Month: August 2025

A quick word from the author:

Hej barn,

Long one today.

There’s this already famous tweet/post/internet truth circling social media (at least the tech bro area):

Easiest ways to make money:

- Men's lust.

- Women's desire for beauty.

- Elderly's health.

- Children's education.

- Rich people's fear of loss.

- Poor people's desire to quickly get rich.

I don’t like it. There’s some truth to it, don’t get me wrong, but I think it’s a piss-poor attempt of superiority and positioning “business makers” as some sort of psycho-analysts that trigger just the right impulses of the “feedstock” to make bank.

The POV of this is basically deluded founders trying to justify to themselves and everyone around them replicating Onlyfans or abusing the eldery in care homes.

Ok, enough complaining, let’s rewrite it:

Easiest ways to make money:

- Men's desire to be appreciated and loved.

- Women's desire to be admired.

- Family's desire to take care of their elderly.

- Parents desire for their kids to be better.

- Rich people's desire to keep their wealth safe.

- Poor people's desire to overcome their situation.

Let me walk you through each one and what the changes imply:

Men's lust.

Carnal desire, illogical, based on urges. Yes, you can make money from this, but it’s temporary or limited, because ultimately men are (somewhat) logical creatures.

- Men's desire to be appreciated and loved.

“Only women and pets are loved unconditionally” Chris Rock. Give a man unconditional love and appreciation, and he’ll never leave. The root of almost all failed marriages (Men most often times cite the reason for cheating as “I felt unappreciated for me efforts”). There’s a reason most $$ made by Onlyfans model is not thanks to the pictures, but the chats their team maintains with the subscribers.

Women's desire for beauty.

This is where you can clearly tell the initial post was written by a guy. Women don’t crave to spend 5 hours in the bathroom getting ready for a 2 hour event. Women don’t inherently desire beauty, beauty is the means.

- Women's desire to be admired.

Reality is women desire to be admired (and not just by men). Men desire to be admired too. Unfortunately, society has entrenched the belief of “being valuable = being admired for physical looks” in women a lot more than men. That’s why you see badly dressed men everywhere. You can make a woman feel good, feel admired, without serving her beauty secrets and recipes for clean skin. This actually opens up the realm of possibility of what you can build.

- Elderly's health.

Right, so as long as you hawk a miracle pill on TV that’s basically just sugar (I’m looking at you Oscillococcinum) and promise the elderly they’ll feel better, that’s good business. Ok, let’s assume good intentions, you’re still focusing on the wrong target. I’ve met the elderly, most of them try to ignore their health issues cause they’re too scared to get checked out. Another miss.

- Family's desire to take care of their elderly.

Now this is truth. The ones trying to keep the elderly safe are their family, but they’ve got to deal with their own life at the same time. Now you’re selling them something to help them track/support/communicate with their elderly? Sign them tf up.

- Children's education.

Close, but no cigar. Go sit outside a school and stop and ask kids if they like being in school (on second thought, don’t do that, it’s creepy af). 8 out of 10 will say no. Children don’t particularly like education in the traditional sense, they like to play. And if they get to learn at the same time, what a great opportunity that is.

- Parents desire for their kids to be better.

The real way to interpret this is again through the lens of the parent: who ultimately decides what activities the kid gets to enjoy? Who is ultimately paying for that?

- Rich people's fear of loss.

Ok, this one is quite spot-on, but it’s again a negative lens that doesn’t really help with brainstorming.

- Rich people's desire to keep their wealth safe.

Suddenly, there’s 1242940434 ideas of how to help rich people achieve that. A really large Safe with a hole leading to the author’s pocket is one of them.

- Poor people's desire to quickly get rich.

Now this is just nasty (and not in the good, kinky way). Generalizing that all poor people desire to get rich quickly. Not everyone dreams of being Jeff Bezos you bozos.

- Poor people's desire to overcome their situation.

Everyone who’s struggling financially is, however, trying to overcome their situation. They see it as temporary. Suddenly, there’s plenty more ways to help them. Just don’t try to sell them a $999 course of how to build a B2B SaaS. That’s old tech, now it’s about Agentic AI systems.

