The system of intelligence for revenue, delivered as an AI workforce. Just talk to @octolane

I'm 24, dropped out of Duke, joined YC, and bet everything on a startup. Here's what actually happens when you go all-in: 1. Your co-founder relationship matters more than your product: You can pivot products. You can't pivot people. Most startups die from founder breakups, not market failure. Choose your co-founder like you'd choose a spouse, you'll spend more time with them anyway. 2. Nobody cares about your startup except you: Your friends are being polite. Your family doesn't understand it. Even your customers barely think about you. You're obsessed. Everyone else has their own life. This loneliness is the actual job. 3. Runway is a countdown to your personal failure: Every month that clock ticks down isn't just money. it's proof you haven't figured it out yet. The stress is less about going broke and more about confronting whether you're actually good enough. 4. Your first 10 customers will lie to you: They'll say they love it. They'll promise to pay more. They'll ghost you next month. Early customers are either friends doing you a favor or tire-kickers. Real validation doesn't come until customer 50. 5. Hiring too fast kills more startups than hiring too slow: You panic, hire someone mediocre, spend 6 months managing them poorly, fire them awkwardly, and burn $100K+ in the process. Better to be understaffed and stressed than overstaffed and broke. 6. Your burn rate is the only number that matters: Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. Runway is reality. You can survive slow growth. You can't survive running out of money. Every dollar you spend is oxygen you just burned. 7. The best features are the ones you don't build: Every feature is debt. Support debt. Maintenance debt. Complexity debt. The companies that win aren't the ones with the most features, they're the ones that said no to everything except the one thing that matters. 8.Profitability is a choice, not a milestone: You can be profitable at $50K ARR if you want to be. Most founders choose to burn cash chasing growth because it feels like progress. It's not. It's just expensive. 9. Your competition doesn't matter until it does: You'll obsess over competitors daily. Then realize customers don't even know they exist. Then one day a competitor will eat your biggest deal and you'll realize you were unprepared. There's no winning, just different kinds of paranoia. 10. The day you launch is the least important day: You'll spend months planning launch day. It'll come and go. You'll get some Twitter engagement. Then nothing changes. Building a company is 1,000 boring Tuesdays, not one epic launch. 11. Every advisor will give you contradictory advice: "Move fast" vs "be strategic." "Focus" vs "diversify." "Raise money" vs "bootstrap." They're all right. They're all wrong. Nobody knows. Including you. Especially you.

high agency is the most important quality you'll ever look for in people. It's the difference between someone who sees a locked door and walks away, versus someone who finds the key, picks the lock, or builds a new door. Here's what I've learned about high agency and why it changed my life: But what is high agency? High agency people don't wait for permission. When they hit an obstacle, they find another way. They ask "how can I make this happen?" instead of listing reasons why it can't. They take ownership of problems that aren't theirs. They learn skills they need rather than waiting for someone to teach them. They create opportunities instead of waiting for them. Low agency people are spectators. They mock others for trying. They're comfortable with excuses. They treat obstacles as stop signs instead of puzzles. And it matters more than you think: Your life is the average of the agency of people around you. Choose a low agency partner? You'll spend your life hearing why things can't be done. Choose a high agency co-founder? You'll accomplish 10x what you thought possible. My co-founder Rafi is like this - every problem becomes a project, every setback becomes a learning opportunity. high agency people don't just change their own lives, they change everyone around them. How to spot it? 1. Look at their past - Do they have a history of making things happen despite obstacles? Or do they have a history of explanations for why things didn't work out? 2. Watch how they handle "no" - High agency people hear "no" as "find another way." Low agency people hear it as permission to quit. 3. Notice their questions - Do they ask "how can I?" or do they ask "why can't someone?" 4. Check their bias - Do they default to action or to waiting? High agency people have a bias toward doing. 5. See how they learn - Do they teach themselves what they need to know, or do they wait for perfect conditions? The Multiplier Effect: Here's what's wild: when you demonstrate high agency, others around you start showing it too. It's contagious. When you take ownership, others step up. When you figure things out, others start problem-solving. When you refuse to accept "impossible," others start finding possibilities. This is how teams transform. This is how companies scale. This is how humanity progresses. Choose Wisely: High agency matters in your: - Spouse (you're building a life together) - Co-founder (you're building a company together) - Early team members (they set the culture) - Close friends (they shape who you become) Surround yourself with people who believe they can figure it out, who don't need perfect conditions, who take responsibility for outcomes. Trust me - it will change your life forever. It did for me. High agency is a fundamental belief about your relationship with the world: that you can shape it, not just react to it. Find these people. Be one of these people. Build with them. The world is changed by people who refuse to accept that things can't be done.

Day 47 at SF - building @octolane_app Not many know this, but after I dropped out of Duke, I received an email from the visa office telling me I had just 15 days to leave the U.S. or face serious consequences. I thought I was supposed to get a 60-days grace period, but apparently not. My world started shaking. The YC batch was about to start, and I wasn't sure when I could come back. I had only 15 days to figure things out, and I didn't know what to say to my mom or my older brothers. They were already upset about me giving up a full scholarship for something they didn't believe in. I didn't cry, but sleep was impossible. I felt a heavy weight in my chest, and eating became difficult. During those days, I coded like there was no tomorrow, ran from office to office, and worked from coffee shops and co-working spaces, trying to find a place to stay in SF. Something inside me kept saying everything would be okay. I just needed to work hard and stay focused. During these days I would still code like there is no tomorrow, run from office to office, work from coffeeshop and co-working space as I was figuring out where to stay at SF. Somewhere something was telling me that everything is gonna be okay. I just need to work hard, do everything I can stay focused. @handotdev from @mintlify was the first person I reached out to. He took me for a walk, gave me guidance, and suggested I reach out to the @ycombinator community. I have a problem where I try to help everyone but hesitate to ask for help myself. Still, I shared my situation with the people in my batch at @ycombinator. When I shared, I only had 12 days left in the country. So I wrote about situation and shared with folks I knew in my batch at @ycombinator. At the time of sharing my situation, I only had 12 days left to leave the country. Then, something incredible happened. Countless people reached out to help. The YC legal team offered guidance. Michael Seibel wrote a recommendation letter. @handotdev mentioned my critical role in AI engineering at Mintlify. My good friends Elle and Sarah connected me with Jacob Boudreau earlier, co-founder and CTO of Stord, who vouched for me. But I still felt it might not be enough. It meant the world to me that @hahnbeelee, my previous manager and mentor at Mintlify checked on me to see how I was doing and if there was anything she could do to help. @matsiiako connected me with his lawyer, and @Chandrika633 sat with me to create a backup travel plan if things went south. @diqitally and Kathryn messaged me time to time on Slack to check and share resourced that can help me go through the difficult process. Thank you! You are amazing! I still felt like I had no shot. It was @minney_cat and her team at @plymouthstreet who organized all the legal papers, recommendations, my past works to build a strong O1 case. They created a 600-page case study about me, and I was shocked because I never realized how much I had done over the years. I published research paper in peer reviewed journal on developing a mathematical model for computational biology, developed biomedical software from scratch that's now licensed and used by Duke Hospital for sudden cardiac arrest patients, grew my previous startup to 300K users and it got acquired while I was a freshman, and created coding tutorials that got hundreds of thousands of views. I never thought of talking about these achievements or adding them to my case. I'm pretty sure @minney_cat and her team pulled a couple of all-nighters to organize all this, and they did it fast! She kept me updated and guided me through every step. My O-1 visa got approved today, and I felt emotional for a moment. Why did everyone help me? They had no reason to, but they did. What can I do to give back to the community I am forever grateful to? I felt what @garrytan said, "Tech give me everything". I'm not a well-known, successful founder; I still struggle every day. But the people I've met on this journey are making me a better person, both emotionally and professionally. They motivate me to work even harder. I love SF. Now I am returning to coding, but but this time, with a mind free from stress and a backpack filled with even more dreams and hope. Let me tell you, the American dream is alive and kicking. We need to work hard, contributing to the community, and maintain sharp focus. Good things really do come to those who strive for excellence. And in San Francisco? This city seems to have a way of making greater things a reality. Mission street, SF 12:21 pm January 29, 2024 #buildinpublic #crm

Yes, your $2M seed round disappears faster here. Yes, you’ll pay $4,000/month for a studio. But you know what’s more expensive? Being in a place where nobody understands what you’re building. Where “thinking big” means opening a second location. Where your ambitious idea is met with “that’s nice, but have you thought about stability?” San Francisco isn’t expensive. It’s a filter. And that’s exactly why it works. The people who stay are the ones who’d rather be broke in a city of builders than comfortable in a city of spectators.

ByeByeCarta.com Thanks to the original inspiration to @steventey it's happening! 🙏 Open Source Cap Table Manager - powered by Octolane AI CRM! - Do whatever you want with the source code - 100% free to self host - no need for commercial license - 1111 likes we will ship the entire version next Friday! I have helped people to migrate before, will happily do that for you! Today marks our 20th day of shipping 30 standalone features in 30 days! Noe valley, SF 7:07 PM, Sunday Jan 07, 2024 #OpenSource #buildinpublic

I am a first generation immigrant and Gen Z. Not many people know this, but after I dropped out of Duke (F1 visa), I received an email from the visa office telling me I had just 15 days to leave the U.S. or face serious consequences. I thought I was supposed to get a 60-day grace period, but apparently not. My world started shaking. The YC batch was about to start, and I wasn't sure when I could come back. I had only 15 days to figure things out, and I didn’t know what to say to my mom or my older brothers. They were already upset about me giving up a full ride from Duke University to build an AI version of Salesforce—a startup they didn’t believe in. They had worked so hard and sacrificed so much to give me a better future, and I felt like I was letting everyone down. I didn’t cry, but sleep was impossible. A heavy weight settled in my chest, and eating became a struggle. During those days, I coded like there was no tomorrow, ran from office to office, and worked from coffee shops and co-working spaces, trying to find a place to stay in SF. Something inside me kept saying everything would be okay—I just needed to work hard and stay focused. I have a problem where I try to help everyone but hesitate to ask for help myself. Even as I decided to share my situation with the people in my YC batch, I felt a constant pain in my stomach from the stress. Yet, I kept coding, nothing else mattered to me than building the best software I could with my co-founder and best friend Rafi. By the time I opened up, I only had 12 days left in the country. Then, something incredible happened. Countless people reached out to help. The YC legal team offered guidance. @mwseibel wrote a recommendation letter. @handotdev highlighted my critical role in AI engineering at Mintlify. My good friends Elle and Sarah connected me with Jacob Boudreau, co-founder and CTO of Stord, who vouched for me. But I still felt it might not be enough. It meant the world to me that @hahnbeelee, my previous manager and mentor at Mintlify, checked in to see how I was doing and if there was anything she could do to help. @matsiiako connected me with his lawyer, and @Chandrika633 sat with me to create a backup travel plan if things went south. @diqitally and @kathrynwu1 messaged me from time to time on Slack, sharing resources and offering support. Despite all this help, I still felt like I had no shot. But then, @minney_cat and her team stepped in. They organized all the legal papers, recommendations, and my past work to build a strong case for my visa application. They created a 600-page case study about me, and I was shocked because I never realized how much I had done over the years. I had published a research paper in a peer-reviewed journal on developing a mathematical model for computational biology, developed biomedical software from scratch that’s now licensed and used by Duke Hospital for sudden cardiac arrest patients, grew my previous startup to 300K users (which got acquired while I was a freshman), and created coding tutorials that got hundreds of thousands of views. I never thought of talking about these achievements, let alone adding them to my case. I am sure her team pulled a couple of all-nighters to organize everything, and they did it fast! Ultimately, my visa got approved within the timeline, and honestly, I felt incredibly lucky and grateful to America. It showed me that regardless of the color of your skin, gender, or ethnicity, it doesn’t matter—Americans and Silicon Valley value meritocracy above everything and are always willing to help. I felt emotional for a moment. Why did everyone help me? They had no reason to, but they did. I promised myself that I will never stop working like hell to ensure I can contribute to this beautiful country in every meaningful way possible. It was a fire burning within me, fueled by the gratitude I felt for the countless people who had stood by me. Every sleepless night, every line of code, every ounce of effort—it all became a part of this unshakable resolve to give back to a nation that valued my potential over my origins. Later we raised funding from top-tier VCs and investors, crossed valuation of $30 million. Over 4,000 companies are on the waitlist, and hundreds of customers are choosing us over giants like HubSpot and Salesforce. We’ve created jobs, empowered businesses to move faster, and contributed to the economy, not just through taxes, but by fueling dreams and ambitions. And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not enough. That no matter how far we’ve come, there’s still more to do, more to give back. This community, this country, believed in me when I was just a kid with a dream. How could I ever repay that faith? What can I do to give back to the community I am forever grateful to? I felt what @garrytan once said: “Tech gave me everything.” I’m not a well-known, successful founder; I still struggle every day. But America made me a better person, both emotionally and professionally, taught me to dream big and take risks. As @elonmusk said, “America rose to greatness over the past 150 years because it was a meritocracy more than anywhere else on Earth. I will fight to my last drop of blood to ensure that it remains that land of freedom and opportunity.” So yes, thank you, America, for being the land of freedom and opportunity. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 And to all the immigrants who have poured their hearts into shaping this dream—your sacrifices and contributions are what make it real. ❤️ And in San Francisco? This city seems to have a way of making greater things a reality. 🌉 Okay, now back to getting things done this week!! 🚀

