sam🍇

@RobertFreundLaw "Can instantly hire 100,000 reps at the tap of a button" is crazy lmao

The FTC alleges that Air AI claimed its conversational AI could "have full on 10-40 minute long conversations that sound like a REAL human" and "do the entire job of a full time agent." In reality, the technology was faulty, often unable to perform basic functions like placing calls or responding accurately to questions.

Today, the FTC sued Air AI and its founders for allegedly defrauding consumers through deceptive marketing and sales of its coaching programs. FTC says Air AI made false promises about the earnings potential for coaching clients, the refund policy, and the "conversational AI" product's capabilities.

@richzou @xai i need a cofounder hmu lol

I just left @xai It was not an easy decision. The past three months were an absolute blast - I've been in many trenches in my life and can say this was by far one of the most intense warzones. I love fighting. Especially being in the trenches with my friends, working on problems that will actually advance humanity. But the current environment wasn't serving my growth. And that's a really hard thing to admit - I've always looked up to Elon, and I genuinely believe xAI will win. I still do. One thing I'll say: don't stay somewhere just because of the name. If you're unhappy, and you know you can't grow 100x where you are - it's the right call to leave. What's next? Get some sleep back. Then find the next trench worth fighting in. I'll always be meeting exceptional people - that was never because of a recruiting title. I just love finding smart people and helping however I can. Many more side quests to come!!!

@petergyang @thesamparr actually i got you annnd it's a full Claude Code plugin scaffolded to walk you through it : ) 13 templates, funnel hacking, 5 parallel agents (copywriter, etc.), deploy live flow, Stripe, etc. github.com/ominou5/funnel…

@thesamparr Make a /landing-page skill to do it. Paste a free screenshots of landing pages you want and ask Claude to make the skill. I prefer doing all this in Claude Code

I love Hubspot (we use it) But I don't want to design landing pages anymore. I want claude to do my landing pages for me in Hubspot. I can't figure out how to solve this problem, though. Anyone know how to?

@thesamparr (once you got a lander you love, just MCP hubspot into your system). Should work great!

@thesamparr Yes sir, i built a full free, open source claude plugin to do exactly this: github.com/ominou5/funnel… 27 Skills, 5 parallel agents, deploy flow, Stripe native MCP, scripts for testing, 13+ landing page templates, funnel hacking - all a command away:

all true and fine, Mark, but this doesn't change the fact that paid ads can be gasoline on that fire :) i don't know this is becoming an either/or conversation on here. done right ads are just supercharging distribution, they can work amazingly well in tandem... that said, with low capital, organic and outreach is the best way to go for sure!

No one knew who I was when I started. Literally no one. My 1st company , I had to email reporters and tell them what they got wrong or right. I learned quickly they needed as much content as I could help them generate. That led to more people asking me for my opinion on software, networking, you name it. That led to me going on various radio and tv stations and then news channels. That blew up my first company that I sold Then it helped blow up my second company that I sold. Then it helped me blow up my 3rd company that I sold. Then I bought the Mavs and the rest is history I wasn't an actor, athlete or born into fame. I was a guy who figured out that the more I communicated with people who had platforms, the more they would platform me The more I stood apart from everyone else and was able to back it up, the more interest I could create That led to a TV show that failed. That led to Shark Tank and who knows how many tv appearances. They got me the platform that allowed me to create @costplusdrugs I never had a PR firm. Never paid to appear anywhere. I found places where I could add value and stand out and went there. That's what got me here The difference between now and then, there are thousands of podcasts and streamers and influencers that need content more than anyone ever did back in the day . Anyone who knows how to brush their teeth can start on small podcasts, find a niche, see if it works and grow from there

"Funnels" used to be hard Never logging into a landing page editor again feels good. Talk to claude > Get funnel > Talk more > Edit funnel > Say "Deploy" > Push it live. Easy mode era.

@danielcberk bros entire X strategy is 'bad takes'

This post is printed on my office wall and I give it a big smooch before I start work every day.