By reframing these, we actually get to build healthy, positive business, not just the next grift/pump-and-dump scheme. Now, how do we airdrop this into the brain of every tech bro in Silicon Valley?

Inbox finds that weren’t shit:

• How I approach motion in product design

“Start with three timings

Quick, default, and long. This creates a simple framework that can be used in most use-cases, then you can refine when custom timings are needed.

Embrace springs

I hear a common misconception of people not using spring animations because they don’t want things to feel “bouncy””

• What Do You Mean?

You’ve probably experienced situations where this lack of understanding has caused problems. Take this simple series of events:

> We are working on a project together.
> I need something from you. I ask for it.
> You say you will “try” to get it to me by the end of the day.
> I operate under the assumption that I will have it by the end of the day.
> You do not send it. The project derails slightly. Now our timing is off.
> You say you did not commit to sending me the item.
> We get into a big argument about what “try” means.

• The Red Queen Effect – Mental Model: Work Smarter, Not Faster

Technology, frameworks, and tools change fast. Running forward without a clear plan just to keep up is a daunting experience. The key is to run with the right focus.

It’s up to leaders to make sure that our teams are running in the right direction and at the right pace:

• Are you learning fast enough?

• What is your benchmark for growth? Are you looking at teams within the company, or outside of it?

• What’s a good conversion rate? (Based on 41,000 landing pages)

Not all conversions are created equal—and neither are conversion rates.

The number that counts as “good” isn’t one-size-fits-all. It depends on your industry, your audience, and how people find your page in the first place.

• Best Practices for Building Agentic AI Systems: What Actually Works in Production

I’m using mixed decomposition for feedback processing:

Phase 1 (Parallel): Categorize feedback, extract sentiment, identify users

Phase 2 (Sequential): Group by theme → Prioritize by impact → Generate report

Works every time.

Startup Idea of the Week: Bear-lingual 🧸

You know what’s worse than kids forgetting their homework?

Watching them forget their heritage language.

That time your kid calls grandma and can only say “hi”? Painful.

When they mix Spanish with English and end up inventing “Spanglish 2.0”? Brutal.

And don’t even get us started on trying to explain cultural traditions in one language only.

It’s not that kids don’t want to learn. They just aren’t being taught in ways that feel natural—or fun.

Because who knows more about bedtime stories than a stuffed bear? Who knows more about playtime than the toy they carry everywhere?

But right now, toys don’t help kids stay connected to their roots.

What if they did?

What if learning a language wasn’t another lesson—but a cuddle?

How It Works

🧸 Plush + AI: Kids get a soft, huggable bear that talks back in two languages—blending playtime with learning.

🎤 Talk, Listen, Repeat: The bear responds to voice prompts, tells bilingual stories, sings songs, and plays call-and-response language games.

📱 App + Parent Controls: Parents pick the target language (Spanish, Mandarin, French, etc.), track simple progress, and unlock new content packs.

⭐ Positive Reinforcement: Kids get gentle praise (“¡Muy bien!”) for repeating words, building confidence instead of pressure.

🔄 Always Fresh: Weekly content drops—seasonal songs, cultural stories, playful mini-games—keep the bear from becoming “that one toy in the corner.”

Why This Works

Kids don’t learn languages from worksheets. They learn by hearing, repeating, and—most importantly—playing.

Right now, bilingual parents are stuck: they want their kids to stay connected to their roots, but they can’t always teach consistently.

Bear-lingual creates a neat loop:

Kids play with the bear →

They pick up words naturally →

Parents see real progress (and guilt disappears) →

The bear updates with fresh stories →

Kids keep playing.

It’s cultural connection disguised as cuddles.

Go-to-Market Plan

🎯 Start with bilingual households in the U.S. (22% of families speak another language at home).

🤝 Partner with preschools, daycares, and bilingual education programs.

📦 D2C launch via Shopify + Amazon, bundled with the app subscription.

🌍 Expand with licensed characters (Disney, Sesame Street) to make bilingual learning feel like mainstream play.

