Month: September 2025

A quick word from the author:

Ahoj děti,

Back with a hot-take: everyone who says you should focus on one thing to be successful is lying to you.

I love this quote by Robert A. Heinlein:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

In my industry (startups), you usually hear VC’s saying that the founders “aren’t focused”, especially if they’re involved in multiple ventures.

Yet nobody says that about the VC when they invest in 10 different industries with barely and connection to one another.

Taking a step back, even our schools are trying to help us specialize in a field, inventing narrower and narrower sub-niches of expertise. “Data-analyst for micro-services on the blockchain” is not the future.

If you visit any great personality of history’s wikipedia page, you’ll see multiple titles, divergent interests.

Let’s take for example Thomas Jefferson. U.S. president, lawyer, architect, writer, inventor, farmer.

Hedy Lamarr: Hollywood actress and inventor (helped pioneer spread-spectrum technology)

Or someone closer to our times: Bridgit Mendler, ex-Disney Channel star turned Musician turned CEO for a space startup company Northwood.

Point is, if you’re truly passionate about multiple topics, don’t stop yourself from pursuing everything that makes you alive just cause some random ass investor/financier told you they wouldn’t invest in you. F*ck them and follow your passion without looking back.

The truly exceptional people recognize each other, so stop pursuing money and investments and start pursuing the best version of yourself, even if it might look like a bowl of Borscht to everyone else. Money will follow.

Inspiration just for you (very personal, yes):

• Hype is a Business Tool

“m constantly trying out various LLM tools and find they often perform far poorer than promised. When I try to discuss this online the boosters come out in great force, often with a dismissive response about “you’re prompting it wrong”. For a UX designer, blaming the user is as close as you can get to a cardinal sin. But this boosterly vibe seems to have escaped social media and is infecting the C-Suite of many companies. Cory Doctorow said it well: “we’re nowhere near the point that AI can do your job, but we’re past the point where an AI salesman can convince your boss it can.” For such a young and still unproven technology, it’s shocking how quickly it’s being forced upon teams.”

• Mini products are everywhere—here’s why

“Miniature products aren’t exactly new in marketing, as sample sizes have long existed to give customers a taste of a bite-sized snack or a quick spritz of perfume. The difference now is that at a time of price-consciousness, many consumers are interested in buying smaller, more affordable items before committing to more expensive, full-sized purchases. According to data from market research company Circana, unit sales of mini beauty products grew 15% in the first half of 2025—almost four times the rate of other sizes.”

• Pull vs Push Marketing

“The buying dynamic is different depending on the customers’ state. They can be searching for a solution (pull) or in a passive state (push). When they’re in a “pull state”, they actively look for solution, experience internal buying triggers, and grow an intent to buy.”

• The founder’s guide to hiring designers in 2025

“So we hosted a virtual session to tackle the nuts and bolts of design hiring in 2025. Nearly 1,000 people signed up, which should tell you something about how high the demand is for design talent right now.

The takeaway: the problem isn’t necessarily a lack of talented designers. It’s that market dynamics have shifted. AI has raised the baseline for product quality, big companies and startups are competing for increasingly similar profiles, and the hiring playbooks that worked even two years ago need updating.”

• The art of prototyping

“In 1997, Stephanie Houde and Charles Hill wrote a paper called, What do Prototypes Prototype? Their framework remains one of the clearest ways to think about the practice. A common mistake in making prototypes is having an unclear intention of what questions the prototype is meant to answer. As a result, several prototypes are solution-oriented with a nice-looking demo but no clear learning objective.”

Startup Idea of the Week: Midjourney for fonts

What’s more divisive than politics at a family dinner?

Fonts.

Case in point: Apple’s big iPhone launch. Forget the specs—what really lit up X and design blogs was the font. A chunky new typeface on the Pro lineup. Some people loved it. Others said it looked like WordArt from 2003.

And that makes sense: typography isn’t decoration. It’s design. The right typeface makes something iconic. The wrong one ruins it instantly (and yes, Comic Sans should be illegal under international law).

But here’s the thing: finding and using fonts is a pain. You’re hunting through sketchy websites, fighting license agreements, downloading zip files, installing, testing, uninstalling. Designers waste hours just to end up with something that still isn’t quite right.

What if, instead of searching, you could just make the exact font you need in seconds?

