Dawson Chen

We hit $1.3M ARR. Then we hard-pivoted. Here's the story:

@jonathanzliu lets goooo

just broke my 1-day revenue record. WTF IS GOING ON BRO

@jahooma Very nice!! Trying it now…

Introducing Freebuff: the free coding agent 100% free, up to 10x as fast as Claude Code npm install -g freebuff

@thekevinqi Long story short, the tasks our AI did — schedule calendar events, reply to emails, make calls — just weren’t delivering much value to users. Cool that you worked at Alexa and are doing your own startup now! Shoot me a DM and down to chat further

I used to work at Alexa, and for the last 2 years of my career, we transitioned the system to use a mix of Anthropic and Amazon models on the hood. I have followed you attempt at building a competitor since 2025, and I'm curious about why the churn rate was so high on the product? Was it the UX/UI? Jarvis is depicted as an AI that lives in your home, and that's what Alexa and Google home try to do. Having listener speakers in every room of the house, so that you can easily access the AI via wake word. Of course, creating consumer devices is extremely expensive and a bit prohibitive for a startup so it made sense for you guys to go with an app interface. What kind of feedback were you getting from customers?

We hit $1.3M ARR. Then we hard-pivoted. Here's the story:

@Pdonelkar We were B2C, so all marketing no sales

@darweenist Mainly outbound or heads down marketing and reaching to batch mates?

@Pdonelkar Thanks! We went from $4k to $100k MRR in about 9 months.

@darweenist how long did it take you to reach 1.3M ARR? Congrats on a successful pivot btw

P.S. Your first month of Letterbook comes with all the B2C growth tips and resources we ever used at Martin!

We’ve already replaced Intercom, Zendesk, Zohodesk, Helpscout, and Freshdesk for many friends in YC. If you’re building a B2C or self-serve B2B product, I’d love to show you how it works! Try it yourself in 10 mins, or book a demo at: letterbook.ai

Introducing Codebuff—coding agent harness maximizing performance of Opus 4.5! - 100+ seconds faster (!) than Claude Code on common tasks w/ better code quality - Clean terminal UI with no flicker (🫶 OpenTUI) - Specialized subagents: file picker, best-of-n editor, reviewer 🧵

@jclin22009 jason lin is my hero!

Just graduated Stanford (🎉), and throughout college I wrote down every single life hack I learned in an Apple Notes doc. Here are my favorites from 4 years of hard-earned lessons: - In college, try to find a friend, a mentor, and a role model (upperclassman or such). It’s as simple as this. - During orientation, write down people’s names in a notes docs along with some identifiers for instant uncanny memory. Also you should think of a great fun fact about yourself because you’ll have to deliver it dozens of times - Get ready for rejection. I was rejected from 25 clubs, classes, jobs, and programs in my first two weeks. It turned out that many of these selective programs didn’t matter much, and I am grateful for the humbling experience. - Your Stanford (but more generally, every college) email address is powerful. Cold email professors and professionals to set up mentoring relationships. Show up to office hours consistently if there’s a professor you really admire (they’re often surprisingly empty!) - Get to know upperclassmen to get college specific life hacks - ON SELECTIVE CLUBS: Many clubs with selective freshman programs can be solid places but ultimately not relevant for real work/company-building in many ways. That is to say, these [redacted] programs are described by alums as being more useful for meeting people than what they actually learned. You are free to make your own path. - Prevent info overload. Consider setting up your email to auto-mute notifications from mailing lists so you don’t get a vibrating pocket every five seconds. - Choose your classes, particularly in mid-late stages (soph-junior year), to hit ~3 requirements at once (there’s a technique to this, will make a video). You’d be surprised how quickly you can graduate this way - Take hard classes with a cracked friend who can explain things. Do NOT use ChatGPT to outline your general approach; you’re kicking yourself in the foot if you don’t learn at least the basic principles yourself - When the instructors’ lecturers are not working for you (i.e. falling asleep or not really learning), consider not going in person, so you can learn things at your own pace with recorded lectures. I was a stickler for going in person early on, on principle, and realized quite late there was no point to that - Find a workout buddy and form a routine. Predinner workouts are amazing - Declare ASAP, even if you have a random advisor. You can always reassign. It’s a good sense of security - Depending on what you want to do, often it can be a waste of time just to max out your academic difficulty and have no life otherwise. It's not a flex to be constantly sleep deprived and taking an unmanageable load of difficult classes while neglecting to do longterm planning (applying for internships etc) - At least at Stanford, people can be flaky, i.e. tend to quit things fairly quickly. It often pays to stay on even just a bit longer. For example, many clubs or activities are extremely competitive freshman year, but by the time junior year rolls around you might be the only person left Disclaimer: These were tips that worked for ME but likely do not work for everyone. Enjoy college, hope this helps!!

Never seen a company with PMF this strong. No VC funding. No flashy marketing. Just a product so good you can't stop using it. Taquería "El Torito" in Mexico City. Their flagship product, the Tacos de Tripa.

Sometimes I get so mad at Siri, I think about buying a hammer and just smashing my iPhone until he stops speaking. For Martin's Product Hunt launch today, I gave into my intrusive thoughts. "Take care" were his last words. You too buddy. You won't be missed. Link to the launch: producthunt.com/products/martin

@t_blom I did group OH with you in S23 about this exact idea! We've been building it out for the past 2 years. You can now talk to Martin in our app or via phone call to manage your calendar, email, and more. trymartin.com

I want an AI voice assistant that can interact with my email and calendar. It would let me catch up on admin during my 15 minute drive to work before the day really starts. Has anyone built this yet? Otherwise, I'm tempted to vibe code it.