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That’s a way to go down.. 😂
you can vibe-code your app
you can no-code your app
you can just code your app
but at the end of the day
the app with the best distribution & positioning wins
was true 10 years ago
will be true in 10 years from now
sorry
This cover story came out 16 years ago! It kind of feels like only yesterday. Thanks @chafkin
I feel fortunate that I moved to San Francisco 15 years ago and caught the very tail end of tech being weird and a bit nerdy.
Every startup in 2010 still had a few developers with ponytails, desks covered with hand-painted Dragon Quest figurines, a CTO who did 80 hours of community service in 2003 for installing malware on their high school computers, and someone in ops who had to leave the office at 6:15pm on Tuesdays to get down to Daly City for bagpipe lessons.
Now, everyone here is like "Oh man, I'm such a nerd! I'm super into hiking, rock climbing, and $400 mechanical keyboards for typing in Slack"
THIS APP IS A GIANT 🤯
"I am" makes $400K/month by tapping into the power of daily affirmations
Forget complex features
150K monthly downloads & a deeply loyal user base (1.5m followers on IG)
Let´s break it down 🧵👇
(1/17)
It takes the average startup 2–3 years to find product market fit. So please keep going even when you want to quit.
Market your startup every single day for a couple years and I guarantee you'll be surprised by how far you'll go.
"I've learned not to question inspiration. To simply let it drive when it shows up with a full tank. Quite often, I don't exactly know where we're going or even why we're going, but it's repeatedly taken me to just the right place at just the right time!"
If they need a break, they need a break.. 😂
Move over, that’s my side.. 😂
Stunning contrast here
** Evidence You Might Be In A Cult **
You follow one charismatic Leader
In your Leader’s mind your Leader can do no wrong
In your mind your Leader can do no wrong
Your Leader demonizes outsiders
Loyalty's the ultimate measure of your devotion
You don't know you're in a Cult
You don't need a mentor. There's no secret sauce left inside anyone's head any more. It's all been tapped, bottled, tweeted, and shared a million times. Sample some of that, but also guard your ignorance. You'll lose it soon enough.
Whenever a team considers adding messaging to their app, I always remind them of the 1970s FedEx tagline: “When it absolutely, positively has to be there.”
That’s basically the standard you’re up against. Messaging is the most brutally competitive space on Earth. Replacing a user’s existing chat threads not only requires a miracle—but also 100% delivery rates, feature parity, and the ability to reach every possible contact. There is no margin for error.
For small teams, it’s a non-starter: you simply cannot compete. For mature teams, it requires relentless execution to make it even into the Consideration Stage.
And ironically, if you succeed, it can often be a net negative to user growth because it leads users to stop distributing your links & content to third-party apps.
The most profitable App Store segment is 45+ years old
Untapped gold mines that print money:
Everyone's fighting for Gen Z users
Meanwhile, millennials and boomers control 70% of disposable income
Gen Z: "This app is mid"
Boomers: "Take my $14.99/month"
Build for people with money 🎯
“If I have a deadline, I can meet it, but I can’t then immediately go on writing again. And do I ever get a piece in ahead of the deadline? I don’t think I’ve ever done that.” —Margo Jefferson
lol remember this one
A reason companies are excited about agents is that they think agents will let them skip the hard task of figuring how to integrate AI into the daily process of work- in theory, agents just let you treat the AI like an employee.
More value will come from tackling the hard task.
You can just take academic papers and paste them into Gemini 2.5/ChatGPT o3/Claude 4 with the prompt "build me a game based on this paper, make it interesting and thematic but still conveying key findings" and get a tiny working educational game. (In this case, I used Gemini)
"build half a product, not a half-assed product"
from the book rework by @dhh & @jasonfried
solo founder
1 AI app
built in 12 hours
$15K/month
So Claude 4 one-shotted an iOS app with @supabase support in one prompt. I got the configuration, the schema, and the SwiftUI UI, all compiling and working on the first try. It even told me how to configure Supabase and seed the database.
Why people move to Silicon Valley.
Look at this completely automated piece of brilliantly vibe coded AI slop.
Almost 2x the amount fo tests as code, works almost 100% as per my specifications. Took around 10 hours of AI looping to get there. Gonna up the tests some more and then. 🚢
Our latest brain-to-image decoding model is now available on 🤗 HuggingFace:
"Dynadiff: Single-stage Decoding of Images from Continuously Evolving fMRI"
led by M Careil & @BenchetritYoha1: