Marshall tells me about its decision to enter into the party speaker segment, and how it's attempting to stand out from the crowd. https://t.co/mlitZ6Kgt8
I'm 40. Born in '85. And you won't find this on my resume. 5 AM weekends for 1.5 years. Startup went nowhere. Left my city at 27. Procrastinated my own dreams for 6 straight years. Built a SaaS to €3K MRR. Elon's API pricing killed...
The hardest part of being indie isn't the tech, the marketing, or the sales. It's waking up every single day whether you feel like shit or great and choosing to build anyway.

These guys used a $10,000 credit card debt to start a business in 2002. That company is now worth $60B. In 2020, they dropped their biggest surprise yet: They told all employees to stop coming to work. Everyone thought it...
Most people start a business with a solution. That’s backwards. Every business is 3 things: a person, a painful problem, and your solution. Talk to people with money and ask about their problems. Solve one painful problem for one specific person, and you have...

@partiful is betting on connecting people to groups and local live events. This clip is from the newest First Time Founders episode, 'How Partiful Is Fixing the Loneliness Crisis.' Watch ad-free on Substack: bit.ly/3NMMwtD
"we pitched investors when it was just a drawing on a napkin" Think we'll be hearing this a lot less if you can draw it on a napkin, you can prompt it into existence. No excuse to be pre-product unless you're building...
at what point does SF's NIMBYism make it a hostile and too expensive place for new startups? Certainly makes it hard for the unfunded eventually the California undersupply of housing becomes the primary obstacle to tech and innovation (and thus the...
Before: move to SF. have an idea. look for a tech cofounder. build a deck in the meantime. Months pass... After: codex/claude in one window, X in the other. Build demo. Make a video of the demo. Announce it online, make it go...
Capital-intensive businesses can keep competitors out. But it's even better when a business is asset-light AND protected from competition. That's the real sweet spot. Low capital needs plus a wide moat.
first wave of non-technical founders who learned to code from AI are now starting companies. their technical ceiling is much lower but their iteration speed is 10x. (or infinity if you consider they couldn't build software before). that trade-off changes...
At no other time in history was this possible. Obsidian is a $350M company built by 3 engineers, and their operating system is wildly unconventional: • ~1 million users per employee (7 full-time staff total) • Fully remote with only 1 in-person...
I’ve replied to 3 cold emails from aspiring VCs in the last year. But I’ve received hundreds. Here’s what the ones that didn’t get a reply looked like: → “I’m really interested in learning more about VC and would love to pick...
Spending $50K on an agency before learning how your own business works is why you can't get past $10M.

When I first started Extra Points, my mother in law asked “why would anybody pay to read what you have to say?”, leading to my wife and other family members constantly trying to tell her that actually, “Matt is a...

As a founder, your biggest bets are the people you surround yourself with. Here’s why it matters more than any decision you’ll ever make 👇
Anthropic is on an unprecedented growth run. Just in the past year they grew from $1B to $19B ARR. They added $6B in ARR just in *February*. Companies like Palantir and Atlassian took 15-20 years to reach ~$5B ARR. Anthropic is...
One hour you’re getting a $150 million offer. The next? Bankruptcy. That’s the life of an entrepreneur. Ups. Downs. Chaos. The key? Stay in the game long enough to win. https://t.co/Vm8elVYrnT
How do you balance the need for focus with the necessity to experiment in your startup? https://t.co/gZawrwsXaJ
The journey of a $100k solo creator: 1. Find niche with active demand 2. Craft an offer that satisfies it 3. Content to funnel demand 4. Redirect to your email 5. Make offers daily 6. Learn & scale In that order.
Native Deodorant's founder emailed every single customer for 2 years. That feedback loop scaled them to a $100M acquisition. Meanwhile you're afraid to email your first 10 customers because you think you're "bothering" them.
Good product + bad distribution = dead. Bad product + great distribution = a business. Nobody buys what they can't find. Build distribution first. Everything else second.
The part of development AI can't touch (yet): Knowing which problem to solve. AI can write the code. It can suggest the architecture. It can even draft the marketing copy. But deciding "this is the feature that matters, and that one doesn't" still...
📡 Prop News | What's happening in the industry: Propr has initiated its seed round with Vault #1, introducing innovative models and new capital structures along with assets like Solana spot to the prop trading industry. SharkFunded is set to launch its...

