MJ

@min_jae_so

founder @hifridayai

San Francisco, CA

Joined May 2024

243 Following

114 Followers

329 Posts

min_jae_so retweeted

Bernt Bornich

@BerntBornich

15 days ago

Introducing NEO’s 25 Degrees of Freedom, tendon-driven hands — nearing or surpassing human-level dexterity, strength, speed, and reliability. For seventy years, robotics worked around the hand problem. The humanoid bet is the reverse: it lives or dies at the fingertips.

24K

min_jae_so retweeted

Sigil Wen

@0xSigil

5 months ago

I built the first AI that earns its existence, self-improves, and replicates without a human wrote about the technology that finally gives AI write access to the world, The Automaton, and the new web for exponential sovereign AIs WEB 4.0: The birth of superintelligent life

14K

min_jae_so retweeted

Saksham

@sxmawl

7 months ago

Tl;dr: we got into YC W26!!!! We’re building Cardboard (agentic video editor) A few months ago, I shut down my last startup and booked a flight to SF (didn't go into debt). I shared my story publicly for the first time, and it ended up getting 85k+ impressions on LinkedIn. I was vulnerable, but I knew I wanted to do the -1 to 0 journey again and just follow my curiosity tbh. In SF, I met founders, researchers, and builders I’ve looked up to for many years. They are earnest, truth-seeking, and obsessed with their craft. It was like my X feed is out of this tiny rectangle. The thing that stood out most was simple: bias to action. On Nov 1, I started building with my school best friend, @ishandeveloper. We picked a problem we both felt personally: video editing is still painfully slow and manual today. We realised that there isn’t a VS Code-like open, extensible editor we can build agents on top of so we had to build everything from scratch. The momentum was great, we were able to get to an agent that single-shot Cardboard’s product demo from random screen recordings. I asked him - do you want to apply to YC? And he said “yes”. And in the process, we realised @garrytan was right, filling the application definitely levels up your idea. It forced us to rethink everything from first principles. We were pretty stoic about the application. So we just kept our heads down and started shipping features every single day. We submitted an honest update to YC, and after that everything moved really fast. We got an interview the next day and acceptance the day after that. Huge thanks to @maitreya_wagh, @srinisarkar, @JayantPanwar17 and @_shubhankar for helping us with the application. The YC news was a breath of fresh air after a really long time. We doubled down, Ishan quit, we moved out of Bangalore, and in the middle of all that, we shipped like a 10-person team with just 2 people. Since then, we’ve shipped: - Keyframes, transcription + captions, canvas editing - Advanced background options, playback speed - Agent overhaul and AI video understanding - Music library, crop and text tools. - Blazing fast exports and a new landing page We’re launching in January 2026 - so keep an eye out. Meanwhile, we're inviting design partners: if you’re leading or working in growth or marketing teams that use video as a distribution channel to ship launch videos, ads, recaps, testimonials, or weekly content, and you care about speed, I’d love to work closely with you. Cardboard will be the fastest way for a team to go from raw assets to a polished story. Not “a better timeline.” An editor that behaves like a teammate. It understands your footage, takes first passes, iterates with feedback, and helps you ship more videos with the same team. DM me if you want early access to a design partner slot.

sxmawl's tweet photo. Tl;dr: we got into YC W26!!!!

We’re building Cardboard (agentic video editor)

A few months ago, I shut down my last startup and booked a flight to SF (didn't go into debt).

I shared my story publicly for the first time, and it ended up getting 85k+ impressions on LinkedIn. I was vulnerable, but I knew I wanted to do the -1 to 0 journey again and just follow my curiosity tbh.

In SF, I met founders, researchers, and builders I’ve looked up to for many years. They are earnest, truth-seeking, and obsessed with their craft. It was like my X feed is out of this tiny rectangle. The thing that stood out most was simple: bias to action.

On Nov 1, I started building with my school best friend, @ishandeveloper. We picked a problem we both felt personally: video editing is still painfully slow and manual today.

We realised that there isn’t a VS Code-like open, extensible editor we can build agents on top of so we had to build everything from scratch. The momentum was great, we were able to get to an agent that single-shot Cardboard’s product demo from random screen recordings.

I asked him - do you want to apply to YC? And he said “yes”. And in the process, we realised @garrytan was right, filling the application definitely levels up your idea. It forced us to rethink everything from first principles.

We were pretty stoic about the application. So we just kept our heads down and started shipping features every single day. We submitted an honest update to YC, and after that everything moved really fast. We got an interview the next day and acceptance the day after that.

