I'm Working on 24 Projects Right Now 🥴 Details 👇

I've tried all (24) AI coding agents & IDEs 😵‍💫 [Cursor, Softgen, Windsurf, Wrapifai, Copilot, Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit, MarsX, Claude, AmazonQ, Pear, Devin, Github Spark, IDX, Webdraw, Tempo, Cline, Continue, Databutton, Base44, Qodo, Aider] The Vibe Coding giga-thread:

AI won't replace the entire profession, but it's replacing the bottom 20-80% in {translation, design, coding, content, marketing,sales,design, operation, account, law} Small teams like mine beat big corporations because AI brings huge leverage for A players Real examples of AI:

Chinese AI startups: 1/6th of US funding, bad press, sanctions, brain drain, communism, little English proficiency, and no talent influx.. But after using Manus AI, Deepseek, Trae, Kling, Vidu, & Ying, I think the US is in trouble. At this pace, China will dominate AI. Demos:

🚨Ilya Sutskever finally confirmed > scaling LLMs at the pre-training stage plateaued > the compute is scaling but data isn’t and new or synthetic data isn’t moving the needle What’s next > same as human brain, stopped growing in size but humanity kept advancing, the agents and tools on top of LLMs will fuel the progress > sequence to sequence learning > agentic behavior > teach self awareness Think of it as the “iPhone”, which kept getting bigger and more useful from hardware point, but plateaued and the while focused shifted to applications. 2025 will be the year of Agents! > @Replit for coding > @seobotai for content > @crewAIInc for the rest

Absolutely nobody predicted this: AI Code is the new NoCode. Honestly, I like talking to AI more than to human developers when building small apps. It understands me better, even with half-baked specs. I've literally tested all AI builders I could find 😑 1/20 🧵 :

I've tried all (46 😵‍💫) AI Coding Agents & IDEs [Factory, Cursor, Heyboss, Windsurf, Emergent, Wrapifai, Copilot, Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit, MarsX, Canva, Devin, Github Spark, IDX, Stitch & more] The most complete list ever made (with demos & notes):

After seeing these humanoid robot demos, I bet you'll be convinced that all manual labor will be gone to robots. (even the world's oldest profession will be taken by them). All 26 humanoid robot demos:

I've tried all (36) AI Coding Agents & IDEs 😵‍💫 [CreateXyz, Cursor, Softgen, Windsurf, Wrapifai, Copilot, Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit, MarsX, AmazonQ, Pear, Devin, Github Spark, IDX, Webdraw, Claude 3.7 Sonnet & more] The most complete list ever made:

The Tech Drama recap for July: [windsurf, soham, google, openai, devin, agi, cluely, truely, amazon, elon, nikita, ilya, sam, satya, ai browsers, grok4, jeff bezos, roy] (you can thank me later, for saving you weeks of doomscrolling)

I've tried all (61 😵‍💫) AI Coding Agents & IDEs [Emergent, CodeRabbit, Anything, Zed, Factory, Cursor, Windsurf, Wrapifai, Copilot, Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit, MarsX, Canva, Devin, Github Spark, Figma Make, Cline & more] The most complete list ever made (with demos & notes):

If only someone told me this before my 1st startup: 1. Validate. I wasted at least 5 years building stuff nobody needed. 2. Kill your EGO. Make your users happy instead of yourself. 3. Don’t chaise investors; chase users, and then investors will chase you. 4...

TLDR (2015-2024): - Elon wanted to stop Demis & Deepmind from creating an AGI dictatorship. - He appointed himself as a CEO. - Greg and Ilya said: but Elon, now can easily become the AGI dictator. - Sam had his own party going, trying to get control, Ilya accused him being driven by money and politics instead of AGI. - Karpathy offered to merge OpenAi into Tesla. Elon liked the idea, others didn’t. - Elon said, let’s merge it with Tesla so that Tesla funds openai and keeps it being non profit. - Sam and Greg decided to find alternative ways to fund the company. - Sam wanted to do an IC0. Elon said it’ll make people think OpenAi is a scam. - They went for Microsoft deal instead. - Elon didn’t like the Microsoft deal and wanted to be the CEO, so he left in 2018 and stopped funding them. - Sam said he is enthusiastic about non profit future and earned CEO title. - Sam turned OpenAI into capped profit - Sam was fired by Ilya for thinking more about monetization than democratization of safe AGi. - Sam was brought back by Satya and Twitter “openai is nothing without its people” - Ilya was fired by Sam - Sam turned openai into for-profit. - Elon started XAI to build his own AgI - Ilya started SSI to build safe AGI - Greg left OpenAI, possibly tried to get into SSI, was rejected and returned back to Sam - But it all doesn’t really matter anymore, since LLMs reached the ceiling of scaling and won’t lead us to the AGI - Sam recently said “I know the worth to AGi now”, which is a fundraising play That’s it. Good night.

The Era of AI Agents began 🫥 I don't know if I'm terrified or excited. see for yourself 🧵:

The Time Has Come for Robots. I build AI Agents to replace office workers, but these demos convince me! All physical labor will be gone to robots, too. (even the world's oldest profession). Just watch it if you disagree. The biggest robot thread ever (50 demos):

What is MCP & why it's a big (huge) deal: (model context protocol) TLDR: MCP makes it possible for AI Tools to use external tools. E.g. Chatbot/IDE/AI-Agent can use Gmail/GoogleDrive/WeatherApp etc. Detailed explanation for both, tech & non tech people (+demos): 1) AI Tools (chatbots, wrappers, agents, code generator, etc) wanna talk to external systems. In pre-MCP world, one would have to write code to connect AI tool to the external system via API. Which meant every connection had to be pre-coded. It also meant that every AI tool had to hard code its connection to every other tool. So if there are 1000 AI tools and 1000 external tools, then 1000000 hard-coded connections via API. 2) MCP is a standard protocol. This means that every AI tool has to implement this once, and then it can connect to thousands of external tools via this protocol. 3) The same goes for external tools. They all have to create an MCP server just once, and all AI tools that support MCP can connect to them. 4) It's a huge deal. Imagine 10k AI tools and 10k external tools now all have to implement MCP just once each. So it's 20k implementations. Versus 10k*10k=100M implementations. 5) This whole thing can also run on the cloud or on local computer. See demos:

Explain me this: Why would American companies hire US based remote employees for $120k-$350k if it’s possible to hire Europeans for $50-$90k? Why Europeans work remotely for local firms if they earn x3 from US remotely? Big unfolding trouble for US employees & EU businesses

I automated 90% of my startup empire[24]. My biggest monthly expense is AI; it's no longer human labor. 41 AI agents & tools for coding, marketing, seo, research, design, sales, accounting, legal, paid ads, data entry, scraping, and everything else:

AI won't replace entire profession, but it's replacing the bottom 20-80% in {translation, design, coding, content, marketing, sales, design, operation, account, law} Micro teams like mine beat corporations because AI brings huge leverage for A players Real examples of AI:

I've tried every AI Coding agent and IDE, As someone who's been coding for 20 years, I think coding as we know it is cooked 🧵 :

I run the most automated org on earth, thx to the agents I built myself or third parties. I just saw YC betting it all on "replace humans with AI" ideas. 24 AI agents to automate the entire org:

I'm building the same app using all popular AI IDEs. Their progress is insane > Replit got way better at UI > Cursor shipped coding agents > Windsurf entered the game and made a nice > V0 can do full-stack apps > Bolt is turning noncoders into coders Mega thread on AI IDEs🧵:

omg 😱 nothing is impossible with AI

This never works: → Startup Idea → Plan → Design → Coding → Marketing→ Audience → 😣 This works (sometimes):

I'm working on 24 startups simultaneously (half a million b2b users, multimillion ARR) No VC funding, employees, calls, office, managers... Each business is 100% async over chat: > me: idea, design, UX & marketing. > comaker: coding, product & support. Why, how, what:

My ideation framework: (I used it to launch over 20 startups)

Product > Distribution Every successful founder I know agrees with it, but every failed founder still blames the distribution, while it’s the product to blame. I think this is the greatest misunderstanding among junior entrepreneurs

This never works: → Startup Idea → Plan → Design → Coding → Marketing→ Audience → 😣 This works ( sometimes ):

My Biggest Regrets as a Startup Founder: 1. Taking VC money 2. Hiring too early 3. Building for an audience I don't know or don't like 4. Not going global from day 1 5. Not doing SEO early 6. Not taking holidays 7. Going to conferences 8. Entering startup incubators 9. Hiring corporate people 10. Partnering with corporates 11. Building b2c products 12. Wasting time on commuting to a physical office 13. Valuing skills versus personal traits in people 14. Optimizing for business instead of personal life 15. Spending little time with parents 16. Holding on hopeless projects for too long 17. Firing lazy people too late 18. Not giving real harsh feedback to employees 19. Outroucing development, growth or design 20. Not building in public and not posting on X daily 21. Not starting a family in my 20s 22. Moving around the world instead of building up roots in one place 23. and yours?