#ThisDayInTechHistory. April 4, 1975. Bill Gates and Paul Allen create a partnership called Microsoft. Later, it grows into one of the largest US corporations and places them among the world’s richest people. https://t.co/W5BQfvWcOE
1/10,000 times someone gets lucky and gets famous with relative ease. We hear that story, then think "that's how it goes, at least if you're successful." No, that's not how it goes. It’s a grind, and with a product, usually you have...
This is true for me I used to be confused why bootstrappers slowed down after hitting revenue milestones like $20,000 a month But I realised that for most of them, they have enough 6-10 months of having 'enough' is a real reset in...
The most dangerous word in entrepreneurship: “soon.” “I’ll launch soon.” “I’ll start posting soon.” “I’ll reach out to that prospect soon.” Soon is where ambition goes to die quietly. Replace “soon” with a date. Put it on the calendar. Tell someone. Now it’s real.
This is spot on. One downside to business models with extremely transparent roi is that customers can then easily compare vendors and profits get competed away. The fallacy is thinking it's just "deliver customer value." It's really "deliver value...
By now we have all read the piece in @nytimes about MEDVi's $1B+ business selling GLP-1s online with a ton of marketing, and very little ownership of infrastructure. I asked two friends @josh_tauber and @keatonbedell: - Is there any moat? (no) -...
VCs convincing founders to take money with a 90%+ probability they will fail. They call it a treadmill for a reason. The second you take capital, you're on it, and it's set at a speed that works for them, not necessarily...
A lot of the decacorn AI agent cos and labs other than OpenAI are trying to kill OpenClaw or replace it However: I think community and open source is too strong and the Apple II moment will actually happen for OpenClaw...
Every successful founder I know has one thing in common: They didn’t wait for perfect conditions. The market wasn’t ideal. The team wasn’t complete. The product wasn’t finished. They shipped anyway. Don’t shrink your ambitions. Go for it.

The man who started a $90 billion-dollar company by accident: Meet John Pemberton • Morphine addict after the war. • Sold a cocaine wine rip-off. • Died nearly broke. Here's the bizarre story behind the world's most iconic brand:
Startups love meritocracy until you ask for a raise. You hit quota for 6 months, close deals, then hear “next quarter” while a founder pays $15k a month to an advisor who joins one call a week. If your numbers grow and...
Startup funding has hit an unprecedented level. Global investment reached $297 billion in Q1 2026, a 2.5x jump from the previous quarter and more than entire years of venture funding before 2019. The scale signals something bigger than a cycle. Capital is...
The best investors don't write founders off after one bad idea. I know someone who pitched a terrible idea in 2011. Truly awful. The kind of pitch that makes you wonder if they understand their own market. More >>
How to launch a licensed product that does millions in its first month: (We’ve followed this exact process to get household name brands to license The Oodie) Find a license that matches your audience. Don't shoot for the biggest name on...
Never give anything for free. You end up attracting the wrong customer, not the ones you want. Founders constantly make this mistake because they don’t understand their customer well enough. Instead of rushing to scale more time should be spent understanding...

Big deal paper here: field experiment on 515 startups, half shown case studies of how startups are successfully using AI. Those firms used AI 44% more, had 1.9x higher revenue, needed 39% less capital: 1) AI accelerates businesses 2) The challenge is understanding...
Everyone is out here taking AI courses and upskilling and consuming tutorials about prompting and so much other bookish knowledge. Honestly all that time could just go into building something real. The best way to learn is through DOING. Stop worrying...
You cannot know what it’s like to try a startup until you try it. It’s like thinking you know what it will be like to have kids. If you want to know, then try it, rather than reading about it.
Got a lot of feedback on this one. Plenty of founders who once did (or planned to) build in public have significantly curtailed their transparency. When the idea/execution-complexity balance changes, marketing and expertise-signaling methods quickly follow.

Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975. A photo of Microsoft staff (cofounders on the bottom row) in 1978 https://t.co/PyY3BlT4Zy
Sri @AshwiniVaishnaw Ji, Your call for “Design in India” is both timely and necessary. To make this vision real, our engineering teams need not just incentives, but the ability to move faster from idea to execution. Today, a large portion of engineering...
AI startups stopped selling subscriptions. They charge per query, per app, per token, and hit $100M ARR in months like Emergent. Lovable and Cursor crossed hundreds of millions with teams under 100 and over $1M ARR per employee. Median AI startups reach $1M...
This is basically all the diligence you mofos in Series A, B, and C are out there doing right now

#TimTalk - How can a founder distinguish between a “growth opportunity” and a “distraction in disguise”? with Jad Atwe https://t.co/qbSSvZj1IH via @DLAIgnite #SocialSelling #DigitalSelling #Sales #SalesLeader #Leadership #Culture #Marketing #Success #Mindset #Entrepreneur #Management
I think it's as unimaginable in the mind of someone who has thousands of people on payroll why you "wouldn't" just hire a second person As it it unimaginable to me why you "would" I personally love my life without managing people,...
How I think about pricing as an anti-capitalist business owner... I'm not the cheapest, to undercut everyone and exploit my own labor for volume. I'm not the most expensive, to maximize profit and price out everyone who isn't wealthy. I just price my...