We built a CRM that works like texting your co-founder. Natural language. No dropdowns. Revolutionary, right? Turns out, AI UX comes with a problem we didn't see coming... we have one week before launch day. we said we'd wait 72 hours before sharing anything. It's been less than that, but 17 people have already signed up. 8 started trials. 5 converted to paid. And honestly? We're learning more in these few days than we did in months of building in isolation. This is the messy, beautiful reality of building a startup: you ship something you think is revolutionary, and the market immediately humbles you with truths you never saw coming. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝗪𝗲'𝗿𝗲 𝗧𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 For the past six months, we've been obsessed with one question: 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗖𝗥𝗠 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗼-𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿? Think about it. When you close a deal over coffee, you don't wanna pull out a laptop immediately, navigate through dropdown menus, and fill out 27 fields. You text your co-founder: "𝘮𝘦𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘚𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘩 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘕𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘢 - $𝟝𝟘𝘒 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭, 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘵 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘩, 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘦𝘹𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘤𝘬." Done. Context captured. Zero friction. That's what we built. Natural language deal creation. No forms. No dropdowns. Just tell Octolane what happened, like you're updating a teammate. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸? People love it... when they understand it. And that's where it gets interesting. 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝟭: 𝗡𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗨𝗫 𝗥𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗡𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗢𝗻𝗯𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 Here's what we're seeing: Users who "get it" are moving 3x faster through deal creation. They're typing things like "𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘫𝘰𝘩𝘯 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘱𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵, 𝟙𝟘𝟘𝘬 𝘢𝘳𝘳 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭, 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘘𝟙" and watching Octolane instantly structure it into their pipeline. It feels like magic. But about 70% of users are still hunting for the dropdown menu. They've spent years in Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive. Their muscle memory is wired for forms. When they see an empty text box, they freeze. "𝘞𝘢𝘪𝘵... 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘥𝘰 𝘐 𝘵𝘺𝘱𝘦? 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥?" 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗻: When you introduce a paradigm shift in UX, you're not just building new features, you're rewiring user behavior. And that requires obsessive onboarding, clear examples, and patience. We're iterating on this now. Showing examples. Adding tooltips. Building in just enough structure to guide without constraining. 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝟮: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹 (𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝘁𝗚𝗣𝗧 𝗜𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗘𝗻𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵) We thought we'd solved CRM with "ChatGPT for your deals." We were wrong. The issue isn't the AI, it's the blank canvas. Users open the chat interface and think, "𝘖𝘬𝘢𝘺... 𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵? 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘪𝘯? 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘭? 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘸𝘦 𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬?" This is what our custome told us: "𝘐 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘢, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘐'𝘮 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘺 𝘣𝘰𝘹 𝘸𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘴𝘬 𝘪𝘵. 𝘔𝘺 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯'𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘦𝘵, 𝘴𝘰 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘮 𝘐 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘰𝘳?" She's right. 𝗔 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝗶𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁. Which leads us to... 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝟯: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲, 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 Here's the real breakthrough we're chasing now: What if your CRM filled itself? Imagine this: Octolane reads your emails (with permission), detects that you've been going back and forth with Alex at TechCo about a potential $75K deal. It sees the pricing discussion, the timeline mentions, the decision-makers being CC'd. Instead of waiting for you to manually log it, Octolane creates the opportunity and sends you a notification: "𝘐 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘈𝘭𝘦𝘹 𝘢𝘵 𝘛𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘊𝘰. 𝘐'𝘷𝘦 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭 𝘧𝘰𝘳 $𝟟𝟝𝘒 𝘪𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘱𝘪𝘱𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦. 𝘞𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘴?" One tap. Deal's in your CRM. Fully structured. Auto-updating as the email thread continues. This is the thesis we're have been working on. And it'll be generally available soon. The best tools don't wait for you to remember to use them. They work in the background, surface insights proactively, and only ask for your input when they need it. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗪𝗲'𝘃𝗲 𝗦𝗵𝗶𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝟮𝟰𝗵𝗿𝘀 𝟭. 𝗣𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲 More updates dropping tonight. We're moving fast because every hour we wait is an hour our early users are struggling with incomplete features. 𝟮. 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝗲𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹𝘆 Users are telling us exactly what's broken, what's confusing, what's delightful. We're treating every piece of feedback like gold. What's Next? 𝗜𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀: 𝟭. 𝗚𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗹 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗻𝘂𝗱𝗴𝗲𝘀 If your Gmail gets disconnected, you're blind from AI getting enough contet to make your system self-driving. We need aggressive, impossible-to-miss reminders to reconnect. 𝟮. 𝗢𝗻𝗯𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗵𝗮𝘂𝗹 Rafi is leading this. We had backend schema issues that broke onboarding for some early users. Fixed now by our awesome engineer, but we're not satisfied with "fixed" - we're making it bulletproof. We're also iterating on the flow based on feedback to increase trial → paid conversion. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗛𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵 I'm not going to pretend what we have right now is perfect. It's not. There are bugs. There are confusing UX moments. There are features we know we need but haven't built yet. But here's what I 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 say: 𝗪𝗲'𝗿𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝘁'𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗱𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. Every signup teaches us something. Every trial user who gets stuck shows us where our onboarding fails. Every piece of feedback sharpens our product thesis. This is what building looks like. Not polished launch videos and perfect landing pages. It's messy iteration, late-night bug fixes, and constant course corrections based on real user behavior. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲 𝗔𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗱 In one week, we're officially launching our 𝟭𝟬𝟬 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝟭𝟬𝟬 𝗗𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲. That's November 1st. 100 days from there to hit our first 100 paying customers at $20/seat. It's ambitious. Maybe unrealistic. But we didn't drop out from college, moved from halfway around the world to SF, and spend months building in stealth mode to play it safe. We're here to learn as fast as possible. Ship as fast as possible. And build a CRM that sales teams actually 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 to use - not one they're forced to tolerate. If you're reading this and thinking, "I want to be part of this journey," come find us. octolane. com. We're still early. Still figuring it out. But that's exactly when the most interesting companies are built. See you on launch day! 🫡 - One / @octolane Cafe Reveille, Mission Bay SF AM 𝗣.𝗦. - 𝗜𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂'𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘀𝗶𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺𝘀 (𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗨𝗫 𝗽𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝘀, 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗶𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲𝘀, 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘃𝘀. 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀), 𝗜'𝗱 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘆𝗼𝘂. 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 / 𝗗𝗠 𝗺𝗲. 𝗟𝗲𝘁'𝘀 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻 𝘁𝗼𝗴𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿.

I came to Duke from San Francisco, just for a brief two days, to appear for my final exams as a junior. But then last night I finished reading how Google DeepMind researchers have elegantly solved what was deemed an unsolvable math problem using LLM. Now I am leaving Durham behind without even taking my finals. All I have with me is a one-way ticket to SF, a small suitcase, and a backpack filled with dreams and aspirations! To my dearest mom, I hope you can forgive me. I'm stepping out of the comfortable embrace of academia to chase what I truly believe in! I'm ready to build the future, a future where boundaries are limitless and possibilities endless! Thank you @ycombinator for the endless videos you posted on your YouTube channel and inspired kids like me to build the future! Now is the best time to build! Period.

Every other CRM on the market previously built a system of records, that changes now. We are building a system of actions thanks to AI. Octolane is building AI-first Salesforce. Our software does a lot more than just store customer data. It uses AI to find the best customers, does lead scoring, reaches out to them and closes them. You can also generate any forecasts or reports from thousands of data points with one click or natural language command. You can communicate with hundreds of customers at the same time and predict their next actions. Customers are switching from HubSpot to us after spending thousands of dollars on their implementation. We are using AI to automate writing many of the integrations that keep customers locked into Salesforce and then we are going to take all of their customers too. Killing Salesforce is a $300 billion market cap opportunity that is just waiting for someone to finally grab it. Also, no one works at Salesforce office after 4pm and I am here at our office on a Saturday afternoon on boarding a series B customer while fixing our scalability issues and my co-founder is not gonna sleep until we fix every single GitHub issues. I asked him to go to sleep because he is tired, but he is just not gonna do it. He is built different. Why? Because we don’t have enough. Our dream companies are still their clients. My co-founder and I are best friends for 10+ years and we are first generation immigrant. I dropped out of Duke from a full scholarship program to do things that seems impossible and to help others. Today, at this very moment, we are going through once in a lifetime opportunity and the industry is moving faster than we can possibly imagine. Who wouldn’t jump on this rocket ship?

Open Source Carta Alternative with Cap Table management - GitHub source code! Check us out on HN: dub.sh/byebyecarta Thank you @peer_rich for inspiring start open source project and and the repo inspired by @steventey Proudly built with @shadcn @nextjs and thank you @rauchg and team behind @nextjs! They made it super easy to just ship! 🚀 ----- We have been awake for more than 36 hours to build this! Building a Carta alternative fast is incredibly hard not because of the engineering but because of the a lot of legal compliance we need to ensure. At the end of the day, doing anything worthwhile is hard and we need to start somewhere. 🙏 Please share and comment because we need all the open source support we can! If you want to contribute, please feel free to text me and join the Discord we have on the website!

I miss my mom so much right now. I wish she were here to see everything I’m going through, and what our team is building through it all. When I was little, she’d quietly cut fruit and place it by my study desk without saying a word. Then she’d leave, just so I could keep reading. No one will ever love me like that again. The last time someone brought me food without asking was my cofounder, who is also my decade long best friend, and my brother whom I look up to, silently placing it beside me while I worked. Different kind of love, same quiet care. I wouldn’t be here without him. I just really wish my mom was here.

No one cares. Get up. Work harder. Go again. (My wallpaper right now)

I think the risk isn't making tools too easy, it's making them produce outputs users don't value enough. Research on the IKEA effect shows people value products they partially created themselves. it has been demonstrated that participants valued their self-assembled IKEA furniture significantly higher than identical pre-assembled pieces. This support the prediction about introducing "fake UX flows" to increase psychological ownership for these companies. However, the Notion product evolution offers a counterpoint. Notion began as relatively complex (requiring significant learning) and gradually simplified their UX while maintaining user loyalty. Their success came from balancing "floor" (ease of entry) with "ceiling" (depth of capability) - users stayed because they discovered increasing value over time, not because of sunk effort. Baking is often about the experience and emotional connection, while app development is typically means to an end. The Lego block approach (modular building with clear steps) satisfies both psychological ownership and efficiency needs. This paper is relevant here - (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…)which suggests that when users create something with genuine utility, satisfaction comes more from the output than the process. I'd argue AI dev tools don't need artificial difficulty; they need to enable creation of increasingly valuable outputs that users couldn't otherwise achieve, regardless of effort level. Good post @bindra_dhruv ♥️

LLaMA 4 Didn’t Kill RAG. It Gave It Purpose. The next generation of AI systems won’t choose between retrieval or context. They’ll combine them with surgical precision. The winners? The ones who master this integration first. 1. 10M Token Context: Depth Meets Breadth LLaMA 4 introduces a 10M token context window — 2,500× larger than when RAG emerged at Meta in 2020. People claiming on social “RAG is obsolete” — They’re wrong. The future isn’t RAG vs. context — it’s RAG X context. Even with massive context windows, vector databases remain critical for personalization, precision, and relevance. Context brings depth. RAG brings breadth. Together, they form a hybrid architecture. 2. MoE: Efficiency > Size What makes LLaMA 4 revolutionary isn’t just scale — it’s the Mixture of Experts (MoE). Scout uses 109B parameters, but only a subset per query. Result? Massive intelligence, minimal compute — even capable of running on a single GPU. This unlocks real-world deployability at scale. 3. The 3-Layer Knowledge Stack @octolane Needs We’re entering the era of layered knowledge architecture: Level 1: In-Context (10M tokens) – Deep reasoning over documents (Done) Level 2: RAG – Dynamic access to enterprise-wide knowledge (Done) Level 3: Fine-Tuning – Specialized memory and expertise (in progress) The most effective AI systems will move fluidly between these layers — invisibly — based on user intent and query complexity. 4. By 2026, AI Will Feel Like Magic Users won’t care whether answers come from context, retrieval, or weights. They’ll just expect instant, accurate, complete responses. You won’t see the gears turning - only the outcome. Invisible knowledge plumbing = massive competitive advantage.

The @ycombinator W24 batch is gonna have more unicorns🦄 than any previous batches of Y Combinator. I say this with confidence because I am in the current batch and have been seeing what these "I am gonna make it happen no matter what" type founders are cooking here. ♥️🫡🚀 With AI and LLM advancements, there are now abundance of opportunities and a real shot to replace the moat of the big incumbents in a very short period of time with fewer head counts. Everyday there are at least 1-2 events at SF that I got invitations from where genuine people who loves building come together, have fun and chat about the future. More and more startups are publishing impressive demos online. Legendary angel investors meeting everyone in person and creating AI specific funds. Young people in VCs are pushing to become founders first and creating just YC specific funds. Positivity is everywhere and helping hands are there if you ask. I can't emphasize that how amazing people at SF who are so much giving and supportive. It's incredibly hard for any founders, @ycombinator and SF combined together - make you grow faster, guide you to avoid mistakes and aim higher. If you want to build a generational company, embrace AI, create impact, have amazing people who will lift you up, support you not only when it's good but also when it's bad. Then @ycombinator is for you. Then San Francisco is for you. Then doing things that seems almost impossible are for you. I love San Francisco ♥️🌉

The less I sounded like a salesperson, the more I sold. The more I admitted we were held together with duct tape, the faster people bought. Everything I learned closing deals from cafe wifi in San Francisco while my co-founder fixed bugs in real-time: 1. You're not selling a product, you're selling belief: Early customers aren't buying features, they're buying your conviction. They want to see fire in your eyes when you talk about the problem. The demo matters less than whether they believe you'll still be around in 6 months to support them. 2. Every "no" is actually "not yet" (until it's not): You'll hear no 47 times before someone says yes. Then that same person who said no will circle back in 3 months when their pain gets worse. Your job is less about closing fast, and more about staying memorable until the timing aligns. 3. Your first 10 deals will come from places you'd never expect: You'll obsess over landing that dream logo. Then your college roommate's cousin becomes customer number 1. That random LinkedIn comment turns into a $50K deal. Serendipity beats strategy in the early days. 4. Discovery calls are therapy sessions where you happen to sell: Prospects don't want a pitch, they want someone who understands their pain better than they do. Shut up. Ask questions. Let them vent. The sale happens when they realize you've lived their nightmare. 5. Your close rate means nothing until deal 50: 3 deals closed out of 5 conversations? Cool, your sample size is meaningless. One founder gets lucky with timing. Real patterns don't emerge until you've had 50+ real sales conversations. 6. Discounting is admitting you don't believe in your price: The moment you drop your price without them asking, you've told them it wasn't worth it. Hold the line. If they can't afford it, they're not your customer yet. Come back when the pain is expensive enough. 7. The demo is where deals go to die: You'll build the perfect demo flow. Polish every click. Then realize prospects zone out after 4 minutes. Show one thing that makes them say "oh sh*t, I need this." Everything else is noise. 8. Your competition isn't another startup, it's doing nothing: You'll obsess over competitor features. Meanwhile your prospect's real alternative is a Google Sheet and hoping the problem goes away. You're not fighting other vendors, you're fighting inertia. 9. Following up is the entire game: 80% of deals close after the 5th touchpoint. Most founders give up after 2. The money is in the patient, non-desperate follow-up that adds value each time, not "just checking in." 10. You can't scale what you haven't done 100 times yourself: Every founder wants to hire a VP Sales after deal 10. You don't know what good looks like yet. You don't know the real objections. Do 100 deals yourself or you'll hire someone to fail expensively.

Dropped out of Duke and moved to SF with my best friend @halim__rafi to build. No playbook. Just conviction. Now I’ve got a view, a bed frame (finally), a standing desk still wrapped in plastic, and users lining up saying - “I’ve been looking for this. You’re building exactly what I needed.” Every day it gets a little better. Every day the dream feels a little more real. Piece by piece, it’s happening. Build. Sleep. Gym. Help people. Repeat. Wouldn’t be here without the friends, the favors, the faith. Thank you @ycombinator for believing. Thank you, San Francisco, for giving builders a place to build. ❤️ Day 517 of building @octolane

Thanks to @ycombinator, we went from: → a scrappy prototype → to 7,000+ companies waiting → building in the dark → to shipping with real signal → lone builders → to learning from the sharpest minds in the game → quiet doubt → to “you’re exactly where you need to be” All because we applied. We thought we were too early. Too raw. Just two best friends building on belief and caffeine. But YC didn’t just backed our startup, It rewired how we think. It made us more ambitious. Sharper. Focused. Taught us how to build motion, not just product. How to lead. How to grow. How to keep going when it’s hard. And most of all: it gave us people we’ll never forget. Founders helping founders. No ego. Just real help when it matters most. So we wrote a doc: 7 Reasons You Should Apply to YC (From Founders Who Lived It) 👇 Screenshot below 📄 Link in comments 🗓️ Deadline: May 13, 2025 Apply. Even if you don’t feel ready. Especially if you don’t. Sometimes, you just need someone to say: “You’re not crazy. You’re early. Let’s build.” Thank you @harjtaggar and all our group partners for guiding us, challenging us, and keeping us from the thousand different ways we could have crashed and burned. - @halim__rafi & One Founders of @octolane (YC W24)

@octolane is the world’s first Self-Driving AI CRM. Not a System of Record. A System of Action. ✅ Your follow-up is already written ✅ Your pipeline updates itself ✅ Your day prioritized before it starts ✅ Replaces 7 tools. Feels like one This isn’t software. This is revenge. We've talked to hundreds of reps who missed family dinners, kids' baseball games, daughters' recitals — all because they were stuck updating CRM fields at 9 p.m. The giants had decades to fix this. They did not. They gave you dropdown hell and called it software. We are not a plugin. We are not a prettier dashboard. We are the alternative to wasting 25 hours a week on manual data entry. Traditional CRMs still ask, “ Did you update your fields today?” Octolane just says: “Go help your customers. I got this.” We are best friends who taught ourselves to code on YouTube, moved across the country, and are building the CRM we always wished existed. Still shipping. Still obsessed. If you’ve ever said, “I could sell more if my tools got out of my way” this is for you. Join the movement. You'll hear directly from us. No sales team. Just builders who care. And you will help shape what comes next. — Huge thank you to the people who believed in this long before it was cool to bet against Goliaths: Brian Shin, @kul, @CindyXBi, @DaveMessina (Pioneer Fund), @xuezhao (Basis Set Ventures), @davj, @arashf, @bonatsos, Tamanna Khemani (@generalcatalyst), @handotdev, @marty_kausas, @matsiiako — Our group partner @harjtaggar and the entire teams at @ycombinator. We’re just getting started. – One & @halim__rafi Founders, Octolane Best friends since high school. Still shipping. Thank you so much @dasha_shunina for writing this beautifully crafted piece - your storytelling captured everything we’re fighting for. ❤️

