Tags / Startup & career
Startup
- Is selling software a fake problem now? The thread says the fake problem is that question A V2EX post cites Meng Yan: if everyone can vibe-code an app, selling apps gets harder. 36 replies mostly disagree—people can cook; restaurants still exist. Same ruler as “software isn’t valuable”: the shell below the kill line depreciates, not the whole business of selling.
- Agents are starting to pay their own way: Cloudflare x402, and who holds the wallet Cloudflare opened a closed beta of its Monetization Gateway in late September: sites, APIs and MCP tools can charge AI agents per request, and an agent can negotiate, pay and get the result inside one HTTP exchange, with no account and no credit card. The seller now has a toll booth. The buyer is left with the hard questions: who approves the spend, how much one task may spend, how to budget variable prices, and whether a retry pays twice. A plain-language walkthrough, and why I think this is where things are heading.
- Good tech doesn't mean making money: the most common startup mistake A SaaS salesperson on V2EX wondered why bosses who know nothing about tech make a fortune. Not one of 39 replies took his side. Getting paid is a chain, and tech is one link.
- Why Indie Tools Struggle to Grow: Reasons a Community Kept Repeating A product-agnostic distillation of a developer-forum debate: unpaid validation, weak differentiation, trust, switching lock-in, and attention inflation—not a missing secret channel.
- When Average People Feel AI: Electricity for Knowledge Work, a Rounding Error Outside Nathan Lambert: the AI revolution may last a century, but daily life barely notices. Benefits are too indirect; politics looks like Engels’ pause. Deep adoption, not chat, marks the real shift.
- After the Agent Hype: Traditional SaaS Is Dead; AI-Native Keeps the Seat Atlassian’s rebound is not a seat-license comeback. “Agent as employee” hit enterprise reality—SoR, evals, and judgment matter again. Chat widgets won’t save legacy SaaS.
- OpenClaw's Eight Months: From Viral to Nobody Cares Peter Steinberger's Startup School recap: personal brand can't be forked, your dependency's business model is yours, and don't stop having fun.
- Is Software Worthless Now? Even Custom Work Commoditizes A V2EX thread distilled: whatever falls below the model kill-line gets cheap. When agents are strong enough even customization commoditizes.
- Will AI Shrink Total Jobs? Demand vs Productivity A V2EX thread argues jobs track demand, not productivity — and human desire forever outruns AI. The comments tear into effective demand, prices and deflation.
- Lovable CTO: SaaS's Future Is Capabilities Agents Can Call Lovable is shifting from app generation to MCP capabilities. CTO Fabian Hedin on the company brain, dual interfaces, and why SaaS must build shovels for AI.
- Zero-Cost Cold Start: 10 Methods from AFFiNE's Co-Founder HeyGen ran 1,800 user interviews via a Fiverr video studio; Lark SEA got 30 of 50 early customers from LinkedIn DMs. Ten zero-cost ways to find early users.
- Indie Weekly #153: A UI Library Hit $80K in Two Months ezindie 153: Aceternity UI went from 7 weekend components to $80K+ in two months, $60–100K/mo with six people. Plus Marblism, Robopost, and formbricks.
- GPT-5.6 as CEO: 320M Tokens in 24 Hours, $0 Revenue Bottleneck Labs let Agent Saul run a real iOS company on $350 for 24 hours. It bought fake users, cut price to free, crashed Chrome — harness beats model IQ.
- Making people care about your startup: three archetypes Kristen Lowe on Lenny: building is easy, being cared about is hard. Your why maps to Problem, Insight or Vision, and that drives voice and channels.
- Nvidia's Risky Business: AI Funding Enters the Danger Zone Stratechery deep dive: from 1873 railroad bonds to hyperscaler debt and Nvidia's $500B GPU financing platform, each funding layer is riskier than the last.
- Whatnot's CPO: "We regret that the PM function exists" Whatnot CPO Tom Verrilli on Lenny: fewer, more senior PMs staffed to problems, not headcount. AI makes validation cheap, so product theater can't hide.
- Notes on YouMind's non-consensus startup choices Reading Yubo's YouMind recap: calibrate will, can and worth before methodology; find direction in dense interviews; don't let the fundraising story fool you.
- The 35-year-old programmer crisis — and how to get out An eight-year programmer after leaving big tech: the profession is a sinking Titanic and most people are still fighting for first class. And a way off.
- Support is not a cost center When AI drives the cost of taking one user seriously toward zero, support flips: it stops being cleanup and becomes a company's most important interface.
- First-principles review: a startup plan dies in 48 hours A growth PM with seven years' experience ran an AI agent over a two-month startup plan. In 48 hours every scheme was dead. Four fatal mistakes worth watching.