Just dropped a full course on using Google Antigravity, designed to take you from zero to LIVE app. In this case, you're building a personal habit tracking app, and shipping it live... but I've made it easy to swap in your own idea and ship that instead. 5 Sprins, 19 Lessons, Interactive w/AG as the copilot. Want it? Follow, RT, and comment 'SHIP' below... (Must be following so i can send it over).

the whole conversation is silly tbh there's a cost to acquire a customer (CPA), whether organic or paid ads you'd have to be a fool to ignore a massive pool of buyers just because you're paying an ad network vs paying off content creators etc. you can do either/or and win, but organic+paid is the sauce and i can't believe this even needs to be said lol

With the utmost respect to @bgurley and @andrewchen I have to strongly disagree. And I want to use their own words to explain why. Gurley posted that paid marketing is "the crudest game you can play." Chen called paid acquisition "a tax on your product's defensibility." These are smart people. These takes are not wrong in their world. But their world is not the world that $10M to $50M DTC founders are operating in, and conflating the two is doing real damage to how founders think about growth. So let's actually have this conversation. First, let me acknowledge what's true. Organic is real. Community is real. Word of mouth is real. A brand that earns its growth through genuine product quality and a loyal customer base is more defensible than one papering over a broken product with ad spend. Organic should be part of every DTC brand's strategy. Full stop. Content builds brand equity. UGC builds trust. Email builds retention. None of that is up for debate. But here is what nobody on the VC side of this conversation wants to say out loud: organic is not a business plan. It is a hope. You cannot forecast inventory on a viral post. When Instagram adjusted its algorithm to prioritize Reels over static posts, brands with strong engagement saw organic reach drop over 60% overnight. No warning. No change in content quality. No policy violations. Just a platform decision that wiped out a distribution channel those brands had spent years building. gritdaily.com/social-media-a… That is the nature of organic. You do not own it. You borrow it. And the platform can repossess it any time it wants. Instagram posts now reach an average of 4% of followers, down 18% from the prior year. Facebook organic reach has fallen to 2.6% on average. martech.zone/organic-reach-… Now tell me: How do you build a demand forecast on a 2.6% organic reach number you cannot control, cannot scale predictably, and cannot turn on when you have 10,000 units sitting in a 3PL you are paying storage on every day? Here is what Gurley himself has said and it actually makes the case for paid media better than anything I could write. In his 2011 post "All Revenue is Not Created Equal," Gurley wrote that visibility and predictability are among the core drivers of enterprise value that the more certain you can be of future cash flows, the higher premium you will put on a business. abovethecrowd.com/2011/05/24/all… He is right. Predictability is everything. Paid advertising, when run correctly, is the most predictable demand generation tool a DTC founder has. You set a budget. You define an audience. You deploy creative. You measure output. You adjust. That loop is measurable, repeatable, and scalable in a way that organic fundamentally is not. Gurley also praised the companies he most admired Yahoo, eBay, Google, Facebook, Skype specifically because they "did not require marketing," with organic growth embedded in the product through network effects. abovethecrowd.com/2011/05/24/all… With respect, those are not DTC companies. They are platform businesses where the product is the distribution mechanism. Every Skype user needed another Skype user. Every eBay seller needed buyers on the network. A wallet brand does not work that way. When a customer buys a Ridge Wallet, they do not inherently recruit five friends to also buy Ridge Wallets. The product is excellent (I have one). I t does not have a viral loop baked into it. Comparing platform businesses with network effects to physical goods DTC brands is a category error. And it is the category error doing the most damage in this conversation. Now let me address Chen directly. Chen has said that when over 50% of a brand's acquisition is coming from paid, "that tells you something" — implying fragility and dependency. future.com/podcasts/basic… I understand the signal he is reading. But here is the other side of it. On average, DTC brands allocate 35% of their budget to paid ads for customer acquisition, with one in four brands putting over 50% toward paid. finaloop.com/blog/the-great… In 2024, ecommerce brands spent over $7 billion on Facebook Ads alone. triplewhale.com/blog/ad-perfor… These are not broken brands. Many are the best operated businesses in commerce. They use paid advertising because it works, because it scales, and because it is the only channel that gives a real-time feedback loop on what the market actually wants. Look at what @Seanfrank built at Ridge. Ridge went from a Kickstarter in 2014 to nine figures in revenue bootstrapped, profitable the entire time, never raised a dollar of outside capital. modernretail.co/marketing/weve… Sean has been one of the most honest voices in DTC about what actually drives that growth. He has said plainly that Facebook will still get the majority of Ridge's spend, that cost per click went from $0.20 in 2015 to $2.50, and that the cost of advertising will go up forever because Facebook is a publicly traded company that needs to grow revenue. sacra.com/research/sean-… He did not build a nine-figure brand waiting for posts to go viral. He built it by understanding unit economics, managing MER targets obsessively, diversifying paid channels early, and using paid media as the engine that funded everything else. practicalecommerce.com/ridge-wallet-c… That is not a brand addicted to paid advertising. That is a founder who understood that paid media, when attached to a great product and sound economics, is controllable, scalable, and most importantly forecastable. The operational reality VCs do not talk about. Average eCommerce CAC increased 40 to 60% between 2023 and 2025, now averaging $68 to $84 per customer. swell.is/content/dtc-ec… That is a real problem. CAC inflation is real. But the alternative, organic only, does not solve the problem. It just moves it. I nstead of paying Meta, you are paying a full-time content team, a UGC agency, an influencer roster, and a creative director. And then you are waiting. Months. Sometimes years. For an audience to compound organically while your competitors are acquiring customers today. The DTC market is expected to grow from $163 billion in 2024 to $595 billion by 2033. swell.is/content/dtc-ec… That growth is not going to be built on viral posts. It is going to be built by operators who understand their numbers, build creative that converts, and use paid media as a scalable engine attached to a real business. The synthesis. Gurley also wrote in 2012 that "the LTV formula, when used correctly, can be a good tactical tool for monitoring and comparing like-minded variable market programs, especially across channels." abovethecrowd.com/2012/09/04/the… That is the whole argument. When used correctly. Paid media run against broken unit economics will kill a brand. Paid media run against sound contribution margin, with a real payback period model and a product people actually want that is the new American dream. The founders building real DTC companies today did not have venture capital. They did not have a Stanford network. They did not have a product with a viral loop. They had a great product and access to the same advertising platform as every other brand in their category. You cannot build a payroll model on a TikTok going viral. You cannot tell your manufacturer how many units to produce next quarter based on organic reach. You cannot go to a lender and say your Instagram is performing well and expect a credit line. Paid advertising is the only growth lever a founder without connections, without capital, and without a network-effect product can actually control. It is democratic. It is measurable. And when it is attached to a real business with real margins, it is the most powerful tool in the history of independent commerce. That is not crude. That is the new American dream. @mcuban Would love to get your take on what Gurley & Chen said. Do you stand in the same boat?