How It Works

💬 Prompt a Typeface
Type “A bold, futuristic font for a tech startup” or “An elegant serif inspired by 1920s Art Deco posters.”

🎨 Get Options Instantly
The AI generates multiple variations. Refine, iterate, tweak until it’s perfect.

📝 Complete Character Sets
Not just pretty mockups—full alphabets, numbers, punctuation, and special characters ready to download.

💾 No Legal Headaches
Every generated font comes with full commercial usage rights.

Why This Works

Fonts are identity. They shape how we perceive brands, products, and even entire cultures.

But the industry is broken:

• Licensing is confusing.

• Choices are overwhelming.

• Custom fonts cost thousands to commission.

FontJourney.ai flips the model:

Instant creativity → Unlimited variety → Zero licensing drama.

Designers go from “settling” for whatever font’s available to creating the perfect one.

Go-to-Market

🎯 Freelance designers and agencies—sell direct with a freemium + credits model.

🤝 Partner with platforms like Canva, Figma, and Webflow.

📦 Monthly subscription for unlimited font generations.

Business Model

Freemium SaaS.

• Free tier: limited generations.

• Paid: subscriptions + credit packs for high-volume users.

Long-term play: acquisition by Adobe, Canva, or Figma at a 12–18× revenue multiple.

What’s going on for us (thanks for asking):

• Level-1.dev: We’re hiring!

Actively looking for a software architect with experience using Langchain. Join us, get equity and work on something truly amazing: making Lovable for Video Games.

Ah, we also dropped a slew of new features and added a free tier, so now’s the time to test level-1.dev if you want to test it.

• European Startup Embassy: Launching in a couple of days.

Look out for our HowToWeb launch this week.

• ReaktorX: Raising a $2M Fund

ReaktorX is turning from an accelerator into a VC fund, backing the most talented Under-25 first-time founders, flying them to San Francisco and letting them loose to destroy their competition.

Very tired and almost out of gas,

The author

A quick word from the author:

Hey there,

Let’s do something different today. Here’s an excerpt from a potential new book.

Chapter 3, “Into the belly of the…”

Day 21, First Day of the Summer Cycle:

Ever since I was brought to their HQ, my hands haven’t stopped shaking. They all want to see me, see if I was real, grasp at me as if I was a rockstar on the way to the stage right before their final show.

I feel like I can’t breathe anymore, like the walls are closing in. Every minute I spend in their underground bunker is another opportunity for them to discover the truth.

But they mustn't, not ever. No one must know. How do I keep hiding this when they want me to do a demonstration tomorrow? I don’t even understand what they expect of me…

I’ll fake it, like I did before. They won’t be able to tell the difference anyway. If my examiner wasn’t able to, they surely won’t.

But Davey seems like he’s onto me. He tried to check under my jacket for hidden equipment when I first Delivered during the examination. The fact they were able to infiltrate the school for so long.. Just goes to show they’re the real deal. I’ve got to Deliver for real this time..

If only Dad was here…”

End of Entry (EoE)

Julius put away his journal, making sure to re-encrypt his dMem with a new key and protocol. Nothing has been the same since he left home, since the exam…

Being exiled is not what he expected. June was always telling stories about the famous exiles that ended up being reintegrated and how they’ve changed the last 250 years Post-Distrum. What June often failed to mention was only 9 exiles were ever reintegrated, out of thousands. And 2 of them committed suicide 1 year later.

Writing down an entry used to calm Julius, but the shaking hasn’t disappeared. It even got worse. “How am I supposed to fake an entire Visual Delivery for tomorrow? I’ve barely got time to think about what I should make…”

Julius put down his tablet, stretched across the improvised bed and hugged his backpack tight.

“If only Dad was here… he’d know.. He certainly would know. Right?”

Sometimes, in this newsletter, instead of some pop-culture inspired article, you’ll receive an excerpt from this new SF book.

Set in 250 PD (Post-Distrum), the story follows Julius, a 14-year old who, after an unexpected outcome during his Majora Exam, ends up in the base of The Rebels, where he’s worshipped as if he’s the new Banksy. Julius however hides a deep, dark secret from everyone, even from his family: It’s all fake.

This week’s kinda news I guess:

• How Instagram hacks perception

“Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom came up with a crafty hack to make the app’s photo-sharing flow feel snappy and instant for the user on any network/device.

