Othmane

To the new people who followed me since @brivael's tweet, a quick intro so you actually know who you've followed. My name is Othmane, i'm 25, founder of Yalc(.)ai and Earleads(.)com. My journey started in early 2022, when i first got my hands on the new wave of AI models. I was still a student at the time, and instead of spending my time binge drinking i decided to learn about AI and use them to bypass homework and breeze through exam prep. Nothing glamorous, but that's where my obsession with what these systems could really do began and what got me attention from people 10x ahead of me in life. From there, i joined my first startup, working on product at the intersection of Web 3.0 and AI. that's where i learned what it actually means to ship something into the hands of real users, and how messy the gap between an idea and a working product really is. Then came the experience that shaped almost everything since: @argildotai, as Chief of Staff working closely with @brivael and @laodis. that's where the AI agent thesis clicked for me, and where i understood why selling outcomes, rather than hours or seats, is the only durable way to run a business right now. The second lesson from that chapter ran even deeper. since the models themselves keep improving faster than any of us can keep up with, the only ground a service business can really own is the last mile: the delivery layer, the part nobody glamorizes but everybody actually pays for. With that mental model in place, i quit at the end of 2023 and started the agency the following January. 15 months later we crossed the $1M ARR mark and worked with some of the best saas companies in the world. What we actually do today sits across two layers that feed into each other. On one side, there's Yalc, our open source GTM operating system. it's the deeper tech bet we're making about how GTM should be built from the ground up. On the other side, and where most of our revenue actually comes from today, we build and manage GTM systems helping teams generate qualified traffic through intelligent content systems, handle the full conversion layer, and reach the right person at the right moment with the right angle. The 2 sides aren't separate businesses, they're the same bet from different angles. the service teaches us exactly what to build into the product, and the product compounds everything the service has already learned. neither would be as strong on its own. The goal is to build the best GTM studio in the world, and ship the best product to use ourselves distributing that same service. Agency on the outside, operating system on the inside. I'll keep building all of it here, with the wins and the messy parts both on display. Welcome into my world.

@satvikputi any signal needs ponderation, who knows if where you could be at today if you spent the same time optimizing for another one ;)

caveat: I moved from India to France before the AI boom happened. Enrolling in a masters at ESSEC was the only signal when no one in France knew who the fuck I am. That said, school's brand is not enough. You have to do things beyond that to stand out. My journey is a good example of the opportunities I created in the last 12 months. If no one knows you in a region you move to, school brand is a starting point to build network. then you are on your own.

School is a ponzi, and understanding why might save you from becoming an NPC. I went to one of the most respected business schools in France. Spent 3 years there. Paid for the brand, sat through the courses, played the game. Honest version of what they taught me i could've learned it in 4 weekends with YouTube, a few good books and a working brain (highly important). "But the network is worth it..." Let's actually do the math on that network. Out of the people i went to uni with, the share who started a company is a rounding error and the ones who did mostly did it despite the school, not because of it. The rest went into consulting and M&A. Growing industries where people thrive and positively impact humanity (absolutely not): Goldman is planning over 1,000 cuts directly tied to AI productivity. Citigroup published a report saying 54% of financial jobs are highly automatable. The entire destination after school that the credential was supposed to gate is being automated as you read this. The thing the diploma signals you can do, an LLM can do in an afternoon and never asks for a bonus. Now why is School a ponzi? Well 80% of the value of a degree is signalling, not actual skill. You don't pay for what you learn, you pay for the right to be screened in by a recruiter who needs a filter. The whole structure only holds while new cohorts keep paying in and employers keep hiring on the signal. AI just removed the second half. Late entrants lose. Classic ponzi mechanic. So the actual question isn't "should you skip school". The question is what to do with the same 3 years, energy, and money. Building or joining a startup is, conservatively, 10,000x better. 1) You learn by shipping things that break in front of real users, not by simulating decisions in a case study no executive will ever read. The first kind of learning is irreversible. The second is forgotten by next semester. 2) Your work is publicly verifiable. Every shipped feature, every closed deal, every post you write becomes a permanent credential nobody can revoke. The MBA grad has one credential, the builder has hundreds, and the builder's by being vocal. 3) You build a network of people who shipped with you, suffered with you, and watched you not quit. That network helps you for life because it's based on what you did, not where you sat. Networks built on credentials evaporate the second the credential stops being relevant. Networks built on shared work don't. If your actual goal is to genuinely help people, build credibility, and assemble support around something that matters, the startup bet isn't even close to the school bet. It's just that the school version has been the default for so long that questioning it still feels heretical.