imagine if they just understood how CPA works? a central fact of any business is how much it costs to acquire one customer... it does not matter where/how you acquire them - you're going to pay no matter what. it's worrisome to think these same people are advising these founders that they should be pouring everything into hunting elusive viral unicorn status and not understanding how the market actually works

the conversation about advertising and paid acquisition on the timeline right now is actually really dark, it bodes extremely badly for the startup ecosystem its shows you how the capital allocators have hired wrong at every turn, why so many frauds get funded why we're given the 45th ai note taking startup, why they glorify the engineer, why so much new talent looks down upon fundraising imagine if they just took the time to understand how successful businesses really operate in the world around them regularly versus more mbas, jrs and analyst who've never had to be responsible for turning a dollar into 2.2x on meta repeatably and then adding other channels on top of that

Your 100% free funnel builder (just pay token dealers). github.com/ominou5/funnel… Quick start: # 1. Clone the plugin git clone github.com/ominou5/funnel… # 2. Launch Claude Code with the plugin loaded claude --plugin-dir ./funnel-architect-plugin # 3. Verify it loaded — skills and agents should appear /help # lists available skills /agents # lists available agents # 4. Try it out /agashic-funnel-architect:funnel-select # pick the right funnel type # or just ask in plain English: # "Build me an opt-in funnel for a free marketing checklist"

@devevangelist @anatelorenzen or a16z about is doing a run-up for a PR launch of a startup that "solves paid advertising with AI" or some such lol

@anatelorenzen 🤯

Why all the hate on paid marketing?