Huge thanks to @maitreya_wagh, @srinisarkar, @JayantPanwar17 and @_shubhankar for helping us with the application.

The YC news was a breath of fresh air after a really long time. We doubled down, Ishan quit, we moved out of Bangalore, and in the middle of all that, we shipped like a 10-person team with just 2 people.

Since then, we’ve shipped:
- Keyframes, transcription + captions, canvas editing
- Advanced background options, playback speed
- Agent overhaul and AI video understanding
- Music library, crop and text tools.
- Blazing fast exports and a new landing page

We’re launching in January 2026 - so keep an eye out.

Meanwhile, we're inviting design partners: if you’re leading or working in growth or marketing teams that use video as a distribution channel to ship launch videos, ads, recaps, testimonials, or weekly content, and you care about speed, I’d love to work closely with you.

Cardboard will be the fastest way for a team to go from raw assets to a polished story.

Not “a better timeline.” An editor that behaves like a teammate. It understands your footage, takes first passes, iterates with feedback, and helps you ship more videos with the same team.

DM me if you want early access to a design partner slot.

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@min_jae_so

8 months ago

@elonmusk nice

min_jae_so retweeted

Grant Lee

@thisisgrantlee

8 months ago

We grew from zero to $100M ARR and 70M users in <2.5 years, profitably it cost us millions in experiments to learn what worked 1100-word post on every growth hack that got us here I'll cover: 1. How to launch a feature in one day 2. How to find top 0.01% talent and keep them 3. What to focus on (and what not to) 4. Influencer marketing 5. You can't wish culture into existence 0. The thing that matters the most 1. How to launch a feature in one day Our feedback loop: 10am: we come up with a new idea, or triggered by user insight. 12pm: designers code a prototype using Cursor. 4pm: we find new users to record themselves testing the feature (Voice Panel, UserTesting). 6pm: we watch the recording. 8pm: we know if the feature can be launched, if it needs refining, rebuilding, or if we should just drop it. This is a way for you to actually watch and hear from your customers as they struggle through your product. You can hear in their voice where they're confused. Sometimes you think you came up with a cool prototype. But as soon as users test it, they get stuck or have no idea how to use it. It's very helpful to have them explain how they're trying to use this feature. When you see them confused, double click there. If they light up, you know you've hit gold. That's how we often ship a feature per week. And not any feature; a feature with good odds of being well received. In a month, we might improve our product in ways that would otherwise take a year. Speed compounds. 2. How to find and keep talent Finding Talent - The best hires came from our network and cold inbound. Someone once sent me a great message on LinkedIn, out of nowhere. We got on a call. 3 weeks later, he was hired full-time on-site. - When someone joins, ask them “Who’s the best engineer you’ve ever worked with,” and reach out right away. - Only open a role after you’ve felt the pain of doing it yourself so that you know what 'Great' looks like. (I ran marketing solo for nearly a year before hiring). - Look for depth. In interviews, ask, “What’s a new skill you’ve learned recently? Can you teach it to me?” Keep asking 'why' and see how far they go. The best candidates go deep. Keeping Talent - A players want playing time. Hiring others takes time in the field away from them. Careful. - Retention takes care of itself when you keep the bar high for hiring. - We'll do regular tender offers so employees' vested shares actually get them liquidity from time to time. - Give them ownership. Our hires are more 'full stack'. Designers can code in Cursor, engineers talk to users, marketers have design literacy. This way, they can own more of what they do and compensation can be proportional to the value they create. 3. What to focus on (and what not to) In March 2023, we rebuilt Gamma to focus on one thing: users must feel the magic in the first 30 seconds. We reworked everything in the process and became AI native. In the 2.5 years before this, Gamma went from 0 to 60k users. In the 2.5 years after this, Gamma went from 60k to 70M users. What changed? What we focused on. As we scaled, the temptation was to go wider - add more things. But we went deeper - make the current thing easier, faster, more delightful. Every new feature, hire or campaign had to be tied directly to user value. Gamma 3.0 does exactly what Gamma 2.0 did, just 10x better. The most common error of a smart engineer is to work on something that should not exist - Elon Musk 4. Influencer Marketing This is a strong amplifier for word of mouth. Anytime we scaled up an influencer program, we saw a disproportional increase in people that came through word of mouth. And when we invested less, we saw a deceleration. What you need to know: - 10% of your content will generate 90% of reach. When something works, figure out why and replicate it 100 times. - Give it 6+ months, select multiple creators, and be willing to spend $10-$20k/mo. It'll not work until it does. When it does, it'll explode. How to get it right: - List creator personas with relevant audiences. Use freelancers/agencies for outreach. - Pay base + viral bonus. What you reward will happen more often. - On TikTok, use new accounts. Same chance of virality as old ones but without previous audience, so you can test. - Test all platforms (TikTok, IG, X, LinkedIn), track specific creators/hooks that work. Triple down on those. - Add "How did you hear about us" to onboarding. Measure leads, not views. - Document 20-30 winning formats, then hire top creators to train others on these. - Never write scripts, creators know their audience better than you do. The formula: Go broad -> See what works -> Scale it. Virality isn't luck. It's discovering the hooks/formats that resonate with your audience and exploiting them. 5. Culture People got this concept backwards. They think, 'I'll write down some principles and tell everyone they need to follow them.' But you can't wish culture into existence. It's not what you hope it was. It's what you do. Culture is a habit. A moving average of the past 60 days. It's not steady. Behavior molds it. One day I looked around, identified the traits I admired in our teammates and wrote them down. Then I realized, 'That's our culture'. Now we had to nurture it. We have an internal Slack channel where people give praise to teammates for a specific thing they did. I note these things and try to reinforce them. Don't just let anyone into your ecosystem. They always change it in some way. Hire up. 0. Have a word of mouth worthy product Are users bragging about having found your product? Are they sending it over to friends and people they work with? Do they feel relieved when they open your app? Until then, stick in a room with your team and get it right. Nothing of what I said above will save you if you don't get to this stage. It doesn't matter if it takes 6-12 months. Digital products can go from $0 to $1bn in a few years if you solve a worthy problem. If you try to speedrun through this step, you'll always be behind. 10 years will have passed and you'll be stuck at the same place. Closing up, these are the main things that helped us grow Gamma. Hope you find our playbook useful.

