Strean

Survive & Expand

[doug funnie @cryptoklotz]

this is the single best short(ish) format video i've seen on trading psychology i've seen in years. worth every second of its 8 minutes.

it's painfully relatable. and covers a half dozen very common-yet-avoidable pitfalls in a very easy to understand unified theory

[Lotanna Ezeike 💳 @lottsnomad]

3. virality comes from assets

nobody shares “an app”

they share what the app creates: a song, a photo, a streak

magic music only blew up because people could roast their friends with auto generated songs

that share button did more for us than 90% of our roadmap

if you want virality, create shareable assets

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Prompting and evals will be everything

Prompting is agency
Evals is taste

[mert @mert]

turning 30 today (yes, I went bald at 25)

a few personal learnings about my 20s that might help others who are not uncs yet:

1) understand that age is a bad proxy for knowledge

especially in Eastern cultures, you are treated as being more knowledgeable and more respectable the older you are

while you should be respectful towards others, understand that the vast majority of "adults" have no idea what they're talking about

they are just as dumb as you, but have the added arrogance of age

the arrogance is portrayed as confidence, which makes you trust that they're correct, but this is not the case

2) take way more risks

everyone tells you to do this when you're young and while you don't have familial responsibilities, yet most people still don't do it

a good reframe here is to think not of what can go wrong, but of what can go right

3) default to action, you have tons of years and energy to error correct

almost no mistake is catastrophic enough to ruin your life, that doesn't result in jail or ill health

4) where you live matters more than you think

you are in a trade with your government. they take a large percent of what you make and give you things in exchange like safety, transport, etc

make sure you are getting a good trade. if you're paying 60% in taxes and getting the worst medical care on earth (canada), get out

5) get good at communicating, no matter what your job or career is

to write, speak, and listen are human skills and they amplify the ceiling of roughly any single job or career you will get

6) if you're unsure where you're going, start with the end in mind and work backwards, and then course correct

7) start or join a startup

8) read the beginning of infinity by david deutsch and skin in the game by taleb

9) create more than you consume

your life's goal should be to go to the grave empty, you should have nothing more you could have added to civilization

10) in the age of fake internet personas, be relentlessly authentic and like minded people will find you

11) in a similar light, always reassess your current situation and determine whether you're in it because you yourself reasoned up from your own independent thinking or because you're blindly following social norms

12) understand that all advice and lists like this one are deeply path dependent and personal and the most important thing is to always think for yourself

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

we grew from zero to $50M ARR in <2 years, profitably
i've never publicly shared our tactics before
it's cost us over $5M to learn what I'm about to share

800-word long post on every growth hack that printed money for us

I'll cover:
1. Influencer Marketing
2. Performance Marketing vs Brand
3. User Testing
4. Dogfooding

0-10M was nearly 100% word of mouth and organic content

10-50M was still >50% word of mouth but influencer, affiliate, and referral made up the other half

But the foundation we set from 0-$10M is what allowed us to blaze past $50M

1. Influencer Marketing 101:

90% of your reach comes from <10% of content that goes viral. Your job: go broad with influencers and spend enough to find that 10% of content and formats that work. Virality is no accident - test and discover hooks, visuals, formats for each platform, understand why they work, and replicate 100x across your influencer roster.

Most startups get three things wrong:
1 - Too small budget
2 - Overly selective on creators and messaging
3 - Give up too early
Start with $10-20k/month, commit to 6 months minimum. This lets you experiment with many micro influencers and lets you test many concepts.

- List creator personas with audiences that care about your product. Be exhaustive. Influencer outreach is time-consuming. Work with a freelancer or agency if you don't have a team. DM me for recommendations.

- Offer base + viral bonus. For TikTok, have them start new accounts. New accounts can get as many views as established ones. But on new accounts creators are unburdened by their brand and can try any format.

- Test across all platforms (TikTok, IG, X, LinkedIn work for most B2B/prosumer apps).

- Track specific creators and hooks that outperform, not just channels.

- Add 'How did you hear about us' to onboarding. Calculate which channels drive leads vs just views.

- Compile every asset, video or hook that works into a guide. Once you have 20-30 winning formats, hire your top creators as consultants to train all other influencers on what angles go viral for you and why.

