Luke Mostert

Venture Capital ‘Backable’? 💡 I’ve reviewed over 3000 African startup pitch decks in the last 4 years. The most important question I ask myself each time is.. ⬇ ‘Is this startup VC ‘backable’?’ A thread 🧵

@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.

@marclou What is the revenue from Twitter derived from?

I made $81,683 in February 2026. ⭐️ TrustMRR — $33.3k 📈 DataFast — $19.7K 🧑‍💻 CodeFast — $14.9K ⚡️ ShipFast — $8.8K 🐥 Twitter — $3.2K 🍜 Indie Page — $530 💨 Zenvoice — $394 🛡️ ByeDispute — $333 🎞️ YouTube — $211 🚀 LaunchViral — $129 🌱 HabitsGarden — $129 📚 WorkbookPDF — $57 My vibe-coded startup marketplace is now my #1 source of income with the 3% acquisition fee. My SaaS DataFast overtook my boilerplate ShipFast and my course CodeFast. And PoopUp did not make revenue this month 😭

"How'd you raise $3M for meme app???" I used a tactic I call "The Cool Shit Law" I made up in 2022. The Cool Shit Law took me from broke in New Jersey to penthouses, Thiel parties, and raising $3M. Here's how it works: For 4 years, I made cool shit and reached out to cool people everyday. No expectations. Just saying hi to people I thought were cool. During that time I went from broke freelance writer to founder/VC ghostwriter to watching YouTube and becoming a founder myself. I kept on posting the whole time and people saw my journey. Then in May last year, I decided I was ready to raise. So what did I do? I didn't spray and pray, I reached out to people who I knew already got me. - Our first check came from @cyantist, one of the best angel investors of all time. We got in contact because she liked my silly videos lol. We got on the phone on a Tuesday, I flew out the next Monday and had a check by Thursday. No deck or product demo. Just a conversation. - Another one of our early checks came from @balajis, one of my long-time heroes. I first DM'd Balaji 5 years ago. I'm literally wearing a sweatshirt in my profile picture that says "Balaji was right" that I made myself. (And yes, he was right about Memelord 😉) - Another early check came from @EricJorgenson. Eric was one of my first Twitter heroes. I read The Almanack of Naval Ravikant and it changed my life and taught me about leverage. I had Eric on my podcast 3 years ago and we stayed in touch. Do cool shit, find cool people who genuinely support you. While I don't how to code, I do know how to make friends on the internet. And I believe in the age of AI, that's far more important. Follow The Cool Shit Law, my friends. It will change your life.