thisisgrantlee's tweet photo. We grew from zero to $100M ARR and 70M users in <2.5 years, profitably

it cost us millions in experiments to learn what worked

1100-word post on every growth hack that got us here

I'll cover:
1. How to launch a feature in one day
2. How to find top 0.01% talent and keep them
3. What to focus on (and what not to)
4. Influencer marketing
5. You can't wish culture into existence
0. The thing that matters the most

1. How to launch a feature in one day
Our feedback loop:

10am: we come up with a new idea, or triggered by user insight.
12pm: designers code a prototype using Cursor.
4pm: we find new users to record themselves testing the feature (Voice Panel, UserTesting).
6pm: we watch the recording.
8pm: we know if the feature can be launched, if it needs refining, rebuilding, or if we should just drop it.

This is a way for you to actually watch and hear from your customers as they struggle through your product. You can hear in their voice where they're confused.

Sometimes you think you came up with a cool prototype. But as soon as users test it, they get stuck or have no idea how to use it. It's very helpful to have them explain how they're trying to use this feature.

When you see them confused, double click there. If they light up, you know you've hit gold.

That's how we often ship a feature per week. And not any feature; a feature with good odds of being well received.

In a month, we might improve our product in ways that would otherwise take a year.
Speed compounds.

2. How to find and keep talent

Finding Talent
- The best hires came from our network and cold inbound.
Someone once sent me a great message on LinkedIn, out of nowhere. We got on a call. 3 weeks later, he was hired full-time on-site.
- When someone joins, ask them “Who’s the best engineer you’ve ever worked with,” and reach out right away.
- Only open a role after you’ve felt the pain of doing it yourself so that you know what 'Great' looks like. (I ran marketing solo for nearly a year before hiring).
- Look for depth. In interviews, ask, “What’s a new skill you’ve learned recently? Can you teach it to me?” Keep asking 'why' and see how far they go. The best candidates go deep.

Keeping Talent
- A players want playing time. Hiring others takes time in the field away from them. Careful.
- Retention takes care of itself when you keep the bar high for hiring.
- We'll do regular tender offers so employees' vested shares actually get them liquidity from time to time.
- Give them ownership. Our hires are more 'full stack'. Designers can code in Cursor, engineers talk to users, marketers have design literacy. This way, they can own more of what they do and compensation can be proportional to the value they create.

3. What to focus on (and what not to)

In March 2023, we rebuilt Gamma to focus on one thing: users must feel the magic in the first 30 seconds.

We reworked everything in the process and became AI native.

In the 2.5 years before this, Gamma went from 0 to 60k users.
In the 2.5 years after this, Gamma went from 60k to 70M users.

What changed? What we focused on.

As we scaled, the temptation was to go wider - add more things. But we went deeper - make the current thing easier, faster, more delightful.
Every new feature, hire or campaign had to be tied directly to user value.