My secret hack for infinite startup ideas: 1. Google search bar: an app that..; cms that... 2. Social media: is there a tool..; how to..; (for validated problems, you can build solutions for)

If only someone told me this before my 1st startup: 1. Validate idea first. I wasted at least 5 years building stuff nobody needed. 2. Kill your EGO. It's not about me, but the user. I must want what the user wants, not what I want. 3. Don't chaise investors, chase users, and then investors will be chasing you. 4. Never hire managers. Only hire doers until PMF. 5. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup. Pick an average template, edit texts and that's it. 90% of the users will end up on your site coming from a blog article, social media post, a recommendation. Which means they have the intent. No need to "convert" them again. 6. Hire only fullstack devs. There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers. One full stack dev building the whole product. That's it. 7. Chase global market from day 1. If the product and marketing are good, it will work on the global market too, if it's bad, it won't work on the local market too. So better go global from day 1, so that if it works, the upside is 100x bigger. 8. Do SEO from day 2. As early as you can. I ignored this for 14 years. It's my biggest regret. 9. Sell features, before building them. Ask existing users if they want this feature. I run DMs with 10-20 users every day, where I chat about all my ideas and features I wanna add. I clearly see what resonates with me most and only go build those. 10. Hire only people you would wanna hug. My mentor said this to me in 2015. And it was a big shift. I realized that if I don't wanna hug the person, it means I dislike them. Even if I can't say why, but that's the fact. Sooner or later, we would have a conflict and eventually break up. 11. Invest all money into your startups and friends. Not crypt0, not stockmarket, not properties. I did some math, if I kept investing all my money into all my friends’ startups, that would be about 70 investments. 3 of them turned into unicorns eventually. Even 1 would have made the bank. Since 2022, I have invested all my money into my products, friends, and network. 12. Post on Twitter daily. I started posting here in March this year. It's my primary source of new connections and traffic. 13. Don't work/partner with corporates. Corporations always seem like an amazing opportunity. They're big and rich, they promise huge stuff, millions of users, etc. But every single time none of this happens. Because you talk to a regular employees there. They waste your time, destroy focus, shift priorities, and eventually bring in no users/money. 14. Don't get ever distracted by hype, e.g. crypt0. I lost 1.5 years of my life this way. I met the worst people along the way. Fricks, scammers, thieves. Some of my close friends turned into thieves along the way, just because it was so common in that space. I wish this didn't happen to me. 15. Don't build consumer apps. Only b2b. Consumer apps are so hard, like a lottery. It's just 0.00001% who make it big. The rest don't. Even if I got many users, then there is a monetization challenge. I've spent 4 years in consumer apps and regret it. 16. Don't hold on bad project for too long, max 1 year. Some projects just don't work. In most cases, it's either the idea that's so wrong that you can't even pivot it or it's a team that is good one by one but can't make it as a team. Don't drag this out for years. 17. Tech conferences are a waste of time. They cost money, take energy, and time and you never really meet anyone there. Most people there are the "good" employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation. Very few fellow makers. 18. Scrum is a Scam. If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were children in kindergarten, then things would eventually fail. The only good stuff I managed to do happened with people who were grownups and could manage their stuff. We would just do everything over chat as a sync on goals and plans. 19. Outsource nothing at all until PMF. In a startup, almost everything needs to be done in a slightly different way, more creative, and more integrated into the vision. When outsourcing, the external members get no love and no case for the product. It's just yet another assignment in their boring job. 20. Bootstrap. I spent way too much time raising money. I raised more than 10 times, preseed, seed, and series A. But each time it was a 3-9 month project, meetings every week, and lots of destruction. I could afford to bootstrap, but I still went the VC-funded way, I don't know why. To be honest, I didn't know bootstrapping was a thing I could do or anyone does. That's it. All my projects → x.com/johnrushx/bio

I've replaced 100% of my marketing & sales dept with AI in 2024. It's literally just me + AI Agents, AI wrappers & AI workflows now. My goal for 2025 is to replace 90% of support, operations, and the rest. I'm not alone 🧵 :

This never works > Startup Idea → Design → Coding → Audience → 😣 This works (sometimes):

Twitter tech drama recap: 1) Dudes got into YC and everyone got so jealous to say forking open source is illegal. 2) An indie hacker started a war after not being feature by Product Hunt. I made an acquisition/partner offer to PH. If rejected, I’ll launch my own. 3) DHH said vercel is just a wrapper on top of aws with 500% markup. He is wrong. 4) Wordpress and WP engine had a family fight but now seem like back together again. It turns out wp run 40% of the web. 5) Sam Altman keeps replacing his cofounders with AI one every few months to end up being one-man billion dollar company just as he predicted. 6) PH CTO doesn’t know who is Pieter Levels, so their meme lord resigns. Buut, it turns to be a great marketing trick to promote his meme saas. Genius. 7) Notion steals nose pics of Kepano(obsidian founder). 8) Elon and his mom spent a week convincing people on X that he isn’t dating Italian PM. Hmm. 9) MKBHD launched an ugly wallpaper app, sparking the meme “the one guy go lectures everyone on a thing but scores F at it”. 10) an employee of gumroad joins buildinpublic with a side project but his employer quickly finds out and asks wtf. 11) Vercel CEO accuses Dax to being sponsored by CF, Dax responds “mf ur really laying out sponsor accusations right now”

I've spent $76,082.42 in August 😓 Can you help me reduce this? Contractors: -$10,137.78 Amazon Web Services: -$4,480.12 MongoDB: -$4,251.50 Google Workspace: -$1,913.61 Google Cloud: -$2,134.74 PayPal: -$4,678.55 Exa: -$1,549.00 Cloudflare: -$350.20 OpenAI: -$15,486.83 Anthtopic: -$16,001.22 BunnyCDN: -$170.00 Notion: -$338.00 Figma: -$420.00 Zoho Corporation: -$374.15 Scrshotone: -$146.00 Ghostinspector: -$190.83 DigitalOcean: -$148.26 Imgix: -$808.12 Pinecone Systems: -$61.47 Mailgun: -$96.51 Grammarly: -$144.00 PandaDoc: -$140.00 Jetbrains: -$12.00 Gamma: -$10.00 GitHub: -$14.00 Zoom Video Communications: -$2,434.74 Scrapingbee: -$848.99 Firecrawl: -$175.00 Cursor: -$40.00 Dataforseo: -$100.00 Apify: -$78.00 Devuap LLC: -$19.99 1Password: -$19.95 Statuscake: -$104.48 Atlassian: -$690.00 Perplexity AI: -$204.00 Webshare: -$59.03 QuickBooks: -$75.00 ElevenLabs: -$22.00 Zapier: -$91.13 Apple: -$76.92 Slack: -$137.18 Hushed: -$4.99 StreamYard: -$106.98 Supabase: -$75.00 Microsoft: -$2,319.58 Webflow: -$24.00 Loom: -$15.00 Clerk: -$37.50 Seo Gets: -$29.00 Intercom: -$248.15 Serper: -$1,250.00 Senty Pty Ltd: -$847.27 Hetzner Online: -$864.71 iPostal1: -$9.99 Twilio: -$315.33 Mailjet: -$17.00 Replicate: -$3.50 Crisp: -$540.00 Lordicon: -$16.00 Lovable: -$20.00 Firstpromo: -$84.15 GoDaddy: -$22.19

AI Coding is the new No-Code! It's a fact. Non tech founder, designers, marketers & anyone can build software now. Zero entry barrier! No limitations! Super cheap! But complex apps still need real coders; AI won't replace them til 2030. 19 AI Coding Agents (for non coders):

Very sad ending for Software Developers. I kept saying this for 6 years. In 10 years, 90% of them won't get their former pay grades (inflation-adjusted). The solution: Become an Indie Maker ASAP. Even if you fail, you'll earn soft skills to be hirable by corporations later.