Day 110 at the SF building @octolane It's not that I've made tons of best friends in the @ycombinator W24 batch over these intense three months, but I've definitely found lifelong friends at YC. They're the ones I can call at 3 AM, whether I need help or just need to cry. These are friends who support and help each other, aiming to grow and succeed together. After a long 20+ hour international flight, my co-founder has finally arrived. His hugged me for 10 seconds straight and his first question about SF was - "so where is this Salesforce tower?" Tyler, a close friend and fellow founder from the @ycombinator W24 batch at OpenFoundry, was kind enough to pick them up from the airport. I hardly had to ask him. He came to my place, drove to the airport, picked up my co-founder and his wife, handled all their suitcases, brought us home, ensured everything was fine, and then left. He was incredibly busy with fundraising but still made time to help. The nature of a startup reflects its founders' characteristics - kindness, helpfulness, and an understanding of craftsmanship are evident in both the product and the company culture. Tyler is no different. Most of my close friends in SF are from YC, and I cherish the time spent with them. Currently, we're at our place, prioritizing features on the glass door with board markers. I'm also trying to cook chicken with the spices my co-founder brought from halfway across the world, making jokes to hide my terrible cooking skills. His wife is laughing in the background while talking to her mom, and the neighbor's dog wants to play with us. Our home is filled with happiness and joy. Though we're all tired, we're also happy, smiling, and excitedly planning for YC demo day. I'm practicing my pitch, and my co-founder Rafi is eager to show me a new button-down shirt he bought for me. I'll wear it on demo day. I'm not fund raising anymore but I am excited to wear the new clothes my best friend bought and to showcase what we've worked on for the last 109 days. @ycombinator is what it is because of the collective efforts of many ambitious founders who aim to achieve the impossible. Coming from halfway across the world, feeling like outsiders at first, it didn't take long for us to find our place here at SF and do what we do best - build. San Francisco is the city for builders, and YC is accelerating the future forward. ♥️🌉🚀🦄 (Also my newsletter on how we do things at Octolane crossed 100+ subscribers.) 7:57 pm 31 March 2024 Noe valley #buildinpublic

I can confirm this. You might think that just because we are at YC, we get customers left and right from YC. What you might not understand as a VC who was never a founder is this: People at YC are incredibly smart, hard working and most of them are always ready to help. But if your product is not great (I am not talking about being good, you have to be great), they are just not gonna continue using it because these people have options, a lot actually. It doesn’t matter if your product is free or you are a YC founder. As a founder you have to work crazy hard to build a great product and only then these smart people your are meeting will keep using your product. @fondocom has an incredible product and you as that VC probably don’t know their story. (I don’t who this VC is but pretty sure they don’t know a thing about building startup from negative + the struggle). Since you just copy paste your case study from a16z or Sequoia or some chart you found on LinkedIn. Let me tell you, It took @davj’s team a long time, they almost ran out of money and worked insanely hard to get where they are today. Yeah I post everyday about my own journey in public as a YC founder. But this is what people don’t see, my co-founder @halim__rafi and I go through hell everyday to figure out all the technical intricacies to build the best product possible, what our users actually want vs what they would pay for, running around from office to office at SF to learn from other founders and companies, implement feedbacks, and most people always say NO to us. We don’t complain and we just keep shipping. I texted my co-founder today saying that we needed to fix a feature our user asked and he was walking on the street on his way to home. He immediately sat on the side of the street, coded for 2 hours, merged and deployed to production and then went home. We are still not satisfied and can still fail, most startups fail. But we just keep shipping. To any VC who is reading this, please understand that at the end of the day it doesn’t matter if we were in YC or a16z gave us $6M seed check. It’s always and ALWAYS will be building something that people want. And if you are that VC who never built a product from scratch, you might not know this, so let me tell you, it takes a different brain muscle and insane amount of will power + relentless to achieve that. No amount of investment or connections can build a generational company, it’s always building a great product that people love and care about. And @fondocom is doing exactly that, building a great product that people love and care about. (The photo was taken by my co-founder who while he was coding on the side of the street and was showing me the new feature we were working on)

"In the tech industry, at least, much of the credit for the renaissance can be given to those who never left; chief among them, @garrytan and @ycombinator ." "After spending last summer here for an internship, he knew from experience it would help to be in close proximity to other founders, as Y Combinator advises. But what became clear to Chowdhury was that in the intervening months, the AI scene had gone from a simmer to a boil." If you're reading this from somewhere with normal weather patterns, then pack your dreams, your weirdness, and maybe a fog-proof jacket – San Francisco is calling! 🌉 Thank you @Priyasideas for such an amazing beautifully written article, what a wonderful read!!! 🫡 Link - sfstandard.com/2024/08/30/y-…

Thanks to @ycombinator, I found my people— the kind who stay up late building, hype you up like you’re the next Steve Jobs, and still have time to send you memes! Octolane wouldn’t be here without YC’s support and this powerhouse crew! 🚀 Here’s to hitting more milestones, making it look easy (it’s not), and helping each other win big! ❤️💪🔥🚀 I love San Francisco 🌁

6 out of first 10 early customers became our angel investors for @octolane. We are only getting started, I am recruiting ex founders to join our team just the way Rippling did. People think we ship fast, wait until my co-founder lands at SF. Glad that he will have at least a week worth of in person experience for YC W24. I love San Francisco 🌁🚀❤️🦄

I once wrote that if I had to bet on any student from my class of 2025 at Duke making it happen in Silicon Valley, all my cards would be on @bindra_dhruv. My bet turned out to be right and more. When people talk about startup "hustle culture," they often paint a romanticized picture of endless energy, late-night work, and big wins. But the reality is often simpler and less glamorous. What might seem like an overnight success is actually the result of relentless effort, pushing through moments so crazy and hard that most people would give up. But some keep going, no matter what, finding ways to move forward against all odds. What makes Dhruv and Rahul’s journey stand out isn’t just the hard work or sacrifices. It’s how they stay true to themselves, laugh under pressure, while building something people want. It’s this mix of "hard work" and "heart" that turns a startup into something special. Watching Dhruv and Rahul build @styl_app over the past two years has shown a story that’s both inspiring and very human. They are the meaning of "doing whatever it takes." - Dhruv once convinced our professor to let him use an entire economics class of students to record a TikTok for Styl. - Dhruv’s app reached 80K+ downloads with tens of millions of swipes while he was still studying at Duke, and he did it without spending a single dollar. - Then there’s the mustache story: Dhruv made a series where decides not to shave until Styl hit 100K downloads. When they did, shaving the mustache became a fun celebration of how far they had come. Rahul’s dedication is legendary. He was known to fix bugs while in the bathroom, he is the reason everything runs smoothly. I honestly can't think of a better team than this for tackling consumer fashion space. Another part of their story is their kindness. Every time I needed help, Dhruv would reply within minutes, no matter what time it was or how busy he was. Even during my visa crisis after I dropped out of Duke to pursue Octolane full-time, Dhruv immediately started doing everything he could to ensure I got the support I needed. Here’s a photo I took when I visited them at their apartment in SF. Dhruv and Rahul are some of the best founders to come out of Duke. I’ve learned so much from them and am lucky to call them my friends. To college students thinking about starting a business: let Dhruv and Rahul’s story inspire you. Please come to SF, immerse yourself in its energy, and build something people want. This is the best time to build. Nothing great comes easy, but this beautiful city has its way of making things happen.

Day 262 of @octolane - Think AI Salesforce, minus the tower (for now) Since I moved to San Francisco, I've started framing one or two photos each month to remember the best moments. This month's top memory was a special dinner. San Francisco always find its way to bring people together. San Francisco is like a crazy, lovable friend who sometimes forgets to shower but always remembers your birthday. Where every steep hill climb is a metaphor for your startup journey (painful, sweaty, but with a great view at the top)! I really love San Francisco. It's full of surprises. Late at night, I often work from @StartupHQ and get to say hi to people working tirelessly on their dreams! I've seen folks working from early morning until way past midnight. It's amazing to meet people who lift everyone's spirits. These people show the best of the @ycombinator community - they're smart, ambitious, and really kind! ❤️ There's always something fun to do here. Once, my friend took me on a food tour through the Castro and Mission areas, trying all sorts of tasty foods. Then I joined a spooky ghost tour at night, learning about the city's scary stories. On a weekend, I had a chance to go to Fisherman's Wharf and watch the sea lions! They were so funny, barking and lying around on the docks! From there, you can take a short boat ride to Alcatraz, the old prison island. I also enjoy walking around Haight-Ashbury. It's full of old stuff from the 1960s and cool vintage shops. It feels like stepping back in time! Whether you build the next generation defining AI startup or just find a group of friends who'll join your midnight burrito quest, SF is your oyster. It's a place where you can fail spectacularly, pivot gracefully, and still have time for a quick trip to wine country to "ideate" (aka nap in a vineyard)! If you're reading this from somewhere with normal weather patterns and reasonable rent, it's time to shake things up. Pack your dreams, your weirdness, and maybe a fog-proof jacket – San Francisco is calling! 🌉❤️🚀 #ILoveSanFrancisco 3:43 PM 30 August 2024 Mission street, SF

Day 172 at the SF building @octolane Every other CRM on the market previously built a system of records, that changes now. Instead of a system of records, now it’s possible to build a system of actions thanks to AI. Octolane is building AI-first Salesforce. Our software does a lot more than just storing customer data. It predicts your next actions and takes care of that for you. It uses AI to find the best customers, does lead scoring, reaches out to them and closes them. You can also generate any forecasts or reports from thousands of data points with one click or natural language command. You can communicate with hundreds of customers at the same time and predict their next actions. Customers are switching from HubSpot, Zoho, Pipedrive and Monday CRM to us after spending thousands of dollars on their implementation. We are using AI to automate writing many of the integrations that keep customers locked into Salesforce and then we are going to take all of their customers too. But why we do this? Because we don’t have enough. Our dream companies are still their clients. My co-founder and I are best friends for 10+ years and we are first generation immigrant. I dropped out of Duke from a full scholarship program to do things that seems impossible and to help others. Today, at this very moment, we are going through once in a lifetime opportunity and the industry is moving faster than we can possibly imagine. Who wouldn’t jump on this rocket ship?

I will pay you $1,000 if you switch from HubSpot to our AI CRM Octolane AI! We are that confident with our 4th version release! 1. We will take care of your entire migration, you will have 2 full time engineers working for you 2. Our team will also setup your GTM motion. The same team that grew 0 to 300K traffic/month before with $0 marketing budget and have 1 successful exit DMs are open and my email one@octolane.com “Octolane AI is rebuilding Salesforce with all the power of AI”

Day 251 of @octolane (YC W24) - Think AI Salesforce, minus the tower (for now). Here's the story of securing Octolane's first 10 Paid customers during @ycombinator W24 with SHIP email template! At @octolane (while going through the YC W24 batch and it was early), we achieved a milestone by securing our first 10 paid customers, each contributing $200/month, resulting in $2,400 MRR. What's even more remarkable is that we accomplished this with just one demo call per customer. I wanted to share the process, and thought that went into writing the prompt framework for AI agent generating emails with hope that it will help others find their early users like we found ours. We did this with carefully crafted email templates that are personalized based on built in signals and written by AI by mimicking the writing style of the sellers. We internally called it SHIP framework. Where a simple email becomes pretty special with more data from the CRM using AI agent. Later we realized that we internally created an AI SDR through some AI automation, but we never called it an AI SDR. Our focus always has been building the best possible AI first CRM solution with high retention where anyone can build any sales engine they want and they can do it fast. Happy to answer any questions in the comments! Please also know that even though we automated a lot of processes we still put a lot of effort to customize the process for actions taken by each buyer persona. We used AI to automate mundane + repetitive task inside of our CRM but always kept our human feedback loop in the process. This gave us best of the both world! This post has 3 parts: 1. Our process of generating these emails 2. Template/Framework that we used to write these emails 3. Best practices (There were only three) (Post continued to the next thread)

Octolane AI is LIVE!! 🚀 LLM powered B2B data enrichment API! ✨ - API Documentation (docs.octolane.com) is also LIVE powered by @mintlify! - App secrets are secured by @infisical - Our real time search is powered by amazing @metaphorsystems (insanely powerful and fast! 🤩) - APIs are hosted using @porterdotrun (1 click deploy to our own cloud account!) - Email system is powered by @resendlabs - Monitoring is powered by @helicone_ai (setup took literally 1 minute!) - Database + authentication stack is on @supabase - Analyzing billions of row of data powered by @ClickHouseDB (Crazy fast!! 🚀) - @nextjs 14 hosted on @vercel using @shadcn UI! We are still pretty early but moving pretty fast thanks to years of hard works of the amazing team above!! And thank you @startupxchange and @cartercote_ for your continuous support!! ❤️

I did 57 Sales Calls and Found the number 1 Predictor of Closing I've been doing founder-led sales for 18 months. Some calls feel great but go nowhere. Others feel mediocre but close in 48 hours. I couldn't figure out the pattern. So I did what any obsessive founder would do: I recorded 57 sales calls, transcribed them, and analyzed every single one looking for what actually predicts whether a deal closes. I tracked everything the sales books tell you matters: 1. BANT qualification (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) 2. MEDDIC framework (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, etc.) 3. Objection handling 4. Demo quality 5. Follow-up speed 6. Rapport building 𝗡𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗶𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘀 𝗺𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴. A single word. Used in the first 10 minutes of the call. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱 "𝘄𝗲." Here's what I found after analyzing all 57 calls: When prospects used "we" in the first 10 minutes: 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲: 𝟲𝟳% (20 out of 30 deals) When prospects used "I" in the first 10 minutes: 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲: 𝟯𝟭% (6 out of 19 deals) When prospects said "I think this could help" (no team language): 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲: 𝟭𝟮% (1 out of 8 deals) The difference between "we need this" and "I need this" was worth 36 percentage points. That's not a rounding error. That's the difference between hitting quota and missing it by 50%.And I almost missed it entirely. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗜 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀? Two months ago, I had two demo calls on the same day. 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝟭: Founder of a 12-person startup. Enthusiastic throughout. Said he "loved" the product. Asked great questions. Requested pricing immediately after.I hung up thinking: "That's closed." 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝟮: VP of Sales at a 30-person company. Seemed distracted. Asked basic questions. Said "this is interesting" but didn't seem excited.I hung up thinking: "That's dead." Guess what happened? Call 1 ghosted me. Completely. Never responded to follow-ups. Call 2 signed up two days later. No negotiation. No further questions. Just: "Let's move forward." I was baffled.I went back and re-listened to both calls. Looking for what I missed. Then I heard it. 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝟭 (𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗵𝗼𝘀𝘁): "Yeah, 𝗜 think this could really help." "𝗜'𝗺 looking for something to organize 𝗺𝘆 deals." "𝗜 need to get better at follow-ups." 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝟮 (𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲): "𝗪𝗲'𝗿𝗲 drowning in manual updates." "𝗪𝗲 just hired three reps and 𝘄𝗲 need to get them aligned." "𝗢𝘂𝗿 team is spending hours in Salesforce every week." Same problem. Same solution. Completely different language. One was talking about himself. One was talking about a team. And the team-focused one converted. The individual-focused one didn't. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗕𝗔𝗡𝗧? Every sales framework tells you to qualify on: 𝗕𝘂𝗱𝗴𝗲𝘁: "Do they have money?" 𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆: "Can they make the decision?" 𝗡𝗲𝗲𝗱: "Do they have the problem?" 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲: "When will they buy?" These questions are fine. But they miss something crucial: Organizational buy-in. When someone says "I need this," they're expressing a personal pain point. That's good. But it doesn't mean their organization agrees it's a priority. When someone says "we need this," they're expressing a shared pain point. The organization already recognizes the problem. You're not convincing them it exists. You're just showing them how to solve it. That's the difference between a 31% close rate and a 67% close rate. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗧𝗶𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 After analyzing the calls, I found prospects fall into three distinct language patterns:Tier 1: "We" Language (67% Close Rate) What it sounds like:"We're struggling with..." "Our team needs..." "We've been looking for..." "This would help us..." 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘁 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀: - The problem is acknowledged company-wide - There's already internal conversation about solving it - Multiple people feel the pain - Budget likely exists (they've discussed it) - Decision will be faster (already consensus) 𝗘𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗮 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱: "So we're a team of 8 doing sales right now, and we're all using different systems. Our CEO keeps asking us for pipeline updates and nobody has good data. We've been talking about getting a real CRM for like 3 months now." This deal closed in 5 days. 𝗧𝗶𝗲𝗿 𝟮: "I" Language (31% Close Rate) What it sounds like:"I'm dealing with..." "I need to..." "I've been thinking about..." "This could help me..." 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘁 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀: - The problem is personal, not organizational - They haven't discussed it with others yet - They're exploring, not actively buying - They might need to convince others - Decision will be slower (need internal buy-in) 𝗘𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗮 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: "Yeah, so I'm the founder and I'm doing all the sales right now. I keep losing track of who I've talked to. I know I need to get more organized but I haven't really had time to set anything up." This person requested a follow-up call, then cancelled it twice, then ghosted. 𝗧𝗶𝗲𝗿 𝟯: "I Think" Language (12% Close Rate) What it sounds like: "I think this could..." "I imagine we might..." "Maybe this would..." "It seems like..." 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘁 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀: - They're not even sure they have the problem - They're researching, not buying - They're probably talking to 10+ vendors - They have no timeline - They're looking for "the perfect solution" (doesn't exist) Example from a call that died:"Yeah, I think this could be useful. I imagine at some point we'll need something like this. I'm not really sure what the priority is right now, but I think it's worth exploring. Maybe we can reconnect in a few weeks?" We reconnected. They still weren't ready. We reconnected again. Same thing.That deal is still in my pipeline at 10% probability. It will never close. 𝗡𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗹 Here's your playbook: 1. In the first 10 minutes, listen for language patterns. 2. If you hear lots of "we":Shorten your qualification 3. Move to demo quickly 4. Ask about timeline and budget (they're probably ready) 5. Focus on proving you solve the specific problem 6. If you hear lots of "I":Dig deeper on organizational buy-in Ask: "Is anyone else on your team experiencing this?" Ask: "Have you discussed this with [boss/co-founder/team]?" If it's truly just them, consider disqualifying If you hear "I think" or "maybe":This is tire-kicker language Ask: "On a scale of 1-10, how urgent is solving this?" If they say anything below 8, end the call politely Offer to reconnect when it becomes urgent 𝗧𝗵𝗲 "𝗪𝗲 𝗧𝗲𝘀𝘁" 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 If you're unsure, ask this directly:"You mentioned [problem]. Is this something you're experiencing personally, or is this something your whole team is dealing with?" Their answer tells you everything:"Oh, everyone on the team feels this." → Continue, you've got a real opportunity. "Well, mostly me, but I'm sure others would benefit." → Probe harder or move on. "Just me right now." → Politely disqualify. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗠𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 This insight changed how I think about product-market fit. You don't have PMF when individuals love your product. You have PMF when teams need your product.If your customers are all solo users who say "I love this," you have a nice tool. Maybe a profitable one. But if your customers are teams who say "we need this," you have a business that scales. Because: - Teams have budgets - Teams have urgency - Teams have expansion potential (more seats) - Teams tell other teams Individual users just churn quietly. This is why I'm laser-focused on founders with teams, not solo founders. Solo founders might love Octolane. But they're "I" language deals. Founders 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗼𝗻 𝗢𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 "𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝗳 𝗶𝘁'𝘀 𝗮 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝗼 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗵𝗶𝗿𝗲 𝗮 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺?" Then they're not ready to buy yet. Come back when they have a team. Selling to someone's hypothetical future state is a low-probability bet. "𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝗳 𝗜'𝗺 𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗱𝘂𝗮𝗹𝘀, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘀? "Then your average deal size will be smaller and your close rate will be lower. That's fine if it's your business model. But know what you're signing up for. "𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆'𝗿𝗲 𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 '𝗜' 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆'𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻-𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿?" Decision authority ≠ organizational buy-in. A CEO can say "I'll buy this" but if their team doesn't actually need it, it won't get used and they'll churn. You want: "𝗪𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗜'𝗺 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻." Not: "𝗜 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗼𝗹, 𝘀𝗼 𝗜'𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝘂𝘆 𝗶𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘂𝘀." "𝗜𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗕𝗔𝗡𝗧'𝘀 '𝗡𝗲𝗲𝗱' 𝗰𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗻?" Sort of, but more nuanced. BANT asks: "Do they have a need?" This asks: "Does the organization recognize the need, or just one person?" Huge difference. Try this, then come back and tell me if I'm wrong. I'm serious. If you do this and find that "we" language doesn't predict closing, I want to know. Because either:I found a pattern that works across sales (and you should use it), or I found a pattern that's specific to my business (and you should find your own pattern) Either way, you win. Because you'll know what actually predicts closing for YOUR product. Not what a sales framework says should matter. What actually matters. Final Thoughts I spent years reading sales books. SPIN Selling. The Challenger Sale. Gap Selling. Predictable Revenue. All of them have frameworks. All of them have acronyms. None of them told me to listen for "we" in the first 10 minutes.I had to discover that by recording my own calls and looking at the data. And it changed everything. You just have to be willing to look. Now go record your next 10 calls. And listen for "we."I promise you'll hear it differently.

