Ali Ilhami Oztan

I’ve been that founder, up at 2am, staring at a half-built app—four freelancers in different time zones, a Figma that doesn’t match the product, and users who just… don’t get it yet. Years in product taught me a hard truth: PLG isn’t code-first. It’s systems + design first. That demands a team that wakes up thinking about shipping working product, and understands the caveats. Most founders are missing one side—product, dev, or design. Then freelancers work in silos and the result is predictable: patchwork, slow, brittle apps that can’t scale. I learned this the hard way while building Nuvio. It cost time, money, and energy I didn’t have. So I’m building what I wish I had: @octostudioco. Not “another agency.” A product studio that sits with you at ideation, shapes strategy & roadmap, designs a coherent system, builds with AI as a co-pilot, and doesn’t stop there—AI agents to automate marketing, sales, and onboarding so momentum doesn’t die after launch. And if you’ve followed me, you know I’ve been building Vivelio in public. It’s still in progress—and it’s intentional. We don’t just build for founders; we also ship our own products to market to prove our standard. We’re our own first client. Like I said, this is not another "agency". No hiring maze. No freelancer roulette. No duct-taped MVPs. Just a team that ships, learns, and compounds. If this is the season you’re in, my DMs are open. I’d love to help you design / build / automate something you’re proud to put in front of users.

@surim0n Toronto! Lets build ✌🏻

toronto has a lot of 🇨🇦 founders and no group chat. fixing that. slack/whatsapp group for people building. share progress, and most importantly UNBLOCK each other first happy hour once there's enough of us. what you also get: office hours from a claude & cognition ambassador reply "toronto"

@parker_brydon @NuvioHQ Looks perfect thanks! Let's build

@ali_ilhami @NuvioHQ Added ✅ madeincanada.dev/tech?q=Nuvio

people kept asking me: does madeincanada.dev have tech companies? it didn't. now it does. 🇨🇦 madeincanada.dev/tech Shopify, Cohere, Wealthsimple, 1Password and hundreds more. all searchable. what Canadian tech company should I add next?

Today I was challenging Fable 5 about the plan it created, asking if it's enough to work on. He answered like a real senior engineer would basically saying, "if you don't trust me, ask another agent". Loved this self-esteem🤓

@coryalthoff nuvio.io

I’m looking for underrated startups. Share your url.

We made 6 hires this year. All of them are AI. They share one brain. The first brain we built made them dumber. Fixing that taught me more about AI than anything else in 2026. The full structure, including the version that failed, is in here 👇

@romanbuildsaas You are spending 60k per month and generating 24k in return, considering your monthly license is $99? And still thinking to 3x that budget? But why?

We're spending $2,000/day on Meta ads for GojiberryAI. We'll likely 3x that budget soon. In the last 30 days, those ads generated: • 600 free trials (with credit card) • 240 paying customers Funny thing? I'd never had success with paid ads before GojiberryAI. Here's the simple playbook that's working for us: 1. Hire 10 UGC creators. Have each creator publish 2 videos/day on TikTok + Instagram. Cost: around $20 per reel. This gives you volume and quickly shows what resonates. 2. Turn winners into Meta ads. Once you've produced ~50 videos, take the top performers and launch them as ads. Don't overthink it. Let Meta's algorithm find the winners. 3. Never stop creating. Keep your creators posting daily. Send them viral content from competitors and have them recreate the format (not copy it). Volume wins. 4. Improve tracking and scale gradually. Follow Meta's best practices, optimize attribution, and increase spend only when the numbers justify it. I know SaaS companies profitably spending $15k/day+ on Meta. If they can do it... Why not you?

@JackEllis I face this day to day. Same model shine on Cursor but struggles on Claude for a big monorepo project. Cursor's indexing and harness way more effective and makes cheaper models work better. And boy Composer 2.5 is great!

I called Cursor's victory over Claude Code in January. Their product is now superior in every way. Claude Code hugely subsidizes usage for now but it won't last. Cursor lets you go between multiple different company's models and Composer 2.5 delivers gigantic cost savings.