He applied a lesson from his time at Google’s Gmail team: don’t just optimise the speed of the technology, optimise the user’s perception of speed.”

• Build Places, Not Products

“From an engineering perspective, it made no sense. You don’t use a massive image for a background when you can’t predict page height, because if everyone is getting a different view of the image, you can’t guarantee a coherent experience. Our approach violated other “best practices” of product design, too: You don’t add texture when flat colors load instantly. You don’t choose paintings over flat backdrops when you’re building software that needs to work on every connection speed.”

• Claude Memory: A Different Philosophy

“When Claude detects memory invocation through phrases like “what did we discuss about,” “continue where we left off,” or “remember when we talked about,” it deploys two retrieval tools that work like web search or code execution—you see them activate in real-time and wait while Claude searches through your history. Once the search completes, Claude synthesizes the retrieved conversations to answer your question or continue the discussion.”

• My (speculative) master plan for immortality

“Where should this personal computing system live? Ideally, it should be built into glasses. I’m already annoyed at how often I have to pull my phone out of my pocket to talk to AI chatbots. It’s doubly annoying when I have to open the camera app, take a picture, send it to the chatbot, and then keep the phone out while I wait for a response. Glasses solve all of this by a) sitting right next to your human i/o interfaces (eyes, ears, and mouth) for easy communication, and b) seeing and hearing everything you see and hear. This gives glasses context that a handheld device lacks when it’s not out and actively recording.”

• Why the best products tell most people to f*** off

“When you finally beat a boss after 50 straight deaths, something magical happens. The frustration of those 49 failures doesn’t just disappear – it transforms into one of the most powerful feelings in gaming: earned mastery. That moment of triumph feels so good precisely because you paid for it in blood.

This is the trade-off at the heart of great product design.”

Startup Idea of the Week: AI Patient Simulators

You know what’s more nerve-wracking than your first day on the job?

Your first day with a real patient.

That moment when a stranger sits across from you, listing symptoms you’ve only read about in textbooks? Terrifying.

The stakes? A person’s health, their trust, their future.

And here’s the kicker: in their first two years, medical students only get about 15 minutes per week of actual patient interaction. Fifteen. Minutes.

Meanwhile, they’re expected to log hundreds of hours practicing bedside manner, diagnostics, and treatment decisions before they even hit clinical rotations.

Real patients are unpredictable. Standardized patients cost $200 an hour. And mannequins? They’re glorified CPR dolls.

No wonder 68% of med students say they feel unprepared walking into real-life patient care.

What if they could practice—anytime, anywhere—with patients who feel real?

How It Works

👩‍⚕️ Meet Virtual Patients

AI-powered simulations with full medical histories, personalities, and evolving symptoms.

🩺 Diagnose & Treat

Ask questions, order tests, and propose treatments. The “patient” responds dynamically—just like real life.

📊 Instant Feedback

Get scored on communication, diagnostic accuracy, and treatment planning. Detailed breakdowns show what you nailed and what needs work.

🌍 Thousands of Cases

From everyday flu to rare diseases across every specialty. New cases roll in regularly, sourced from real medical data.

Why This Works

Right now, med students are learning to swim by reading about water.

AI Patient Simulators flip that:

Practice builds confidence → Confidence builds competence → Competence saves lives.

Students walk into clinicals having already “treated” hundreds of patients—without risking a real one.

Go-to-Market

🎯 Sell directly to medical schools as a bundled learning tool.

🤝 Partner with med ed platforms and residency prep programs.

📦 Subscription pricing: $50/student/month for unlimited access.

Business Model

B2B SaaS.

Schools pay per student, predictable recurring revenue.

Expansion into residency prep, nursing programs, and continuing medical education.

AI Patient Simulators becomes the “flight simulator” of medicine.

Long-term: acquisition by a medical education giant like Kaplan or Pearson at an 8–12× revenue multiple.

It’s med school practice—without the $200/hr actors or the creepy mannequins.

What’s going on for us (thanks for asking):

• Level-1.dev: We’ve redone the entire UI and right now implementing tutorials so you guys actually understand how to use it…

Also added asset preview and replacement 🙂

• European Startup Embassy: We’ve signed the lease, insurance is being drafted as we speak, and the furniture is being picked from facebook marketplace (we’re on a budget, ok?)