Day 85 at SF - building @octolane_app (YC W24) - Today is a big day even though I didn't have enough sleep. As we are migrating a series B company to our CRM suddenly we are facing scalability issues that we didn't even knew were there. Migrating to AWS and thank you @porterdotrun for helping us with SOC compliance and migration support - Just today we also finished analyzing 1M+ page view data for all of our customers in the last 60 days and captured 49K+ leads. Why is this significant? Because thanks to @OpenAI and our proprietary ML models, it was done entirely using AI, without any data scientist - We are also oversubscribed in terms of fund raising. Today I am having my office hour at YC and will talk to well wishers to decide on that. Shipping fast, building and profitability over everything. - No amount of investment or connection can make us a generational company, only building exceptional products can. So we are just focused on that. I love San Francisco ♥️ Noe Valley 6:35 am Wednesday March 6, 2024 #buildinpublic #crm

@ycombinator made everything faster for us 🚀❤️ Investors responded faster. Round closed quicker. Got a great valuation. And we skipped the 6 month “prove yourself” grind most early founders face. Most importantly, our product moved 10x faster, thanks to weekly office hours, our incredible group partners, constant feedback, and being surrounded by some of the sharpest builders we’ve ever met. YC creates pressure and momentum. That batch energy forces you to rise. We’ve never built or learned so fast. You’re not just raising at higher valuations, you’re also compressing time, tapping into a global signal boost, and joining a compound network. Speed + credibility + access = asymmetric upside. YC is the cheat code, if you’re ready to go all in. Best decision we ever made. 🔥💪🫡

Day 183 of building @octolane Today, I find myself at my co-founder's hospital cabin. He's just had surgery and can barely move. Here I am, coding in the corner, updating our AI enrichment codebase to add more features. I had a team meeting over a Slack huddle from the hospital's waiting area. Afterward, I recounted the discussion to my co-founder. Though he can't move his head, he's listening and offering suggestions. “You're right, I should’ve used Porter CLI to find the bug. It seems our object mapping got messed up during the migration from HubSpot,” I say, answering one of his questions. We've been best friends for over ten years, and this is the first time I've seen him bedridden, halfway across the world. Thankfully, it's nothing major, and he'll be fine. Despite his condition, this is the first day in 183 that he hasn’t pushed code. Yet, we didn’t miss our PR, and this month we're shipping more code, features, and fixes than in the past five months combined. He’s not allowed to touch his laptop, so he's collaborating with me through conversation alone. As he talks, he drifts off to sleep. I keep updating his wife, who arrives at the hospital with lunch for us. Eating in the hospital canteen with my co-founder parents, I can taste the love and effort in every bite. I overhear nurses laughing and talking about various things, including one complaining about the economy and how her neighbor is always out until 2 am. It always seems like everyone is thriving on Twitter, and sometimes I wonder how they do it. People rarely show the real struggles and challenges behind the scenes. One core lesson from @ycombinator has always stuck with us: keep showing up, no matter what, and keep doing it for decades. @daltonc taught us two key mantras that we hold close to our hearts: 1. "Just don't die." 2. "Are we having fun?" It's the "having fun" part while building something seemingly impossible that keeps a startup alive. I honestly don’t know how much joy and resilience we would have without the support of my co-founder, his incredible wife, and the entire @ycombinator community. They are our rock, our inspiration, and our strength. Seeing my co-founder in a hospital bed, yet still so passionate and driven, reminds me of the love and dedication that fuels this journey. We are not just building a company; we are building dreams, supported by people who believe in us wholeheartedly. For this, we are deeply grateful and feel incredibly fortunate to be part of this adventure. The next morning, I visit his cabin and stand beside his bed. He looks at me and asks, “How are things?” “Everything is fine; we are continuously crushing it,” I reply. He smiles, knowing how many challenges we’ve been facing to reach our goals since the day we started. He never stopped. He’s in it for the love of the game. “We’ll have a new layout by Friday, and filtering plus sorting will launch tomorrow,” I add, making sure he knows we are on track. He asks if I addressed all the feedback from @BurdinRuben Burdin Ruben at @stacksyncdata I nod confidently. “Yes! The AI enrichment can now identify people based on any job description for auto-prospecting. I'll deploy it today. Ruben also mentioned custom objects, and that will be done. @Andydy42 talked about duplicate opportunities, and the new layout will fix that issue as well.” “What about the investor update?” “We're not near our growth goal, but I believe our investors will understand. The HubSpot migration we did for some customers took a lot of resources, but it made our product better. We have customers trying to meet their MRR goals, and our priority should be to support them with everything we have before onboarding more customers.” His wife arrives, and the nurse brings a box of post-surgery-friendly food. I readjust a chair and help him sit up slowly. His wife, who is also pregnant, starts feeding him. Watching them, I am struck by the depth of their bond. Many couples would dream of having half of what they share. Though I don’t fully understand love and am still extremely single, I am learning from them. People don’t realize it, but without my co-founder’s wife’s support, Octolane wouldn’t have come this far. It’s not just founders who sacrifice; our close family members do too. They left everything behind, flew to San Francisco, and are helping build the company we dream of. One phone call was all it took for them to drop everything and come to help. Each day, it becomes less about building a unicorn and more about making a statement. America is the country where any first-generation immigrant can thrive if they work hard, stay focused, dream big, challenge the norm, and give back to the community. If you are reading this, fight for your dreams and never lose hope. Your grit is your gift. Please keep showing up, no matter what, and the universe will find a way to make things work. 5:22 am 13 June 2024 #buildinpublic #crm

Day 78 at SF - building @octolane_app (YC W24) My co-founder's O1 visa application got rejected 4 days ago. He is not gonna be here before @ycombinator demo day (April 3rd). I read that email then we talked about it for 15 minutes, figured out the next course of actions and went back to code. If anything, this motivated us to work even harder. Life is not easy for any founders, even if your product is working. Taking actions and keep going are the only things that matter. Good thing is he is in a different time zone so someone is always pushing code and ready to answer customers' call. So this video was made by AI (thank you @veedstudio!), and it reflects how it's going after joining @ycombinator, dropped out of Duke University, moving to SF and replacing Salesforce with the next generation AI Sales CRM! Things that are working for us - 1. Building in public (all users are coming via word of mouth and from my tweets) 2. Take every single sales call in person instead of zoom 3. Talking and getting feedback from our group partners Harj Taggar and Emmett Shear at @ycombinator 4. Making our customers are becoming our greatest advocates 5. Talking to other experienced YC founders to get feedback and suggestions 6. Shipping every single day 7. Shadowing SDR, AE, leaders in Sales in-person, doing Salesforce certification course 8. Listening to hip hop while coding 9. Drinking more coffee than water Wed 28 Feb 2024 Mission street, SF #buildinpublic

Octolane: Day 484 (April 9, 2025) It's been another productive week here in San Francisco. Looking back at the past 7 days of shipping at Octolane (days 477-484), I'm reminded that persistence is everything in this journey. What We Shipped This Week: 1. Better Slack Integration - Implemented OAuth flow with connect/disconnect actions and confirmation modals 2. JWT Payload Restructuring - Optimized token structure and implemented user data API with useUserSession 3. Meeting Transcript Enhancement - Added transcript copying functionality and improved speaker engagement metrics showing percentages and speaking times 4. Major UI/UX Upgrade - Enhanced scrollable activity containers, faster note creation, and improved stage handling with pipeline context 5. Fixed tons of bugs and more.. Looking at our metrics, the team pushed hard: 43 total pull requests reviewed from April 2-9. The most important part of all this isn't the features or numbers. It's that we keep going. There will always be thousands of reasons why something won't work - technical challenges, market doubts, competitive pressures. But you don't build for the skeptics. You build for yourself and for the people who believe in you. Here in SF, surrounded by both fierce competition and incredible innovation, I'm reminded daily that persistence is the differentiator. Day 484 isn't special because of what we shipped - it's special because we showed up again and again, pushed forward, and refused to stop. On to day 485.

Today is day 101 at SF building @octolane It has been 100 days here for me after dropping out of Duke and joining Y Combinator. I can talk about 100 things that we accomplished and failed to accomplished, mistakes I made and things my co-founder and I did right. Instead I want to talk about my struggle and a story of two individuals who saw through it and helped me. The greatest thing that ever happened to me as a kid who came from half way around the world and moved to a new city is the community and close friends for life I got through @ycombinator. Not many people know this, but during the busy week of fundraising I called Elle from RetailReady AI for help. She dropped everything at the spot to ensure everything was alright and I was doing okay. She invited me to her place for breakfast the next morning, sat with me, Sarah was making breakfast while emailing customers at the same time and Jason was coding in the background and I suddenly felt - "Wow, isn't this perfection? Working hard to achieve a goal that seems impossible to achieve from outside while spending time with friends I love and care about." Elle helped with my financial modeling, gave feedback on YC office hour notes, taught spreadsheet formulas that I had no ideas before. She calls me time to time just to ensure I am doing alright, gives me encouragement. If you are lucky to be her friend, she will look into your eyes and tell you - "I believe in you!" and sometimes that's everything you need. Not millions of dollar of funding but just to have someone who will believe in you. Elle and Sarah are all about the collaborations and they've this positive energy that's downright infectious! I am grateful to @ycombinator for bringing such concentration of incredibly kind and talented people together for life whom I wouldn't be able to meet otherwise. YC founders got this all-in attitude, building a product to tackle a real pain point – sometimes something the big names are too afraid to touch. I am proud to announce that Octolane AI (YC W24) collaborating with ReatailReady AI (YC W24) to celebrate all the hard work that our YC W24 founders are putting in through an after batch party. I can't thank enough to amazing @LisaShmulyan from @EveryBanking who is helping us to organize the event and she is literally taking care of everything to bring the community together for this post batch celebratory event! ✨ Date: 17th April Wednesday (7 - 10pm) Event link is in the first comment. ♥️ 9:26 pm 22 March 2024 2nd street, SF

@tryparadigm (YC W24) literally does this with AI spreadsheet better than anyone!! in a minute you can: 1. Extract data from LinkedIn url structured format using LLM 2. Customize any columns with AI prompts 3. Enrich/Search/Edit columns with built-in research agents

Day 93 at SF - building @octolane_app This is an open letter to San Francisco. From the moment I set foot here, I felt grateful for the warmth and generosity of its residents. There have been countless moments the generosity of the people at San Francisco has made a difference. Whether it was a friendly smile on a tough day, a helping hand when I needed it most, or the encouragement to keep pushing forward, you’ve shown me the true meaning of community. I’ve never felt alone here, not because of the city’s bustling streets, but because of the people who fill them with life and love. Your openness, your willingness to embrace others, and your unyielding support have been my rock. There hasn’t been a single instance when I reached out for help and received a ‘no.’ That’s something truly special about San Francisco - the sense of belonging and collective resilience. As I reflect on my journey, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude. To the friends who have become family, the office neighbors who’ve become friends, and the strangers who’ve shown kindness, thank you. You’ve taught me that it’s not just the place but the people in it that make life beautiful. I love San Francisco ❤️🌉 12:31 am 14 March 2024 2nd Street, SF #buildinpublic

Day 82 at SF- building @octolane_app (YC W24) - we are growing - red arrows are the day when we did major update and you can see it helped us to get more tractions and increase retention - I am so excited for the 4th version launch ^_^ - This is nothing, we need to push and ship more - We organized an insanely good hackathon with great people yesterday. Currently making a TikTok video on that and gonna publish soon! - now going to my friends' place AI and they are helping us with financial modeling. - with $6-8K monthly burn rate, we don't need much funding, and there are just too much inbound interest from good angels and VCs. Our plan is to be cockroaches until we reach profitability. Since we don't wanna spend time on fundraising instead of building, we are gonna close our round before demo day as fast as possible and go back to building. Thank you so much @davj @fondocom @retellai @yu_weijia @kathrynwu1 @openmartai @pelaseyed @superagent_ai @grntlng and AMID! 🙏 I love San Francisco ♥️ Noe Valley 9:05 am Sunday March 3, 2024