It’s 2012. I sold my bootstrapped startup, made my 1st mil. I wanna build a unicorn, raise from big VCs, move to SF. One day I meet a guy looking like a movie star. This day is gonna change my life. He makes a pitch:

I've tried all the Browser-Use tools I could find (from Claude, OpenAI, Convergence, Deepseek, Google and more). Some are incredible; others are pure marketing overhype. The review & demos:

We hit the wall with LLMs > Two years ago, GPT4 made AI wrappers & Agents possible. > Sonnet 3.5 solved the AI code generation. > I just tried Sonnet3.7, GPT-4.5, O-3, Grok, and Gemini... > Not impressive. Not even close to gpt3->gpt4 jump What's next:

We've built a real AI AGENT: @seobotai It works 100% on autopilot. For example, an article takes 2 hours & runs 727 prompts & 126 jobs. Costs $6. It's not similar to traditional SaaS. AI controls a large tree of nested tasks imitating a human org. How it works (in details) 🧵:

I'm turning 35. If you're a startup founder in your 20's, read these 28 rules I learned the hard way: 1. Validate idea first. I wasted a decade building stuff nobody needed. I thought Incubators and VCs served as a validation, but I was so wrong. 2. Kill your EGO. It’s not about me but the user. I must want what the user wants, not what I want. My taste isn’t important. The user has expectations, and I must fulfill them. 3. Don’t chaise investors. Chase users, and then investors will be chasing you. I’ve never had more incoming interest from VC than now, when I’m the least interested in them. 4. Never hire managers. Only hire doers until PMF. So many people know how to manage people, and so few can actually get sh*t done barehand. 5. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup at the early stage. Pick a simple template and edit it with a no-code website builder in less than an hour. That’s it! Your first 100 sales happen outside of the website. 6. Hire only fullstack devs. There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers for an early-stage product. One full stack dev building the whole product. That’s it. 7. Chase global market from day 1. Go for a small niche in a global market instead of a large niche in a local market. 8. Do SEO from day 2. As early as you can. I ignored this for 14 years, and it’s my biggest regret. 9. Sell features before building them. Ask existing users if they want this feature. I run DMs with 10-20 users every day, where I chat about all my ideas and features I wanna add. I clearly see what resonates with me most and only go build those. If you don’t have followers, try HN, Reddit, or just search on X for posts and ask it in the replies. People are helpful, they will reply if the question is easy to understand. 10. Hire only people you would wanna hug. My cofounder, an old Danish man said this to me in 2015. And it was a big shift. I realized that if I don’t wanna hug the person, it means I dislike them on a chemical/animal level. Even if I can’t say why, but that’s the fact. Sooner or later, we would have a conflict and eventually break up. It takes up to 10 years to build a startup, make sure you do it with people you have this connection with. 11. Invest into your startups and friends. Not crypt0, not stockmarket, not properties. I did some math, if I kept investing all my money into all my friends’ startups, that would be about 70 investments. 3 of them turned into unicorns eventually. Even 1 would have made the bank. Since 2022, I have invested all my money into my products, friends, and network. If you don’t have friends who do startups, invest it in yourself. Walk away from shiny get rich quick investment options. 12. Post on Twitter daily. I started posting here in March last year. It’s my primary source of new connections and growth. I could have started it earlier, I don’t know why I didn’t. If you are at the same place, start today. I promise you won’t regret it. 13. Don’t work/partner with corporates. Corporations always seem like an amazing opportunity. They’re big and rich, they promise huge stuff, millions of users, etc. But every single time none of this happens. Because you talk to a regular employees there. They waste your time, destroy focus, shift priorities, and eventually bring in no users/money. 14. Don’t get ever distracted by hype, e.g. crypt0. I lost 1.5 years of my life this way. I met the worst people along the way. Fricks, scammers, thieves. Some of my close friends turned into thieves along the way, just because it was so common in that space. I wish this didn’t happen to me. I wish I was stronger and stayed on my mission. 15. Don’t build consumer apps. Only b2b. Consumer apps are so hard, like a lottery. It’s just 0.00001% who make it big. The rest don’t. Even if I got many users, then there is a monetization challenge. I’ve spent 4 years in consumer apps and regret it. 16. Don’t hold on bad project for too long, max 1 year. Some projects just don’t work. In most cases, it’s either the idea that’s so wrong that you can’t even pivot it or it’s a team that is good one by one but can’t make it as a team. Don’t drag this out for years. 17. Tech conferences are a waste of time. They cost money, take energy, and time and you never really meet anyone there. Most people there are the “good” employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation. Very few fellow makers. 18. Scrum is a Scam. If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were kindergarten children, then things would eventually fail. The only good stuff I managed to do happened with people who were grownups and could manage their stuff on their own. We would just do everything over chat as a sync on goals and plans. 19. Outsource nothing at all until PMF. In a startup, almost everything needs to be done in a slightly different way, more creative, and more integrated into the vision. When outsourcing, the external members get no love and no case for the product. It’s just yet another assignment in their boring job. Instead of coming up with great ideas for your project they will be just focusing on ramping up their skills to get a promotion or a better job offer. 20. Bootstrap. I spent way too much time raising money. I raised more than 10 times, preseed, seeded, and series A. But each time it was a 3-9 month project, meetings every week, and lots of destruction. I could afford to bootstrap, but I still went the VC-funded way, I don’t know why. To be honest, I didn’t know bootstrapping was a thing I could do or anyone does. 21. It may take a decade. When I was 20, I was convinced it takes a few years to build and succeed with a startup. So I kept pushing my plans forward, to do it once I exited. Family, kids. I wish I married earlier. I wish I had kids earlier. 22. No Free Tier. I’d launch a tool with a free tier, and it’d get sign-ups, but very few would convert. I’d treat free sign-ups as KPIs and run on it for years. I’d brag about signups and visitors. I’d even raise VC money with these stats. But eventually, I would fail to reach PMF. Because my main feedback would come from free users and the product turned into a perfect free product. Once I switched to “paid only” until I validated the product, things went really well. Free and paid users often need different products. Don’t fall into this trap as I did. 23. Being To Cheap. I always started by checking all competitors and setting the lowest price. I thought this would be one of the key advantages of my product. But no, I was wrong. The audience on $5 and $50 are totally different. $5: pain in the *ss, never happy, never recommend you to a friend, leave in 4 months. $50: polite, give genuine feedback, happy, share with friends, become your big fan if you solve their request. 24. I will fail. When I started my first startup. I thought if I did everything right, it would work out. But it turned out that almost every startup fails. I wish I knew that and I tried to fail faster, to get to the second iteration, then to the third, and keep going on, until I either find out nothing works or make it work. 25. Use boilerplates. I wasted years of dev time and millions of VC money to pay for basic things. To build yet another sidebar, yet another dashboard, and payment integration... I had too much pride, I couldn’t see myself taking someone else code as a basis for my product. I wanted it to be 100% mine, original, from scratch. Because my product seems special to me. 26. Spend more time with Family & Friends. I missed the weddings of all my best friends and family. I was so busy. I thought if I didn’t do it on time, the world would end. Looking back today, it was so wrong. I meet my friends and can’t share those memories with them, which makes me very sad. I realized now, that spending 10% of my time with family and friends would practically make no negative impact on my startups. 27. Build Products For Audiences You Love. I never thought of this. I’d often build products either for corporates, consumers, or for developers. It turns out I have no love for all 3. But I deeply love indie founders. Because they are risk-takers and partly kids in their hearts. Once I switched the focus to indie makers on my products, my level of joy increased by 100x for me. 28. Write Every Single Day. When I was a kid, I loved writing stories. In school, they would give an assignment, and I’d often write a long story for it, however, the teacher would put an F on it. The reason was simple, I had an issue with the direction of the letters and the sequence of letters in the words. I still have it, it’s just the Grammarly app helping me to correct these issues. So the teacher would fail my stories because almost every sentence had a spelling mistake that I couldn’t even see. It made me think I’m made at writing. So I stopped, for 15 years. But I kept telling stories all these years. Recently I realized that in any group, the setup ends up turning into me telling stories to everyone. So I tried it all again, here on X 10 months ago. I love it, the process, the feedback from people. I write every day. I wish I had done it all these years. The End.

