Afnan Hussain

Running 2 SaaS
web app: -2609 Users
Android App: - 25 downloads

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

First flying car innovation by this guy

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Turns out the future does have flying cars

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

To every founder building in silence:

Your users are sitting on feedback that could save you months of guessing.

Go talk to one this week. Just one.

You don’t need a research team or a feedback form. You need a conversation.

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

Talked to my first user last night.

It completely changed how I think about building our SaaS.

I spent days researching how successful SaaS founders grow. The pattern was obvious every time:

They talk to their users. A lot

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

4/
We’re removing that phrase pattern from our writing engine this week.
One conversation.
One real insight.
One actual product improvement.

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

What he told me:

We overuse “Here’s how to” in AI-generated posts
It feels robotic the moment he reads it
He called it straight-up “AI slop”

I didn’t see it until he said it. Now I can’t unsee it.

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

So I made a decision: at least 1 user conversation every week. No excuses.

Round one was last night.

Honestly? It was my relative, Sakib Khan. He uses our tool to write Facebook posts.

But the feedback hit different.

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

sendable is not a keyboard. #grammar #englishtips #linkedin #whatsapp #fixmistake

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

5. Every “failed” project is still data

Nothing you build is wasted. Even if the business dies, the knowledge doesn’t.

It waits for the next opportunity to prove itself.

For me, that opportunity was Contant. It now has 2,619 users.

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

Failed products teach you more than successful ones ever will.

In 2023, I built my first SaaS.

I integrated Stripe. I polished every feature. I thought I had it all figured out.

It failed.

Nobody tells you about failure 🧵

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

4. Confidence comes from doing, not winning

My SaaS failed as a business. But it taught me I could build almost any kind of SaaS.

That confidence wasn’t given to me. I earned it through late nights, broken code, and one product that never found its market.

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

3. Proof beats promises

When Maruf Vai asked, “Can you work on pricing for Contant?”

I didn’t just say yes.

I showed him my failed product, with the pricing system working flawlessly.

That one demo spoke louder than any resume.

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

2. Your failures become your portfolio

Abu Yousuf Md Jumman Vai saw my failed SaaS.

He didn’t see failure. He saw someone who had actually built something real.

So when MD Muzahidul Islam Maruf Vai needed someone to build Contant, Jumman Vai referred me.

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

The pain builds real skills

That payment system wasn’t easy to build.

I debugged for hours.
I learned Stripe inside out.
I understood pricing logic at a deep level.
The product died. The skills stayed.

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

I am thinking about that Number 2 point: If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.

My observations:

1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.

2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.

3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.

4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.

5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.

6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.

They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.

7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.

8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.

Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.

9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.

10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!

11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.

12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.

13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.

14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.

15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.

16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.

17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?

18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.

19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.

20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.

21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.

Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.

Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.

Happy to be home and locked in.

Until next time!

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

Now I’m taking Jacob’s advice, breaking it down with Claude, and building my own content system to grow my SaaS.

No audience? No problem.

Consistency. The right platform. Showing up where others aren’t.

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

Yesterday I left a random comment on Jacob’s reel:

“I don’t have much of an audience. How do I start?”

He replied within minutes.

That one reply taught me more than most paid courses. 🧵

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

Big creators check their quieter posts more than you’d think. That’s where the real conversations happen.

I heard this on a podcast months ago, tried it, and it keeps working.

Tips, hacks, honest feedback. All from the right comment section.

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

But the bigger lesson was HOW I got that reply.

Want a big creator to actually respond?

✗ DM them: they’ll probably never see it
✗ Comment on viral posts: you’re lost in the noise
✓ Comment on their low-engagement posts: they reply

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

His advice:

→ Pick ONE platform and double down
→ Write 3-4 posts a week
→ Engage with people 30-45 mins a day
→ End of the week, check the data
→ Repurpose the posts that spiked
Simple. Direct. No fluff.

[Afnan Hussain @ShipItAfnan]

Is that video perfect for marketing the app? Need #feedback