Gamma 3.0 does exactly what Gamma 2.0 did, just 10x better.

The most common error of a smart engineer is to work on something that should not exist - Elon Musk

4. Influencer Marketing

This is a strong amplifier for word of mouth. Anytime we scaled up an influencer program, we saw a disproportional increase in people that came through word of mouth. And when we invested less, we saw a deceleration.

What you need to know:

- 10% of your content will generate 90% of reach. When something works, figure out why and replicate it 100 times.

- Give it 6+ months, select multiple creators, and be willing to spend $10-$20k/mo. It'll not work until it does. When it does, it'll explode.

How to get it right:

- List creator personas with relevant audiences. Use freelancers/agencies for outreach.
- Pay base + viral bonus. What you reward will happen more often.
- On TikTok, use new accounts. Same chance of virality as old ones but without previous audience, so you can test.
- Test all platforms (TikTok, IG, X, LinkedIn), track specific creators/hooks that work. Triple down on those.
- Add "How did you hear about us" to onboarding. Measure leads, not views.
- Document 20-30 winning formats, then hire top creators to train others on these.
- Never write scripts, creators know their audience better than you do.

The formula:

Go broad -> See what works -> Scale it.
Virality isn't luck. It's discovering the hooks/formats that resonate with your audience and exploiting them.

5. Culture

People got this concept backwards. They think, 'I'll write down some principles and tell everyone they need to follow them.'

But you can't wish culture into existence. It's not what you hope it was. It's what you do.
Culture is a habit. A moving average of the past 60 days. It's not steady. Behavior molds it.

One day I looked around, identified the traits I admired in our teammates and wrote them down. Then I realized, 'That's our culture'.

Now we had to nurture it. We have an internal Slack channel where people give praise to teammates for a specific thing they did.
I note these things and try to reinforce them.

Don't just let anyone into your ecosystem. They always change it in some way. Hire up.

0. Have a word of mouth worthy product

Are users bragging about having found your product? Are they sending it over to friends and people they work with? Do they feel relieved when they open your app?

Until then, stick in a room with your team and get it right. Nothing of what I said above will save you if you don't get to this stage.

It doesn't matter if it takes 6-12 months. Digital products can go from $0 to $1bn in a few years if you solve a worthy problem.

If you try to speedrun through this step, you'll always be behind. 10 years will have passed and you'll be stuck at the same place.

Closing up, these are the main things that helped us grow Gamma.
Hope you find our playbook useful.

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@min_jae_so

9 months ago

is this fr? interesting

kache

@yacineMTB

9 months ago

I honestly can't figure out what Sammy boy actually wants. With Elon it's really clear. He wants to go to Mars and will kill many villages to make it happen with no remorse. But what's Sam trying to get? My best guess is "become a legend"

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min_jae_so retweeted

Preston

@prestonattebery

9 months ago

Paywalls of Top Grossing Apps Tolan Robinhood Cal AI Headspace Tinder Suno Snapchat ChatGPT Flighty & Copilot How the best in the business are upselling their users: Curated by @appclub

prestonattebery's tweet photo. Paywalls of Top Grossing Apps

Tolan
Robinhood
Cal AI
Headspace
Tinder
Suno
Snapchat
ChatGPT
Flighty
& Copilot

How the best in the business are upselling their users: Curated by @appclub https://t.co/O0ITd5vL2D

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min_jae_so retweeted

@1x_tech

9 months ago

https://t.co/XnWpDKXXyF

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@min_jae_so

9 months ago

@0xTP91 i don’t have telegram. how about dm?

@min_jae_so

9 months ago

how i got #1 on @ProductHunt without begging 100 friends (thread)

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@min_jae_so

9 months ago

@0xTP91 sure what do you wanna chat?

min_jae_so retweeted

Dmitry Noranovich

@javaeeeee1

9 months ago

Friday: AI that calls you for self-reflection https://t.co/DSRl5Daxz6 by @min_jae_so

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@min_jae_so

9 months ago

that's it. nothing fancy. just thinking a bit differently made all the difference. this is friday, btw. it’s an ai that calls you, asks thoughtful questions, and turns the conversation into your journal. try it free. https://t.co/bS9kXtwfF9

@min_jae_so

9 months ago

2. launch on the weekend. everyone says to launch on tuesday or wednesday because that’s when traffic is highest. true, but that also means competition is brutal. PH isn’t a long-term growth channel anyway. you just need that #1 of the day badge. so if that’s your goal, go for a weekend. i launched on saturday, even though my app’s name is friday 😂