Jay

At 21, I was homeless. I built the UK’s largest CS:GO retailer from nothing. Four years later, I made my first $1M. By year 8, I’d made $5M. Exited my last startup for a few million. Made $3M selling NFTs not buying them. Now building ChadAI an AI dating coach that actually works. SEO flywheel. Partnerships. Iteration. Sharing the wins, failures, and lessons here.

reacreated design on left in figma, think I am getting better with my design skills but still need to improve my typography

@matthheos best to run your own ads first and see which ones perform before hiring

MY INFLUENCERS GOT OVER 300K+ VIEWS IN TOTAL PROMOTING MY APP and I got little to NO conversion… I believe it’s because I hired the wrong type of creators Can’t lie, this is confusing me

@bchesky do you regret giving away 20% so early

After YC, Airbnb raised $615k at a $3M post-money valuation. We were the highest valuation in our batch.

@Naina_2728 it is good for scripting, spoke to some influencers they tell me its really good at directing their video and overall script

okay but fr quick question who is ACTUALLY using manus ai (curious)

My background is a bit random. Robotics in London. CS in Melbourne. Music production in Berlin. DeFi protocols in Solidity. Now AI apps for the App Store. For a while I thought that meant I was scattered. Now I think useful skills just stack in weird ways.

@harpriiya @a16z @speedrun congratulations, looks amazing

I can finally talk about this!! Hotbox is backed by @a16z @speedrun :) I spent the last 14 months in Korea and now I’m back in SF, where it all began. My entire career exists because of social media. From early NeurIPS papers, to working on ranking algorithms, and then building viral playbooks for startups. The thing I kept coming back to is: every company has no choice but to become a media company. To distribute. To get attention. That is the next generation of entrepreneur’s biggest challenge. That’s the next single person unicorn’s moat. Hotbox is built for that next gen entrepreneur. Businesses run entirely on social now. Hotbox is the sales infra for the social economy. more to come. sign up on our waitlist & lmk if you’ll be at the a16z speedrun demo day 🤫

@jonathanzliu amazing, thanks. can I join you as marketing intern, I am really fascinated by your tik tok growth skills

@jaykch my app Cupidly (check my pinned post)

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

@petergostev for real, ai is getting my juices flowing but a bit too much 😂

There's worry that people will stop using their brains with LLMs, but managing several AI agent threads in parallel has been some of the most cognitively intensive work I've done in years

@tdinh_me why would you set up a company in germany 😂

That's wild. 3+ months and still waiting for VAT ID. Is this normal in Germany? 😳

@chaosengineerr lack of patience for interview processes

be honest: what made you pivot to startups?

@big_duca yep i think its way better to have a hard paywall

Only idiots offer free versions of their products. Awaken has a free version. Problem is the people attracted to that are often horrible. Our rudest users are always the ones who pay us the least. It’s amazing how consistent it is.

@alexcooldev @grok can you deslopify this ai slop

Most people quit too early. Not because they’re not talented. Not because the idea is bad. But because nothing happens… at first. 0 users. 0 revenue. 0 validation. Just you… and doubt. But here’s the truth: The first phase is always invisible. You’re building skills. You’re learning patterns. You’re getting 1% better every day. Then suddenly… something clicks. 1 user → 10 → 100 → 1,000 1 video → viral 1 app → life-changing People will call it “luck”. But they didn’t see the boring days. So if you're in the quiet phase right now: Keep shipping. Keep posting. Keep building. Because momentum doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up one day. And changes everything 💪

@Pauline_Cx development

What’s one thing you’ll never outsource?

@indiewhacker best balance I have found is claude/gpt for ideas and then I rewrite it

If claude actually writes better copy than you, then you just suck at writing copy

@MillyTamati @claudeai love it, good to see people posting already

You probably need an AI generalist .... what if you could hire one by the weekend? (save this!!) built on @claudeai, obvs

@TeeDevh not as much, also many generalists have no place in the job market but they are exceptional at saas or business in general for them job markets never work out

@jaykch SaaS is competitive too.

For me, building a SaaS to $5k/month feels more achievable than getting a $5k/month full-time dev job. Maybe it’s just my path 😐

@RealProductGirl 🤝

I NEED my feed full of builders. What are you working on right now? I don't care if it's a startup or a weekend side project. If you're building something, I want you on my timeline. Reply and let's connect. 👇

@rozzabuilds namecheap is much cheaper, cheapest one to be honest

Developers - where do you usually buy your domains? I’m still using Vercel exclusively.