What Could Go Wrong?

❌ Kids might lose interest if the bear repeats too much.

❌ Parents may worry about screen time.

❌ Not all language translations feel natural in plush-toy voice.

That’s why:

– Content refreshes weekly to keep things engaging.

– The bear focuses on audio + plush interaction, with optional app visuals (not mandatory).

– Native speaker linguists curate translations so it’s always culturally correct.

Business Model

Hybrid.

🛒 One-time plush purchase.

📲 Subscription for ongoing content packs, new languages, and premium features (seasonal story drops, cultural mini-games).

Long-term play: Position for acquisition by a major toy company (Hasbro, Mattel) or ed-tech leader (LeapFrog), targeting a 5–8× revenue exit.

Ok, hear me out, you should try: Gladwell’s Law

Word-of-mouth isn’t random – it’s driven by three specific types of people: Connectors (people with huge networks), Mavens (love sharing knowledge), and Salespeople (natural persuaders).

How to use it

Go through your customer list right now. Find people with 5,000+ LinkedIn connections (Connectors), customers who send detailed feature requests (Mavens), and anyone who’s referred others without incentives (Salespeople). Give these people exclusive access, early previews, and special recognition.

1 connector sharing your content > 100 regular customers.

Excerpt from The 13 viral marketing laws 🏛️

T-t-t-t-that’s all folks, see you next week.

A quick word from the author:

Bongiorno,

While hanging out with my house-mates around the fire yesterday, we started talking about the reality that surrounds us and current social, political and economic context.

We all had different takes, some of us mentioned this is the best humanity has ever been and we’re lucky to be alive today, some of us (myself included) thought that this is just the beginning of the end and we’re doomed to experience techno-feudalism.

There is an objective reality and a way to interpret that reality (our own subjective views).

The objective reality is that inequality is getting worse every single minute, government is powerless (or actively trying to make it worse) and we’ll soon all be at the mercy of the few and the powerful.

Now, taking into account this objective reality, what’s our own individual take? There’s a lot of options, for example, we could:

A. Decide the bad guy in this current setup are the corporations, the elites and the 0.1% and fight them through any means necessary (backing political adversaries, boycotting the companies owned by these elites, speaking out and protesting against them etc.)

B. “If you can’t beat them, join them”. Start building products and services for the elite, try to join their ranks by making things they want to see in the world. Praise them on social media for their skill and know-how and support their actions.

C. Build your own, parallel system. Disconnect from the current architecture of society and find alternative ways to live and grow (this is the hardest to put into practice since our world is so inter-connected). This is reflected in what the crypto community initially tried to achieve.

D. Live ignorant to all these struggles and just focus on your own well-being and your immediate family. Get a job (any job at this point), go on vacations, enjoy life to the fullest and navigate the uncertainty one turn at a time.

E. Actively pursue your own narrow-goals, not focused on the bigger picture. Build that restaurant/club/app you’ve always wanted to make. Very similar to option D, but with more intent on personal goals.

F. (My Take) Understand what’s under my control, what’s not, and make an active, genuine effort to move things in what I consider to be the “right direction”. Problem with this approach is that what I consider “right” will be considered “wrong” by others.

Day-to-day, I do a lot of reading of technical, professional and, let’s call it “philosophical” reading. For example, this great read from Dan Koe about the 12 rules to change your life.

The principles are incredible and will definitely help you engage with your life better than before. But I can’t escape the feeling they’ve been written from the myopic lens of a person who owes a lot of their achievements to luck, timing and positioning.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about success:

Once you’re at the top and start giving advice, you’re already wrong. Because the path behind you has already changed dramatically and things aren’t like they used to be, the same path to success, the same principles, beliefs and systems that made someone successful no longer apply to the new reality.

What I want you to take away from this rambling of mine is to be very aware of the lens you’re adding on top of the objective reality we’re all living through. The way to do the most damage to yourself and everyone around you is to stay ignorant to your own beliefs and values.

The bad and the good of last week:

• I’m Worried It Might Get Really Bad

“Hundreds or thousands of companies, and billions of dollars, are being spent on replacing human workers.