@brivael Watch it here: taap.it/X6FYqFq

So @brivael went on record saying i'm becoming a billionaire in the near future. you think he's capping? i'll let the vlog below do the arguing. it's from our offsite in the spanish mountains a few weeks ago where the whole team locked in for 7 days and shipped Yalc(.)ai together. if you haven't seen Yalc yet, easiest way to describe it is it's an operating system to run your GTM from Claude Code or Codex. some people are saying it's Clay in reverse (both in names and value proposition)... i'll let you decide that by yourself. the other thing we go deep on in the vlog is the actual thesis behind my ai native agency. to clear up the obvious confusion right now this is absolutely not an AI SDR. AI SDRs are robots pretending to be humans at scale, and the moment your prospect can tell, you've burned the relationship. we want no part of it. what we do is the opposite. AI builds the system that finds the right moment. humans own the conversation when the moment hits. that inversion is the entire business. the founders we work with already figured out that sending 10,000 personalized robot emails is a worse strategy than sending 50 messages a real human wrote, at the right moment, to the right person, with the right angle. our job is either to find OR create those 50 moments a week. their job is to close. i also walk through how we bootstrapped to $1M ARR in 15 months, and how we plan to run the same play to add a zero behind it. everything's on camera. not your boring "We're happy to announce" type of bs startup content. just the actual conversations on where the GTM space is heading and how we plan to become the n°1 GTM engineering team in the world :) vlog in the first reply 👇

@brivael I was an early user of Snipets :)

Notre première candidature YC. Snipets — knowledge management sur GPT (da-vinci). Un an avant ChatGPT. Refusés. On est rentrés à la 3ème tentative, avec Argil. YC ne regarde pas ta candidature. YC regarde ta trajectoire entre deux candidatures. Build in loop. Tiens. Le reste suit.

i guess i have no other choice now but to take this platform seriously and start posting :) quitting a system i saw was dragging me down was the best decision i ever made. you will never regret starting early when you have a burning fire in you. and don't worry about the "social" aspect. i met dozens of people i would never have dreamed of meeting thanks to entrepreneurship. the grass is not greener elsewhere, but when you can't even grow what you want in your garden (because of social pressure) then leave and do whatever suits you. go build something. thank you for this @brivael.

@adilmania you're a legend man

🔥OFFICIAL: feb recap just became the most watched episode ever (+300K views) still can’t believe it. cause i was killing myself the whole week. i was like… the rhythm is off, the output is worse than al previous ones, no one will like it. so yeah! i’m so grateful! 🤟 3 quick things: 1. a full ref’ guide drops in a few minutes. 2. i believe everything i’ve made so far feels like making a few cookies 🍪 while i’m willing to build the best pastry ever 🏠 still figuring out full-time team, more $$$ and a good space to increase production. i know the process takes time. i trust it. if you can help, feel free to send a DM :) i care a lot about vibes, high agency and quality. those are my main criteria. 3. just wanna thank you for all your support 🫶 next productions (AI + non-AI) will be insanely cool. got thousands of ideas. so excited to share all of them 🔥 also.. currently sick, lost my voice, hope i’ll get it back before the night-show starts in 2-3 weeks 😂

Stop calling your GPT workflow an "AI agent" Stop calling your N8N workflow an "AI agent" Stop calling your comfy ai clone an "Agent builder" A rigid system is not agentic. Zapier, Make are automation builders an agent might use them as tools, but they're not agents builder. An agent orchestrates tools autonomously. Claude Code, Lovable. If you defined "if X then Y", you built an automaton. Today, truly agentic apps that work? Mostly code. More modalities coming. But real agentic products right now? Extremely rare. The intelligence lives in the model, not in your flowchart.

if everyone replaces everyone who’s paying everyone to replace everyone?

