Launched SiliconChats to silence. Almost quit. Then applied Naval's leverage principle: Automate what scales. Beta users cut support costs by 70%. Now 1k businesses onboard. Lesson: Build for impact, not applause. ❤️🤖 #SaaS #AI #StartupLessons #BuildInPublic

Are you invading blindly? ​Persia built bridges, ignored narrow seas, and sank. ​Thai's Washbox24 expanded abroad, ignored local cash, and died. ​Secure your own soil! ​#GrowthStrategy #StartupLessons ​#Bootstrapped

THE PRODUCT THAT WAS TOO GOOD TO SAVE THE COMPANY medium.com/p/the-product-tha… #businessstrategy #businesscasestudies #marketing #startuplessons

Most AI chatbots fail. Why? Trained on generic data, not yours. We learned: - Feed it your past support tickets - Let it learn your tone - Watch resolution times drop 60% Build for your unique customers. #AI #CustomerSupport #SaaS #StartupLessons 🤖🚀

5 checks before I trust AI-generated code in production: 1. Can I explain the risky part without rereading the prompt? If I can’t explain the auth flow, data write, payment logic, permissions, or edge case, I don’t ship it. 2. Did I test the failure path? Happy-path demos are cheap. The bugs usually live in retries, timeouts, bad input, duplicate events, expired tokens, and partial writes. 3. Is there a rollback path? If this breaks in production, can I disable it, revert it, or route around it fast? If not, it’s not ready. 4. Did I separate generation from validation? The same AI that wrote the code should not be the only thing approving the code. Use tests, linting, security checks, code review, logs, and real runtime evidence. 5. Is the blast radius limited? Least privilege still matters. Especially with agents. A tool should only touch what it needs, when it needs it, with logs that prove what happened. AI makes shipping faster. But speed without controls is just leverage pointed in the wrong direction. The operator version of “vibe coding” is not trusting the vibe. It’s building the guardrails so the vibe doesn’t bankrupt you. #AI #SaaS #SoftwareEngineering #AIAgents #StartupLessons

The top startup killer isn't competition. It's building something customers don't actually want. Read more: cbinsights.com/research/repo… #StartupLessons #Founders #BusinessGrowth

Startup lessons learned until now: - product name should be self intuitive and ridiculously easy - start with smaller problems - for larger enterprise problems, you need a larger team - 65% outreach, 35% product development #startuplessons #outreach #users

Every founder watching Anthropic/OpenAI IPO race is learning the wrong lesson. The real story isn't who goes public first—it's who avoids becoming the next Nortel. Infrastructure builders rarely capture value they create. @AnthropicAI @OpenAI #Founders #IPO #AIInfrastructure #StartupLessons #TechHistory

Business school covers a lot. These three things almost never make the curriculum — and they determine early survival. 🎓 #BusinessEducation #Entrepreneurship #StartupLessons #FounderAdvice #CashFlow

What if a $40 mistake made you a billionaire? This is Day 10 of my series: 10 Days Studying the Greatest Startup Founders Follow me to see my upcoming series about how to build a startup. #StartupFounder #Entrepreneurship #FounderMindset #StartupLessons #Reedhastings

Strong businesses are built through clarity, discipline, numbers, feedback, people, and systems. None of these are exciting topic. None of these goes viral. Yet these are the real drivers of long-term success. Ideas start businesses. Basics keep them running. #BusinessGrowth #StartupLessons #Founders #Entrepreneurship #SurendraTiwari

OpenAI just renegotiated its Microsoft deal — then immediately signed new partnerships with Amazon and Google. Translation: the $13B that built ChatGPT is now funding its own competition. The age of exclusive AI partnerships is over. Every moat is temporary. Build for portability, not lock-in. #OpenAI #Microsoft #Amazon #Google #AIStrategy #TechNews #AIInvestment #StartupLessons #BuildInPublic #AIEcosystem @OpenAI @Microsoft @Amazon @Google @sama @satyanadella

This is Day 9 of my series: 10 Days Studying the Greatest Startup Founders Follow for day 10. #StartupFounder #Entrepreneurship #FounderMindset #StartupLessons #Whitneywolfeherd

“The dot-com bubble was good because it built the internet.” Maybe. But that argument focuses mostly on what survived. Yes, some of the fiber eventually got used. Yes, the internet transformed the world. But the internet was probably going to be built anyway. Telecom companies had real incentives to keep expanding their networks. Demand for bandwidth was growing. Competition was pushing investment forward. The question is not whether the internet would have been built. The question is whether it needed to be built at bubble speed, with bubble assumptions, funded by bubble capital. What about the thousands of companies that never had a viable business model? The engineers who spent years building products that nobody ultimately wanted? The capital that was permanently destroyed? The infrastructure that was built far ahead of realistic demand? The entrepreneurs, employees, and investors who spent years chasing projects that only made sense inside a speculative mania? Those costs were real too. The surviving fiber is easy to see. The opportunity cost is not. The real question is not whether something useful came out of the bubble. Almost every bubble produces something useful. The real question is whether all of the capital, talent, energy, and time committed to the bubble represented society’s best use of resources. That’s a much harder question. And it’s probably the most important question investors should be asking about AI today. #DotComBubble #InternetHistory #TechInvesting #StartupLessons #SpeculativeBubble #InvestmentRisks #TechInnovation #Entrepreneurship #CapitalAllocation #FutureOfAI

The Best Instant Messenger You Never Heard Of open.substack.com/pub/galrat… #ProductStrategy #Distribution #StartupLessons #TechStrategy #AIHype #CTO

If you can't explain why a feature exists in terms of user value, you shouldn't be building it. 'Because it's cool tech' is how startups burn through seed rounds. #StartupLessons

What AI didn't solve Focus discipline judgment Tools improved Human decisions still matter #StartupLessons #AI

Don't launch free. Charge from day one. Period! The biggest lesson I've learned as a solo developer. #BuildInPublic #IndieHacker #SaaS #SoloFounder #StartupLessons

BoAt co-founder Aman Gupta believes founders often focus on offices, teams, and operations too early, while the real priority should be building a product customers actually want. Credit: @TICETV #AmanGupta #boAt #StartupLessons #ProductMarketFit #Entrepreneurship #Startups