a great product with no distribution dies
a mediocre product with great distribution wins
this is the part they don't teach you
#buildinpublic#startups
cost breakdown on $21k rev:
ad spend: $6,500
apple tax: $1,875
ai api costs: $1,000
supabase: $50
revenuecat fee: $125
stripe fees: $175
net: $11,549 (not including taxes)
for new entrepreneurs:
1. don’t be an inventor
find already existing products and improve them - “new” ideas have likely been tested before & there’s a reason they aren’t making money
2. marketing is the moat
building the product is easy - now you have to market, which is the hardest part. try every distribution method possible - reddit, meta, tiktok, youtube, cold emails - at least one of these channels will be high ROI and you can double down on it
3. kill your babies
look at levels, marclou… they’ve built 10-100 startups each and most have failed. ship fast, validate fast, and kill the project when the signals are clear. don’t be emotionally attached, it’s just business
4. failure is valuable
it’s part of the process, overtime you become more efficient in making higher ROI decisions - don’t get beaten down by failure, harvest it for its valuable lessons
5. build a personal brand
once you have some success, you can prove it, and teach others your learnings - a personal brand unlocks many revenue streams (rev share from X/YT, sponsorships, consulting, courses etc) - it makes you bulletproof. if all your businesses disappeared tomorrow, you’d be able to spin up new ones fast and have a huge audience to show it to
💡Recent insight: gaslighting @claudeai seems to improve code quality >90% of the time.
“You overengineered this, there is a simpler way”
“There is a smaller delta that buys us most of the benefits”
“There is a more elegant way”
“This is not architecturally coherent”
…before I even read its code. 😆
I’ve been doing this now for four days consistently and I’m I’m a believer.
Appreciate @CoachDanGo for putting this thread together
I’m seeing it at 47 years old. It’s a great way to prime the body in the morning.
Today was the first day the stretch’s felt easier
High-paid tech workers are cutting life down to the basics so they can invest and retire by 30
One Meta engineer makes over $300K a year and still owns no car, couch or TV
More successful Gen Z are choosing calm life over career and money
We’ve shipped a security-guidance plugin for Claude Code that helps identify and fix vulnerabilities as you’re writing code.
Available for all Claude Code users. Install from the plugin marketplace (/plugins).
Introducing: Tesla CLI/Claude Code Skill/OpenClaw and Hermes skill from the @ppressdev.
- "Unlock the car" and "turn on dog mode" as one-line commands, callable from your phone or laptop
- Agent: "during winter school days, defrost my car at 7:50 every weekday before school dropoff"
- Charging cost ledger
- Supercharger queue watcher pageable from an agent
- Your signing key stays on YOUR host
- Much more
Fun fact: when I got my first ClawdBot, Tesla was one of the first skills I made. But I could only get it to work with my older Tesla. Now that I have the Printing Press, I was able to build what I wanted soup to nuts and now it's here.
https://t.co/d9i2RSwqiF
https://t.co/BUTiVynrbl
Hoy, mi Tesla me ha salvado.
La frenada que veis no la hago yo (conducía el coche)
El coche de detrás iba muy rápido y conducía él.
¿Resultado? Yo me quedo a unos 50cm de la furgoneta.
¿El de detrás? no me golpea por 1 MILÍMETRO.
Todo es más seguro cuantos más Tesla te rodeen.
SpaceX is actively hiring world-class engineers/physicists for SpaceXAI, even if you have zero prior experience in AI. Smart humans figure it out fast.
Please send an email with ~3 bullet points demonstrating evidence of exceptional ability to [email protected].
🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.
My Take
The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.
This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.
Hedgie🤗