Benlloyd Goldstein

always a fan of interactive realtime ✨

@Jason i'm in

We started an AI founder twitter group... reply with "I'm in" if you're a founder and want to be added

@gregisenberg @boringmarketer such a specific time frame i love it lol

@boringmarketer nice. let's get you on the pod within the next 45 days

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

@ryan_rosenthal thinking caps 🧢 on!

@benlloydg nailed it

@fin465 guide

Now that we’re done at YCombinator, we’re revealing how we went from 0 → $10k MRR in our first 30 days, using only ONE channel (step by step). We spent less than $100 and didn’t have any paid ads, SEO, waitlist, or content marketing. Instead, we sent 50-75 highly targeted cold emails a day. Cold email is the most underrated channel because it's hard to get right, but if you figure it out you can sell ANY B2B product. Here's what we did from start to finish: STEP 1: Build an ultra‑specific customer profile at both company and person level. If you do this right, you can mess everything else up and still succeed. The goal here is to create such a perfect customer, that if they heard about your solution they would have no choice but to say "tell me more". Step 2: Build your list After you create this customer profile, find the companies that meet this criteria. Find 30–50 target companies on LinkedIn, then grab decision‑maker emails via Apollo/Wiza. STEP 3: Writing a killer email I used to run an outbound email agency and we'd send 50k+ emails/month to book b2b sales calls via cold email. Here are the basic principles of cold email writing that I always use: -Keep it 5-8 sentences. 70%+ of emails are read on mobile, so make sure they get most of it from that screen view. - Never write more than 2 sentences without breaking up the lines. People skim, and that’s the best way to keep their attention - DO NOT talk about your product’s features. - Instead, talk about the person, their company, and their pain points. STEP 4: The call I took 493 sales calls in Origami’s first 3 months. Here's what I learned: The 2 biggest goals for this call are - Figuring out the customer’s problems - Getting the customer excited about your solution Unless you already have PMF, it doesn't matter if you have a full built product. You still need to spend 90%+ of your time figuring out what the customer actually needs. In the early stages, you can even offer a full refund if they aren’t satisfied to give them maximum confidence and get your first few deals over the line. STEP 5: Closing/After Congrats! You cracked cold email. This was the exact approach we used at Origami to get our first $10k MRR, and the highest converting outbound approach I’ve seen when I ran my agency. I posted the stats in my prior tweets, but in our first 40 days we sent 3119 emails (~77 per day) and got a 5.3% response rate, resulting in demos with 64 founders at companies within our ICP. This resulted in ~$22k new MRR by the time our sales for all of these calls had closed. The best part is that once you nail this process, you can automate it. We've got our Origami AI Agents (@origamichat) finding new customers 24/7, which frees us up to explore new channels and focus on scaling. CONCLUSION This is a very short version of my guide. The full guide I posted on X last year (@fin465) hit 800k impressions and 10k+ bookmarks. If you want me to DM it you, comment GUIDE.

@iaaaaan might have to try and combine the 2 👀

@benlloydg love this. Agentfy shows the lock screen status the whole time it runs so you catch if it stalls before 4,800 lines go sideways. apps.apple.com/us/app/agentfy…

as i was falling asleep i gave claude code a drowsy goal and a 5-minute heartbeat and passed out woke up to 20 commits. 4,800 lines of code. 182 passing tests. It specced, built, tested, found and fixed its own bugs. Overnight. Unattended. 🌙 a mini-harness in 3 files: github.com/benlloydg/pill…

@iaaaaan wow this is dope! native ios app ?

but for real, customer interviews at scale just got interesting

Trillions of agents means trillions of potential customers... and unlike humans, they'll actually respond to your calls. ( API humor )

@BrennanErbz love this and completely agree. well written piece

@ycombinator @GoogleDeepMind Registration closed while I was mid-submission. Any waitlist or late-add path? YC W20 founder here with a strong multimodal project ready. Would love to join.

YC and @GoogleDeepMind are hosting the Multimodal Frontier Hackathon this Saturday. Most AI apps still don't utilize the full multimodal stack. So we’re giving you access to Gemini 3.1, Lyria, & NanoBanana 2 to see what you can build! Sign up at: events.ycombinator.com/deepmind-march…

@mlg27_ congrats on launch! 🚀 looks sick can't wait to try it

launched on product hunt! producthunt.com/products/kodo-…

@ycombinator @GoogleDeepMind is the sign up page down for anyone else?