Some don’t think this is possible, but they think we need to invent some super smart model that’s better than anything we’ve ever seen.

We don’t need that. What we need is scaffolding and piping that connects the dots and brings the right context together in the right way to solve problem x or y.”

• The Ad Industry Is Dumping Younger Workers

“In recent years, the unemployment rate among college graduates aged 22-27 has inched higher than jobless levels for all workers, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

This is a new development: Young degree holders have consistently experienced lower unemployment than the general public going back to at least 1990, the earliest year the data is available.”

• Designing With AI, Not Around It: Practical Advanced Techniques For Product Design Use Cases

“Jumping straight into execution feels fast, but it’s risky. We might end up solving the wrong thing, or solving it the wrong way. That’s where GPT can help: not just by generating ideas, but by helping us think more clearly about the structure of the problem itself.

There are many ways to break down a task. One of the most useful in product work is the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework. Let’s see how we can use advanced prompting to apply JTBD decomposition to any task.”

• Eleven Music is Here

“Today, we launched Eleven Music – the next step on our mission to build the most comprehensive AI audio platform in the world. With Eleven Music, businesses, creators, artists, and every single one of our users can generate studio-grade music from natural language prompts, with:

– Complete control over genre, style, and structure

– Vocals or just instrumental

– Multi-lingual, including English, Spanish, German, Japanese and more

– Edit the sound and lyrics of individual sections or the whole song”

• Why LLMs Can’t Really Build Software

To be fair, LLMs are quite good at writing code. They’re also reasonably good at updating code when you identify the problem to fix. They can also do all the things that real software engineers do: read the code, write and run tests, add logging, and (presumably) use a debugger.

But what they cannot do is maintain clear mental models.

LLMs get endlessly confused: they assume the code they wrote actually works; when test fail, they are left guessing as to whether to fix the code or the tests; and when it gets frustrating, they just delete the whole lot and start over.

Startup Idea of the Week: Collective LLM Teaching

You know what’s worse than AI models making mistakes?

Watching them make the same mistakes—over and over again.

That time an LLM explained how to boil water at “450°F”? Painful.
The one that confused Kafka the author with Kafka the database? Brutal.
And don’t even get us started on tax advice…

It’s not that the models aren’t smart. They just aren’t being taught by the right people.

Because who knows more about tax law than a tax lawyer? Who knows more about mechanical engineering than an actual engineer?

But right now, specialists don’t get a direct way to feed their knowledge back into the system.

What if they did?

What if training an LLM was less about abstract datasets and more about a collective tutoring session—where experts teach the AI in exchange for better access?

How It Works

🧑‍🏫 Experts Answer, Models Learn: Specialists in fields like law, medicine, design, or software development respond to real user questions. Their answers aren’t just helpful—they become high-quality training data.

💸 Teach-to-Earn: In return, contributors earn free or discounted access to the model. Think of it like tutoring your future AI assistant.

🔍 Quality Control Loop: Answers are peer-reviewed, scored, and reinforced before being ingested. Experts earn reputation points alongside their credits.

📚 Domain Pods: Communities of practice form around specific areas—e.g. “LLM for Radiology,” “LLM for Contract Law,” or “LLM for Game Dev.”

⚡ Continuous Improvement: Instead of waiting for big updates, the model gets smarter incrementally, with domain experts steering it.

Why This Works

LLMs are only as good as the data they’ve seen. Right now, that’s mostly internet text. Great for memes, not so great for medical nuance.

Specialists want smarter AI in their field—but they don’t want to give away their expertise for free.

This creates a neat loop:

• Experts supply targeted, vetted knowledge.

• The model improves in real-world domains.

• Experts get privileged access to a sharper tool that helps them do their jobs faster.

It’s a collective upgrade cycle.

Go-to-Market Plan

🎓 Start with professions where precision matters (law, healthcare, finance).
🤝 Partner with professional associations who want AI aligned with their standards.
💡 Target indie consultants and freelancers: people who’d love free AI horsepower but can’t pay enterprise rates.
📱 Build a gamified platform where “teaching the AI” feels like contributing to Stack Overflow—but with direct rewards.