@harleyf We are building the finance OS for founders. Check it out! nuvio.io

Good morning to all the entrepreneurs ☀️ Drop a link here to what you’re building. Would love to check it out 💪

@JimminBed Thanks for the heads up! Will fix this asap

@ali_ilhami Looking good! Thank you for the deep dive into the process. Just one thing I noticed: when you click on the logo in the nav bar, you land on the /old-home page.

@tim_yakubson Stack

I cancelled my Clay subscription, and I run a Clay agency: My 2025 outbound stack cost $3,300 a month. My 2026 stack costs $700, and it still does the same sourcing, enrichment and filtering without touching a paid Clay credit anymore. A year ago that wouldn't have made sense. Now Claude Code quietly handles the day-to-day workflows I used to open Clay for, which raises an uncomfortable question: how many people are paying full Clay pricing out of pure habit, not because the work needs it? To be clear, this is NOT me saying Clay is dead. It still does jobs nothing else on the market does. The role it plays in your stack is just shrinking. I recorded a full breakdown of the 2026 stack, and I'm giving it away free, as one of the first UK-certified Clay experts telling you to de-risk Clay. Comment "STACK" and here's everything you get, free: • The $3,300 to $700 swap, line by line, so you see exactly what moved off Clay • The 4 workflows Claude Code now runs (sourcing, enrichment, filtering, the daily grind) • The jobs Clay still does better than anything, where you keep paying • The orchestration setup that lets you offload more than you'd expect • The Free Plan config I actually run my agency on PS I profit from people staying on Clay. I'm still telling you to shrink the bill.

@parker_brydon Canada! Let's go!

Spent the last few months cataloguing Canadian-made products across every category I could find. Clothing, knives, outdoor gear, food, beauty, you name it. It's ready. Goes live tomorrow on Canada Day 🇨🇦 Reply 'Canada' and I'll send you early access.

I still can't fully believe this one. We rebuilt Nuvio's entire landing page with Claude Code. It runs on Webflow. There's zero code in it. Here's how it actually happened 🧵 x.com/ali_ilhami/sta…

@sridharfyi Local minimum wage. I guess investors would like to see that. If you are not mentally sane, providing for yourself and family, you cannot build something good in the long run.

founders, quick question: if you raised a $500k pre-seed round, how much salary would you pay yourself from it? curious to hear what founders consider reasonable.

@LoganTGott Prompts

Most AI-generated LinkedIn content sounds identical. The difference between generic posts and posts that book calls isn't the tool. It's the prompt behind it. Most people treat prompts like recipes. Copy, paste, hope it works. So the same hooks, the same takes, the same lifeless content floods your feed. I spent 6 months building and testing prompts for one thing only. Turning LinkedIn into a revenue channel. I compiled it all into a free Claude prompt database: → Profile optimization for bio, banner, headline, and featured → Viral content prompts for hooks, lead magnets, and repurposing → Outbound systems for DM sequences and Sales Nav targeting → Strategy prompts for competitor analysis and ICP research → Lead magnet campaign builds that drive conversions These are built around the LinkedIn algorithm and B2B buyer psychology. Want the full prompt database? 1. Follow me 2. Comment "PROMPTS" I'll send it straight to your DMs.

@kunchenguid Cursor definitely. The harness makes it the best solution in the market and you can use any model you like. The top tier models work better with harness. Plan with a top tier models and switch to composer 2.5 to build, save 90% on costs

i’m close to exhausting the quota from both my anthropic and openai $200/month plans, so thinking of getting a 3rd subscription which one should i get? i care about model selection, harness flexibility and token value ROI

Hey @NotionHQ, your agents are spitting out their entire thought process into the output, even when the system prompt explicitly tells them not to. I'm seeing internal reasoning show up where the answer should be. Any plans to fix this? 😬

Everybody is talking about loop engineering, but the part that actually matters is verification. @cubic_dev handles that step for us. It doesn't just flag syntax. It reads like a senior engineer and catches the small logic flaws that usually slip into production before you notice them. It has become our default reviewer.