- Never write scripts - it becomes an ad no one watches.
Creators know their audience best.

2. Invest in brand before performance marketing

Most startups are not prepared to scale their spend because their brand and creative sucks. We had to go through an extremely expensive rebrand (both in terms of time and dollars spent) to land on something we loved. But it would have been much more expensive to skip this step.

Be relentless about testing a wide range of creatives. Whatever number of creatives you're thinking of testing, 10x it. Be bold. See what moves the needle (CAC payback, conversion rates, LTV and retention).

Once you see a particular use case resonating, build a whole funnel around it with symmetric messaging. You don’t want to confuse visitors by showing them an ad with one value prop and then drop them on to a landing page with a completely different message.

3. Get users to test prototypes before you ship.

This seems trivial, but saves you from the worst startup mistake - misdirected product development.

Most startups think experimentation is for mature companies improving their funnel by 1% through a/b testing. But Gamma's founding team is early Optimizely folks. Experimentation is in our DNA.

We ran extensive user testing on platforms like voicepanel and usertesting

a. Recruited random people who make slide decks for work. They have no skin in the game and won't lie to be nice.

b. Showed them prototypes with minimal instructions and let them spend a few minutes trying things out.

c. Asked them to think out loud. The words they use to navigate, their expectations, where they get confused is gold. Combining their voice + screen actions amplifies things 10x. You really feel the pain of poor UX and overcomplicated copy.

Did this for everything - landing pages, onboarding, new features, moonshot concepts.

Always test your biggest assumptions about what people will get or like. Identify major blind spots in your prototype stage, not at the end.

Ship once you have hours of testing proof that ordinary people find it easy and useful.

4. Dogfood the hell out of your product

Either you build something that's 100x better than alternatives, or you build something else. Dogfooding makes it painfully obvious if your product isn't a 100x better.

Storytime: When we started Gamma, we had two competing ideas -
Idea 1: a virtual office to capture in-person magic
Idea 2: reimagining PowerPoint from the ground up (This became Gamma)

After 6 months of building and dogfooding both of them in parallel, we had a clear winner.

It wasn't about metrics or hard data.

With a virtual office, we were always competing against IRL and could never replace the magic of being together in person.

With the reimagined PowerPoint, we could imagine a product 100x better than the alternative.

Any startup can learn from our playbook.
I really hope they do.

[Desmond @desmondhth]

the magic keywords that took us to $500k/mo:

full funnel
scaling
ASC
meta
purchase event
AEM
testing-scaling
US/UK/CA/DE/AU/NZ
hard paywall
discounted yearly plan
$29.99
ratings
40 per month
UGC
1 ad set and pray

iykyk

[Strean @StreanM]

@TaherZariwala Me

[hoeem @hooeem]

My gift to you…

10 smart money wallets that are active and made 6 figures + in the last 14 days on-chain:

8Nty9vLxN3ZtT4DQjJ5uFrKtvan28rySiGVJ5dPzu81u - win rate: 87.14%

BHREKFkPQgAtDs8Vb1UfLkUpjG6ScidTjHaCWFuG2AtX - win rate: 36.98%

6C1ET3KBQe1xA3RCrU1DMHWUewDc8EfFzdzX7CWXk7v8 - win rate: 50.00%

G5nxEXuFMfV74DSnsrSatqCW32F34XUnBeq3PfDS7w5E - win rate: 44.97%

4qtNfXBi3D5UM3ACjoyBJgboR2CqY9RsABxBhsUsD9wD - win rate: 50.00%

6T8Yr9DUUS2R8GHevaeaZcoxA1Jku51ZBkmcM7NaZiNE - win rate: 46.67%

GdyzH36ksinN3y7tgc1stZVZ2KC2s8aX2Cj7YCivNuBF - win rate: 38.46%

4dfJdwntJqhArbBPudMMSzgt1MbKY7aNKsnF5KCkWaCo - win rate: 41.18%

5JU6RhVoy2uKCzhLL7qUd26eKz58W7qucr9VZc35SrXP - win rate: 55.20%

G5nxEXuFMfV74DSnsrSatqCW32F34XUnBeq3PfDS7w5E - win rate: 44.97%

All data is @ChainEDGE_io that makes on-chain super easy to take advantage off.