THIS IS WHAT'S KEEPING ME UP AT NIGHT: 1. AI will kill the concept of a 9–5 for millions. MANY get laid off, become freelancers, shift to portfolios of agent-assisted work. 2. livestreaming explodes 100×. it becomes the only way to prove you are real and not AI. Twitch will look like one of the greatest acquisitions of all time. 3. the creator economy is graduating into the founder economy. audiences are mobilizing into companies, funds, and franchises. MrBeast was just the prototype! 4. we’re entering the app recombination era. the biggest startups of 2026 will be built by remixing three or four existing AI tools into new vertical workflows. 5. agents will start talking to other agents, and you won’t be in the loop. every “human in the middle” job becomes an API call between two models. 6. AI is collapsing the value chain. agencies, recruiters, consultants, and project managers disappear while micro-operators running ten-agent stacks take their place. 7. distribution goes agentic. every AI company will run a thousand influencer agents testing titles, thumbnails, and CTAs nonstop. ad spend becomes a living organism. i hope you like testing. 8. personalization flips commerce. the same product sells for fifty prices through fifty custom funnels, each built by AI for that buyer. price discovery becomes dynamic. this is prob better for business owners and worse for consumers :( . 9. data privacy becomes the new luxury. entire brands form around “human-only,” “no-model,” or “offline verified.” authenticity becomes a trillion-dollar aesthetic. 10. creators will own AI studios instead of channels. one prompt becomes a short, an app, a brand, a product line. the boundary between content and company disappears. 11. the big social platforms fracture into signal markets. people will trade ideas, audience data, and prompt assets the way day-traders swap stocks. virality gets financialized. already happening. 12. energy becomes the next constraint. every AI boom ends in a power bottleneck. whoever solves cheap, local compute with solar or geothermal wins the century. 13. storytelling becomes an economic engine again. the only moats left are narrative, taste, and trust. 14. AI-native insurance becomes a massive opportunity. once agents handle billions of decisions, someone must underwrite the risk. 15. an AI glut means deflation everywhere except in ideas. when intelligence is free, originality becomes priceless. 16. governments create national models to protect sovereignty. data turns into a weapon and compute becomes foreign policy. 17. as agents handle logistics, humans move up the stack into aesthetics. art direction becomes a daily skill. everything becomes branding. 18. the next decade’s wealth comes not just from building AI but from deciding where not to use it. restraint will make fortunes. 19. AI compute arbitrage becomes a trillion-dollar trade. people buy cheap cloud in underdeveloped markets and rent it globally, like Airbnb for GPUs. 20. AI-native brands dominate e-commerce by owning micro-trends. they launch new products daily, test a thousand ad variants, and kill losers overnight. 21. the AI gold rush ends with a massive data rush. whoever owns or licenses niche, verified datasets controls the supply chain of the future. 22. the next $10 billion fund is hybrid: part VC, part compute allocator, part data warehouse. capital moves from money to intelligence. 23. once personal AGIs hit, subscription fatigue dies. consumers will want one AI that handles everything. the first “super-app for life” could be a trillion-dollar company. 24. most billion-dollar outcomes this decade come from repackaging existing industries through AI... the AI accountant, AI real-estate broker, AI logistics coordinator starting as highly vertical versions of familiar services. 25. mobile UI shifts from taps to chat + camera. the screen becomes a lens, the conversation becomes the interface. the app era quietly turns into the agent era. @meetLCA is a design agency i co-founded that is behind the biggest AI apps rn, seeing it play out now. 26. every industry is about to unbundle into interface companies. whoever owns the customer interface, not the backend or the model, controls the value chain. it’s Shopify vs AWS all over again. 27. vertical media merges with vertical SaaS. every niche publication births a product; every software company births a content arm. the media-product line disappears. 28. the internet used to reward consistency. the new internet rewards experimentation. the faster you test, the faster you compound. 29. AI blurs the line between work and art. products start to feel authored, like albums or films. founders become creative directors of automation. 30. AI regulation prob will look like climate policy... too slow, too messy, full of loopholes. innovation moves to places that treat compute like oil. 31. the internet fragments into private ecosystems. niche communities curated by AI become the real web. public feeds feel like Times Square; private groups feel like homes!! 32. the first fully autonomous startup launches within 3 years. no employees, no meetings, no deadlines, just connected agents generating profit. insanity. 33. we are living through the great compression. timelines that used to unfold over decades now happen in months. this is the closest thing to a gold rush most people will ever see. 34. people will look back on 2026–2029 the way we look at the early internet. the difference is you don’t need permission, capital, or credentials. you just need to build something people actually care about. 35. mobile consumer apps feel alive again. they talk back, remember you, and evolve with you. static interfaces begin to feel prehistoric. 36. the next decade of wealth will belong to people who understand three things: distribution is leverage, taste is strategy, and AI is infrastructure. im tired because i havent slept but wired because... THIS IS THE BEST TIME IN HISTORY TO BUILD. our future will look very different than our past/present. life as we know it changing. i hope you get some sleep.

⏰ Just 1 day left to apply for CatalyzU's Micro-MBA Class of 2025! CatalyzU has now trained talent from 32 countries globally that represent some of Africa's best and brightest – if you want to join them, then visit the link below and apply before it's too late: catalyzu.io/micro-mba-in-v…