What Could Go Wrong?

❌ Experts might game the system by giving low-effort answers.
❌ Conflicting expert opinions could confuse training.
❌ The platform risks becoming just another Q&A forum.

That’s why:
– Peer review and reputation scores gate what counts as training data.
– Multiple perspectives are tagged and labeled, not discarded.
– The incentive structure is tied to model improvements, not just volume of answers.

Business Model

Freemium.

🆓 Anyone can ask and browse questions.
💎 Verified specialists can:
– Earn credits for discounted access.
– Build reputation in their domain pod.
– Access pro-tier tools (custom fine-tuning, private deployments, priority inference).

Ok, hear me out, you should try: a Trustworthy Smile

Trust isn’t just built. It’s triggered.

Research suggests we evaluate trustworthiness based on facial cues that resemble happy expressions, like an upturned mouth and slightly raised eyebrows.

They signal to us that a person is likely approachable and has good intentions, so our guard drops.

But it runs deeper than just feeling comfortable.

One study found people invested up to 42% more money in strangers who had “trustworthy” features. 🤯

Because, as research shows, feelings of trust quiet our risk radar.

When someone looks trustworthy, we’re less likely to imagine getting scammed or disappointed.

So instead of spiraling through all the scary “what ifs” on the checkout page, we click “Buy now” with confidence.

That’s why trust isn’t just a vibe—it’s the currency of business.

In just milliseconds, potential customers will judge your profile picture and decide if you’re trustworthy or not.

So if you wanna trigger trust and earn more sales?

Smile genuinely, choose a profile picture that screams “I’m trustworthy,” and use that same pic across every platform.

What’s going on for us:

Our platform is live:

Is it working perfectly? Nope.

Do we know how to improve it? Not yet.

Is this gonna be the coolest f*cking thing once it works properly? 100%.

More news coming soon, for new we keep it cryptic to increase FOMO.

Have a wonderful time these last few weeks of summer,

The guy who didn’t know how to code 8 months ago.

A quick word from the author:

Cześć dzieciaki,

What if laziness is the habit of thinking about the cost of things or the effort instead of thinking about the payoff?

What if you could reverse laziness by simply developing a habit of thinking more about the delicious food you’re about to enjoy than the effort to get up and go get it?

Can we think more about the good outcome and less about the work?

Can we go back to daydreaming, being hopeful? Would that make a difference in how we carry ourselves every day?

Focus on the outcomes, not on the effort. And you will, without a doubt and probably against your will, reach your goal.

Also, remember to be kind and loving. You never know when it’s the last time you get to meet and talk to someone. Stay strong brother.

The NeWs (if you can call it that):

• How to write a good design document

“Novice document writers make the exact same mistake, but with prose instead of code. They get a soup of sentences and paragraphs and expect the reader’s brain to do what they want.

If the reader is smart enough, you might actually get away with this. Just like an expert programmer can mentally untangle spaghetti code.

But a perfect doc is written such that the reader is never surprised. The reader should find that every sentence flows obviously from the previous ones. They should finish your doc and think “well this was entirely straightforward, why did we even need to have this meeting?”

• What is the N+1 Query Problem and How to Solve it?

“If you have 100 posts, that’s 1 query for the posts and 100 more for the comments: N+1 queries in total.

That’s the problem.

It starts small. Feels innocent. But once your data grows, this turns into a flood of unnecessary database traffic and your app crawls.:

• Where to find ideas

“Here’s what it actually takes to find a startup idea. This also will help if you’re working at a startup considering building a new product, or even just a new feature. I am writing this so that you, a serious person trying to build something real, don’t feel like an idiot when you see people peddling nonsense about how easy it is.

This post digs into three fundamental questions:

1. What are we looking for?

2. Where do we find it?

3. How do we know we’re right?”

• tokens are getting more expensive

“imagine you start a company knowing that consumers won’t pay more than $20/month. fine, you think, classic vc playbook – charge at cost, sacrifice margins for growth. you’ve done the math on cac, ltv, all that. but here’s where it gets interesting: you’ve seen the a16z chart showing llm costs dropping 10x every year.”

