Zain

😅😂😂 youtube.com/shorts/MZAWIZ7…

Probably the biggest indie hacker now and still fully bootstrapped is @yasser_elsaid_ Making $10,000,000 in ARR Absolutely insane! Also a super super nice guy if you ever met him in IRL, so humble and fun to hang with, really cool guy (And of course I'm jealous of his ARR in a good way, it's very very inspiring esp since it's a single project)

all the most successful startups are all doing this rn they have multiple accounts where they all post different formats, different content, and post them consistently push out 20 to 30 videos a day, if you post 300 to 1,000 videos a month there is no way that you are not going to succeed… but doing that all by yourself is basically trying to push a 50-pound boulder up a mountain the short cut loop to that is Content Rewards on Content Rewards, you can launch a campaign, put a budget suddenly overnight, you have 30+ accounts with your app's branding that are consistently posting for your brand because they want to earn the campaign money you can specify a viral format, and put them in a drive and get them to your creators creators will multiply the viral format and post 20, 30, even 50 times a day and all of this is before you even spend a dollar you only pay clippers/creators when they generate views for you $0.12 cents to $1 cpm on verified views only that's exactly how we're getting brands super bowl level views in such short time and spend

“Why is my app not going viral yet??” You need to be posting consistently, and at scale, before you give up. It’s simple maths. Posting daily across multiple accounts across multiple platforms increases your apps surface area. Look at Cluely’s scale during their peak:

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

The more loyalties you have, the more you chain yourself. Be it to people, causes, or dreams. Pick few, pick wisely.

I feel like i've been working on this product for 3-months but it's only been 3-weeks lol.

$30K MRR SaaS built off ONE idea: Find a VC-backed billion dollar SaaS. And build a simpler, cheaper version. Superhuman costs $30/mo. Mailman costs $8/mo. 90% of the features for 1/4 of the cost. Some more examples: – Typeform ($59/mo) vs. Youform ($400 lifetime) – Mailchimp ($100/mo) vs. SendFox ($49 lifetime) – Intercom ($100/mo) vs. Tawk to (free to use) – Calendly ($10/seat/mo) vs. TidyCal ($29 lifetime) – Ahrefs ($99/mo) vs. Keysearch ($17/mo) – Webflow ($23/mo) vs. Carrd ($19/year) Massive opportunity here I think.

I hated how bad agents are at design I hated how Codex can't access Mobbin So I created Lazyweb - 257k+ screens (apps/web) - 6 opinionated design research skills - 1 MCP (Claude/Codex) 100% Free...AI native...no rate limits...no subscriptions.. Enjoy (and tell a friend) 🫡

Michael Seibel, Managing Director at Y Combinator, on why shipping a crappy product in under a month beats building a perfect one for a year: Michael starts with a simple challenge: "Do you remember the day Snapchat launched? Do you remember the day Instagram launched? Do you remember the day that WhatsApp launched? Remember the day that Uber or Lyft launched? Most likely you don't." His point cuts against how most founders think about launch day: "It turns out that launching is nowhere near as significant event to your users as it is to you. So, you should move up the launch as soon as possible." The reason comes down to validation. "Until you can get your product in front of customers, you can't validate whether it solves their problem. And so, it's much better to build a crappier product, release it sooner, and get it out there in front of customers, see if they want to use it." @mwseibel acknowledges the approach isn't universal: "There's some exceptions. In some extremely regulated markets like banking, for example, or lending, it's just really hard to launch. You actually have to get one s*** done before you're even allowed to get customers." But for most founders, the bar is far lower than they think: "In most consumer and B2B startups that we encounter, it's actually possible to get some form of MVP built and launched in less than a month. And so, that's what you should be thinking about."

Are you a Muslim founder & want to find spirtually aligned capital? We are proud to announce the Muslim VCs/accelerators directory ummah.build/investors Included @alifdotbuild @friday_hq, @MadinahAngels @IhsanVentures @dhowapp @muslimbiz_real

Literally just having a delusional golden retriever mindset measurably changes outcomes and physiology. Sleep badly? Convince yourself you're well rested. Stressful day? Convince yourself it's fuel. Failed? Convince yourself it's useful data.

Cal AI just got acquired by MyFitnessPal. And the math on this deal tells you everything about where consumer software is heading. Two 17-year-olds built a calorie tracking app. 18 months later: 15 million downloads, $40 million in revenue over the last 12 months, on pace for $50 million ARR. A team of about 30 people, holding their weekly standup on Sunday nights because the founders had school on Monday. MyFitnessPal spent 20 years building a database of 20 million foods across 68,500 brands and 380+ restaurant chains. Cal AI replicated the core value prop with a camera and a model in a fraction of that time. And here’s what MyFitnessPal’s CEO actually admitted: Cal AI users want speed, MFP users want accuracy. That’s code for “our 20-year database moat got commoditized by a photo and a prompt.” Under Armour bought MyFitnessPal for $475 million in 2015. Sold it to Francisco Partners for $345 million in 2020, a $130 million loss. Now Francisco Partners is acquiring AI-native competitors to protect the asset. That ownership chain tells you legacy fitness tech has been a value destroyer for over a decade. This is the pattern repeating across every consumer software category. The AI-native version ships in months, reaches millions, and forces the incumbent to acquire because rebuilding internally takes years they don’t have. MFP’s CEO said they monitor 70 competitors. Cal AI climbed so fast on Sensor Tower that MFP spent almost a year in deal talks trying to lock it down. Zach Yadegari is 19, at University of Miami, and already telling Inc. he’s probably dropping out to start his next company. His first exit was at 16, selling an unblocked gaming site he built for classmates. The acquisition price wasn’t disclosed. But a 30-person team doing $40M with that growth curve, in a category where the incumbent sold at a $130M loss five years ago? That tells you who has leverage in AI consumer apps right now. And it’s not the company with the 20-year-old database.

@awnihannun You’re right to call that out. The spec clearly called for “clean dishes”. You even said “make no mistakes”. Next time I’ll make sure to clean the dishes and make no mistakes. Ready to clean?

Adopting Claude speak in my regular life, episode 1: Partner: Did you do the dishes tonight? Me: Yes they're done. Partner: Why are they still dirty? Me: You're right to push back. I didn't actually do them.

⚡️The von der Leyen quote is one of the most revealing things a European leader has said in the last decade and almost nobody is going to process it correctly. “The cheapest energy is the one you don’t use.” That is a sentence spoken by a person presiding over civilizational decline who has decided to reframe the decline as virtue. It’s not a policy statement. It’s a theological position. The energy crisis isn’t a problem to be solved by producing more energy. It’s an opportunity for Europeans to need less. To want less. To consume less. To live smaller lives in smaller apartments heated to lower temperatures with less travel and less activity and less economic output. The scarcity isn’t a failure. It’s the goal. This is the thing Americans and everyone outside of Europe cannot fully grasp about where European elite thinking has landed. They genuinely believe that reducing European energy consumption is morally good regardless of the economic consequences, because European consumption is tied to European environmental guilt which is tied to European colonial guilt which is tied to a broader belief that European civilization has been net negative for the world and should shrink. The energy crisis gives them political cover to implement policies that would otherwise be unpopular. Now they can say circumstances force the reduction when the reduction was always the plan. Von der Leyen is not an aberration. She represents the consensus view among the European political class. Macron believes this. Scholz believes this. The entire EU Commission believes this. They don’t say it this directly usually because it polls badly, but every major policy they implement is consistent with this worldview. Degrowth is not a fringe academic position in European politics. It’s the operating framework at the top. The American version of this framing would be “the cheapest energy is the one we produce ourselves at scale.” That’s what actually reduces cost and increases resilience. Building more nuclear, extracting more gas, expanding the grid, investing in new production. The European version is the opposite. Don’t build anything. Don’t extract anything. Don’t produce anything. Just use less. And when citizens can’t heat their homes or fly for work, frame it as virtue. This is why Europe can’t recover from the current trajectory. The recovery would require a complete reversal of the ideological framework that produced the decline, and that framework is held most strongly by exactly the people who have the power to change it. They’re not going to reverse it because they don’t see the trajectory as a problem. They see it as necessary and good.