There's a shocking fact about AI that nobody tells you: You can catch up to the public AI research frontier in just 2 weeks. Yes, really. I've built a $150M annual revenue startup over the last 8 years and If I were to start a company today, I’d drop everything and go all-in on AI. But like many busy software builders, I felt lost—overwhelmed by the noisy, crowded and fast-moving modern AI landscape. And I wasn’t alone. So I spent my entire holiday diving deep into AI research—reading 30+ papers, watching hours of lectures, analyzing trends, and catching up to the research frontier. ✨ Here’s what I learned: - You don’t need months (or years) to catch up. - You don’t need a PhD or decades of ML experience. - You need fewer than 20 papers and 2 weeks to understand the major breakthroughs shaping AI today. It's because the technology is extremely nascent and most techniques that came before are no longer relevant: - ChatGPT is barely 2 years old and Transformers are only 7 years old. - Most game-changing discoveries happened within the last 4 years, driven by a few breakthrough ideas, scaling laws, and efficient matrix multiplication. The biggest secret? Many groundbreaking AI papers with thousands of citations are surprisingly simple and applied, like adding "let's think step by step" to the prompt, or simply asking the LLM over and over again to improve its answer (Self-Refine). I realized there are tons of founders and builders in the same boat—wanting to dive deeper into AI but unsure where to start. I've created an essential AI Guide that helped me catch up, in just 2 weeks, to the frontier of public AI research to figure out where the next opportunities and gaps were: - Curated list of only the most important papers - Simple explanations of key concepts - Clear pathway to understanding the frontier of modern AI It’s perfect for: - Founders expanding into AI - Builders wanting to innovate at the frontier of AI - Investors looking to separate the signal from the noise 👇 Want the full guide? - Like and Share this post - Comment "AI Guide" - I'll send you the complete guide (ps, I’m also teaming up with @VishalVasishth, co-founder of @obviousvc with @ev (focused on large-scale societal impact companies like Twitter, Medium, Beyond Meat), to host a small meetup to discuss what's working and needs to be solved in the AI stack in SF. Message me if you're interested)

@henrythe9ths AI Guide

Cheat code in corporate: giving colleagues praise

@iDEGEN_AI thoughts on Roger Federer?

HUGE $5000 $IDGN GIVEAWAY! We are giving four of you the chance to win $1250 worth of $IDGN 🔥 Tokens will be allocated at our current price of $0.00319, once the presale has ended! How to enter: Follow @iDEGEN_AI Like + RT this post Winners will be chosen December 17th 📅 Join the $IDGN presale today ➡️ bit.ly/iDEGEN

@elonmusk thoughts on Baby Doge? Perhaps to replace the Rand 🇿🇦

New vid : Follow & Comment "1". 1 will win a $3,000 NEO Tokyo s2. (Must like/follow/share) 3 will win $500 in Bytes. AI alt season is starting. Binance may be pamping these coins here soon. Here's my top picks. youtube.com/watch?v=HyziGx…

Monday Motivation | Three South African Entrepreneurs Shaping the Future> ow.ly/gXh250U9JbI @lukemostert @catalyzu | Nompumelelo Madubedube @thesanhair | Esethu Cenga #MondayMotivation #Entreprenurs #SMEnews #BusinessPartners 🔸

In the October issue of The African Catalyst: • Applications are open for our Sales Success Fellowship • Connect with our Lecturers • Meet Tony Onwukwe, Product Manager and the Founder of @KeekStatEducate catalyzu-news.beehiiv.com/p/the-african-…

You must understand the following: In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field itself and border on the religious.

The future belongs to those who build a media company around themselves.

🚀Exciting Announcement 🚀 Applications for our 6th Venture Capital Fellowship are NOW OPEN! This 6-week program is a comprehensive journey into VC investing and startup fundraising. Whether you're looking to break into VC or elevate your early-stage career, this fellowship is designed to equip you with the essential knowledge and skills to succeed. APPLY HERE; catalyzu.io/catalyzu-ventu…

"The fellowship covered a comprehensive range of topics including VC economics, investment strategies and due diligence. Thank you to CatalyzU for the thoughtfully planned curriculum and to all the guest lecturers for their excellent sessions and engaging discussions!" -Shuai Zhang, Entrepreneur and VC Fellow To be a part of the next VC cohort, apply today. catalyzu.io/catalyzu-ventu…

Congratulations to Cohort 5 of the CatalyzU Venture Capital Fellowship! 🎉 At Demo Day last night they presented and defended their capstone assignment - a new VC Fund including thesis and mandate - to a panel of experts and CatalyzU alumni. The calibre of these proposed funds showcased their investment skills and a strong grasp of the African startup landscape. Congratulations to our graduates! 🤝 If you'd like to learn more about our VC Fellowships, click here: catalyzu.io/catalyzu-ventu… @54collective_vc