Shant

dot connector • first principles maxi

[Finn Mallery @fin465]

in @ycombinator they have a playbook on how to get customers ASAP for your startup.

if you follow this, you’ll brute force your way to 100 customers, almost no matter what your product is.

Here it is:

1/ launch-max.

product hunt, hackerNews, devhunt, betalist, peerlist, indie hackers, etc. YC tells you to launch 3 times MINIMUM

2/ pull your competitor’s strongest backlinks and get yourself listed in the same places.

whatever article they have listed, you make a better version and ask the site to replace it (or supplement) with yours.

3/ WARM OUTBOUND.

Everyone knows about building in public. but you still need to capitalize on the 99% of leads who see your content but don’t come inbound

scrape everyone who likes your posts on Linkedin each week, check if they fit your customer profile, and message them.

you set this up to fire automatically with @origamichat (i dropped a prompt in the comments)

4/ find 20 to 30 ugc creators on tiktok / instagram in your niche. ask them to create content about your product, ideally from a fresh account.

pay them a fixed fee ($15–$30 per video) plus performance incentives ($1k for 1 million views, etc).

you can use @sideshift_app (best creators imo) and line up 20+ of these creators in 1 day

5/ when building in public, a video is 10x better than an image/text - spam use cases of ur product on X/Linkedin

6/ figure out where your customers actually spend time.

which slack/discord groups are they in? what newsletters do they open? which podcasts and accounts do they follow? pay those people for shoutouts

7/ there's a fresh trend on x basically every week. jump on the relevant ones and fold your product in (like i’m doing right now).

To find trends i just use Origami & search “Lead Gen/GTM posts that are viral on X” to find the best posts every week in my niche

Then, I will reply to those, quote tweet them, and use the formats that work myself

(that’s the secret to why my account has high engagement BTW - you can do this too)
---------

if you are doing all this every single week and DO NOT GIVE UP (launching, posting demos, contacting new customers)

I guarantee you will hit your customer goals. Then the game becomes retention.

will be posting 2-3 more growth hacks every single week

[Shant @smaroo]

@chrisandreola Same

[Eric Jorgenson 📚 ☀️ @EricJorgenson]

Everyone can use @elonmusk's "Magic Wand Number" and "Idiot Index"

They're universal ideas, helpful in any industry.

[0xkato @0xkato]

LLMs explained without all that yucky math stuff

https://t.co/cpgVukSbJx

[jessy @13yearoldvc]

https://t.co/DGdLu79krs

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Legal AI superempowers normal individuals with no legal background to fight big institutions in bureaucracies and in courts on a level knowledge/skill playing field, for the first time in human history. As such, it is one of the most inspiring applications of AI.

[Shant @smaroo]

@andy8052 If interested in more, here’s a solid overview of the agentic finance stack, thanks to @chuk_xyz

https://t.co/cTNLYgfB8N

[Jacob Shell @JacobAShell]

The controversy over AI data centers feels to me a lot like the controversy over hydrofracking 10-15 years ago. The idea that the big companies are looking to scam local communities, destroy all the local water, poison the air and soil, etc. The idea that there won't be any real negotiation because capitalism is theft and can't produce new value, so therefore the companies' entire business plan requires paying locals nothing. This all feels very familiar.

And I'm skeptical of the more damning claims of the anti-data center activists for this reason: I remember the anti-fracking movement's claims turned out to be very over-the-top (local water supply didn't burst into flame everywhere like in that documentary "Gasland"). Mainstream progressives warmed up to fracking pretty fast. And when the activist left realized their claims weren't really correct and weren't doing anything for them politically, they dropped the topic and moved on to the bigger abstraction of "climate."

So, I think the data center issue is going to be what fracking turned out to be: everyone has their price. The big companies will negotiate with local communities. Locals will get paid. It will become business as usual.

[Shant @smaroo]

The sources of USD’s power is its position as the petrodollar, along with its deep capital markets, institutional trust, network effects, and the US’s military / geopolitical power.

ETH’s value accrual from being a blockdollar, only matters if ethereum & base’s blockspace become a top commodity everyone needs because they are the only things set by policy to be paid in ETH, which drives purchasing beyond the supply and demand dynamics of speculative investors.

All other goods and services being denominated in ETH rely on capital market depth and social consensus of the asset as a reliable store of value, backed by the full faith and credit of the Ethereum blockchain.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
—Douglas Adams

[Ben Lang @benln]

Jack Dorsey on how every company can now be a mini-AGI:

[Riley Brown @rileybrown]

Proximity to SF doesn't matter if you use Twitter Correctly.

https://t.co/fIBkJVm26e is 2 months ahead of SV/founders/eng
(if you curate your feed correctly and are in the right group chats)

[Shant @smaroo]

@danrobinson @gakonst This.

[Matt Van Horn @mvanhorn]

Introducing the Printing Press, a CLI-factory and a CLI-library. Built with @trevin. 🏭🖨📚

Most APIs suck for agents. Most MCPs suck for agents. Most official CLIs suck for agents. They waste tokens and time. @steipete started making his own because of this.

📚 A Library of agent-native CLIs you install today (Linear, ESPN, Flight GOAT (Google Flights + Kayak nonstop), Contact Goat (LinkedIn + Happenstance + Deepline more) +30+ more)
🏭 A factory that prints new ones for any service - just type /printing-press <product name>

CLIs are fast, local, SQLite-backed. Work in Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes.

🌐 https://t.co/GjnN9E9yTH

[Shant @smaroo]

Great write up

[James | Snapcrackle @Snapcrackle]

https://t.co/nnA7XCDkTA

[Shant @smaroo]

Risks feel riskier under threats of public scrutiny from a recording device in every hand and unrecoverable reputational damages from globally discoverable internet records.

An unforgiving culture is a sterile culture.

A risk intolerant culture is a brittle culture.

We must protect values of forgiveness and redemption to allow learning from risk taking to balance all-time highs of public accountability.

Zoomers and gen alpha also need less reminders of what they can lose, and more of what they can gain from the risks of social experiences and offline hobbies.

This is the way to a vibrant, adaptable, and resilient civilization.

New Media can play a role in this to counteract any bleaker, more mainstream alternatives.

[Shant @smaroo]

The United Labs of DeFi

[Stani @StaniKulechov]

@aave DeFi United.