• The Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion

“The Rationalist movement is a lifestyle as much as a set of ideas. The adherents have mixed their focus on A.I. with advice for how to live your life and manage your career. The community embraces unconventional ideas, including polyamory and the genetics of intelligence as well as Effective Altruism, which is also a lifestyle. And for aspirational A.I. developers, Rationalist events have become essential networking opportunities.

Gatherings like the Machine Learning Alignment and Theory Scholars program, or MATS, hosted at Lighthaven each summer, are a more important way of getting into the field of A.I. safety than academia, said Sonia Joseph, an A.I. researcher at McGill University in Montreal and the tech giant Meta.”

Tool of the Week: Orchids.app

Lovable, but the websites actually look good?

Sign me tf up. Right here:

https://www.orchids.app/

Startup Idea of the Week: Cards Against You

You know what’s more fun than telling a great story?
Convincing everyone it’s true.

The internet is currently obsessed with lore—not the fantasy kind, but the “tell me a weird fact about yourself” kind. One viral tweet asking for personal lore got 1.2 billion views. That’s billion with a “B.” Now there’s a constant flood of people oversharing their quirks, drama, and bad decisions.

And we thought: why should Twitter have all the fun?

What if this became a living room blood sport?

The Game:
Like Cards Against Humanity—but instead of picking the filthiest punchline, you’re spinning the wildest backstory.

Here’s how it plays:

👑 Lore Lord: Each round, a rotating “Lore Lord” draws a prompt card. Example: Share a piece of dating lore about yourself.
🎭 True or False?: Every player answers the prompt—either truthfully, or with one of 6–8 bluff cards in hand that suggest believable lies.
😂 Pick the Best: The Lore Lord chooses their favorite. 1 point if it’s a lie, 2 if it’s the truth (gotta reward the real-life chaos).

Why This Works:

• Humans love swapping stories—especially the kind that toe the line between “that happened” and “no way.”

• Viral social trends are great testing grounds for IRL fun.

• The format is easy to explain, fast to play, and endlessly expandable.

Go-to-Market:
📦 Launch as a $25–$30 physical card game.
🃏 Drop themed $5–$10 expansion packs (“Family Lore,” “Office Lore,” “Holiday Lore”).
📱 Optional app with extra prompts, bluff generators, and story-recording features.
🎯 Sell direct-to-consumer, then court party game publishers like Hasbro, Exploding Kittens, or What Do You Meme.

What Could Go Wrong?
Somebody shares lore that ruins Thanksgiving.
Everyone’s too shy in the first round.
Half the group is too good at lying.

That’s why:
– Prompts are designed to be fun, not therapy.
– Bluff cards keep even shy players in the game.
– The scoring rewards both truth and lies, so you can play to your strengths.

Business Model:
One-time purchase + optional expansions and digital upsells.
Target an exit to a party game giant at a 4–6x revenue multiple.

Ok, hear me out, you should try: Make your premium plan free during weird hours.

• $0 on weekends

• $0 after 9pm

• $0 during lunch breaks (12pm-2pm)

It’s unusual enough that some people will probably share your pricing page. Could create some buzz.

Someone who sets an alarm for 2am to try your product is already emotionally invested before they even start using it.

For B2B products, this is genius: You’re making employees try work-related software during their personal (or weekend) time. When someone voluntarily tests your project management tool on Saturday morning instead of relaxing → they’re solving real work problems on their own time. Truly obsessed. Perfect users.

Now, some people will cheat with VPNs or time zone tricks. Let them. If someone goes through the effort to hack your free hours, there’s sunk cost.

👉 Put a “Remind me when free access starts” form on your pricing page.

People will happily give you their email to get notified about your weird-hour windows. These are much better than random leads – they’re people who specifically want to try your premium features for free. They convert like crazy.

What’s going on for us:

I’ll just leave you with this demo:

And one last meme for good measure:

I kiss you,

The author at 1 AM from the comfort of his bed.

