Steven Motta 🐬

First Waveful hackathon in less than a week. More info here: luma.com/0synvsi2

if I meet a founder ages 17-25 there is a 50% chance they cut their teeth running Minecraft servers at 10

If a founder, in their youth: – Made Minecraft mods or Roblox games – Was ranked in competitive gaming – Built sneaker bots – Hacked together gadgets with a 3D printer Invest in them immediately.

if you’re building a consumer product, do not launch it to tech people first. that is the biggest countersignal in consumer today. your first draft will be evaluated from another builders lens, not an actual users lens. e.g. using a browser is very diff for tech ppl vs normies.

@jessechor @speedrun @WavefulApp thanks Jesse!! only hockey sticks here at Waveful 🏒

At @speedrun and what a hockey stick. Congrats @WavefulApp!!

I realized most software founders spend 90% of their time building what 10% of their users want, obsessing over edge cases and power user features while ignoring what brought people to their product in the first place. They get seduced by the loudest voices in their Discord, building increasingly complex features for a tiny subset of users while their core experience stays mediocre. Meanwhile, the silent majority - who love the simple, original product - slowly drift away as the thing they fell in love with becomes bloated and complicated for no reason they actually care about. The best software founders find a tiny niche they can dominate completely, make those users insanely happy, and expand surgically from there - becoming a mile deep before going an inch wide.

We are looking for very specific founder types that we’ve seen be successful in consumer. Sometimes we call them “savage.” They are obsessive, competitive, disagreeable, opinionated, insanely smart, and neuro-divergent. They are fast, confident enough to take in new information and change, and sensitive to the nuance of psychology and language. They think small on the details and big on the business. A bit angry, a bit crazy.

I raised $2,500,000 for @focustree_app & spoke with dozens of VCs & consumer app founders Here's the top 3 metrics of a successful social app 👇 (only top 0.1% of founders can get #3)

The biggest winner from DeepSeek will be consumer AI apps. Cheaper models mean you can offer more for free, delay monetization to juice growth and network effects, and let power users go wild finding emergent use cases without breaking the bank. May a thousand apps bloom.

consumer software has paradoxically become one of the least competitive spaces, especially compared to b2b, where everyone’s endlessly iterating on slightly different flavors of the same crud saas tools. we basically trained an entire generation to optimize for b2b metrics & repeatable playbooks, & in doing so, we accidentally lobotomized the instinct to grow consumer businesses organically. it’s like we industrialized the process of building software & forgot that products require culture, intuition, & vibes—not just optimization frameworks.

🧊SPEEDRUN 004🧊 We are just getting started 🫡

no one tells you this but i will. its not ok to be shy. not in this economy.

The biggest startup opportunities right now: biggest b2c: solving loneliness biggest b2b: vertical ai agents biggest saas: pay-per-result saas biggest consumer social: social apps designed for friend-to-friend communication, not creators biggest e-commerce: ai personal shoppers biggest creator: tools that make creators go viral or monetize more efficiently biggest edtech: personalized learning biggest health: gut health biggest wellness: anti-microplastic products biggest overlooked: elder tech

the current wave of 17-25 year old founders are going to run laps around the industry > learning at a much faster rate of speed because they grew up native to rapid feedback loops > test and iterate faster > no corporate baggage teaching them "that's not how things are done" > raised on youtube tutorials — if they want to figure it out they'll find a way > native to building community > cost structures that make sense — not trying to copy silicon valley excess > born into chaos — market cycles don't phase them > think in memes — can actually communicate with online > building for mobile first Fun times

lest we forget, facebook still has 2.11b daily active users (5.5% increase year-over-year) groups in boring niches hitting 100k members, video reach climbing, local ads still cheap, ad cpc ~$0.50 imagine ignoring 2.11B daily active users because "facebook is for boomers”

How many downloads does it take to go #1 overall on the App Store? I pasted in data points across several of my apps and fit a model: #1: 110k downloads (US) #10: 60k #50: 35k #100: 30k #200: 25k

forget virtual reality, the next big thing is actual reality