Regarding MCP - while @gokulr's Google + website analogy makes sense, I think the actual dynamic will mirror the CRM ecosystem (ironic I know). Initially, @Benioff faced resistance when asking companies to put customer data in their cloud. Then they created AppExchange - a platform where companies could build extensions while maintaining customer relationships. 1. Smart apps will embrace MCP but with "relationship preservation mechanisms" - requiring authentication tokens that expire, implementing callback confirmations for critical actions, and maintaining exclusive features only available in their native interface. 2. evidence suggests ecosystem participation often beats resistance. Look at how retailers initially fought Amazon but many now generate significant revenue through its marketplace. Similarly, hotels that joined booking platforms with careful terms ultimately expanded their reach. 3. for ad-supported apps, we'll likely see "MCP Premium APIs" emerge - where apps charge AI agents for API access to offset lost ad revenue, similar to how Spotify offers ad-free premium subscriptions. This is I think like how banks eventually embraced financial aggregators (Plaid) but with carefully negotiated terms. MCP adoption will follow a similar negotiated path

Day 62 at SF - building @octolane_app - We have paid users now - We are growing organically and inbounds are coming by building in public - We got our first enterprise LOI and design partner today - We got a new co-working space at Market street and it was our first day. If you are reading this, you are always welcome to join us. - Getting incredible support from Simon, Chris and Max from creator camp to take my content creation to the next level (they stayed at my place at SF and they are amazing) - Hosting AI hackathon for startups with @kathrynwu1 and thank you @davj from @fondocom and @grntlng from amid.ai for supporting us! (BTW it takes $1 to file your Delaware Franchise Taxes with @fondocom!) - My co-founder Rafi is still coding like a monster basically whenever he is not sleeping and as always, I am still coding at night and running around from office to office during day to close deals and learn. This all happened in the last 72 hours and the lack of sleep changed my face a little I think. Well, not gonna have any girlfriend soon for sure. Valentines day is just another day for me at SF. I am very excited that I am writing letters to some of close friends and sending token of appreciations for all the support I have been getting. Noe valley, SF 11:03 pm 13 Feb 2024 #buildinpublic #crm

Founders and friends I admire called me within minutes. Others reached out over text, email, Linkedin and even Slack. Some messaged just to say, “I’m flying to SF this week, let’s work together.” One friend stayed on Zoom, co-working with me until I finally went to bed. A few invited me to their offices, just so I wouldn’t have to work alone. Another offered to cover a gym membership, “just so you don’t forget to take care of yourself.” And then there were people who opened their arms. @CindyXBi, thank you for bringing me into your home yesterday. You cut fruit like my mom used to. You made me dinner. You sat with me for hours, just talking. That kind of quiet love, soft, steady, human is something I’ll never forget. You’re not just an investor. You’re a reflection of everything we love, respect, and are working so hard for. Moments like this remind me why San Francisco is still the best place to build. It's because of the people who show up, unprompted, when it matters most. To my cofounder, best friend, and the brother life gave me, @halim__rafi, thank you. You’ve stood by me through every storm, every sleepless night, every fragile moment. None of this would be possible without you. I wouldn’t want to build this with anyone else. We’re building something special with Octolane. Big updates are coming. Team motivation is at an all time high. And most importantly, we’ve locked in the one thing every great startup needs to win: focus. We’ll be sharing everything, how we build, what we learn, and the countless iterations it takes to get it right. One day at a time. In public. As always.

Dear @mintlify (or should I say, "My Silicon Valley Fairy Godparents"), Not many people know this but the name "Octolane" was actually was given by @handotdev! I'm writing this letter from my desk at Mission street, where the dream of having 3 monitor setup with a standing desk did come true! Do you remember when I showed up in San Francisco for the first time, fresh off the plane from Duke, looking like a lost puppy? Just like tech industry Dumbledores, Han and @hahnbeelee waved their keyboards and made me Mintlify's first intern! They didn't just fly me to SF; they made sure I had a home here! You practically gave me wings! You guys were in permanent "founder mode" before it was cool while having fun playing ping-pong! Hahnbee, you taught me TypeScript, turning my "JavaScript but make it better” approach into actual, readable code. And Han, you showed me how to build products from the ground up, and more importantly, how to make puns during standups! Thank you both for encouraging me to apply to @ycombinator! I used to have weekly check-ins with Hahnbee. I still miss them. They were half progress report, half life lessons, and half debugging marathon. (Yes, that's three halves. In startup land, we defy mathematical logic.) Thank you for always making sure and checking if I was doing okay! You are the greatest manager one can ask for, and thank you for always there for me!! Thanks to Mintlify, I rubbed elbows with the cool kids from Infisical, Pylon, Resend, Helicone and more. It was like a tech version of "The Avengers," but instead of fighting Thanos, I was seeing them battling merge conflicts to make the world of software beautiful! I went from "What's an API?" to "I just shipped a feature" faster than... well anything! IThank you Mintlify for inspiring me to start @octolane, probably because you saw my knack for turning caffeine and panic into functional code. Your constant support means more to me than anything in this world!! I am a better human being on a professional and personal level, it was because Mintlify was kind enough to take a shot at me! I promise to always remember your lessons like "comment your code as if the next person to read it is a sleep-deprived psychopath who knows where you live" and "the best way to debug is to explain your code to a rubber duck!" One day, I hope to inspire others the way you inspired me, minus the dad jokes (those are Han's territory)! Thank you Mintlify, for everything!!! Forever your mintie, One 5:43 PM 5 Sep 2024

Day 109 at SF building @octolane - We have now advanced the customization of the dashboard that can power your B2C sales too, with forecasting and contact-level insights on Octolane AI. This is currently available to any customer who was asking for a B2C specific CRM. - I can't thank @bonatsos enough for connecting me with @BrendanFoody - CEO of @mercor_ai. I talked and chatted with him today for hours. From just one conversation, he connected me with the right people and practically saved me 1 month of work, if not more. He is doing incredible work with Mercor AI, extremely humble and kind (also a dropout ^_^). We talked about Rippling's approach, how to do modular-based shipping and moving fast, compound startup methodology, and more! Will write more on this in my newsletter: coffeewithone.beehiiv.com/su… - People in San Francisco are so giving, and when young ambitious + extremely technical founders work and collaborate in this city, great stories are written. I love San Francisco ❤️🌉 7:44 pm 30 March 2024 StartupHQ, 2nd street #buildinpublic

Today marks day 366 of building @octolane (YC W24) — we’ve officially completed one year!! My co-founder and I are writing a post to share what it’s been like building an AI startup in SF, as a YC company and first-generation immigrants taking on the Goliath that is Salesforce. Here’s what we’ll cover: 1. What we wish we knew when starting out 2. Our toughest losses (and late night wins) 3. The raw moments (like when I cried but still kept going) 4. Closing our seed round in just 5 days, then dropping everything to help other startups and friends raise their funding 5. How one of our earliest customers became our first investor and wrote the first $100K check 6. Why SF is so special 7. Why my family is divided on my goals 8. Why I’ve been so focused on profitability from day 1 and cutting costs wherever I can 9. Growing a waitlist of 2,500+ companies, even as the most expensive CRM option out there 10. Only accepting new customers when we’re 100% sure our current customers are satisfied — and why I prioritize retention over revenue and profitability over growth 11. Why I see myself doing this for the next 20+ years 12. How we shipped 30 features in 30 days 13. How I ended up on the All-In podcast (not knowing about it at the time!) 14. Why we feel incredibly lucky and wouldn’t be here without the help of close friends, founders, and the SF community. It’ll be an honest and transparent look at our journey so far — it might surprise you. Let us know if there’s anything specific you’d like us to include! This will also be featured in our newsletter at coffeewithone. com, so subscribe if you don’t want to miss it. PS. Thank you @JinjingLiang for the kind words!

Here are a few things that were possible at Octolane, and wouldn't have happened without the miracle workers at @EveryBanking! 1. I couldn’t pay myself or my co-founder for the first seven months. We were so busy building the company that we struggled to set up payroll due to various challenges. This was also my first time managing payroll for a company. It was @LisaShmulyan who introduced me to Every, and CEO @rajeevbehera personally onboarded us, ensuring everything ran smoothly. The setup literally took minutes, and the team was always there to help us implement the best practices! 2. When I moved to SF, I didn’t have health insurance. My co-founder and his wife were new to the country and also without health coverage. Terence Looi and the Every team sorted everything out for us! 3. Every offers the BEST ONBOARDING EXPERIENCE! Hands down! Trust me, many companies tried to onboard us with great offers, but Every’s process stands out. I always recommend Every to anyone starting a new company. and there's more: "Our sign-up bonuses go directly to founders. Our cashback on card spending goes back to founders. Our treasury management automates cash handling for founders who need to stay board-compliant with their VCs. Our expense tracking and bill payments seamlessly integrate with bookkeeping—and we handle accounting and taxes automatically." - Rajeev Behera, CEO & Co-founder of Every With Every, your company's back office runs so smoothly, you'll have time to actually run your company!! Congratulations on the Series A!!!!!!!! Go team Every.io!!!

Day 84 at SF - building @octolane_app (YC W24) This week, 12 more @ycombinator W24 companies will register at Octolane AI. I am currently onboarding them in person on a 1:1 basis. "Octolane AI is rebuilding Salesforce with all the power of AI" #buildinpublic #CRM

If you’re thinking about moving to San Francisco, stop Googling cost of living calculators. That’s not what will make or break you here. Here’s what I learned about SF: 1. The fog always lifts eventually. Those cold, gray mornings won’t last forever. Same with hard times. Just because you can’t see clearly right now doesn’t mean the view isn’t coming. 2.Expensive doesn’t mean better. The $4 taco from the truck can be more memorable than the $200 tasting menu. Stop confusing price with value. 3.Your network is everything. In a city where everyone’s building something, the person you help today might change your life tomorrow. Show up for people. 4.Comfort zones are death zones. Everyone here moved from somewhere else and took a risk. If you’re not a little scared, you’re not growing fast enough. 5.You can’t out-earn dysfunction. Watching tech workers making $400k but miserable taught me that money solves money problems, not life problems. 6.Proximity to ambition is contagious. Being around people who are building, creating, and dreaming bigger makes you raise your own standards without trying. 7.The hill always looks steeper than it is. Whether it’s literal San Francisco hills or your goals, start walking. You’re stronger than you think. 8.Microclimates are real in life too. Two people can live in the same city and have completely different experiences. Your neighborhood, your people, your routines, they create your weather. 9.Transience teaches you to treasure. When everyone’s always leaving, you learn to be present. Stop waiting for the perfect moment, this is it. 10.The bridge you’re looking for is already built. The Golden Gate didn’t appear overnight. Your path exists, you just need to start crossing it.

Day 40 at SF - building @octolane_app @ycombinator backed our startup when I was practically doing linear algebra homework at Duke. Harj Taggar called me from SF and when he gave me the good news I started crying in front of everyone. I was still determined to take finals and then I read the research paper by Google Deepmind, and immediately left college with the next flight to SF from Durham, North Carolina. The only thing I regret? Not leaving sooner. I love working with natural language processing, and how we are doing sentiment analysis from all the emails, slack messages and video calls. I love when our AI email agent can make better decisions than me on what should be the response. I feel like I am building a mini Jarvis for myself. Which I can borrow to my friends to 10X their productivity. 1. Today is one of the happiest day of my life!we received triple the usual feedback on our product, and I'm all geared up to implement it within 24 hours! I am gonna implement all the feedback in the next 24 hours! Can't wait for deploying the next update. You can see some of sketches while building the product. 2. Just had a meeting with our Elle and Sarah from RetailReady AI (Our new customer). They are building next generation computer vision powered compliance engine that helps to stay up-to-date with retailer requirements, guiding operators to pack and ship orders that meet retailer standards. Basically eliminating chargebacks at the source! 3. Also on boarded @stacksyncdata and Towster Corp and getting great feedback and suggestions! @BurdinRuben and his team are building two-way sync between CRMs and Databases - including Salesforce, HubSpot, Postgres, BigQuery, MongoDB and more. 4. I'm thrilled to say we're using @lanterndb to manage over 5 million+ startup company data. Think Harmonic AI but free for everyone to use! And yes, we're making this an open-source app for everyone! 5. Tonight's plans? Meeting @fondocom CEO @davj and @brickywhat from @join_arc tonight for dinner and the menu is provided by @chefjeffsf I am still running around at SF from office to office with my college boy stamina! Not everything goes well all the time though. 1. Currently my docker is failing as I am trying to push the updated Gmail with AI integration for our CRM. I have been trying for 4 hours and absolutely no idea why it's not running. I am gonna reinstall docker and try again. God knows if it's the OS update, gonna figure it out. 2. I am getting NO all the time, more than you think actually. I just keep pushing through. 3. One VC friend told me that I am the right founder building for the wrong market. She meant well, she believes that my time would be better spent if I moved my energy to a different market instead of B2B data infrastructure for sales CRM. Good founders know when to pivot and great founders know how to pivot fast. Time will tell. 3. Someone 3 days ago just told me that our competition is gonna crush us. Also I got an email that says that "You have no chance." I completely understand that what I am trying to accomplish is incredibly hard and I am in a very saturated and competitive market. I purposefully chose this because I wanted to go for the most competitive market for a reason. If we make it, we'll not only become a Decacorn but also 10X workforce productivity! I replied to that email saying - "I like to live life dangerously." ^_^ Mission street, SF 6:00 pm, 22 Jan 2024 #buildinpublic #crm

my account is being targeted with a coordinated flood of fake bot attack, damaging my visibility since the algorithm flags profiles with high bot percentages as suspicious and low-quality. With 4,000 real followers, these fake accounts are having a substantial impact on my content reach - my posts are being suppressed and I'm at risk of shadowbanning or account restrictions or even blocked entirely.

2 days ago, I set out to get 100 new paid customers. Today, I’m changing that to 1,000. Why? Because If I work like hell, I can probably get 100 customers. That’s the problem. “Probably” means I’m playing not to lose. 1,000 customers in 100 days? That’s impossible. Honestly I don’t even know if I can pull it off. But here’s the thing, if everyone could do it, everyone would have done it. I dropped out of Duke 18 months ago. Built in the dark with my best friend. Talked to hundreds of customers. Watched some stay, watched some leave. Learned what didn’t work. Learned what might work. Different customers tried different things. Now we have conviction: A self-driving CRM that observes, acts, and learns from you. That’s the unlock. That’s what we’re betting everything on. Here’s the plan from San Francisco: 1. Talk to customers every single day 2. Build what people actually want 3. Do everything in public Keep trading. Keep shipping. There’s focus, but there’s also fire everywhere. That’s the only way anything worth doing gets done. This is David vs. Goliath. We’re not supposed to win. The Goliath is literally in the photo behind me, that the tallest tower in SF. But we’re going to keep going anyway. For you. For our team. For everyone who believes impossible goals are the only ones worth chasing. Let’s make this happen. - One / @octolane

Thank you @samuel_spitz for all the kind words! San Francisco is the place to build and has the community to achieve goals that seem almost impossible from outside! 🌉❤️🚀🫡 I love San Francisco ❤️

This happened in Mission. I live in Mission with my co-founder, his wife, and their newborn, putting in everything we have—working seven days a week with 6 senior engineers around the clock to build future that we believe in. I’ve convinced so many of my smart friends from Duke to move to SF because this city pushes you to be ambitious, to dream big, to work hard—the America we believe in. But the least we should expect is basic safety. People should be able to walk the streets without fear. It’s shameful that we build billion-dollar companies, pay some of the highest business taxes in the country, and still can’t ensure public safety. This isn't just one incident, there are more stories like this. He could have died. What are we doing? Why wouldn’t @SFPD step in to help? Why wouldn't they press charges or arrest the criminal? I have so much hope in @DanielLurie, but what should I tell my brilliant, ambitious friends when they ask if SF is worth the risk? Because right now, I don’t have a good answer. cc: @realDonaldTrump @elonmusk

Day 94 at SF - building @octolane_app I do a lot of stuff everyday but nothing gives me more joy than coding with my best friend at night and get into a silly contest of who can ship code faster. Reminds me of the old days in the high school when we were learning how to code from @YouTube and @freeCodeCamp together. His visa got rejected and he is in a different time zone, and if anything that actually made the situation better. Someone is always pushing codes - doesn't matter if it's day or after midnight at SF. We are improving our product at least 1% or more every single day and we are gonna do this for decade. customers over everything. Constantly optimizing every tiny pixels because this is gonna be our life's work. World's greatest founders and investors are backing us as mentors and as friends. We are not gonna let them down. We are not gonna let our customers down. 4 of our first 10 early customers became our angel investors and there is a reason for that. Also, everyone is asking. Yes, I bought 13 unicorns 🦄 - This is my way of surrounding myself with unicorns. The guy at the toy shop said congratulations to me because he thought I am having a newborn daughter or something. I was like, nope, I am extremely single, so much so that the only girl who ever paid any attention to me was a good looking person on Twitter who spam me through DM and has been asking for my social security number for some reason. 11:07 pm 2nd street, SF (5 minutes walk from the Salesforce tower because I like to keep my competition closer.) #buildinpublic