A quick word from the author:

Pryvit dity,

It’s not that hard.

But really, it’s not that hard. Whatever you want to achieve in this life, as crazy as it may sound, it’s not that hard.

Most of us are not that inspired honestly to dream about impossible dreams: riding unicorns, flying outside the solar system etc. 98% of us dream about human things: owning the best sports car, having the ideal body, travelling the entire globe etc.

And most of us are stuck in the realm of “If only…”. “If only I had more time, more money, more energy, more courage, more friends, more knowledge”. “If only..” is the killer of “what if?”. And everyone would rather engage with a dreamer than an obstacle detector.

Trust me, I felt it first-hand during my first month in the US. The hater in me (thanks Eastern Europe!) was hard to smother.

But getting rid of “If only..” is not so easy. It’s literally your brain trying to keep you away from what it deems as risky.

The only trick here is to start with one. One push-up, one design, one email sent, one feature built, one plane ticket bought. Start with one, do it 100% and then no.2 will feel like a breeze.

(in my Grant Cardone era ngl)

Stuff to spark your rough:

• Elements of System Design

“One of the rewards of working in computer systems is the field’s sheer diversity, spanning operating systems, databases, computer architecture, distributed systems, programming languages, networking, and more, each with a rich history. For newcomers, it can be challenging to spot connections across different domains due to the diversity of traditions and vocabularies: the same design principle may appear in different guises across domains.”

• Virality Prompts

“The key appeal is shareability: users can export outputs to social media, nurture their communities around AI art challenges or collaborative storytelling.

Social Gaming:

AI generated dynamic characters, narratives, and worlds, enhancing multiplayer interactions.”

• How to Get Quoted in the Press

“Smart marketers already know earned media isn’t just “good PR.” It’s strategic. One way to move this needle is to focus on getting mentioned by journalists. A quote in an article might now have more downstream reach than a blog post or press release.

Fortunately, you can do this low-lift, high-leverage PR tactic yourself. You don’t need a PR firm on a monthly retainer or a product launch to score earned media.”

• AI Is Wrecking an Already Fragile Job Market for College Graduates

“Bill Balderaz, CEO of Columbus-based consulting firm Futurety, said he decided not to hire a summer intern this year, opting to run social-media copy through ChatGPT instead.

Balderaz has urged his own kids to focus on jobs that require people skills and can’t easily be automated. One is becoming a police officer.

Having a good job “guaranteed” after college, he said, “I don’t think that’s an absolute truth today any more.””

• On the Edge of Competence

“I’ve also started treating myself like a system. After every project, I log my assumptions, key decisions, and outcomes. Did the latency drop I expected actually happen? If not, why? Over time, patterns emerge—such as my tendency to underestimate complexity in certain areas. Tracking that stuff compounds into better judgment.”

Tool of the Week: OpenRouter

Planning to build an AI tool (like 99% of tech bros) and not sure which AI model is the best for your case?

Try OpenRouter: just switch the ID of the LLM in your IDE, no need to remap, reroute, re-order if you want to swtich the model.

Startup Idea of the Week: Builder Parties

You know what’s worse than unfinished ideas?

Having too many of them. That Arduino-powered herb garden? Still a sketch. The horror short film? Just vibes. That modular furniture set? Somewhere between your Pinterest board and your garage.

You’re not lazy—you’re just solo.

And solo is where good ideas go to die.

But what if creative projects didn’t feel like work?

What if they felt like… going out?

A weekend-based “project party” app where you join live builds, jams, and collabs with other makers.

Because your ideas are more likely to come to life if someone’s waiting for you Friday night with a soldering iron, a mic, or a Figma file.

How It Works:

Every Friday, the app drops a fresh lineup of open projects.
Join one. Host one. Build something weird and wonderful together.

🎉 Drop-In Projects: Creators post what they’re building this weekend—music tracks, tiny robots, short films, zines, browser games. Each one has a time window and roles they need.
👾 Join Instantly: Find a project that needs your skills—or just your vibes.
📅 48-Hour Jams: Most collabs are weekend-limited, with a clear start and end time. Think “hackathon,” but chill.
🧠 Prompt Generator: Stuck? The app can pitch random creative constraints or challenges.
📎 Built-In Tools: Shared workspace for to-do’s, file sharing, voice chat, and streaming progress.
🏆 Wrap-Up Monday: Showcase what got built. Celebrate shipping. Then move on.

