Shayan H. retweeted
AI has collapsed the cost of building products, but not the cost of knowing what to build.
- The old loop: spec, scope, build
- The new loop: build, play, design, ship
Prototypes are cheap. Great products still require taste, judgment, and a clear understanding of what users actually need.
a16z's @joshelman on the artifact a product manager actually produces: a16z.news/p/product-manageme…
Shayan H. retweeted
Make something agents want
thinking machines is actually such a funny company
the dashboard is slow enough to be unusable but you can now train a model by dropping the api key and telling fable to train one so it doesn’t matter
it’s literally train models by api, but more flexible than what oai has had for like 3 years
and their distribution is just really good blogs
honestly goated give them another 100B
Shayan H. retweeted
We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.
We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.
Shayan H. retweeted
VCs don't fund ideas. They fund stories about ideas. The best founders aren't pitching what the company does. They're pitching what the world looks like when it works.
Shayan H. retweeted
New from Stripe Economics: The Age of the Solopreneur
stripeeconomics.com/p/the-ag…
The whole joy of creating something was, at least partially, participating in the process of turning an idea into reality. I feel like simply talking to an agent is now the optimal approach, but I don’t think it’s fun anymore.
Apparently profitability was the real mythical creature.
economist.com/business/2026/…
Shayan H. retweeted
The best way to learn AI is to work at an AI startup.
On August 15, we're inviting ambitious students to YC HQ to meet founders and engineers from 50+ YC companies.
Roam the expo hall to meet founders (and collect swag), startups pitch you, interview onsite, and land your Summer 2027 internship – co-ops and more.
3/6 Enter dynamic tool generation:
The LLM writes the code for a brand-new function on the fly, executes it in a sandbox, and uses the result.
No predefined API. No hardcoded tools.
Just: “I’ve never done this before, but I can build the capability right now.”
Shayan H. retweeted
in @ycombinator they have a playbook on how to get customers ASAP for your startup.
if you follow this, you’ll brute force your way to 100 customers, almost no matter what your product is.
Here it is:
1/ launch-max.
product hunt, hackerNews, devhunt, betalist, peerlist, indie hackers, etc. YC tells you to launch 3 times MINIMUM
2/ pull your competitor’s strongest backlinks and get yourself listed in the same places.
whatever article they have listed, you make a better version and ask the site to replace it (or supplement) with yours.
3/ WARM OUTBOUND.
Everyone knows about building in public. but you still need to capitalize on the 99% of leads who see your content but don’t come inbound
scrape everyone who likes your posts on Linkedin each week, check if they fit your customer profile, and message them.
you set this up to fire automatically with @origamichat (i dropped a prompt in the comments)
4/ find 20 to 30 ugc creators on tiktok / instagram in your niche. ask them to create content about your product, ideally from a fresh account.
pay them a fixed fee ($15–$30 per video) plus performance incentives ($1k for 1 million views, etc).
you can use @sideshift_app (best creators imo) and line up 20+ of these creators in 1 day
5/ when building in public, a video is 10x better than an image/text - spam use cases of ur product on X/Linkedin
6/ figure out where your customers actually spend time.
which slack/discord groups are they in? what newsletters do they open? which podcasts and accounts do they follow? pay those people for shoutouts
7/ there's a fresh trend on x basically every week. jump on the relevant ones and fold your product in (like i’m doing right now).
To find trends i just use Origami & search “Lead Gen/GTM posts that are viral on X” to find the best posts every week in my niche
Then, I will reply to those, quote tweet them, and use the formats that work myself
(that’s the secret to why my account has high engagement BTW - you can do this too)
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if you are doing all this every single week and DO NOT GIVE UP (launching, posting demos, contacting new customers)
I guarantee you will hit your customer goals. Then the game becomes retention.
will be posting 2-3 more growth hacks every single week