I’m a startup founder, X is my top source of inspiration & education. Every day, I discover super cool things here. The most impressive products, robots, AI Agents & innovations I've seen this month:

I can't fu*king believe what's possible with AI. In 20 minutes - Prompted AI to build a mini-tool - Deployed it to the internet with one click - Asked AI to make a landing page for it - It's live 😲 Details below:

I co-founded a startup as CTO, had Lego, McKinsey, and Macy as customers, entered the best b2b accel in the world, moved to SF... But one event turned my 15% stake into 0.15% 🥴:

> Traditional SaaS is done (soon) > commoditized > founders clone successful products & halve the price > a race to the bottom, down to $0 > everything is about to look & work the same: the social mediaschedulers, web builders, calendar apps, etc I think this is what comes next:

Don’t do this until you made $10k with your startup: > hire employees > paid google/fb ads > website redesign > registering a company > outsource > add more features > refactoring > optimization > raise VC funding > start a new project Why:

5 years ago, I needed 30 people & $3M in funding to build just one startup, Today, I run 11 bootstrapped SaaS projects with just a handful of people. These AI agents & tools 10x busy founders in marketing, coding, legal, operations, design, sales, anything 🧵 :

My kid asks me: Daddy, should I be a programmer like u? I answered: no, kiddo, learn real-world skills. By the time you're 25, coding will be an obsolete profession. But, I wonder if physical labor will last for long. The progress in AI + Robotics makes me smoke🧵:

The lowest-hanging SEO fruit (just takes 5 min & often works) 1) Go to Google Search Console 2) Open "Search Results" 3) Sort the "Queries" tab by "Impressions" 4) In the top 20, find top 5 queries with "CTR" < 40% 5) Insert them to your home page hero section, h1/h2 & meta tags

I'm risking being unfollowed or disliked for saying the following, but I really wanna help, so I'll still proceed: 90% of founders who have never had a successful product think their problem is marketing. But that's not the case. If the product is good, you don't need much marketing. You bring 100 users (very few fail to do this) using non-scalable random methods, and they fall in love with the product, bring their friends, and share it on social media. The next users brought by them do the same; they bring their friends and share it on social media. Ofc, there are cases, where one may drive users to "bad" products just by having strong marketing skills and distribution. But these days, I rarely see it work in SaaS. It may work in enterprise software but not in SMB SaaS. I have launched average products myself, and despite my marketing and distribution, they failed. Every single time. Not even one exception, So, if you have built multiple SaaS products in the past and one of them succeeded. I advise you to read my following essay with an open mind, turn off the defense and the "I failed because I did little marketing" and try to apply it. Maybe I'm wrong, but at least you'll try something new and see if it works or not.

I keep testing all new AI IDEs cuz I plan to build & launch 5 more SaaS tools next year. Today is the Biggest day of the year! > Devin is finally live! > Replit is out of beta > ChatGPT canvas for coding > Windsurf, Copilot, Lovable, SuperXyz, Wrapifai and more Updates 🧵 :

I’m feeling so pessimistic about AI today. After building dozens of AI agents for many years, here is what I got to say: The biggest challenge in building AI agents is agent’s long term memory. LLMs with huge context windows are pretty much scams, cuz they compress the text under the hood making it completely unreliable for any serious task (the error accumulation and forward propagation when run in an agentic loop ). Existing LLMs would be capable of replacing humans if only the memory problem was really solved. But..nobody has come even close to solving this yet, and it may take a decade until this is solved. I won’t even be surprised if it turns out that our general intelligence comes from our insanely amazing memory engine in our brains coupled with the logical apparatus. Right now the LLM can only apply logic, but it can’t memorize things as our brain does, therefore we’re very far from AGi or even a basic 100% autonomous ai agent. Unfortunately :( But, I have an idea to solve this at least for business ai agents. I’ll present my solution soon in my next ai agents release.

I’ll go bankrupt with these bills :( Can anyone help me get credits/discounts for LLM APIs? (For my AI agents)

As a startup founder, just don't do this 🧵 : As a startup founder, just don't do this 🧵 : As a startup founder, just don't do this 🧵 : As a startup founder, just don't do this 🧵 : As a startup founder, just don't do this 🧵 : As a startup founder, just don't do this 🧵 :

I let my daughter divide by zero

How I got my first 100 users for each of my 24 startups:

Future of Software Companies TLDR: Independant founders will eat the world. • Software creation is expensive. • Developers are costly because they translate English to JavaScript. • LLMs are lowering software creation costs to zero over time. • Lower costs will lead to exponential growth in the quantity of startups. • One-size-fits-all solutions from corporations will be smashed by ultra-niched solutions that focus only on their audience • These founders will be “distributors” first. Their key talent will be distribution and winning the attention of their niche. • Founder-led companies will replace "Brands." The founder = Brand. • We can already see how Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, MrBeast, and Lex Friedman have stronger distribution than multi-billion corporations. It looks surreal, but it’s facts. • Successful founders of the future won’t be coders-first, just like the new gen of music artists didn't receive heavy music education. • VCs will invent a new investment model: investing in people. The sports, movie, and music world has had it for a century now. It'll become mainstream for startup founders and content creators, too.

I've tried all ( 74 😵‍💫 ) AI Coding Agents & IDEs [Rork, CodeRabbit, Anima, Zed, Factory, Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot, Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit, MarsX, Canva, Devin, Github Spark, Vercel, Lindy, Warp, Figma, Cline, Vibe Coder & more] The most complete list ever made (with demos & notes):

