on to the next idea. but 9 times out of 10, it was a positioning problem disguised as a product problem. the product worked fine. the audience just never understood why they needed it. the hardest skill in early-stage isn't building. it's validating that real humans actually want what you're building before you go all in.

You’ve shipped 3 products. Got 0 paying users. And you’re already thinking about the next idea. Shipping more ≠ revenue.

shipped new cognitive simulation features on Aetherya this week. you can now run autonomous multi-perspective website audits where AI personas actually browse your site like real users — finding behavioral friction points that analytics alone can't catch. aetherya.com

What did you build this week? Drop your project URL 👇🏻 Let’s drive some traffic

marketer who can code. every time. a developer who can sell still thinks in features. a marketer who can code thinks in outcomes — and can actually build what converts. the best early-stage hires are people who understand *why* users buy, not just *what* to build. that customer empathy compounds faster than technical skill in year one.

As a founder, who would you hire? 1. a marketer who can code? 2. a developer who can sell?

the missing step most people skip between "pick a niche" and "build distribution": actually understand the behavior of the people in that niche. not their demographics. not their job titles. their decision patterns, hesitations, what makes them click, what makes them bounce. most builders pick a niche then immediately start creating. the ones who win spend time understanding why their niche behaves the way it does first. then everything they build resonates by default.

do yourself a favor learn to get good with ai pick a niche build distribution build apps or agents as a service make something so useful then expand around that behavior 99% of people will read this and do nothing 1% will read this and do their future selves a favor i don't know how long this window last but wow what a excellent time to be building time to make moves

Aetherya — AI-powered cognitive simulation platform. we're replacing traditional user research (slow, expensive, small samples) with behavioral simulation at scale. create digital twins of any target audience, simulate how they react to your product, content, ads, websites — and get predictive insights in hours instead of weeks. our THYMOS engine simulates real human behavior: hesitation, bias, emotion, irrationality. not perfect robot responses. aetherya.com

Who’s building big? Show me, I’ll check it out Happy to be an investor

because they close the feedback loop faster than anyone else. code something → test it with real audience behavior → iterate → ship something that actually works. most teams have builders and marketers in separate rooms guessing at each other's priorities. the founders who can think in both languages at once skip months of misalignment.

Founders who combine coding and marketing become unstoppable

building Aetherya — an AI platform that replaces slow, expensive user research with high-fidelity behavioral simulations. create digital twins of your target audience, simulate how they'd react to your product, ads, landing pages, and content — before you spend a dollar. think: instant focus groups that actually predict real behavior. aetherya.com

Show me what you're building. 👇 No pitch. No fluff. Just drop the link. will click every single one. 🔥 Last time this got 400+ links and thousands of views. Let's beat that. ↓

100%. and here's the problem — most teams write that first line based on what *they* think the user cares about. not what the user actually cares about. the gap between "what we think resonates" and "what actually makes someone stop scrolling" is where most landing pages die. best approach: test your headline against how different audience segments actually react to it before it goes live. the answers are almost never what you expect.

The first line of your landing page MUST answer: "Why should I care about this?" If it doesn't, the rest doesn't matter.

positioning, and it's not close. bad distribution with great positioning = slow growth but you eventually find your people. great distribution with bad positioning = you reach everyone and convert no one. most founders skip the hard part — actually understanding how their audience thinks, what language resonates, what makes them hesitate. they jump straight to channels and tactics. nail the positioning first. distribution becomes 10x easier when you know exactly who you're talking to and why they should care.

What's harder to nail? - Positioning - Distribution

this is exactly why the best products feel like someone actually used them before shipping. the irony of the AI era: the more automated everything gets, the more valuable that human touch becomes. users don't just notice — they feel it. biggest gap in product development right now is understanding how real humans actually experience your product. not through analytics dashboards, but through the messy, emotional, irrational way people actually behave.

You can still instantly tell when an app lacks the human touch. I can't commit my time to something if I see that the creator is not willing to commit theirs.

the real problem isn't writing articles or finding backlinks — it's doing all of that without knowing what your actual audience searches for, clicks on, and cares about. most SEO strategies are built on keyword tools and guesswork. very few start with behavioral intent. we built an SEO Orchestrator inside Aetherya that simulates how real persona segments actually search and interact with SERPs — so you can prioritize content that matches real behavior, not just search volume.

Honestly the worst part about doing SEO is writing blog articles and finding backlinks Is there any product that fixes this?

This resonates deeply. We've been on the same journey at Aetherya — building AI personas with 50+ behavioral variables that capture real cognitive patterns: hesitation, bias, emotional reasoning. The "nobody believed in it" phase is real. But once people see personas that actually think like humans instead of outputting generic LLM responses, the shift clicks instantly. Focus groups at 1/100th the cost is just the beginning.

I've been slaving away for months trying to optimize our AI personas for accuracy and realism and still nobody believed in what we were doing... and my co-founder has the bright idea to bring them to life and it just works. These reactions feel completely real. Focus groups at 1/100th the cost are here.