David J Phillips

Starting a startup completely changed the trajectory of my life Before: – 22 years old – $100k in debt – Skinny-fat – Hacker house After: – 25 years old – $350k in debt – Just fat – Homeless Here’s what I did after:

@klwongkyle Full ep here: fondo.ai/4agJeGP

Before AI, marketing teams built five creatives for every campaign. Now they can generate fifty. But more content didn't solve marketing. It exposed a new bottleneck. Most of it is slop. AI solved the quantity problem. It created a quality problem. @klwongkyle & co-founder @tseungcolin built @InstaAgentAI to solve the second one. A consumer brand hands InstaAgent a single marketing brief. From there, the team handles the strategy, the creative, the distribution, and the analytics. The result isn't 50 generic ads. It's personalized content built for hundreds of distinct audiences - each with its own messaging, creative, and targeting. Think about a global CPG company. Hundreds of SKUs. Dozens of countries. That's thousands of creative variations before you even start optimizing performance. The hard part isn't generating content anymore. It's knowing what to create. Anyone can pay $25 a month for an AI model. Very few know how to turn that model into marketing that actually performs. That's why InstaAgent isn't positioning itself as another self-serve AI tool. It's an AI-native marketing partner - combining human judgment with AI execution to produce creative that brands can actually scale. The market is responding. From $0 to $1M ARR in just 10 months. Enterprise customers including Nestlé and P&G. Enterprise sales cycles closing in less than a month. The first wave of AI made content abundant. The next wave will reward the companies that know exactly who that content is for. 🎙️ @klwongkyle, Co-Founder & CEO, @InstaAgentAI on @Fondocom @thestartpod

@startupoppa @myfirstmilpod @ShaanVP @thesamparr @markpinc @markpinc is such a legend

i’ve watched almost every episode of @myfirstmilpod by @ShaanVP @thesamparr but this episode with @markpinc is my hands down favorite. he cuts through the noise and urges you to define who you are, what pulls you. very “you” oriented approach to deciding what to build and the wake of watching this is profound. fuck being big is so right. the size of a venture’s outcome is a hindsight that’s highly case by case. who you are, what you like should be the focal point of long term dreamers, not will this make $x within 30 days. x is plagued with many builders (who i do respect for their grind) giving superficial advice around copy pasting products that already work. please watch this. these lessons coming from the man who is both a legendary builder and investor in one is just irresistible and it will inevitably influence the texture of your thinking as it did mine.

Think of startup sales as a doctor/patient relationship. If you just walked into the doctor's office and they said "here take this prescription", you wouldn't trust it at all. They don't even know what problems you have yet! Sales is the same. You are the doctor/expert that has to ask lots of questions to understand your customer's problems before you earn the right to show how your product can help. (shoutout @ryanRneu for teaching this to many founders)

@pierreeliottlal Can you share your playbook?

We paid $30 for this UGC. It reached 175k views, sent 1,000+ visitors to our website, and massively outperformed a normal day in signups. This feels like a cheat code !

Anyone who consumes more tokens than I do has full-blown AI psychosis Anyone who consumes fewer is NGMI These are the facts

@nbaschez @lulumeservey Virtual coffees are the best!!

@lulumeservey Hi Lulu! Big fan of your tweets. Would love to pick your brain about a few comms issues we’re facing. Up for a virtual coffee? Thanks!!

Point #1, “stop asking to pick people’s brains,” is especially salient if you’re asking people who sell pickings of their brains as their product Then it goes from aimless to insulting It’s like cold emailing someone at Apple and asking them to send you a free MacBook “Hey, I have a need for your product and would love for you to give that to me, a total stranger, for free. Thanks!”

I walked into the room to see my nephew using ChatGPT. He asked GPT-5.5 high what its favorite color was. "What the hell is this?" I said, "That's a terrible use of tokens." I logged him out of the account. He started crying. He doesn't understand that tokenmaxxing doesn't mean poor usage of the most powerful models. He doesn't understand that he's using PhD-level intelligence to ask a simple question. He doesn't understand any of it

Claude in 2027 after it answers your question

The days are long but the decades are short

@mynameisyahia @nikhilrado @Fondocom 🫡

@aridutilh @Fondocom Haha need to add the fam!!

@davj @Fondocom really holding down the fort, party of one 😂

Concerning

I use @sunflowersober everyday. And @kobyjconrad is one of the best people I've ever had the privilege of working with. A genuinely good human.

Check out the full ep here: fondo.ai/4wphUiX

1.2 billion people struggle with addiction. There will never be enough clinicians to treat them. @kobyjconrad believes AI changes that equation. His own story starts much smaller. High 24/7 from 19 to 24. He got sober. Taught himself to code. Built a side project called Sunflower. Years later, that side project became a VC-backed company with a much bigger ambition. Today, @sunflowersober has: → 500,000+ users and counting → Grown from 200 to 100,000 monthly active users in under 6 months → Reached a $1M run rate in about 10 months → Tracked 109 years of sobriety every single day → Expanded to users in almost every country, across 5 languages The product combines consumer software with clinical care. A consumer app featuring: An AI sponsor for addiction recovery Visual sobriety progression tracking A social network built for recovery CBT journaling and educational content across major addiction types Alongside a tele-therapy clinic: - Talk therapy in California and Texas, expanding nationwide with MAT - World-class doctors building the most effective protocols for addiction The mission began with one billion sober days. The team realized they'd reach that goal sooner than expected. So they raised the target. One trillion. Koby's growth philosophy mirrors the one behind his book, "Channels of Growth": Don't choose between product and distribution. Build both. Because at real scale, only a handful of growth channels matter. Find the one that fits your business—and optimize it relentlessly. His biggest prediction isn't about sobriety. It's about work. At Sunflower, they call it 'Operation Ender's Game' Map every task. Automate what AI can do today. Design for what AI will do tomorrow. The only role left? fleet operator. 🎙️@kobyjconrad, CEO & Founder, @sunflowersober on @Fondocom @thestartpod

VCs texting a PortCo founder "So tell me what your company does again? What happens if Anthropic builds this. What's the TAM?"

Fable 5 is absolutely unreal. I gave it a startup idea, and in 8 hours it interviewed 100 users, built the v1, raised a 200 million seed round from a16z, blew the entire seed round on expensive GTM hires and slop ad campaigns that didn't convert, panicked and raised a down round, fired their entire leadership team, pivoted twice and then ultimately shut down the startup

Today we're launching Monumint! Monumint is conversational AI for financial services. Our agents work across voice, SMS, and email to help banks, credit unions, and lenders reach customers at scale. In the US, people spend 10 billion minutes a year on the phone with their bank. Despite that, as a consumer it feels like there's a mile wide communication barrier anytime you want to get something done. And on the flip side, financial institutions have more data than ever and still struggle to reach customers with the right message at the right time. That’s the gap we’re working to close. We’ve now handled more than 5 million customer interactions for financial institutions, and the growth we’ve seen over the last 10 months has been incredible. Building a startup is never a straightforward journey. Where we are today is very different from where we started in YC. We had to say goodbye to great customers, make hard calls, and rebuild a lot of our assumptions from the ground up. Huge thank you to the team, our customers, and the investors who stuck with us along the way. Excited to finally share Monumint with the world.

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