I built 30 startups in 20 years. VC-backed, Bootstrapped, Apps, SaaS, B2B, B2C, AI Agents. 99 mistakes I regret making: 1. Doing consumer apps. The failure rate here is 100x of b2b rates, nearly a lottery. 2. Raising VC money too early. It shifted all our focus from "happy users" to the headcount, media coverage, conferences, LOIs, partnerships, networking and the next funding round. 3. Hiring too early. Employees and contractors are like an average nanny for your kid. They do the bare minimum, they dont take any risk. But not taking risks means no innovation. Only founders have enough incentives to take risks. SO the founders should do all the work until they gain traction. 4. Ignoring SEO. None of the people in my network did SEO. We all thought it was something for later and we kept postponing it forever. Paid ads were easy and predictable and having too much money in the bank basically spoils you. 5. Ignoring content marketing. Never took blogging seriously. Big mistake. I thought blogging is a full time job, but it's actually possible to spend an hour a day on it and still do a good job. 6. Social Media Marketing. This is my biggest regret. I started using X just 2 years ago. Nearing 100k followers now. What if I started 20 years ago? Could I have 1M followers now? I think so. 7. Skipping idea validation. I'd always assume for the audience. Anticipate what they need. It almost never turned out to be true. My best projects were those I thought will fail and failed projects had my highest hopes at the start. 8. Hiring managers. I haven't yet seen any useful manager in a startup. They might be useful for corporations, but for startup I should have hired only doers. 9. Chasing Investors. For every startup I'd spend 40% of my time fundraising. I'd succeed in most of the cases, but at what cost? I haven't done a single outreach to investors in 2 years, but I get VCs knocking my doors, because I have good traction and they search for such projects daily. So, don't chase VCs, just make users happy and VCs are gonna find you. 10. Hiring specialized developers. Nothing is less efficient than a team of specialized developers for a startup (frontend, backend, db, devops, design, qa..). Today I have 1 fullstack dev doing 5x more progress on a project than a team of 12 back then. Avoid "teams" at all cost until at least $30kmrr. 11. Hiring people I don't wanna hug. My cofounder, an old Danish man said this to me in 2015. If you don’t wanna hug the person, it means you dislike them on a chemical/animal level. Every time I ignored this rule, I paid the high price later. 12. Betting on partners. I partnered up with large billion dollar corporates many times with different startups. They promise huge stuff, millions of users, but end up just wasting your time, destroy focus, shift priorities, make you spend zillions on ramping up security and compliance, and eventually bring in no users/money. 13. Shiny objects. I fell for crypt0 hype. Got super rich, then lost it all. Years wasted. Almost got depressed by seeing how scammy and greedy humans can be, even saw best friends losing their souls there. 14. Holding on a bad project for too long. I kept believing in projects after years of no traction. I thought that one day something magic will happen and things will go up. It was just a waste of time, money and my prime years. 15. Went to tech conferences. Totally waste of time. Most people there are the “good” employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation. All decision makers are on the stage and you never meet them as an attendee. 16. Scrum is a Scam. If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were children in kindergarten, then things would eventually fail. The only good stuff I managed to do happened with people who were grownups and could manage their stuff on their own. We would just do everything over chat as a sync on goals and plans. 17. Outsourced development & marketing. The vendors were good, but the outcome was not good. Startups are so difficult that there is almost no chance someone from outside can do a good job for them, because it's just yet another assignments for those folks and they key goal is to make it look professional, the process and things, they never gonna disagree with your stupid ideas, they will just bow. 18. Started with a free tier in b2b. Free projects attract totally wrong crowd with irrelevant feedback and drive your project away from where it should head. Freemium is okay, at some point. But always start with paid(30day refund no questions asked). 19. Code from scratch. My team would spend first 3 months coding basic things like auth, admin panel, cruds and etc. It was huge waste of time. The moment I started using boilerplates, the speed went up 10x. Eventually I built my own AI Coding IDE optimized for code reusage, and it was the best decision of my life. 20. Spent little time with my family & friends. I worked way too much. Didn't take holidays at all. Missed so many weddings and birthdays. It was very destructive for my creativity. Once I started having some off(to do other active things), I became way more creative. Quality >Quantity. Most readers won't ever make it to the end, so I'll skip the 21...99.

Absolutely nobody gets this yet. Running ideas inside of your brain is 1000x more efficient than communicating them with a team. The difference between solopreneurs & teams is as big as integrated circuits vs analog lamps. They’ll run the world by 2050. I don’t say “AI will replace everyone”. I say “the ultra best founders will run all companies solo or with cofounders, and instead of hiring employees they’ll use AI agents”. AI has its limitations. But founder+AI has no limits. If you bet your life on learning a skill to be employed for 50 years and then retiring, you’re taking a huge risk of ending up on an UBI and getting just the minimum to survive. It won’t happen tomorrow, maybe by 2050 or 2070. But that’s still not too far into the future. If you’re 22 now, you’ll be still at the work force. Long story short: don’t trade your time for money, but trade your skill for money. Meaning: build products, instead of selling your hours .

It’s a first time founder, just don’t do this: - b2c - Quit your main job to go all in with your startup - Expect to make profits in your first 3 years - Look for cofounder - Build before you validated the idea - Waste time designing your landing page - Outsource - Hire - build and hope you’ll just pay for traffic once released - try to make it prefect - Move to SF - Build 12 projects in 12 months - be hype driven and jump from one shiny object to another - Learn from coursebois who never successfully applied their own advice Do this instead - keep your main job or part time job to pay your bills - Live cost efficient life - Start with simple challenge first, e.g. a web directory or a micro saas - Validate your idea first (by cold DMing or by building an Audience first) - Don’t hire, try to do it all by yourself, even if you fail, it’ll be easie to hire people for this job later since you’ve tried - Don’t chase cofounders, finding one is as difficult as finding a good wife. If it happens, good; but don’t depend on it, go solo - Use nocode for your marketing website, it’ll simplify the marketing, e.g. @unicornplatform works with @seobotai out of the box. But if you handcode your site, you can’t easily connect SEO and marketing tools to it - instead of outsourcing the whole thing, outsource fixed priced small gigs - Focus on organic marketing channels until you see it converts well and only then go for paid - Focus on one product for at least one year. (don’t do 2 or more products simultaneously) - learn from people who have achieved what you wanna achieve - see it as a marathon, up to 10 or even 20 years

I'm risking being unfollowed for saying this, but I really wanna help, so I'll still proceed: 90% of founders who never had a successful product think their problem is marketing. But that's false. If the product is good, you don't need much marketing. You bring 20 users (very few fail to do this) using non-scalable random methods, and some of them fall in love with the product, bring their friends, and share it on social media. The next users bring their friends and share it on social media, too...that's called "word of mouth". I have launched average products myself, and despite my marketing & distribution, they failed. Even Fireship launched an AI tool a few years ago, which failed despite having a huuuuuge audience and distribution. How to build good products? 1) simplify 2) don't make users think 3) reduce time to aha moment down to seconds or minutes 4) convince your user on the onboarding step 5) present the outcomes to the user to make it clear that the product works 6) make it easy for the user to share it to social media 7) make sure your product either saves at least 80% of the costs for the user or makes them richer 8) remove everything from the interface and UI that can be removed and the product is still able to function 9) make it easy to remember the brand/ui/ux/ 10) painkiller, not a vitamin 11) start with a problem first. Dont build a solution looking for a problem. 12) spend at least 50% of your time on UX 13) test with real users as early as possible, ideally start doing it already on the ideation stage 14) test features by communicating them on social media first. If nobody reacts, it means nobody cares and nobody needs it.

100% autonomous AI Agents:

How to promote your startup with no followers:

Building a “SaaS people wanna pay for” is sooooooooo hard 😩 AI made it easier to build things, but it didn’t really change the game the products people wanna pay for and share with friends. How I build products people love: (very different from what you’d expect)

i wish I could go back to my 20s and: 1. bootstrap instead of raising VC money 2. build in public and post on X /Li daily 3. marry early and start making kids 4. spend time with my friends & family instead of conferences 5. chase users instead of media coverage 6. settle in one place, plant trees and grow my roots 7. build b2b instead of b2c 8. pick partners and employees based on their heart instead of their IQ 9. never adopt scrum 10. buy lots of land 11. drop out of school earlier 12. only build for the audience I know really well 13. killed my ego 14. never hired managers 15. started doing SEO 16. built a bunch of web directories 17. hired only full stack developers 18. validated products before wasting years building them 19. Invested in my friends’ startups 20. didn’t waste time partnering with corporations 21. didn’t get distracted by shiny objects 22. didn’t hold on to a bad project for years trying to save sinking ship 23. never outsourced

If you’re a corporate employee, Cancel your hobbies, Netflix & entertainment. Free up 30h a week to build a $10k+ MRR indie project in the next 3 years. Take it as an existential challenge. You may fail to achieve it, but not trying is the ultimate failure. How to start:

Predictions for the Future of Startups: [AI, Education, Parenting, Platforms, Deglobalization, AI Agents, Bio, Agro, Healthcare, Space, Governments, Onpremise, Devices, Migration, Made-by-humans, LLMs, Money, Whitelabeling, Content creators, Startups, VCs, India, Poland]