@weswinder the obivous reason is relationship and trust. none are replaceable by AI (yet). i won't be the one betting against vibe coded saas though. especially if built by great engineers. maybe what people are waking up to is tech was never the main reason salesforce became salesforce

everybody saying saas is finished because of ai but i still haven’t seen a vibe coded salesforce or slack people out here running 100 claude codes in parallel and yet… literally not a single big saas has been replaced by ai code lol

@OmriBuilds one of our clients is the fastest growing enterprise saas in their industry (icp is financial institutions). i've never seen a team hire engineers more aggresively (the founders and mit grads so they surely gave a shot at vibe coding)

Is it possible to vibe-code a legit enterprise SaaS?

@LoganTGott edutainment time. personal branding was never a thing tbh. it was just a better at getting attention than boring company page owned marketing.

"personal brand" is dead in 2026 nobody cares about your content pillars lol they care if you're doing something interesting

@1Umairshaikh gtm engineering. only role who's gonna reconcile every departement

What deserves more respect? – Marketing – Engineering

@toddsaunders 4. keep a foot in the sh*t to help clean it

At some point you realize your job as CEO/founder is to only do 3 things. 1/ set the culture and live it everyday 2/ build the vision and get the entire team continuously bought in 3/ never run out of money

@Kazanjy additional point: someone whose internal incentives (bonus, promotion, social validation) are bound to what your solution can achieve for them. with some insider like copy you can make them feel this would happen with you.

Founders: The CEO isn't always your best first contact. Target the person who: 1. Owns the pain point 2. Has budget authority 3. Needs this problem solved now Often it's the functional leader, not C-suite.

@Yannlce you take a snowboard and descent full speed

Chat I'm at the peak, what do I do ?

@NickAbraham12 What has been working best for us (> $1M ARR GTM engineering agency): - Company qualification (Clay) - Sales-nav people search (job titles) - Re-qualification (job title + headline) on clay On micro campaigns with high ACV leads: manual final check from the client on each batch

We re-built our data scraping flow because keyword and industry filters just aren't good enough. There's always an issue with them: - False positives - Actual good accounts being excluded - Lists shrinking because you added too many filters It's a waste of time and credits. Thankfully, AI and lookalike tools have gotten good enough to the point where we can bypass the need to use those filters. Here's what the new flow looks like: 1. Run lookalike search on accounts we know are best-fit. Doing this will already yield better results than typical filters + keywords, but it goes a little further. 2. Run people search on those accounts. This is a much smarter play than just starting with a people search because of the issue mentioned above. Being that we have / can get information from prospects' LI profiles and other info, this is much more accurate and less prone to mistakes. From there, we run the typical validation process. Are you doing this or something similar?

@itsalfredw closing rate optimized? qualification rate optimized? good CAC to LTV? i might have a profile for you, making sure i am not sending him on a hype phase that will turn into "go create qualified pipeline yourself now" typ of things

No lunch breaks for our AEs right now (unless we hire more). They’re busy closing 4x quota. Inbound is nonstop and pipeline is full weeks out. That is a great problem to have. We are hiring Account Executives and BDRs to keep up with demand.

One of the biggest red flags for me when I am pitched is when the entrepreneur talks about how he (or we) are going to make money. Or they talk about exits. Or they talk about how a competitor is worth $1 billion. None of that matters. A startup is a mission. A great entrepreneur is a missionary. Not a mercenary. A great irony of entrepreneurship: The entrepreneurs who come in and say they're going to make everybody money, don't. People who say that they're going to paint a picture of the world that's never been seen before often are the ones who make a fortune. When entrepreneurs leave their cushy Facebook or Google jobs, some of them can't stop looking back. That is a bad sign to me. If the entrepreneur ever says, I could be making $XYZ at Google, I am concerned that they've got one foot in and one foot out and won't make it as a founder. The same can be said for founders who are building a company for the resume versus the mission. There's been an influx of Ivy League MBAs who believe that starting a venture-backed company is the next logical career move. I'd much rather invest in someone who has found a problem and believes with every fiber of their being, and knows deep in their bones, that they're the one who is destined to find the solution.