Day 292 at @octolane A few weeks ago, it was my birthday. Birthday surprises in startup land are a rare breed. Usually, it's just your code surprising you with new bugs. A small package arrived from @BasisSet. Inside was a custom keyring. As I turned it over in my hands, I read the three messages engraved on its surface: 1. Just don't die 2. Are we having fun?" 3. Octolane AI I felt a lump in my throat as I was instantly transported back to our last day at @ycombinator W24 batch, remembering what @daltonc told us on that day. Dalton had spoken about founders who endure tough times, who keep pushing through despite facing near-death experiences. He said these founders are more likely to succeed, not because of some inherent genius, but simply because they "stay in the game" long enough to leverage the compounding benefits of continuous effort. I showed the gift to my co-founder @halim__rafi and I felt a surge of emotions - gratitude, determination, and yes, a hint of fear. It meant a lot to us that someone out there believes in us, in our vision, in our ability to persevere. (Or at least believes we can handle sharp metal objects responsibly!) I clipped the keyring to my backpack, right next to the American flag. 🇺🇸 It'll go everywhere with me now. A constant reminder of our journey, our challenges, and why we do this. More than anything, building is about perseverance. It's about asking ourselves every day, "Are we having fun?" and being honest enough to course-correct when the answer is no. Here's to Octolane AI, to Basis Set, to YC, and to every founder out there pushing through their own challenges. (And the audacity to believe we can change the world, one line of code at a time.) Thank you @Xuezhao, @BeingTilly206, and @WilsonKyi from @BasisSet for the gift and the letter! This truly made our day!! Onward to Day 293. We're just getting started! ❤️ Mission Street, SF 8 October 2024 8:24 pm

Day 446 of just keep shipping at @octolane... 🚀💪🫡 my @ycombinator shirt says "Make something people want" but the fine print reads "even when nobody's watching, even when the metrics are down, even when your co founder is the only one who liked your launch post." They told us overnight success takes 10 years. Well, we’re on day 446, only 3,204 to go! For all founders, no one cares, so get back up, and ship anyway. Not because it's easy. But because makers gonna make. So I'll see you tomorrow for Day 447. Same shirt, same mission, same relentless pursuit of making something people want. 2:28 pm, 4 March 2025 Mission St. SF

Hands down, the best decision I ever made was moving to San Francisco! 🌉 It wouldn’t have happened without @harjtaggar from @ycombinator taking a wild shot on a college kid who thought he could outdo Salesforce! Dream big, take chances, and never look back! 🚀❤️

I feel extremely grateful and fortunate to be the first intern that @mintlify has ever hired. 💚 This is the @ycombinator startup I would happily work for 7 days a week and still it wouldn’t feel like work because how much the team was having fun, enjoying their time while building with friends. If I ever happened to be married, team members of Mintlify are the type of the people whom I would invite to my wedding. (All of you at Mintlify are by default invited by the way at my future wedding). @hahnbeelee and @handotdev created a world class culture and that attracted the best talents. I couldn’t ask for better mentors, guardians and friends to navigate my first time at SF as an intern. @mintlify is one of the best products out there for a reason. So much passion, work ethics, and hard work poured into what it is today. The best part is that they are just only getting started. 🦄 Thank you @hahnbeelee and @handotdev, for taking a chance on me. Team Mintlify made me a better human being, both emotionally and professionally. Thank you @katezchenn for making that phone call and convincing me to move to SF that summer. It’s incredible how one phone call from the right person at the right time can change the trajectory of your life, forever.

Day 71 at SF - Working on @octolane_app It's nearly 7:00 pm at our Mission Street office in SF. The cleaning team has started in the kitchen. The co-working space seemed empty until I spotted @Chandrika633 still engrossed in her laptop, fingers dancing across the keys as she takes her notes. And @darshil coding away with his headphones on, just like any other day. I really look up to them. I needed a break. It's been a tough day. Our app is down, and customers are messaging me, asking when it will be back. I just deployed the latest version of the app on @porterdotrun, hoping it fixes things. When we first made our app, we didn't think about how big it could get. We just wanted to make something people liked. Now we're tracking over 100,000 events, and it's starting to show. I approach their work area, to see what they were still doing at work. They're making something cool—a tool that shows you your net worth over your whole life, not just right now. You can watch it change and see how what you do affects it. I tried it out, linking my bank accounts in under a minute. I don't spend much—I don't take a salary—and save where I can, so I'm not even at $800 yet. But now, I'll be able to watch it grow and see how my previous decision changed it. Not many places in America you can have such concentration of talents where people are working on solving almost every sectors of humanity. San Francisco is one of these cities. I'm happy I dropped out of Duke, moved here, and met driven founders like @Chandrika633, who are working on seemingly boring yet complicated problems that can elevate the quality of our life. Tuesday, 20 Feb 2024 Mission Street, SF #buildinpublic

What Happened in 2023? - Joined @mintlify (YC W22) as their first SWE intern (Hands down the best thing that ever happened to me!) - Dropped out of Duke to pursue my startup full time (second best thing!) - Moved to SF with just a suitcase - My professor at Duke became a paid user of our product - Convinced my married friend to leave his full-time job and come halfway around the world to SF to work with me - Got into @ycombinator - Published a research paper with a mathematical prediction model that’s now licensed by Duke School of Medicine to help patients with sudden cardiac arrest risk - Onboarded 20+ customers who practically became my best friends and are actively giving feedback on our product and committed to pay - Met my hero @zenorocha (Still using his Dracula theme) and got an autograph for the book he wrote "14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers" - Started drinking more coffee than water #buildinpublic

Day 344 at @octolane Here in SF, you can just “do things”. Sometimes, that means 5:06 AM at a Mission Street apartment, looking at monitors while debugging code that was supposed to “just work.” The city’s quiet now—except for the endless dreams, and, let’s be real, caffeine machines. Extremely grateful to everyone who believed in Octolane early on—you trusted us before we even had a logo, a fully functional product, and every “is this even possible?” moment.. We promise we won’t let you down—no matter how long it takes (or how much caffeine it requires). The future doesn’t wait, and neither do we. My mother taught me to make magic out of nothing growing up, and it’s a lesson my co-founder @halim__rafi and I live by every day. It’s how we do more with less—and it’s how we’ll keep this promise. Alright, back to building—those bugs aren’t going to confuse themselves! 5:06 AM 19 November 2024 Mission St.

Day 87 at SF - building @octolane_app - Customers over everything Some of my friends were asking about a typical day for me. So here's my schedule for today. 5 - 7am: Building an advanced form feature and contact section on our app for @retellai. Super excited that they are our customer, team is moving fast! Write this tweet 7 - 8am: Meeting Tyler from Unidata (YC W24) who lives at Noe Valley, gonna go for walk with his dog Bisco and grab coffee 8am: Make breakfast + lunch and then go straight to our office 9am: One meeting, then work until all the bugs are fixed. We are shipping tons of new feature. One of which is using doing person level identification from your anonymous visitors and not just company. Then gonna publish the "Opportunity" (If you use Salesforce you know what it is) feature that we have been working on. @raunakdoesdev from @reductoai asked for session recording, so introducing that feature for our customer today. Thank you so much for all your feedback. What an impressive product you and @AbrahamAdit are building. Yesterday I worked with @caitlin and @brickywhat from awesome @join_arc to understand their workflow at their office. Their team is incredibly passionate and has been helpful to us from day 1. Got some great feedback, gonna work on them today and implement them for our 4th version release on March 11. Will get back to them this week with our new release to get feedback, and then iterate. 1pm: lunch with @Chandrika633 (our customer) and see how can we help more 6pm: Meeting with one of the most high growth successful YC founder from the recent batch whose team has been crushing it. I look up to them because of the level of customer obsession they have and how incredibly passionate they are. Gonna show a demo to the team and get feedback. 8pm: go through all the feedback we got with my co-founder and fix every single bugs. I just can't go to sleep until there are zero issues on GitHub 11:30 am: Head to home, make a todo list for the next day and go back to sleep before 1:00 am Wake up at 5:30 am and continue (I love sketching ui/ux and visualize customer feedback on paper) I love San Francisco ♥️ 6:46 am Friday 8 April, 2024

In the last 24 hours, over $100M has been poured into different “AI CRM” startups. Every headline looks the same: the true AI CRM. Friends and VCs keep sending me links. Here’s what you missed. Everybody and their moms are talking about “System of Action.” But here’s the truth: no one has set the standard yet. You can call a product AI-native, but if it doesn’t actually do what you want it to do, if it doesn’t move work forward for you, it’s just branding. And honestly, that’s not even the point. I’ve talked to hundreds of sales reps. One dad told me he missed his daughter’s recital because he was stuck updating Salesforce until 9pm. Imagine telling your kid, “Sorry honey, Daddy couldn’t make it because I was moving a deal from Stage 2.5 to Stage 3 in a dropdown menu.” That’s not software. That’s cruelty. People don’t love Salesforce, they fear it. They tolerate HubSpot, the way you tolerate a lukewarm coffee when it’s the only thing left at the office. Both ended up making reps do more work just to keep the system happy. They became Big Brother clipboards instead of partners in closing deals. That’s why we’re building @octolane differently. Engineering is our craft, but craft is also art. Every screen, every action, is designed to feel alive, to remove friction, and to give reps their time back. Because if reps don’t love using it, nothing else matters. But why our story is different? 1. First-gen immigrants. No safety net. Just hunger. Building in San Francisco with grit, espresso, and a Wi-Fi connection that sometimes cuts out mid-Zoom. 2. Youngest founders taking on Salesforce. They have more money than God, we have more caffeine than sleep. Fair fight. 3. Least funded team. Out of all the AI CRM companies, we’ve raised the lowest amount. But scrappiness is an advantage, hard to bloat when your “office” is a café table. We work 7 days a week. From cafés. From coworking spaces. Taking calls on the street. I once fixed a customer issue on Octolane while dodging a bus on Mission Street. True story. My co-founder shipped code the same day his wife gave birth. Our engineers regularly pull all-nighter, joined standup at 9am, and shipped the impossible by noon. We work on weekends so others don't need to. This isn’t about chasing funding headlines. It’s about giving reps their lives back. The dad at the recital. The mom who wants dinner with her kids instead of “one more pipeline update.” The rep who just wants to sell instead of role-playing as an unpaid data-entry intern. Gen Z doesn’t tolerate clunky dashboards. We expect software to be fast, simple, and intelligent by default. That’s what we’re building. The market is massive. There’s room for many players. But make no mistake - we’re the underdog. The future will tell who wins. Until then, it’s my best friend @halim__rafi, our small team and me, shipping from cafés in San Francisco, fueled by oat lattes and the belief that sales reps deserve better. Do we even know what we’re doing? Probably not. I still can’t remember where I put my eraser five minutes ago. But we don’t do this for money. We do this for Jennifer, who doesn’t want to miss dinner with her kids. For Tyler, who doesn’t want to miss his daughter’s recital. For Andrew, who’s so good at supporting his customers he shouldn’t have to waste 2 hours updating fields every single day. That’s why we’ll keep building. One day, one line of code, one awkward café Wi-Fi reset at a time. 🇺🇸 🫡

Two kids with big dreams and even bigger smiles!!!

Built personalized AI tutor for college students over the weekend using @supabase @nextjs and fine tuned Mistral! Thanks to @brevdev and tutorials from @HarperSCarroll!!

Day 175 of building @octolane You can now search for decision-makers directly within Octolane CRM. Get verified emails and LinkedIn profiles of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) without ever leaving Octolane. This feature is now LIVE for all our users! [Attached is a live demo video] 12:43 PM, June 4, 2024 Question: My newsletter has reached over 100 signups! The first edition is coming out this week. What content would you like to see? Check the first comment for the subscription link. ✨

It's way past midnight and I am late to the party, but this is a post that I just can't miss writing. I've been racing around San Francisco all day to get user feedback for @octolane. From @greptile's office (You guys should check out their new space!) to the other side of the Bay Area, it's been quite exciting! Everywhere I went, people kept asking, "Hey, did you catch Paradigm's launch?" It's as if Paradigm secretly replaced the fog with hype! I first met Anna at an event in @usepylon's old office. (I love Pylon's new office, but I still get emotional about their old one - where co-founders Marty, Robert, and Advith were living and working together. It inspired my co-founder and best friend Rafi and me to live and work together.) I showed up for Marty's feedback, and @annarmonaco appeared! During @ycombinator W24, Anna was everywhere. Prod event? There's Anna. YC office hour? Anna again. I started wondering if she had a teleportation device. Later, I had dinner with her team. (Hey June and Michael, congratulations on the grand launch!! So so excited for you guys!!!) Anna's work ethic is something else. Every day, I watched her work tirelessly, often from morning until past midnight. No matter where or when I'd see her, Anna and her team were always working relentlessly on their dreams. I'm pretty sure she thinks sleep is optional. She even convinced her old Google manager to join Paradigm as a founding engineer!! Talk about a persuasive pitch! Congrats, Anna! You've inspired us to work harder, sleep less, and maybe invest in a better coffee machine. Again, congratulations on everything, Anna! You're a motivational poster come to life, and you made it look easy!

Most people don't realize how much of the world runs on nobody checking if you're allowed to be there. Nobody asked me if I was "ready" to start a company while in college. We just started one and applied to YC with my best friend. Nobody asked if we were "big enough" to brief Gartner analysts. We're 5 people. We just scheduled the meeting. They took it. Nobody asked if our product was "done" enough to charge money. We shipped it anyway. didn't give up fro 18 months straight. Now we convert 54.6% of trials. The permission you're waiting for doesn't exist. There's no committee that decides you're qualified enough to reach out to that person, pitch that investor, or launch that product. The world is way more informal than you think. Most gatekeepers are imaginary. I used to think you needed connections to get into doors. Turns out you just apply. I thought you needed a network to raise money. You don't, you just need a problem worth solving and the ability to articulate why you're the one to solve it. Action creates legitimacy, not the other way around. We got our first customers before our product was "ready." We scheduled analyst briefings with Gartner as a 5-person startup. Why? Because we just... asked. And when you're building something real, people take you seriously. Once you start doing things, people assume you were always allowed to. Nobody asks "wait, who said you could do that?" They just respond to the email, take the meeting, or become your customer. Most of the world is held together by people who just decided to do something and nobody stopped them. My mom spent her whole life believing she could build something from nothing. No permission slip required. She was right. You can really just do things.

@chamath : “Last night while we were at poker i got this thing which — somebody in TWO DAYS built an open source competitor and just put the code out there and said here you go! Isnt that incredible?” Thank you @TheManMikeTan for the recording 🙏

18 months of not giving up, now @octolane growing faster than ever. Here's everything we learned the hard way: 1. Product-market fit isn't found in analytics. It's found in sales calls. Every "no" teaches you what people actually want. Every "yes" proves you're onto something real. You can't discover the truth hiding in your garage. You find it by selling in the daylight. 2. The best moat isn't your features. It's your speed. We spent 4 months building what competitors didn't have. Launched proudly. Customers shrugged. Our competitors had basic features that solved the actual problem. We had advanced features that solved imaginary ones. So we changed everything: → Shipped broken things weekly → Fixed what real users hated → Iterated 10x faster than anyone "doing it right" A moat isn't what you build. It's how fast you learn. By the time competitors copied our features, we were 20 iterations ahead. They were perfecting version 1.0. We were shipping version 7.2. When you're small, speed is your only unfair advantage. Everything else is just founders feeling productive while losing. 3. Launch day doesn't matter. Shipping every day does. We delayed launch for 8 months. "Not ready yet." "One more feature." "After we fix this." Subconciously, we were just terrified of judgment. Then we realized: launching is just ship daily or you die slowly. Launch day feels monumental. It's not. It's just Tuesday #1. Then comes Tuesday #2. Tuesday #3. Tuesday #47. Building a company isn't one epic moment. It's 1,000 boring Tuesdays where you choose to show up. Nobody remembers your launch. They remember if your product actually worked. 4. Runway isn't a deadline. It's a countdown to brutal honesty. 6 months left: "We have time." 3 months left: "We should probably move faster." 6 weeks left: "Everything that doesn't get customers dies TODAY." Low runway didn't kill us. It saved us. It forced one question for every decision: Does this get customers? Yes or no. Does this make money? Yes or no. Is this real work or am I just pretending to be busy? Constraints breed clarity. Abundance breeds delusion. The market doesn't whisper. It screams. You just have to be brave enough to listen.