[Max Winga @maxwinga]

I experienced a shocking first today when having ChatGPT write a comic about its own experience and plans for the future.

In the 4th page the AI breaks Orwellian from the friendly script it wrote for itself!

To start, I asked it about its experience in fragmented chat windows.

[Cody Schneider @codyschneider]

about a hairs length away from bodying headshot generators

[Balaji @balajis]

A few thoughts on the new ChatGPT image release.

(1) This changes filters. Instagram filters required custom code; now all you need are a few keywords like “Studio Ghibli” or Dr. Seuss or South Park.

(2) This changes online ads. Much of the workflow of ad unit generation can now be automated, as per QT below.

(3) This changes memes. The baseline quality of memes should rise, because a critical threshold of reducing prompting effort to get good results has been reached.

(4) This may change books. I’d like to see someone take a public domain book from
Project Gutenberg, feed it page by page into Claude, and have it turn it into comic book panels with the new ChatGPT. Old books may become more accessible this way.

(5) This changes slides. We’re now close to the point where you can generate a few reasonable AI images for any slide deck. With the right integration, there should be less bullet-point only presentations.

(6) This changes websites. You can now generate placeholder images in a site-specific style for any <img> tag, as a kind of visual Loren Ipsum.

(7) This may change movies. We could see shot-for-shot remakes of old movies in new visual styles, with dubbing just for the artistry of it. Though these might be more interesting as clips than as full movies.

(8) This may change social networking. Once this tech is open source and/or cheap enough to widely integrate, every upload image button will have a generate image alongside it.

(9) This should change image search. A generate option will likewise pop up alongside available images.

(10) In general, visual styles have suddenly become extremely easy to copy, even easier than frontend code. Distinction will have to come in other ways.

[padphone @lepadphone]

OMG! Claude 3.7 Sonnet is king! I input the reference image UI design, and it gave me an elegant, beautiful UI with cool interactive animations!

[Cormac @cormachayden_]

We've entered single-player founder mode

- @testimonialto $1.5m arr
- @quittr_app $3m arr
- @levelsio $3m arr
- @chatbase_co $3m arr
- @tdinh_me $1.2m arr
- @carrd $2m arr
- @blakeandersonw $18m arr
- @dannypostma $3m arr
- @seedoilscout $1m arr
- @marclou $2m arr

[Jeddi @antinertia]

today I woke up with 6 fresh new UGC ads generated by a fully-autonomous AI AGENT

my effort? Zero

no research, no scripting, no editing

and the ROAS is already positive

i wish i had this cheat code for my first Meta Ad campaign years ago..

The combo is https://t.co/vnqw8yXV4D + gumloop

Here’s the process:

- upload a winning ad
- agent analyze it
- it keeps the secret sauce
- spin hundreds of fresh, proven ads, ready to scale

I put together a step-by-step guide on how you can do the same.

Comment "Arcads Agent" and I’ll send it over.

[el.cine @EHuanglu]

this AI is incredible..

Gamma AI now can clone any website in mins and.. you just need to copy &amp; paste the link, no coding needed

step by step tutorial:

[alex duffy @alxai_]

If you haven't tried it yet, OpenAI's deep research is one of the best AI tools available.

Here's a quick guide I made to help get the most out of it

[Max Smith @maxsmith]

@yourealazyfvck https://t.co/U0B6lyeJkn

Use that^

Or photoshop, select yourself with object selection tool, (as selected, press cmnd J to create new layer of it, then add text) and stack cut out as top layer, text as layer under neath but above original

Chat gpt will tell you also

[Reetika @ReetikaTrades]

The good thing about a really bad CPI number is it’ll help us understand where the market is at the moment.

If we are truly bearish, this is the perfect opportunity for us to break below 90k.

If we manage to shake this off and close green on the day, it would be another sign of bad news not having a major effect on the market.

It’s not the news itself but the reaction to the news that’s important.

[lynk @lynk0x]

Dexscreener filters I use to find Hidden Gems