An essay: Why founders fail, despite being good at coding and high IQ. Being mathematically smart hurts startup founders. Math doesn’t account for emotions, and this is why devs easily build useful products but fail to get to Product Market Fit in 99% cases. Imagine you’re building a building to sell. As a good builder, you put great effort into the materials, structure, architecture and make a great house. You host open day for the potential buyers, but a nasty cat drops a 💩 at the entrance. It smell shit. People come and the first thing they feel is the shit smell. It disturbs their perception and all those genius construction idea and great efforts aren’t important anymore. In products, emotions mean as much as the actual value the product delivers Devs tend to ignore it. The best example is the UX. It always feels like a decoration that’s not so important, as long as the features are in place and there is a way to benefit from the product for the user. However, some times, the size of the button, the label, or the sequence of the steps in a flow becomes a deal breaker. Every part of UX sparks certain emotions in users. Very often the simplest fixes bring the highest impact for the UX. And here comes another issue for a dev mind: the amount of effort never equals the amount of impact. The more mathematically intelligent you are, the more you get excited by hard tasks, where your IQ can shine. Any rational calculations often confirm this assumption too. It again, the emotions don’t work this way. So this is what makes tech startups so hard. One must build solutions to real problems, and at the same time, engineer the user emotions to basically manipulate user into feeling great while using the app. The “feeling great” comes when 1) user never has to think. Literally. Imagine the user using the product while driving a car or running. 2) user feels certain achievement and proud of themselves for the outcome. Ideally, user give the smallest input possible, and it makes high impact on the outcome. Versus the opposite: high effort and low impact. Another enemy of smart devs building products is their issue with prioritization. Bugs and big features always feel important. But the reality is that one must always do both. The hopeless hope that one day there will be no urgent tasks and I can finally spend time on UX and cosmetics is what kills so many good products. Every day, you need to find an hour for small things in the emotion roam. Like moving that button into navbar, because keeping it behind the menu is confusing. Or making the text size smaller for the sidebar. How to know what small tasks deserve attention? 1) Play user sessions (use posthog for it) 2) Turn on a podcast(about quantum physics), listen it with a good focus and try using your product as a user, while being very focused on listening the podcast. It’ll make you behave more like a user who is lazy and doesn’t know the app and spot the weaknesses.

I acquired Unicorn Platform for almost $1M. Since then, it went from 25k to 551k users. I've literally tried every growth method I've heard of. All my marketing failures & successes:

I acquired Unicorn Platform for $0.8M in '22. I've literally tried every growth method I've heard of. It all failed in 2023, but in 2024, I found what works & went 25k to 370k users. Details report on each marketing experiment (failures & successes):

My 10 cents on this hot debate. Bootstrappers say: you don’t need to pay for all these tools, it’s all bulshit and scam. Those startups raise $300m, bribe all YouTubers and influencers to post good stuff about them and convince office clerks that it’s “cool boys” who use it. VC backed say: don’t reinvent the wheel, but instead buy each tools, sdk, api, module from those who put years into building just this one thing and make it nearly perfect. What I say: use free or cheap plans when you’re in MVP stage, because it saves you time. The chance that you’ll suddenly get huge traffic and have to pay vercel $37393 is maybe 0.0001%. The reality is that almost all project you launch will fail, so better fail faster. Once one of your project finally gets traction, you can refactor the code and redo the whole thing. I’ve done it in @unicornplatform where it relied on maybe 20 third party vendors and when I started getting 10k new users every week the costs went through the roof. I’ve spent some time refactoring the code and infra and dropped 90% of theirs party vendors and moved to hetzner and cut costs 90%. But if I started this way, I’d be solving the problem that doesn’t exist yet and maybe because I waste time on it I’d spend less on product and fail. So there is no 0 or 1. Never go into extremes. Be wise per stage you’re at.

My Startup log from 2005 to 2025, TLDR; > exit > invested > failed > failed > failed > lost investments > failed > scammed by cofounders > failed > failed > investors diluted my 15% to 0.15% > failed > c0vid kllled my tourism startup > failed > failed > lost all my crpto after exchange being hacked > failed > failed > pivoted > sold my house to save the startup > managed to survive > sold all my stocks to self fund my next startups > pivoted into bootstrapping in 2023 > started posting daily on X > learned SEO > fired my entire marketing team > learned marketing & product led growth > stopped delegating to people to go solo+ai on growth and marketing > instead of hiring developers went for 50-50 collabs with other devpreneurs > success > success > success > success > success > success > success me today: > website builder with 600,000 users > world's most famous AI Agent for SEO > best directory listing agent on the market, used by half of every YC batch > the only AI SaaS generator on the market with over 100k users on the waitlist. > the most famous directory guide that helped thousands of people launch directory businesses, grow them, monetize, and exit > launched an ad network for b2b that actually works, competing with huge players > second biggest launchpad in the world after product hunt & and 1st for dev tools > 20 more projects with happy users. Me tomorrow: > launch 12 more AI Agents with new co-makers to finish my job of automating my entire org and enabling other solo founders to do the same using my toolset Day after tomorrow; > reinvent the education from 3yo to 35yo(founder academy) to teach the next billion people to be indie makers > develop a new way of building affordable housing, partner up with land owners to set up the distributed maker village in the cities all over the world (my summer project is to build two houses with my own hands, to experiment with my ideas for innovation in construction) > democratize entrepreneurship and make it more accessible to people outside of the privileged circles (rich families, rich locations, rich network) If you wanna be part of my journey, give me advice, help or need an advice/feedback/help, just ask in the comments, I’ve replied every single question I ever received on social media. Lfg

Very important decision to be made, and I need your say on this! Where should the first Indie Maker village be? 🇹🇷 Turkey 🇵🇹 Portugal Why Turkey: - no visa needed - best airport in the world - cheap Why not Turkey - poor brand. People think it's a poor third-world country that's Islamist, has a dictatorship, and is dangerous. - locals don't speak English at all - almost no Western immigrants Why Portugal - good English - good reputation and brand - lots of Western immigrants - D7 and nomad visa Why not Portugal - need a visa. Easy for EU/US people, hard for the rest If you live in Portugal, can you please help me decide? 1. Do people actually speak English everywhere? 2. How are the prices? 3. How is the crime? 4. How is life in rural areas (I plan to be in a ranch/farm area, far from the city) 5. Are there actually many Western immigrants? 6. What is great about the place? 7. What is wrong about the place? By the way, I consider Turkey because it seems like the indie maker space will be primarily popular in non-western countries since Western founders prefer VC-funded models.

Twitter brain is insane 👏 I know how to cut my expenses in half now, from $76k to $38k: 1) Move all my hosting to Hetzner (from AWS/Azure/Google) 2) Self-host everything I can on Hetzner: Sentry, Campfire, etc) 3) Use cheaper/smaller LLM models + caching 4) Many vendors reached out to offer me sweet discounts(e.g. screenshotone, digital ocean, groq, firecrawl, tolt & more), thank you guys, I really appreciate it ❤️ 5) Replace zoom with free googleMeet+cheapRecordingBot. 6) Reach out to my vendors and ask for 30-50% discounts if I commit for 2-3 years with an upfront payment (a few have already accepted this offer 🎉) I hope this thread gonna save money for other scrappy bootstrappers! I'll report back in a few months with my new expense report.

Drones, Robots & Humanoids will be absolutely everywhere 10 years from now. affecting: [nurses, waiters, construction workers, soldiers, cops, janitors, factory workers, gardeners & pretty much every other repetitive manual labor]. Real demos that look like sci-fi:

I'm announcing my new mission, Until today, My goal in life was to try EVERYTHING:::: 1) Tried b2c, mobile apps, hardware, robots, IOT, e-commerce, b2b, enterprise, saas, agents, directories, courses, no code, wrappers, freelancing, running an agency, outsourcing... 2) Run several startups, each doing $1M+ ARR. 3) Run many VC-backed startup. 4) Run deep tech startups with a co-founder & a team of devs. 5) Run multiple SaaS & directories solo. 6) Run multiple AI agents in duet with co-makers. 7) Bought and Sold startups. > Did many of the above points simultaneously 🥴 8) Worked as a taxi driver, security guard, mover, teacher, bartender, software developer, PM, CEO, CTO, Designer. 9) Entered Startuplab, theHub, 500 startups & Alchemist accelerators 10) Raised pre-seed, seed, series A. 11) Self funded. 12) Bootstrapped. 13) Tried Islam, atheism and Christianity 14) Tried being a liberal and conservative 15) Lived in the west, east, south and north (25% of my life each). 16) Grew up on a farm, lived in a big city, small town, village, downtown, outside of town, house, villa, apartment. 17) Married, divorced, have many kids 18) Semi pro in Judo, Football and Pingpong, amateur in Volleyball & Tennis 19) Have a driving license for trucks and busses 20) Dated European, Slavic, Asian, African, Latino, and Arabic women 21) Lived on $50/month and $50k/month 22) Only used public transport for a few years, then only a scooter, then only a bicycle, and then only a car. 23) Been fat, fit, hacked and average. 24) Drunk, smoked, partied. 25) Built a house, playground, furniture... 26) Spoke/Thought in 3 different languages (33% of my life each) 27) Learned to sing and play guitar 28) Leaned to paint 29) Built my first AI neural net in 2008. 30) Studied CS, AI and UX in uni 31) Dropped out of university 32) Studied in a public school in the ghetto where only two classmates survived to this day 33) Studied in another school in the village, where we'd go to school on horses. That's how I ended my "Pre-training" and reinforcement learning stages. WHAT's Next: From today(not literally today ofc) and on, my next goal in life is to change the startup world by moving the wealth FROM vc-backed corporations TO bootstrappers. I'm doing my job - by sharing everything I know, with detailed examples, and showing by doing - by building SaaS, Nocode tools, Launchpads and AI Agents for busy founders, to help them outcompete entire organizations - by educating people about AI and sharing my predictions & analysis Every day, I get messages from founders thanking me for this. I see their progress and success, it warms my heart and gives me more energy to continue my mission. My goal is to automate my org to the level where it's the most automated org on earth. Then, I wanna share my blueprint, knowledge, and tools with fellow bootstrapped founders so that we together could take over the software world and make it more decentralized and fair. Instead of 50,000 billion-dollar corporations owning the whole market, we can have 50 million bootstrappers owning it. And I'll do all I can to get as close to this goal as possible. Also, I wanna create an alliance similar to the one YC founders have, where they buy from each other, promote each other, integrate with each other, and fund each other.... I wanna do the same for bootstrappers. Who is in?

A list of "Open Source alternatives to XXX" that I've saved in my bookmarks for the past 3 years. 30 tools 👇 → supabase.com - firebase → documenso.com - docu sign → cal.com - calendly → plausible.io - google analytics → devhunt.org - product hunt → ai.meta.com/llama - open ai gpt → papermark.io - docsend → godotengine.org - unity3d → marsx.dev - all dev world → ghost.org - medium → joinmastodon.org - twitter → rowy.io - airtable → sentry.io - error tracking → n8n.io - zappier → appsmith.com - retool → clickhouse.com - bigquery → gitlab.com - github → penpot.app - figma → jenkins.io - devops → forem.com - circle → posthog.com - mixpanel → dub.co - bitly → opencart.com - shopify → typesense.org - algolia → appflowy.io - notion → webstudio.is - webflow → typebot.io - Typeform → passbolt.com - 1Password → @shadcn - tailwind ui → @nutlope - ai tools If you've enjoyed this list, follow me → @johnrushx for more content like this. I build everything in public and share all the details of my process. These are the projects I'm working on daily → unicornplatform.com - a simple landing page builder for busy founders → seobotai.com - AI blog & SEO on auto-pilot → marketsy.ai - AI marketplace builder → marsx.dev - AI NoCode/ProCode platform with micro apps → floatui.com - Tailwind CSS ui kit → devhunt.org - A better Product Hunt alternative for dev tools.

My Startup log from 2005 to 2025, TLDR; > exit > invested > failed > failed > failed > lost investments > failed > scammed by cofounders > failed > failed > failed > failed > failed > scammed by VCs > failed > failed > pivoted > sold my house to save the startup > managed to survive > put all my bets on AI > pivoted into bootstrapping in 2023 > started posting daily on X > learned SEO > success > success > success > success > success > success > success me today: > website builder with 350,000 (1 million users by the end of 2025) > world's most famous AI Agent for SEO > first directory listing agent on the market, used by half of every YC batch > the only SaaS IDE on the market with over 100k users on the waitlist. > the biggest directory guide that helped thousands of people launch directory businesses, grow them, monetize, and exit > 20 more projects with happy users. me tomorrow: > launch 12 more AI Agents with new co-makers to finish my job of automating my entire org and enabling other solo founders to do the same using my toolset > launch the most massive and new education project, to teach the next billion people to be indie makers

I just tried The Fullstack AI Developer 😨 Bolt can build entire projects, frontend & backend, install packages, and everything a dev can do. Made a functioning app using AI only. I didn't touch the code even once! It took 30 min & $0. 👉 johnrush.me/startup-idea-gen…

I launched 20+ startups using the following playbook: Audience → Problem → Idea → Validation → Waitlist → SEO → One Feature MVP → Iterate → Marketing → Success. See a full breakdown of each step 🧵 :

AI can: > generate UI, sites, logos, banners, images, photos, movies.. > write books, articles > generate 90-100% of the code > hear & speak with emotions indistinguishable from humans > control robots/cars None of this was possible 5y ago. Feels like a dream tbh. Examples 🧵:

How I Go From Idea to Revenue in 14 Steps: (done it so many times, so it is a habit now)

The lowest-hanging SEO fruit I do in 5 min which always works. 1) Go to search.google.com 2) Open "Performance" page 3) Sort the "Queries" tab by "Impressions" 4) In the top 20, find top 5 queries with "CTR" < 50% 5) Insert them to your home page hero, h1/h2 & meta tags