@jamesonhaslam they're just high on their own VC supply dude, herd mentality virtue signaling, that's all

I have a question about Twitter When you see 5+ voices (gurley, a16z etc) come out on the same day saying the same thing (paid customer acquisition is for losers?) is someone paying them to say it? Was there some event I missed? Help me understand

paid ads just means you find out *if* there's a lack of product market fit faster a faster feedback loop is a good thing! startups - whether consumer or not - should absolutely be testing the funnel against organic & paid, and paid gets you the data MUCH faster

X is just VC on it's side: > <

X is just VC at this point All these people made a few smart money decisions out of hundreds, were in the right place at the right time, or got hired at a firm, got high on their own VC fart supply and now think they are experts on everything from Marcus Aurelius to paid ads to fucking geopolitics lmfao

It's funny watching all these consumer VCs doxxing how little they know about how even their own portcos achieved 'generational' scale. The common thread: none of them have actually grown a consumer app, and they conflate spectatoring as an investor with actual experience.

@andrewchen Man you can actually do both fyi :) I know X loves these zero sum takes that start with 'but here's reality', but cmon lol that's not the ONLY reality

There's a vast marketing industrial complex of agencies/consultants/advisors/whatever that promotes tech startups spending billions of dollars of unaccountable marketing budget. They're triggered by my anti-paid stance but here's the reality: - paid marketing is much, much worse than organic on every metric (conversion, ROI, etc) - startups work on a fast time scale and can't manage LTV/CAC correctly beyond a months timeframe - risk is asymmetric. a few bad cohorts can kill you (and btw, this has definitely happened) - the age of easy/cheap ad inventory is over. Pricing is controlled by an oligopoly, it's all being algorithmically bid up, and ROI sucks at scale - paid UA has S-curves. Early spend looks good, but plateaus and it's easy to get addicted - if your product is growing organically already, you might just be cannibalizing and pulling forward demand you'd already get anyway - high reliance on paid indicates weakness in the core product and value prop - you can't build a 100m+ DAU product with the majority coming from paid UA (it's just obv math) - going majority paid UA makes it 10x harder to raise VC capital down the line. For all the reasons on this list the main benefit of paid is simple: your agency/consultant/whatever spends money, some numbers go up, and you feel like you're doing something. It's simple to understand, you can apply it to every type of product, and every big co does it right? Billions of dollars swap hands just based on this dynamic. But for startups I argue it's the growth lever of last resort, since it's the most commoditized form of distribution -- you should try to exhaust your other ideas, invest deeper in your product, and grow based on whats unique in the ways that only your startup can grow. That way your channels are as defensible as possible, built around your killer value prop After all one day, you hit your CAC ceiling, your channel saturates, or worse, your competitors just do the same, copying your distribution strategy, dragging the whole industry into a prisoner's dilemma. When that happens, it's hard to incubate a bunch of new 0-1 channels to save your forecasts. The temptation is just to stretch payback periods, buy more, and ride it out. That's a dark path...

@gregisenberg Bro described all of X tbh Why are there so many VCs on here that also think they are thought leaders on everything from paid ads to geo politics lmfao

you shouldn't be allowed to be a VC if you haven't worked/built a startup idk why this would be controversial

If you need this many caveats, maybe rethink/reword the original argument? X algo loves these black and white arguments, but they often fall apart with scrutiny. Startups need penetration, sometimes you pay an ad network, sometimes you don't, sometimes you do both. Regardless you ALWAYS pay somehow. Organic also has a cost.

Wow, lots of discourse on this one! A few things I want to point out from the original post: 1. I am talking about generational consumer companies. In my mind these are $10 B - $20 B+ outcomes. There are many other AMAZING consumer businesses that have gotten big with paid ads. 2. I’m not saying all growth has to be 100% organic. I’m referring specifically to paid ads which I’ve seen to be nearly always inflationary over time (cost increases at scale). This doesn’t include creator marketing, brand marketing, referral programs, etc. 3. Historically the biggest consumer outcomes are network effects businesses (social apps and marketplaces). In these cases, unless the network is growing itself pretty organically, usually the product value proposition is not strong enough. 4. Note that I say it’s a problem to grow “largely” with paid ads. I have seen companies use ads to kickstart a flywheel that then grows more organically. But if you’re 50%+ paid ads for a significant period of time starting in the early days, I think it’s tougher. This is why a lot of the consumer subscription businesses (physical and digital) that are ad-dependent have grown to be $1 B+ businesses but aren’t the biggest consumer businesses in the world. This could change with AI as the true mainstream user is willing to directly pay for software! And, lots of counter examples that people have pointed out - in my mind TikTok is probably the biggest one. That uniquely required a large content graph to start hooking users.