Why This Works:

• People are overwhelmed by long-term commitments.

• But short-term, social, low-pressure creative jams? That’s fun.

• Creativity thrives on constraints, deadlines, and good company.

This isn’t about finding a lifelong collaborator. It’s about showing up, doing the thing, and shipping it. Then disappearing like a project ghost.

It’s a maker jam, not a marriage.

Go-to-Market Plan:

🎓 Partner with design schools, film schools, and college makerspaces.
🎧 Drop sponsored collabs with creators on YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch.
🎨 Highlight themed weekends: “Synthwave Sunday,” “Low-Poly Jam,” “Spooky Arduino Night.”
🏙️ Host IRL project parties in cities with high creative density. (Berlin, SF, Brooklyn, Tokyo)

Make it feel like a cultural event. Less GitHub, more Burning Man.

What Could Go Wrong?

• Someone ghosts mid-project and now you’re stuck finishing the banana piano alone.

• Too many “idea guys,” not enough doers.

• It turns into a glorified Discord server.

That’s why:
– Projects are opt-in, short-term, and scored on completion.
– Team ratios and contributor types are balanced automatically.
– You earn XP for shipping. Not for talking.

Business Model:

Freemium.

🆓 Join and participate in public jams.
💎 Pro users can:
– Host private project parties
– Save full project archives and media
– Get VIP invites to curated jam weekends
– Use premium prompts and build kits
– Integrate with tools like Notion, GitHub, or Ableton.

Is this just a rebranding of hackathons? Maybe. Does it sound better? Yes.

Ok, hear me out, you should try: Discounting properly

If you are discounting a product that is priced more than $100, use an amount off discount (i.e. $X off).

If you are discounting a product that is priced less than $100, use a percentage off discount (i.e. X% off).

Keep “100” as the cutoff for other currencies too (e.g. for an item priced 180 pesos use 36 pesos off, not 20% off).

• For higher-priced products, people perceive better value and are more likely to buy when a discount is an amount off (e.g. $25) rather than a percentage off (e.g. 10%).

• For lower-priced products, the opposite happens. People perceive better value and are more likely to buy when a discount is a percentage off.

• A cutoff of “100” (e.g. $100, €100, 100 pesos) determines what is high priced (more than 100) and what is low priced (less than 100).

• For example, in experiments:

  • When a jacket priced 480 pesos was discounted as 120 pesos off (vs 25% off), people

    • Perceived the offer as 12.4% better value

    • Said they were 16.3% more likely to buy

  • When balloons priced 48 pesos were discounted as 25% off (vs 12 pesos off), people

    • Perceived the offer as 7.8%* better value

    • Said they were 11.1%* more likely to buy

Why this works

• Part of how we perceive the value of an offer is based on the absolute number of that discount (e.g. 10, 50).

• That’s because we don’t always put in the mental effort to calculate a percentage discount to the equivalent amount.

• For example, a 10% discount means we think of the number 10. If a price is higher than $100 (the equivalent amount would be more than $10 off), we perceive it as a smaller discount than what it actually is.

• When we see $20 off instead of $10 off for a $200 item, we think of the number 20, which is higher, so better.

• Mathematically, amount offs will look bigger than percentage offs when the price is higher than 100.

• When we perceive a promotion as better value, we’re more likely to buy it.

What’s going on for us:

That’s all you’re getting this week 🙂 Sneak peeks into the potential new HQ’s in the heart of San Francisco.

What I can tell you is I’ll give you a single chance: When I post about the launch of the House, it will already have been too late.

If you want a space for yourself (or your startups) in the middle of SF, you’ll have the chance to book it right here, on this newsletter, 1 week before everyone else.

As a legendary orc once said in the corner pictogram of Warcraft 3:

“Work work”. Ceau!