Sneak peek at the layout, just for the ground floor:

Can’t wait to have just 2 weeks to furnish the space and start organizing the first events. Any suggestions of what kind of events you’d like to see in the new space? (except orgies of course, we already added those to the list).

May your coffee be strong today,

The author

A quick word from the author:

Buna copii,

I’m baaack. I know, last week you didn’t receive the wonderful gift that is my writing, but here I am to grace you with my thoughts yet again.

Today, a bit of popcorn culture + metaphoric stereotyping. Just the way I like it 🙂

I’ve realized I haven’t told you a lot about my American Experience (moved to SF 5 months ago). Let’s start doing that with today’s topic:

Eastern European founders vs American founders (through the lens of Wednesday, my new show obsession)

If you’re not familiar, here’s the fastest rundown possible:

On the left, Enid, a werewolf that likes pink and is generally positive and upbeat and loves hanging out with people.

On the right, Wednesday, a loner, serial-killer obsessed with death, really talented and poetic.

It’s very similar to how founders operate in these 2 regions of the world: on one hand you have the Americans, being ultra mega positive and hyping themselves up to the moon, with an incredible network of connections that just make it possible (their pack).

On the other hand, you’ve got the Eastern European: one guy in a basement somewhere in Bulgaria that build that one piece of open-source software 80% of the internet relies on (I’m looking at you ffmpeg).

These two, polar opposites. Couldn’t be more different. Put them in the same room together, and there’s a 1125% chance sparks will fly.

And here’s where my obsession with the show Wednesday is even more apparent: in season 2, an entire Freak Friday episode happens (typical for these kind of coming-of-age shows). Masterfully executed might I add, the actresses freaking killed it.

Basically, you had the Eastern European founder trying to cosplay the American one and viceversa.

My favorite part of that episode is when Enid (in Wednesday’s body) gets a typical American rainbow milkshake that triggers Wednesday’s ALLERGY TO COLOR (if lack of color isn’t typical Eastern European, idk what is).

There’s a lot of twist and turns in the episode itself (not gonna spoil more here), but at the end, they both learn how it feels to be in each other’s shoes and what each other’s superpowers actually are.

So here’s my thoughts: I think we need each other. Eastern European founders need more positivity and generally a more positive outlook on their life and work. American founders need more grounding to stop overselling and under-delivering. The ideal team setup in my mind is an Eastern European CTO with an American CEO, the roles just fit.

TL;DR: Just go watch the show, it’s pretty freaking cool.

This week’s news slop:

• Video Game Blurs (and how the best one works)

Graphics programming is uniquely challenging in the beginning, because of how many rules and limitations the hardware, graphics APIs and the rendering pipeline impose. But it also unlocks incredible potential, as other limitations dissolve. Let’s find out how graphics programmers have leveraged that potential.

INCREDIBLE READ FOR NERDS, IGNORE IF YOU’RE NOT A NERD.

• Claude Code Framework Wars

The big idea: Claude can automate the coding, while you step into higher-value roles as project manager, designer, and software architect. The trick is to stop treating Claude as a chatbox and start treating it as a framework—a set of rules, roles, and workflows that make its output predictable and valuable.

Even more fascinating – claude code doesn’t require code to become a framework – just structured prompts. And right now, the developer community is experimenting wildly—what you could call the Claude Code Framework Wars. Dozens of open-source projects are testing different recipes for how to work with AI productively.

• The destination for AI interfaces is Do What I Mean

The best prompts now are quite simple, leaving AI to handle how to answer a question. Meanwhile AI chat suffers from the same problem from command lines to Alexa – how can i remember what to ask? Only this time the problem is exacerbated by the fact that AI is capable of practically anything making the task less one of remembering commands but a creative one of coming up with great questions or delivering an interface to discover them and then wrapping the resulting prompts as buttons.

• Stuff costs money

If you want to build a big software business, there are two ways to do it:

1. Build a new product, and charge people to use it.

2. Build a new product. But start small, in a narrow niche. Make some helpful utility, for a very specific set of people with a very specific problem. Downplay your ambitions; talk about how you’re solving a problem for yourself; how you’re building the thing you always wanted. Acknowledge your product’s rough edges; its odd opinions. Put it on Github; say it’s free, open source, forever. Go viral on Hacker News; talk to people on Twitter, on Reddit, never on LinkedIn. Create an online space for your users; call it your community. Open issues; debate them; ask for contributions. Build in public—for the people; of the people; by the people.