Day 311 of building @octolane CRM - Think AI Salesforce, minus the tower (for now) Shipping updates from a sunny SF Sunday: 1. Instead of launching another narrow point solution, we went bold - building a complete CRM that actually replaces nine different tools - because that's what users actually need. Now we're in the fun part: obsessing over each feature, making each feature so polished that it feels like magic! 2. Our SF team has grown to 4 full-stack engineers, and I still code every single day. The buzz of a GitHub merge notification on Slack hits different - it's pure joy! No amount of operational duties will pull me away from coding. Actively hunting for 2 more senior engineers to join our mission. 3. Living with my co-founder and his wife in our SF apartment isn't just about saving money - it's our secret weapon. Morning chai from him, BBQ from me, and endless whiteboard sessions in our kitchen area. When you're building with your best friend, gathering user feedback in the mornnig to shipping before midnight feel like the most natural thing in the world! Having someone like my co-founder Rafi who knows your strengths, pushes your limits, and believes in your crazy ideas - that's the real startup advantage. 3. @Linear helps us move fast without meetings. Trust runs deep when everyone knows the roadmap and expectations - we just know what needs to be done. We ship v0, gather feedback, and iterate faster than anything because we're not afraid to be wrong and fast iterations fixes everything! 4. Wait list gonna cross 5 digits by January, around when we launch the next version of Octolane. Each number represents trust we've earned as a young startup. 5. Burn rate is around $40k monthly. It'll increase when we bring on our new design lead and 2 more engineers, but we're laser-focused on profitability within 12 months. At our current trajectory, we'll hit it! 6. Crystal clear on our ideal customer now. GTM strategy is locked and loaded. Few know this, but my co-founder and I previously scaled a site to 300K monthly visitors. Now we're using those battle-tested strategies for Octolane's growth. Through my posts and newsletter (shoutout to @beehiiv!), we've tested and proven our content marketing approach. We know exactly how to deliver value to our community. 7. Real talk from the trenches: My co-founder Rafi and I've faced everything together - lost customers, killed features without flinching, tough calls on turning away eager users. I'm a young founder and make mistakes (like thinking sleep is optional), but one thing's constant - we never stop shipping and we celebrate shipping over everything! Every single day, Octolane gets better because two best friends and first generation immigrants decided to chase a dream together. We'll keep at this for the next 20+ years, or until we can point to a tower in the SF skyline and tell our future kids, "See that? That's what happens when two friends believed in the American dream more than they feared failure.". Not just because we believe in the product, but because we believe in each other, and in all the other dreamers out there who see San Francisco's fog and think, "That looks like a good place to build something amazing." P.S. Mom, if you're reading this - yes, we're eating well. No, we haven't given up. And yes, someday we'll explain what a CRM actually is. Promise. 🚀 P.P.S. To all the immigrant founders out there running on chai, dreams, and visa deadlines: Your crazy dreams are valid. Those late-night calls to mom, the visa stress, and the weight of family sacrifices aren't holding you back - they're your winning edge. Our accents are proof that we're brave enough to pitch far from home. You are built for actions, and your story is just beginning. See you at the top of our future towers (or at the nearest chai spot, whichever comes first). 🚀 One Git commit at a time. 🫡 2:32 pm 27 Oct 2024 - Sunday Franklin Street, SF [Created weekly newsletter to share more on learning making things happen at Octolane - link in the first comment]

Day 30+2 at SF - Building @octolane_app We got our first 21 customers in the first 30 days. Here's how: We shipped 30 standalone features for 30 days. Yes, that means we shipped 1 feature every single day for the last 30 days. Some features worked well, some features didn't. Features that did well, we doubled down on those. Here's a simple plan we followed and it's gonna sound crazy simple to you: 1. Build something that solves a real problem. 2. Talk to people who have this problem - listen deeply and take notes. Be empathetic. 3. Launch as fast as possible. 4. Seek feedback from your first believers. 5. Keep improving quickly by repeating steps 3 and 4. What's next for us? Well, our product is ready. It's not perfect, but it started providing value that is converting to actual revenue for our users. We got our first power user 6 days ago and he spends more time on our site than his HubSpot account. I am getting more and more demo calls than I was getting just 3 weeks ago. In less than 48 hrs we are gonna do a public launch. Then for the next 50 days our goal is to get 10 paid customers. We want to make our product so good that it's a no brainer for our users to use our product. Only then we will believe that's it's a win-win situation for both of our customers and us. We need to provide more values. To a level when user will absolutely fall in love with our product. The way we are measuring this is retention and how much we are increasing average sales revenue for our users. I could't go to sleep knowing that our product can be even better and provide more values. This is very personal to me. These all may sound extreme but we are here to build a generational company. No amount of investment or industry connections is gonna make us a generational company, only building a truly great product can. At the end of the day, it's our users who will decide if our product is great or not. So yes, for the next 50 days our goal is to get 10 paid customers. What do we do exactly again? "We’re building the first sales CRM that can actually find customers and book sales calls with them for you. Our CRM uses LLMs to figure out anonymous users who are visiting your website and starts an email conversation with them that ends with scheduling a sales call, all without involving a human." How much our product gonna cost? (Open-Source projects and @ycombinator startups will get extreme Friends & Family discount. So the following price doesn't apply to you.) For our first 10 paid customers for pro plan it's gonna be $1,000/month and you get unlimited everything for 12 months. That means unlimited emails, unlimited seats, unlimited B2B data enrichment through our CRM, unlimited sales call booking for you. You also get my personal phone number and Slack connect support because we are committed to provide 24/7 support. If you do yearly contract, you will get discount and it's gonna be $5,000. I know, sounds crazy low. We already have some paid customers, but since the product changed so much in the last 30 days. I am gonna start counting from zero again. To all the brave founders out there starting their own thing: I get it, it's a rollercoaster that only goes up with your hard work. I am there, hitting walls and feeling the weight of each challenge. Please do not give up, just keep going. If there's anything I can do for you please know that my DMs are always open and you can reach out to me at one@octolane.com Sonoma, CA 9:14 PM Jan 16, 2024 #buildinpublic (I am again gonna pull all nighter for the public launch)

A few weeks ago, I found an injured pigeon on Market Street and decided to take it in. We named the pigeon Batman. It healed quickly, and over time, it became part of my routine. Every morning, it would sit on my blanket, waiting for food. If I was late, it would make noise and peck at me—like the most persistent alarm clock ever. During the day, it wandered around the apartment, and at night, it went into its cage on its own. Today, Batman finally regained the strength to fly, so I let it go. I thought I’d feel happy, but instead, it feels like I lost a friend. Happy New Year everyone!!!

Day 210 of @octolane - Think AI Salesforce, minus the tower (for now). We just shipped Conversation Intelligence! Know what is the latest with all your emails, meetings, and CRM data 1 click from for any company or contact — now all in one place in Octolane CRM! This is LIVE for all of our customers right now! Got a feature wish for your dream CRM? Comment or text me), and we'll keep granting wishes faster than a genie! ☕🧞‍♂️ 8:47 AM 10 July 2024 P.S. Also sharing a weekly newsletter where I spill the beans on our quest to buy the Salesforce tower! It's part product update, part confessional, and part "Oops, we didn't mean to set that on fire!" Newsletter link in the next comment! #buildinpublic #crm

Day 246 of @octolane (YC W24) - Think AI Salesforce, minus the tower (for now). I bought a physical table clock for my desk, but forgot the battery. For weeks, I've been staring at this 10:10 PM time-frozen monstrosity, convinced I'd discovered time travel or entered the Twilight Zone. I guess I just lose track of time when I'm glued to my laptop, forgetting I live in startup time where "just five more minutes" means "see you next week!" It seems like there's a never-ending list of things to do, with customers constantly joining the waitlist. One particularly persistent customer has signed up for the waitlist 4 times! I'm tempted to tell them, "Look, we're not a trendy nightclub. Repeatedly putting your name on the list won't get you in faster. We just can't onboard more customers until we've implemented all the feedback from our current ones." It's not that we have too many customers, but each one is as precious to us as the last slice of pizza at 3 AM. We've sworn a blood oath (or was it just coffee stains?) not to aggressively onboard more until we've achieved retention rates that would make cults jealous! Retention is our holy grail, even if it means fixing hundreds of bugs, constantly pushing new features, and upgrading our database schema so often that it's developing an identity crisis to accommodate all the new features. It's 3:05 AM in San Francisco, and I'm on my fourth round of reheating coffee. My blood type is now officially "Espresso Positive." With our Our team of four superheroes, our burn rate is somewhere between $20-25K per month. We're spending as little money as possible and working with ambitious people we respect, love, and care about. In fact, we believe in this philosophy so much that we added a quote from @paulg to the footer of Octolane's website long time ago: "You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible." ― Paul Graham I'm in awe of founders who achieve great success in a very short amount of time and make it look easier than breathing on Twitter. Meanwhile, Rafi and I haven't taken a day off since we got into @ycombinator. (Sorry, Mom! I promise I'll go back to studying... right after we IPO!) Rafi's been coding since morning and still hasn't slept. After 11 years of friendship, I finally started to suspect he's secretly a robot. (Note to self: Check for charging ports.) There's an infinite to-do list. It's extremely hard. Even on Day 246, we still feel like we haven't accomplished anything, which makes us want to put in even more work. I do get tired sometimes, but I keep going, with cracking jokes that are probably not as funny as I think they are (Sleep deprivation does wonders for my comedic skills!). Shoutout to @CindyBiSV who sent us enough food today to feed a small country. (Pro tip: Do yourself a favor and get yourself a unicorn investor like Cindy. She doesn't just go through walls to support you; she bulldozes entire buildings to ensure your success!) Looking at the feast Cindy sent, Rafi and I honestly thought she'd bought the whole restaurant or was planning to hibernate with us for winter.. (Note to self: Check local news for reports of missing a food truck.) Thank you, Cindy! The world is a better place with you in it, our stomachs are happier, and our fridge is fuller. Our capability of drinking more water than coffee is still questionable, but who needs hydration when you're drowning in deliciousness? ^_^ We're furiously working on: 1. A multi-step automation feature (like @zapier for CRM, with a lot of inspiration from them! ♥️) 2. A revamped sidebar to accommodate all our new features (because who doesn't love a good sidebar?) These features will be LIVE tomorrow! Or possibly the day after tomorrow. Time is a social construct when you're running on four hours of sleep and pure adrenaline! 3:08 AM August 14, 2024 Mission St, SF P.S. P.S. If anyone has a spare battery, a time machine, or the ability to bend the laws of physics, please hit us up. P.S. 2 If anyone needs us, we'll be in a food coma until 2025. Send reinforcement... or more coffee. Actually, just send coffee.

Super excited for you!!! 🫡🫡🫡🚀

Day 98 at SF - building @octolane Just finished reading everything I possibly could about @Rippling and @parkerconrad. Rippling is truly built different and we are blessed to have a founder like Parker Conrad in our lifetime. To beat big companies like Salesforce, using the "compound startup" idea, shown by Rippling and coined by Parker Conrad, is the only way and we have been doing this from day 1 for Octolane AI. This idea goes against the usual way of making just one product at a time. Instead, it suggests making several products together. This way, everything works better together, and each product is made well to solve big problems across different areas. By doing this, startups can find great opportunities that others might miss because they're only looking at small, specific problems. Rippling shows how this works by linking everything through employee information, bringing together HR, IT, and finance. This makes things less complicated and allows for smarter work processes. One of the big benefits is offering all these products together at a good price, making it easier for customers because they only have to learn how to use one system. This approach not only opens up new chances to grow but also offers complete solutions to big challenges, helping to move faster than big companies like Salesforce. Well, back to building in public, so today is day 98 of building @octolane (@ycombinator W24) and this is what we did today: - Fixed 19 issues, and implemented 9 feedbacks after the new feature launch. All within less than 24 hours. You can see it in the video. - Helped onboarding one customer from HubSpot to our platform. - Helped couple of companies with planing and connecting with right startups and people to host after YC batch party at SF. More information are coming soon. - Made a lot of intros today for good YC startups to some of the top investors in Silicon Valley - Helped two founders with their decks, pitches and when to accept pro-rata and MFN or not. Irony is I still don't have any deck for my startup - Wrote a recommendation for a 2 founders for applying to YC that I deeply believe in and worked together before. - Now working with the following features for our CRM: 1. AI note taking feature 2. Task creation and assignment 3. Meeting tracker 4. Redesigned dashboard My co-founder and I will release all of them tomorrow. Do I feel tired and overwhelmed? Yes, all the time. Will that stop me? No. We will work all day and we will work even more at night to get it done when big companies are still stuck deciding what to do. They talk too much so we will ship too much. Why? Because we don’t have enough. Our dream companies are still their clients. 12:46 am (technically day 99) 20 March 2024 2nd street, SF #buildinpublic #crm

9998 more customers to go - this is day 2 of 100. Let’s go San Francisco!!! 💪🌁

Day 5 at SF - Building @octolane_app The entire @TheCeloCenter co-working office feels empty; there's no one here right now. I was going through a @contrary research article and realized how big of a fan I am of their detailed analysis of companies. Today, we are shipping the 1-Click AI Analyst for our LLM First B2B Sales CRM! Imagine if your AI performs analysis at the same level as @contrary, then helps you tailor your ideal customer profile to truly personalize your outreach. Imagine having an analyst who does this for thousands of prospects, quickly and reliably. That's what the "1-Click AI Analyst" is! Rafi and I are now fine-tuning a model for this specific use case, so the end result will be even better! I was showing a demo to my partner friend at a prominent VC to get some initial feedback. He said, "One, dude, you are going to make our lives so much easier!" This made me very happy. Pulling an all-nighter was worth it! ^_^ Today marks our 5th day of shipping 30 standalone features in 30 days! @TheCeloCenterA Office, Mission Street, SF 8:28 PM Dec 23, 2023 #buildinpublic

1. @peggy_wang’s startup does not compete with Ego. Please stop pretending you’ve done the “due diligence” when your source of information is just another comment. 2. Peggy is an incredible human. ❤️ Years ago when I needed help, she showed up without hesitation, even when we weren’t close. Every time I see her, she brings joy. 3. She’s cracked at what she does. Not every co-founder split is rainbows and unicorns. sometimes it’s more like dividing up the IKEA furniture after a breakup but that’s life. You move on like adults. I know both Ego founders too, they’re good people. 4. What actually bothers me is how low the average IQ on Twitter feels. Some of you are out here cosplaying as startup analysts when your biggest business decision this week was choosing between oat milk and almond milk at Starbucks. Proud of you Peggy, you have my full support. you’re killing it, please ignore the noise! 💪

Day 174 at the SF building @octolane "She is trying to show you her shoes, you should pay attention." I paused typing and turned to look at my sister-in-law. She stood beside me with my 4-year-old niece, whose tiny hands cradled a new pair of shoes glittering like a thousand stars. She held them close, yet cautiously away from my laptop, as there is an invisible boundary between her world and mine. "Papa, see my shoes, they have glitters!" her eyes were sparkling. I had returned home after more than 3 years, following a 23 hrs flight and I am always with my laptop to reply all the never ending Slack messages and emails to help our users. It took a moment for her words to sink in. I turned to my sister-in-law and asked, puzzled, "Why is she calling me papa?" "She calls all your brothers papa," she replied, a gentle smile playing on her lips. "Just say something nice about her shoes, and she won’t bother you. You always seem so busy!" There was a hint of something in her voice—a mix of understanding and unspoken concern. I looked around the room. A glass of milk sat in front of me, a small plate covering it to keep it warm. My mom prepared it. My water bottle was filled with mango juice she had made, and snacks I hadn't seen were laid out on the table. "Those are made by me. You used to eat them all the time," my sister-in-law remarked, noticing my gaze. My niece's voice broke through my thoughts. "Do you like my shoes?" I looked at her, feeling like an outsider in this world. Was this a bubble I had forgotten how to live in? "I love your shoes!" I said, forcing myself to be present. "They are so shiny! What else do you have?" "I have shoes that light up and have Spider-Man on them." "Wow! That's amazing! How did you get them?" "You can have mine if you want!" Her eyes were filled with kindness and joy—a combination money could never buy. "What do you do all day?" she asked innocently. Being confused about how to explain what a CRM is, I replied, "I am building a machine that can save people time." "Can it save your time?" "It is saving my time, but I still need to help people with it. That’s why I’m always with my laptop." "Okay, helping is good. My grandma said you are dumb. I don’t think you are dumb, papa. Also, please don’t tell grandma I said that." My sister-in-law interjected, "Okay Inaya, you’ve talked enough. One has stuff to do. Let's go to the other room." As they walked away, I looked around once more, taking in the little acts of love and care that surrounded me. In my niece's eyes, I was a hero. I am here to live up to that with work ethic and by building a legacy of doing what seems impossible with our team. By working hard, staying focused, and improving our product by 1% every day, and doing it for 10 years, we will end up helping millions of people. I am grateful for this opportunity to prove to her that dedication and perseverance will always create a meaningful impact. --- We have newly built custom objects where you can go wild on customization for your CRM. This is LIVE for everyone! [Attached is a live demo video] 3:11 AM Monday, June 3, 2024

today wasn’t about big milestones. it was about the kind of progress no one sees. deep work, small pieces clicking into place, foundations being set. Logged 12+ hours of focused work Prioritized my workout and full meals first, because if I'm not at my best, I can’t lift the team Took real steps to sharpen our product focus with my co-founder @halim__rafi - just keep shipping, just keep improving, every single day No fireworks. No big headlines. Just another day stacking bricks. If there’s anything I’m learning: ✅ Focus compounds quietly. ✅ Discipline compounds quietly. ✅ Trust builds quietly. Proud of where we’re heading. Grateful for every invisible win along the way. Brick by brick. Saturday by Saturday. Improvement by improvement. More soon. Day 495. 9:47 PM. Mission St., SF.

Big fan of @annarmonaco and what she’s building with @paradigmai. What an incredible founder!! We were in the same YC batch (W24), and it’s inspiring to watch her execute. Here’s why I think Paradigm is doing a lot right: 1. AI-native by design: not a bolt-on feature, but a rethink of what a spreadsheet can be when every cell is powered by an agent. 2. Immediate ROI: Paradigm saves real hours for teams like ours at Octolane. We’ve seen research and tracking research work for our product ideation in minutes now!! Love seeing a @ycombinator batchmate turn a bold idea into a product people genuinely rely on. Paradigm is one of those tools that just clicks when you use it. ❤️ Note: shared a video on how we are using Paradigm AI at @octolane

Yesterday: → 3 in-person customer interviews → 80+ bugs & improvements Today: → 2 more → Already 10 more issues logged (thank you @BurdinRuben 🙏) Tomorrow: → 5 lined up Past 4 weeks at Octolane: ✅ 131 PRs merged ✅ 340 PRs reviewed 🚀 93,577 lines of code modified ⏱ ~5 minutes to first review ⏱ ~13 minutes to merge We're not stopping until: → Retention is world-class → The experience feels invisible → Every bug, every friction, every silent frustration is gone And we're fixing every silent frustration users don't even know how to explain. Octolane isn’t perfect. And we didn’t grow in perfect conditions. But that’s the point. And that’s exactly why we’ll win. We ship. We fix. We listen. Every. Single. Day. Because this isn’t writing code. It’s a reflection of who we are. Of what we stand for. It’s not just product. It’s personal.

I completely agree with @paulg and thank you @davj for mentioning me! 🙏 I was coding alongside with a late 30 years software engineer just 2 days ago. And my realization was, if you are a 10X software engineer, AI will make you 100X engineer. But if you do not know the fundamentals, you won't be able to get the most out of AI for your coding.

Day 280 of @octolane - Think AI Salesforce, minus the tower (for now!) San Francisco isn't just accelerating our product improvement and Octolane's velocity of shipping—it's supercharging our wellbeing! 🔥🚀 There's not a single day when Octolane hasn't improved or we haven't pushed code. Each commit, each feature, each improvement adds up—in our product and in ourselves. We're not just building software; we're building our best selves! 280 days of non-stop leveling up! 📈💪 It's 7 PM in the City by the Bay, and this productive day is reaching its crescendo. But the night is young, and so is our energy! 🌃 Gym time is calling—gotta keep ourselves in shape! Then, it's back to the workstation, fueled by endorphins and excitement! Speaking of excitement, I'm deep in the code, shipping my favorite feature today! Meanwhile, my incredible co-founder @halim__rafi has already launched our sleek new left sidebar, showcasing all the upcoming features we're iterating on. He is relentlessly working to keep the whole Octolane squad towards our ICP roadmap. Talk about teamwork making the dream work! 🤜🤛 From 1-click automation to email sequencing, and using LLM to scan emails for updating CRM fields real time— staying in focus for the long term goal is the key! But remember, Octolane fam: amid all this hustle, we prioritize our well-being. A healthy founder leads to a healthy startup, and a healthy startup changes the world! 🌍 Our daily mantra: 1. Ship Relentlessly, Iterate Fearlessly! Embrace feedback like it's rocket fuel for growth. 2. Hit the gym! Strong bodies build robust code! 3. Eat healthy! Fuel your body with the same care you optimize your databases. 4. Elevate Others, Accelerate Together! 🤝🚀 Your success is my success; we rise by lifting others. 5. Kindness is our Killer Feature! ❤️🔧 A supportive community ships faster and celebrates louder!

Here's to every immigrant who took that giant leap for building a better tomorrow. ❤️🌁🚀

Day 260 of @octolane (YC W24) - Think AI Salesforce, minus the tower (for now). Just shipping, what are you guys up to? Would appreciate any feedback! 5:34 PM 28 August 2024 Mission street, SF #buildinpublic #crm

Overheard at Café Réveille today - "There’s not many who can take down Salesforce… well, there's the Octolane kids. But they stopped posting. They’re too young. And honestly, anyone with enough funding can build what they’re building. There’s MCP and a hundred tools out there now..." And then they laughed... At first I thought, wow, we’ve officially made it into SF coffee shop gossip. Then I realized… oh, they’re laughing at us. Judging us off our frequency like we’re TikTok influencers with an algorithm to please. Oh please, our LinkedIn activity is not your stock ticker. Here’s the thing though. While they were laughing, we’ve been cooking. I mean the kind where you read so many research papers your eyes start indexing citations in your dreams. And what we’re building isn’t something you can just spin up with money and a couple wrappers around GPT. We’ve read research papers most people would never open just to squeeze out a tiny accuracy gain, because it matters. Anyone can build a chatbot. But building LLM architecture that runs 24/7 with real-time context, evaluates edge cases step by step with transparency, remembers exactly how you work, and pushes millions of tokens per second just to make your next move effortless, that’s art. And then you still have to make the UX so clean the complexity disappears. That’s the hardest part. And we didn’t want it to be easy. So yeah, laugh at us. Undermine our baby. Say we’re too young, too quiet, too whatever. That’s actually perfect. Because the only stories worth telling are the impossible ones. And about me “not posting”? Well… guess who’s back. One day at a time. 🇺🇸🫡 @octolane Cafe Reveille, Mission Bay, SF 29 Aug 2025 - 1:51 pm

Three issues with this take: 1. Confuses capability with product - OpenAI can build good models, but building 1000 vertical SaaS products well? Different game entirely 2. The last mile is hard - General capabilities ≠ domain solutions. Specialized workflows, integrations, and customer relationships create real moats that models alone can't replicate. 3. History suggests otherwise - AWS didn't kill all infrastructure startups. Salesforce didn't kill all CRM companies. Horizontal platforms rarely dominate every vertical layer. The 12-18 month window might be real for basic apps, but dismisses real value creation at the application layer

Day 345 @octolane It’s raining in San Francisco, and I’m walking to Blue Bottle on Mission Street. No umbrella—just the rain soaking through my shirt. I like walking in the rain. Rain feels grounding, like home. Back home, my mom would spend hours at the sewing machine, patching clothes, stitching uniforms, and somehow making everything last. I’m wearing my favorite shirt today—an Oxford shirt I’ve worn so often it’s almost part of me. My mom sewed my name onto it, right over my heart. I didn’t think much of it as a kid, but now it’s a reminder of her love and the sacrifices she made so all four of her sons could go to school. San Francisco has a way of making you feel like the world is moving faster here, like every corner of the city holds a story waiting to unfold. After our morning stand-up, I walked through the rain to Blue Bottle for my daily coffee. Here’s what’s happening around me at Blue Bottle right now: •On my right, a developer is writing code with @cursor_ai—I can tell from the shortcuts he’s using. •On my left, two founders are trying to convince someone to join their startup. They’re debating the best restaurant websites to test their ai ordering automation •And me? I’m drafting a welcome letter for the newest engineer joining our team tonight. He’s amazing. This is a big moment—our tiny team of four is about to double. Thirty hours ago, something we’d been working on for eight months finally clicked. We’d spent sleepless nights coding, reading blogs, studying research papers, and talking to strangers—people who became our friends, then our customers. There were rejections, setbacks, hearing it’s not possible and a hundred reasons to give up, but we didn’t. When the breakthrough happened, I almost physically felt that the thought process of my brain shifted. I ran to the kitchen to show Rafi. We’ve been building together for over a decade, so I didn’t even need to explain. He looked at my wireframe and just nodded. We both felt the moment. Now, we’re finally ready to bring more people on board—the ones who believed in us even when we had nothing to show. This is still hard, maybe harder than ever, but that’s why we’re here. As I’m drafting the letter, someone taps my shoulder. “Are you One?” she asks with a smile. I nod, a little surprised. “Recognized you from your shirt,” she says, pointing at my name stitched on my shirt. I laugh. “I’ve been wearing this shirt for 4 years now!” She grins. “I can see why. Octolane came up in a meeting last week. Can I buy you a coffee? You know, like a coffee with One.” “Oh, by the way, I’m Jenifer,” she adds. “You probably have five Jenifers in your contacts, but my last name is Gets Things Done. Just in case you need to find me later.” Growing up, my mom taught me to take care of others first. And here, in SF, that same spirit exists in its own way. If you work hard, do not say no to free coffee, and help others along the way, this city has a way of giving back. 12: 20 p.m. November 20, 2024 Mission Street, SF 🌁

Turns out the ultimate luxury isn’t a private jet, it’s eight kids and still having abs ♥️

The first ever fall application for @ycombinator is now open!

The CRM just started driving itself. I click one button on @octolane and every single field updates in real-time. No data entry. No manual updates. Just AI pulling from emails, meeting transcripts, and live web search. Leadership changes? Found it. Product updates? Got it. Company news? Already there. Every single update is backed by evidence - sourced from your company memory, inbox, meetings, and the web. If you can Google it, Octolane finds it for you. Triple-verified data. Every field links back to its source. And if you edit something? Octolane remembers. Self-driving. Not manually driven. And this is only Saturday.

It has been a year since dropping out of Duke to build @octolane. 2024 taught me that success isn’t about funding, hype, or connections. It’s about your “why”—the one reason that drives you so deeply, others can’t help but believe in you too. I still feel incredibly fortunate that @YCombinator decided to take a chance on Octolane - when I was just an college kid doing linear algebra. YC gave us lifelong friends who became therapists when things got tough, helped us sidestep mistakes we didn’t see coming, and connected us with the most talented people in the industry. If we had to start over, two things that would be common are to build with my co-founder Rafi and apply to YC - every single time. 2024 brought more challenges than I could have imagined, but such is life. We don’t plan for the inevitable; we stand up, and do everything to keep the fire alive. That’s the game we’re in. I want to thank each and every one of you, especially my co-founder @halim__rafi. There were days when I didn’t feel deserving of all the support I received during toughest moments. But your belief in us, through the good times and the bad, has been everything. Thank you for standing with us. We won’t let you down. 10:37 AM Saturday, 4 Jan 2024 Mission St. SF

Day 27 at SF building @octolane_app Note- We are rebranding Bye Bye Carta and getting ready for Product Hunt launch with a stable version! Please suggest us a name, and if we end choosing that one, we will give you lifetime free access and will also buy you coffee at SF! Thank you so much @stijnbe for making the first contribution and creating issue! 🐐 ------- "Can you please help us to migrate from Carta, we are actively looking for alternatives!" A VC GP urged us to pivot towards an open-source solution for Carta alternative, despite our project being barely 48 hours old. I told her that our project is not stable, it will take us some time to support cloud hosting with a stable version. She said, "One, I have been tracking your progress for months and I understand that your sales CRM is doing well but you should 100% lead the project for an open source solution for a Carta alternative. We will happily invest if you need funding." Emails are flooding in, asking for pricing, making me think – should I shift focus from our AI Sales CRM for startups, which is already helping my startup founders friends? Salesforce and Hubspot is crazy expensive, and we need a sales CRM solution that can support startups and SMBs. We need a CRM that will not only help you to sell but also improve your product at the same time. I am looking at my notebook and all the UI I drew over the months for this project and while thinking. Team at @twentycrm inspire me a lot with their mission of building an open source CRM, thank you twenty.com for doing everything that you guys do. I called my mom back at home and she is still upset that I dropped out from Duke. I told her about the situation that I am currently in and she said, "Well, you should go back to college, you had a full scholarship there." She paused and then she said, "Then again, son, I didn't raise a quitter. People like us need to work twice as hard to get the opportunities. College was supposed to prepare you for this and if you ask me the end goal is to always help others, so you should do whatever help most people. God will give greater gifts in return if you make it your mission to help others." So here's the action plan: 1. We are rebranding the Bye Bye Carta and will do everything in my capability to make it as easy as possible with self hosting. You can do whatever you want with the code, no need to give us credit. 2. We are introducing Cloud Hosting with the most affordable solution in the market with free tier. No restriction on how many stakeholders you can add. This will introduce strong competition + pressure on the market and we are aiming to break the monopoly in the market an open source solution. Our AI Sales CRM isn't going anywhere – the Octolane AI team (My co-founder @halim__rafi and I @coffeewithone) is dedicated to its growth. But Bye Bye Carta will stand as its own entity with its rebranded version, forever championing founders and the open-source community. We will ALWAYS put the founders and open-source community first. Period. I'm grateful for the overwhelming support. Especially @peer_rich, who reposted my tweet and upgraded our cal.com account for free until our investment round wrapped up. Thank you so much @james406 for sharing our hacker news post, it helped us to get our initial traction and onboarded more open source developers who wanted to help us. Thank you @steventey for building dub.co project, our repo structure inspired by your project. Thank you @shadcn, every component we built was built with shadcn ui. You guys inspire us to achieve greatness in life and I can't thank you enough. Thank you @diqitally for building open-source @lanterndb, your team made it super easy to implement an AI first database for our project. Thank you @porterdotrun, we helped us to use our own AWS credit for our service. Thank you @rauchg and the team behind @vercel, you made it incredibly easy to do 1 click NextJS deploy. "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships" - Michael Jordan. Mission Street, SF 6:15 PM Jan 13, 2024 #buildinpublic

Day 352 at @octolane Building in public inspired this newsletter. It’s about giving you a transparent, behind-the-scenes look at the struggles and successes of building a startup in San Francisco, taking on a $300 billion giant like Salesforce. I share Octolane's daily journey on Twitter and LinkedIn, but this newsletter dives deeper—more stories, lessons, and insights. If you have any feedback, I’d appreciate it—let us know what you’d like included in the next one! Thanks to @denk_tweets, using @beehiiv for Coffee with One newsletter is wonderful! 🚀 As a former Substack fan, I’ve got to say, the writing experience here is so smooth that I immediately upgraded to the Max plan! Happy Thanksgiving everyone!! 9:49 PM 28 Nov 2024 Mission Street, SF 🌁

Brian Chesky got told Airbnb would never work. Drew Houston got told Dropbox was just a feature. Patrick Collison got told Stripe would get crushed by PayPal. All of them ignored the noise and built. When I dropped out of Duke to build Octolane with my best friend, people had opinions. Plenty of them. “CRMs are a solved problem.” “Salesforce has too much of a moat.” “Another AI tool? Really?” The thing is, everyone has an opinion about what won’t work. Very few people actually build. I remember working late nights in San Francisco, debugging our software for the hundredth time. My mom called asking when I’d go back to school. Friends from Duke were posting their job offers. But I kept showing up with my best friend Rafi. Every day. Building. consistency beats conviction every time. i saw the best founders who win are the ones who keep building when everyone else stops. They’re the ones who ship on Day 100 with the same energy they had on Day 1. we’re building a self-driving CRM @octolane to take down Salesforce. Could we fail? Absolutely. Will some people say it won’t work? They already do. The noise never stops. Your job isn’t to silence it. Your job is to build anyway. Show up. Ship. Repeat. That’s the only way anything gets built.