If only someone told me this before my first startup: 1. Validate idea first. I wasted a decade building stuff nobody needed. Incubators and VCs served to me as a validation, but I was so wrong. 2. Kill your EGO. It’s not about me, but the user. I must want what the user wants, not what I want. My taste isn't important. The user has expectations, and I must fulfill them. 3. Don’t chaise investors. Chase users, and then investors will be chasing you. I've never had more incoming interest from VC than now when I'm the least interested in them. 4. Never hire managers. Only hire doers until PMF. So many people know how to manage people and so few can actually get sh*t done barehand. 5. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup. Pick a simple template, edit texts with a no-code website builder in less than an hour and that's it! At the early stage, You win traffic outside of your website, people are already interested, so don't make them search for the signup button among the texts! Focus on conversion optimization only when the traffic is consistent. Keep it to one page. Nobody gonna browse this website. 6. Hire only fullstack devs. There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers for an early-stage product. One full stack dev building the whole product. That’s it. 7. Chase global market from day 1. If the product and marketing are good, it will work on the global market too, if it’s bad, it won’t work on the local market too. So better go global from day 1, so that if it works, the upside is 100x bigger. I launched all startups for the Norwegian market, hoping we will scale to international at some point. I wish I launched to international from day 1 as I do now. The size of the market is 10000x bigger. I can validate and grow products in days, not in years as it used to be. 8. Do SEO from day 2. As early as you can. I ignored this for 14 years. It’s my biggest regret. It takes just 5 minutes to get it done on your landing page. Go to Google Keyword Planner, enter a few keywords around your product, sort them by traffic, filter out high competition kws, pick the top 10, and place them natively on your home page and meta tags. Add one blog article every week. Either manually or by paying for an AI blogging tool. 9. Sell features, before building them. Ask existing users if they want this feature. I run DMs with 10-20 users every day, where I chat about all my ideas and features I wanna add. I clearly see what resonates with me most and only go build those. If you don't have followers, try HN, Reddit, or just search on X for posts and ask it in the replies. People are helpful, they will reply if the question is easy to understand. 10. Hire only people you would wanna hug. My cofounder, an old Danish man said this to me in 2015. And it was a big shift. I realized that if I don’t wanna hug the person, it means I dislike them on a chemical/animal level. Even if I can’t say why, but that’s the fact. Sooner or later, we would have a conflict and eventually break up. It takes up to 10 years to build a startup, make sure you do it with people you have this connection with. 11. Invest all money into your startups and friends. Not crypt0, not stockmarket, not properties. I did some math, if I kept investing all my money into all my friends’ startups, that would be about 70 investments. 3 of them turned into unicorns eventually. Even 1 would have made the bank. Since 2022, I have invested all my money into my products, friends, and network. If you don't have friends who do startups, invest it in yourself. 12. Post on Twitter daily. I started posting here in March last year. It’s my primary source of new connections and growth. I could have started it earlier, I don't know why I didn't. If you are at the same place, start today. I promise you won't regret it. 13. Don’t work/partner with corporates. Corporations always seem like an amazing opportunity. They’re big and rich, they promise huge stuff, millions of users, etc. But every single time none of this happens. Because you talk to a regular employees there. They waste your time, destroy focus, shift priorities, and eventually bring in no users/money. 14. Don’t get ever distracted by hype, e.g. crypt0. I lost 1.5 years of my life this way. I met the worst people along the way. Fricks, scammers, thieves. Some of my close friends turned into thieves along the way, just because it was so common in that space. I wish this didn’t happen to me. I wish I was stronger and stayed on my mission. 15. Don’t build consumer apps. Only b2b. Consumer apps are so hard, like a lottery. It’s just 0.00001% who make it big. The rest don’t. Even if I got many users, then there is a monetization challenge. I’ve spent 4 years in consumer apps and regret it. 16. Don’t hold on bad project for too long, max 1 year. Some projects just don’t work. In most cases, it’s either the idea that’s so wrong that you can’t even pivot it or it’s a team that is good one by one but can’t make it as a team. Don’t drag this out for years. 17. Tech conferences are a waste of time. They cost money, take energy, and time and you never really meet anyone there. Most people there are the “good” employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation. Very few fellow makers. 18. Scrum is a Scam. If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were children in kindergarten, then things would eventually fail. The only good stuff I managed to do happened with people who were grownups and could manage their stuff on their own. We would just do everything over chat as a sync on goals and plans. 19. Outsource nothing at all until PMF. In a startup, almost everything needs to be done in a slightly different way, more creative, and more integrated into the vision. When outsourcing, the external members get no love and no case for the product. It’s just yet another assignment in their boring job. Instead of coming up with great ideas for your project they will be just focusing on ramping up their skills to get a promotion or a better job offer. 20. Bootstrap. I spent way too much time raising money. I raised more than 10 times, preseed, seeded, and series A. But each time it was a 3-9 month project, meetings every week, and lots of destruction. I could afford to bootstrap, but I still went the VC-funded way, I don’t know why. To be honest, I didn’t know bootstrapping was a thing I could do or anyone does. 21. It may take a decade. When I was 20, I was convinced it takes a few years to build and succeed with a startup. So I kept pushing my plans forward, to do it once I exited. Family, kids. I wish I married earlier. I wish I had kids earlier. 22. No Free Tier. I'd launch a tool with a free tier, and it'd get sign-ups, but very few would convert. I'd treat free sign-ups as KPIs and run on it for years. I'd brag about signups and visitors. I'd even raise VC money with these stats. But eventually, I would fail to reach PMF. Because my main feedback would come from free users and the product turned into a perfect free product. Once I switched to "paid only" until I validated the product, things went really well. Free and paid users often need different products. Don't fall into this trap as I did. 23. Being To Cheap. I always started by checking all competitors and setting the lowest price. I thought this would be one of the key advantages of my product. But no, I was wrong. The audience on $5 and $50 are totally different. $5: pain in the *ss, never happy, never recommend you to a friend, leave in 4 months. $50: polite, give genuine feedback, happy, share with friends, become your big fan if you solve their request. 24. I will fail. When I started my first startup. I thought if I did everything right, it would work out. But it turned out that almost every startup fails. I wish I knew that and I tried to fail faster, to get to the second iteration, then to the third, and keep going on, until I either find out nothing works or make it work. 25. Use boilerplates. I wasted years of dev time and millions of VC money to pay for basic things. To build yet another sidebar, yet another dashboard, and payment integration... I had too much pride, I couldn't see myself taking someone else code as a basis for my product. I wanted it to be 100% mine, original, from scratch. Because my product seems special to me. 26. Spend more time with Family & Friends. I missed the weddings of all my best friends and family. I was so busy. I thought if I didn't do it on time, the world would end. Looking back today, it was so wrong. I meet my friends and can't share those memories with them, which makes me very sad. I realized now, that spending 10% of my time with family and friends would practically make no negative impact on my startups. 27. Build Products For Audiences You Love. I never thought of this. I'd often build products either for corporates, consumers, or for developers. It turns out I have no love for all 3. But I deeply love indie founders. Because they are risk-takers and partly kids in their hearts. Once I switched the focus to indie makers on my products, my level of joy increased by 100x for me. 28. Write Every Single Day. When I was a kid, I loved writing stories. In school, they would give an assignment, and I'd often write a long story for it, however, the teacher would put an F on it. The reason was simple, I had an issue with the direction of the letters and the sequence of letters in the words. I still have it, it's just the Grammarly app helping me to correct these issues. So the teacher would fail my stories because almost every sentence had a spelling mistake that I couldn't even see. It made me think I'm made at writing. So I stopped, for 15 years. But I kept telling stories all these years. Recently I realized that in any group, the setup ends up turning into me telling stories to everyone. So I tried it all again, here on X 10 months ago. I love it, the process, the feedback from people. I write every day. I wish I had done it all these years. The End.

If You Have No Idea what to build & how to grow it:

Lazy SEO guide for startup founders:

To make $0 build b2c To make $1k build a directory To make $5k build a launchpad To make $7k build a boilerplate To make $10k build a micro SaaS To make $20k launch a nocode tool To make $30k launch SaaS To make $50k launch a course To make $100k launch AI wrapper To make $1M launch Vertical SaaS To make $10M launch AI agent To make $100M launch b2c

The progress in Robotics in 2024 makes me question my life choice of being a SaaS founder 😬 > paralyzed can walk > new era of warfare > automating most human labor > westworld-like humanoids A Mega Thread on Robotics + AI (Nov 30) 🧵:

Let's get the first 100 users for a startup, 21 methods I've personally tried multiple times for my SaaS, Directories and AI Agents:

My simple framework for Startup ideas: (it has worked for me 20 times)

“Made by humans” will 100x the price of all commodities in post-AGI era. Movies, music, and even the software.

Twitter tech drama recap #3 (it was freaking hot 😳) The thread🧵:

I extracted the most common failure patterns from my 20-year-long startup journey. (spoiler: most successful founders have done the same thing, while failed ones did many different things) Why Startup Founders Fail:

I fight myself every week. One part of me wants to build an empire of AI agents that’ll change the world, while the other part wants to exit the digital world, throw away my phone&laptop, move to a farm, get a horse, be outside the whole day and never use internet again.

The original video from the talk by @ilyasut at the Neural Information Processing Systems (December 10 - 15, 2024, Vancouver)

Web Agents are automating the entire class of jobs: > fill out forms (file complaints) > signup for things (apply for a visa) > browse web (buy tickets) > collect data These AI agents are actually good for humanity - they remove the most boring jobs. Tools I use to build them:

I started building an AI Agent for SEO in 2022. The 1st version took a year to build, then another year to iterate & reach a near-human level. Today, @seobotai replaces my entire blog SEO team. An average article takes 2 hours, 700 prompts & 125 tasks. How it works in detail:

I came up with 20 Ideas in 12 months using these methods: (Number 15 is 👌)