• Go faster

f you want to win, go faster. If in doubt and uncertain, go faster. If you want to make $1B dollars, go faster. If you want to change the world, go faster.

Startup Idea of the Week: ⛈️ Weather-based Calendar

(don’t build this in California)

You know what’s worse than canceling plans last minute?

Letting the weather cancel them for you.

That time you set up a picnic, only for the clouds to open up? Painful.

When you finally psych yourself up for a big work sprint—only to realize it’s the sunniest day of the month? Brutal.

And don’t even get us started on scheduling a long run the day it snows.

It’s not that we can’t plan. It’s that we don’t plan with the weather in mind.

Because who knows more about your week than your calendar? And who knows more about your mood than the forecast?

But right now, the two don’t talk to each other.

What if they did?

What if your calendar flexed around the sun, clouds, and rain?

How It Works

📲 Connect & Sync: Link Google or Outlook calendars, give weather access, set your city and preferences.

☀️ Play on Sun, Grind on Gray: The app rearranges your flexible tasks—moving deep work to rainy days, freeing up sunny slots for fun.

🧠 AI-First Planning: Non-negotiables stay fixed. Everything else shifts intelligently based on the 7-day forecast and your productivity style.

🔔 Always Adaptive: Forecasts change. So does your calendar. Real-time nudges help you adjust without the chaos.

Why This Works

Weather already dictates how we feel and what we do—whether we admit it or not.

Right now, planning ignores that reality. But Cloudcal flips it:

Sun comes out → You get more leisure time → Work still gets done on cloudy days → Your week feels balanced.

It’s productivity disguised as play.

Go-to-Market Plan

🎯 Start with remote workers, freelancers, and digital nomads who crave flexibility.

🤝 Partner with wellness coaches, co-working apps, and productivity influencers.

📦 Launch as a freemium SaaS (Cloudcal.ai) with an optional “Pro” tier.

🌍 Expand into team calendars and integrations (Slack, Notion, Jira) so companies can coordinate around weather-sensitive workflows.

Business Model

Freemium SaaS.

💻 Free: Single-user app with core weather-aware scheduling.
🚀 Pro: $10–15/month for smart integrations (Slack, Notion, multi-location weather), team use, and advanced customization.

Long-term play: Position for acquisition by a productivity platform like Notion, Atlassian, or Google Calendar—valued at a 5–7× multiple for its unique behavioral data and IP.

Ok, hear me out, you should try: Launch absurd mini-products to make your brand cool

To make your brand stand out and feel cool, launch an unrelated product in a category far and different from your core one (e.g. cookies from a marketing agency specialized in promoting books) and pick one main brand feature to use in the extension (e.g. make the cookies in the shape of books).

Launching an unrelated product in a totally different category (e.g. clothing from a snacks brand) makes people perceive the brand as cooler.

• Across 4 experiments with 1,454 people and an analysis of over 5,000 social media comments, researchers found that:

  • When real brands launched extremely unrelated products (e.g. KFC’s fried chicken-scented nail polish, White Rabbit’s candy-scented body lotion, KFC Crocs), people felt surprise, joy and saw the brand as cooler

  • When a hot pot brand launched a spicy flavored toothpaste, people rated the brand as 20% cooler

  • When a snack brand launched an unrelated product of home furniture that had the shape of their signature cookie (vs one with no visual connection), people rated it as 11.5% cooler

• The effect is:

  • Stronger when the brand is popular or well-known. When people saw herbal coffee marketed by a popular brand (vs a lesser known brand), they rated the brand as cooler

  • Stronger when the extension is co-branded. For example, people rated McDonald’s 9.7% cooler when they launched a sauce-themed sneaker with Adidas

  • Weaker when the new product is in a category near the core brand’s one (e.g. Instant noodle extension for a hot pot brand)

What’s going on for us (thanks for asking):

• Level-1.dev: We have our first paid user. Pushing new features every single day.

• European Startup Embassy: We officially have a house for Eastern European founders here in San Francisco. Full announcement at How To Web.

• ReaktorX: We’re raising a $4M fund to invest in high-schoolers and students across CEE, fly them to SF and let them devour all of the script kiddies playing around with AI here.

One last meme for good measure.

Lots of hugs and some occasional punches from the author,