It's been a week of endless nights, alongside keeping up with the fastest week in AI, Seedream 5.0, Nano Banana Lite, and a dozen other content models dropping. In the middle of that, we me and danny ran a 12-hour workshop over several days just to nail our "ideal" ICP (that's how fast things are moving, literally) and our marketing funnel. But somewhere in those 12 hours we figured out a lot more than that. Sharing a few here, might be useful to founders starting out like me: 1- Services: The New Software, published by Sequoia. Same thesis YC wrote into its RFS for AI-Native Service Companies: sell the work, not the tool. Services spend dwarfs software spend. 2- everyone heard about Forward Deployed Engineer so we digged more on the AI native service firm angle and maybe danny just coined a term idk "Forward-deployed marketers" (from a16z's services-led-growth / FDE reading). so his idea was AI does the intelligence, humans hold the judgment that's how you get a real, valuable asset instead of slop. Raw generation is near-free. Taste, prompting craft, knowing what converts AI alone can't do that yet. 3- The demo-vs-delivery gap isn't a bug, it's the business. Every AI content creation tool Higgsfield, Arcads, Creatify, us shows a demo it can't reproduce without a skilled operator behind it. AI can't hand you the end result unless someone knows how to steer it: imagining the scene, communicating it to the model, knowing the model's quirks, running retries without burning the budget and also content generation has gotten expensive fast. It really comes down to how well the operator knows the tools, and that's exactly the team we have. Whoever supplies that operator captures this rising oppuritnity because all the marketing agencies already using AI for content/ads are either trying it themselves or commenting under every AI Infulenecer post "prompt" and then keeping the library of prompts but things are moving rather fast everyone needs an AI partner either to scale their operations or upgarde their current team, especially AI startups are now realizing marketing is very cruicial has to be in-house will pay for a team that hand-holds them for 3 months until they're proficient, then stays on as an advisor. 4- while trying to figure out if our products PMF this came across "Elena Verna (Lovable, Head of Growth): PMF is no longer a static milestone it's an ever-evolving moving target". its crazy that feature differentiation is dead and the only moat that is left beside the endless VIRAL marketing is the trust on humans responsbility you cant BLAME "AI" and also continuous human-centric iteration so we have come to the point of SINGULARITY not Human not AI not Organic not Paid its EVERYTHING and ALL at once - so we are still chasing the ever evolving moving target. 5- 75% of HubSpot's revenue comes from partners (SaaStr). Proof that services distribution scales inside a software company. anyways 12 hours in, and we only got to solve our top of the funnel that is "the web-app is the demo and MCP is where the "aha" moment actually lives" Monday tomorrow excited and tensed at same time for our next workshop it really is best time in history to be building anything.

brands are dropping $10.5 billion on world cup ads this summer. more than the entire nfl regular season. fox is charging up to $50 million per package. all 16 fifa sponsorships sold out before kickoff, $2.8 billion worth, up from $1.8 billion in qatar. and the part nobody talks about: 89% of the 100 million americans watching plan to buy something during the tournament. thats $7.5 billion in consumer spend looking for a brand to land on. you dont need $50 million to take your cut. you need creative thats live while the matches are. 2 ai ugc ads below, made in eComrads from 1 product image each. The MacBook hook is crazy 💀