Greg Isenberg

This is still the best business advice I've ever received:

Think like a farmer.

We think we're internet entrepreneurs but we're really farmers.

Fun fact:

The 1920 USA census tells us that 30% of Americans were farmers in 1920.

Today, under 1% of Americans are farmers with 72% using the internet to perform their jobs.

We've moved from real farmers to internet farmers.


More ways we can learn from farmers:

-Rotate Crops: Adapt and change strategies to prevent stagnation.

-Observe Neighbors: Learn from competitors' successes and failures.

-Prioritize Soil Health: Foundation first; prioritize team well-being.

-Store Surplus: Save profits for unforeseen challenges or downturns.

-Embrace Natural Rhythms: Respect individual work rhythms; avoid burnout.

-Prevent Pests Early: Address small issues before they amplify.

-Forecast and Plan: Analyze trends; anticipate future industry shifts.

-Wear a hat: Protect yourself from the sun

-Wake Up Early: Consistency pays off

-Invest in the Right Tools: The right equipment will 10x your yield

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reminder

I’ll tell you a story I haven’t told many people…I'm 18, bank account dwindling, and desperate for a job.

I applied to 100 jobs and got zero offers.

They said I didn’t have enough experience or my French wasn’t good enough. The hopelessness was real.

So, I reached out to internet companies in SF/NYC.

“Hey, would you pay me $2/lead? No risk to you.“

It was 2008, during the great financial crisis. Companies were looking to cut costs, and this was attractive. Mobile/social was just becoming a thing. New apps needed users.

The first few hundred emails were ignored. Finally, one company said yes. I made $100 that month. Not exactly balling out, but it was a start. I bought a pair of cool shoes with it.

Sweetest shoes I ever bought.

Every app needed users, and I knew how to get them. I could scale this. I hired two friends, trained them on the pitch, and paid them $1/lead. The margins were thin, but we started pulling in volume.

One day, I found a goldmine—a venture-backed startup scaling fast. They needed users and had the budget.

I pitched them: “$2/lead? Let's scale to 1,000 leads a week.“ This was Zynga. They had just put out Farmville and were looking to grow users.

They bit. Suddenly, I was making $2,000 a week. I dropped out of college.

We experimented with Facebook ads, forum postings, and influencer marketing. The results were wild. Facebook ads were literally $0.05 per click!

In '08, we built an iPhone app (before the App Store) to ping us every lead we generated. On my 18th birthday, it dinged every few secs.

In 6 months, we were generating over 20,000 leads a month and running a mini lead-gen empire.

I was still living at my parents' house.

But the $$ wasn’t the most interesting part. We were learning skills that would be invaluable—growth hacking, community mgmt, copywriting etc

Fast forward to today, and I've built and sold multiple companies. But it all started with that $2/lead hustle during the worst economic downturn of our generation.

Moral of the story:

When the world goes to hell, look for opportunities. Innovate. Be relentless. Your big break might be just an email away.

I felt pretty hopeless back then. But the cool part about the internet is the lack of gatekeepers.

Not too long ago...

- You had to get press to get customers.
- You needed VCs to build a product.
- You needed a degree to get that job.

There was always a gatekeeper

Not anymore. Tons of people sit on the sidelines. They aren't shipping.

But it's not because they can't. They totally could. Especially with the cost of launching anything being so cheap. They just don't realize the gates have recently become wide open.

It fires me up.

So, stop waiting for permission. The gates are open.

Just walk through.
--

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Here are 30 realizations that changed my life as an entrepreneur:

1. Startup valuation is literally a made up number.

2. It's impossible to work with people who don’t answer texts within 24h.

3. The internet can be your lottery ticket or your prison sentence.

4. If Abercrombie & Fitch can rebrand (up 285% in 2023), then you can rebrand too.

5. Having an internet audience is still wildly underpriced.

6. Build products that no one asks for but everyone wants.

7. It's actually a good idea to be poor in your 20s and reinvest everything in yourself (learnings, travel, network, figuring out who you are).

8. Google is probably not going to “copy your startup”.

9. Content is your salesperson that works for you 24/7.

10. Look for opportunities that are low status now, but probably high status in a few years.

11. Lifestyle businesses are still massively underrated. You can often turn them into non lifestyle business if you want.

12. Avoid dependency on anything. Social apps, VCs etc. Freedom is two words: self-sustaining.

13. Taking a break doesn’t mean you’re lazy, burn out is real.

14. Whatever you do, don't be mid-curve.

15. The only things that should change your mood are things that will change your life.

16. Copycats are a nuisance, not killers. They are usually mosquitoes, not sharks.

17. Good design can’t fix a poor product. But good design can multiply a product that’s working.

18. People follow a journey, not a social account.

19. If you’re doing stuff you hate, you aren’t rich.

20. Don't create a startup without a “why now“.

21. Strangers don’t want to hear about you. They want to talk about themselves or better themselves.

22. The best negotiators talk 10% of the time, and listen 90%.

23. Good things happen when you add value to people’s lives through content & community.

24. You could learn a lot about someone by their likes on X/Twitter.

25. First find the niche, then learn from the community, then the startup idea will come to you.

26. On hiring: if it isn’t a hell yeah, it’s a hell no. Never compromise for fit.

27. Startups never go according to plan. There is no real plan for startups, only a direction.

28. The best businesses are the ones that look like a movement. It needs to be an identity, not a product.

29. Your identity is never your company ever. Your company is your business.

30. Change scenery 2-3x per day to be extra creative.

What are some realizations you've had as an entrepreneur, creator, maker, etc?

Btw, recently, i went to Japan (for the first time) and I had some MORE realizations as a founder. You can check them out here for free. Enjoy. https://lnkd.in/eJZ4rQKZ

A big mistake I made in my 20s was not starting a product design agency.

I was living in Silicon Valley. And over there, it's all about big VC raises, big exits. So basically, starting a service business was the anti-cool.

After I sold my last company when I was 24. I had an idea to start a product design agency and studio called “Islands“.

Why the name Islands? Because we'd help different clients, kinda like their own islands.

But, after asking for feedback from 2 billionaires/Silicon Valley legends, they persuaded me to turn Islands into a social networking product.

“You're good a community and social products, build a product. You can always start an agency later“

I nodded.

But, deep down, I always loved the product design agency business. I love working on multiple projects, I love seeing others succeed and helping them get there.

When COVID hit in 2020, I knew that I couldn't wait any longer to start that concept of Islands.

I called it Late Checkout, a product design agency and studio for companies who want to supercharge their communities.

Lesson learned #1: Better late than never

Lesson learned #2: trust your intuition, it's right more than you think

Apple JUST quietly announced something that’s a lot BIGGER than it looks: "the Mini Apps Partner Program"

Apple is admitting that the future of software is embedded, lightweight, vertical mini-apps distributed inside bigger app

For founders who want to make $$ building apps:

1. Apple just legitimized the “superapp” model for the West.

China has WeChat mini-programs. India has PhonePe Switch. The West has… nothing. Apple just opened the door. You can now run HTML/JS mini-apps inside a native host and earn 85% on qualifying purchases. That’s Apple-sanctioned platform piggybacking.

2. Distribution arbitrage becomes real again.

You don’t need to convince users to download your app. Just partner with a host app and drop in a mini-app. This is a cheat code for early traction. Think: travel apps hosting niche tools, fitness apps hosting mini workouts, marketplaces hosting micro-utilities.

3. Apple is creating a new economy layer: “embedded SaaS.”

Imagine: CRM mini-apps inside vertical tools. Math solver mini-apps inside education apps. Calendar mini-apps inside productivity apps. The TAM for tools that don’t need standalone installs just went vertical.

4. Developers get an 85% revenue share.

This is Apple basically saying: “We want this ecosystem to grow, and we’re willing to cut our take rate.” When Apple lowers its cut, I pay attention because they see a platform shift coming.

5. AI makes this 10× more important.

LLM-powered micro-apps (calculators, planners, agents, coaches, niche utilities) are tiny by design. They’re perfect mini-apps. Apple just created infrastructure for AI-native micro utilities to live inside bigger apps with built-in commerce.

6. Host apps become new “distribution landlords.”

If you own an app with traffic, you become a platform. You can host mini-apps, take a cut, and build a developer ecosystem around you.

It’s a new monetization model for existing apps with audiences.

7. This unlocks a wave of second-order opportunities.

- Agencies helping apps become mini-app hosts
- Mini-app dev shops
- “Shopify for mini-apps” toolkits
- Mini-app marketplaces
- Analytics for mini-app performance
- Discovery engines for mini-apps
- For more startup ideas/trends... sign up to https://ideabrowser.com

TLDR;

Apple just turned every high-traffic app into a potential superapp and every indie developer into a potential platform partner.

The App Store is becoming modular, composable, and layered. The next decade of consumer apps will look less like standalone products and more like ecosystems stitched together with mini-apps.

This is quietly one of the biggest distribution unlocks in years.

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED. I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams and 3 billionaires. My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise.

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now.

10. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

11. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

12. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

13. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

14. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out.

What an incredible time to be building.

Note: find ideas to build in this AI age on ideabrowser.com

You probably can make $10m+ in 2026 by installing, configuring and optimizing clawdbots for businesses right now. You sell Clawdbot the same way MSPs sold cloud, security, or IT in the 2000s: install it, tune it, own it.

Installing clawdbot is scary for 99.999% of people. You help there.

You start niche. One vertical. One job to be done. Real estate brokerages, law firms, ecommerce ops teams, agencies, accounting firms, logistics companies.

You price on value and realistically it'll be cheaper than hiring a new employee.

Everyone can install clawdbot because its one line of code. But very few people make it reliable, fast, safe, and trusted by the team. You own the green box.

The part of the workflow worth $10k an hour.

When it breaks, you get the call. When they want advice, you get the call.

I think if you have distribution this idea can get to $10M+

Hard to scale if you don't.

But probably one of the most no brainer ideas floating around right now.

More ideas at http://ideabrowser.com

I'm rooting for you.

dear founders,

build like the clock’s running out. the window is open but it won’t stay. for the first time in history, you have free distribution from social platforms and infinite leverage from AI tools. you can reach millions without permission.

the internet is handing out unfair advantages to anyone bold enough to use them so...

ship before you understand it. clarity comes from commits. half your roadmap is ego, delete it. launch "ugly". talk to users every day. build what you wish existed. best ideas are the most obvious painful. go niche. no, go superniche. vertical is your moat.

clarity comes from commits. half your roadmap might be ego, delete it. make ugly things until they work. share prototypes that break.

kill what doesn’t grow. use AI as leverage, not decoration. test ten things before breakfast. delete your roadmap. double down on what works. design for clarity, not cleverness. brand before code. write daily. post your lessons.

find your first hundred users manually. distribution is the new product. attention is the new funding. taste is the new code. build small cults. scale later. automate boring things. keep the human parts human. study why things spread. study why things die.

pricing is positioning. aesthetics are trust. make people feel something. ignore haters. build in weird corners of the internet. break things publicly. pivot loudly. consistency compounds. only raise VC if you dream of going IPO one day. otherwise, cash-flow is your BFF.

your network is distribution. your story is marketing. your design is psychology. ship like it’s day one. iterate like you’re behind. stay obsessed. learn faster. think longer. risk embarrassment. make noise. build the thing that keeps you up at night. money follows obsession. stay in motion. stay loud. stay building. distribution is an art form now.

AI makes it easy to make things; the hard part is making things that matter. build like the world’s ending in a year but your idea has to outlive it

we’re living in a window of maximum leverage and minimum permission

im rooting for you.

best,

greg isenberg

just another founder rooting for you

note: find startup ideas at ideabrowser.com to get your creative juices flowing

I don't know why more people aren't buying dead SaaS companies and turning them into AI agent companies.

1. Use OpenClaw, Hermes, Perplexity Computer etc to build an automation that scans Product Hunt, Acquire, and app stores for dead SaaS products. Filter for ones that launched 2019-2024, had real customers, and went quiet.

2. Reach out to the founder on X. Most of them will respond within a day because they've been wanting to sell for a year and nobody asked.

3. Buy it.

4. Export the database. Feed it to Claude or GPT. Map every workflow their customers were trying to do.

5. Read the support tickets. This is the goldmine. 200 strangers already told the last founder exactly what they needed and he couldn't deliver it.

6. Build an agent-native version that actually does those workflows instead of giving people a dashboard to do them manually.

7. Upload the old email list to Meta. Build a lookalike audience. Those old customers have moved on. You're not selling to them (realistically). You're using their data to find the next them.

8. Run $20/day ads targeting people who look exactly like the customers who already validated this market for you.

9. Build content around the exact pain points you found in the support tickets. Post on X. Post on YT. You already know what to say.

10. You now have the customer profile, the pain points, the pricing sensitivity, the churn reasons, and a lookalike audience. Your competitor who's starting from scratch has a landing page and a guess.

The dead SaaS acquisition playbook is going to be one of the biggest quiet wealth builders of the next 5 years.

Most SaaS products are a collection of workflows that can be rewritten as agent skills. Many will die. The top ones will pivot to agent companies.

Build agent companies.

i found a github repo that lets you spin up an ai agency with ai employees

engineers, designers, growth marketers, product managers

each role runs as its own agent and they coordinate to ship ideas

10k+ stars in under 7 days

1. engineering (7 agents)
frontend, backend, mobile, ai, devops, prototyping, senior development

2. design (7)
ui/ux, research, architecture, branding, visual storytelling, image generation

3. marketing (8)
growth hacking, content, twitter, tiktok, instagram, reddit, app store

4. product (3)
sprint prioritization, trend research, feedback synthesis

5. project management (5)
production, coordination, operations, experimentation

6. testing (7)
qa, performance analysis, api testing, quality verification

7. support (6)
customer service, analytics, finance, legal, executive reporting

8. spatial computing (6)
xr, visionos, webxr, metal, vision pro

9. specialized (6)
multi agent orchestration, data analytics, sales, distribution

what i like about this approach is the framing

instead of one big ai agent trying to do everything, you structure it more like a company. specialized agents, clear responsibilities, workflows between them

im curious to see what this actually feels like in practice and if its any good (do your own research)

but as always will share what i learn in public on LI, X, IG and my pod the startup ideas podcast

one thing is for certain and it reminds me

the future belongs to those who tinker with software like this

Nothing to see here, folks

Send this to every normal person you know because normal people don’t want to touch a terminal and this will make them 100x more powerful and productive at whatever is they do

WELCOME TO THE SKILL ERA OF THE INTERNET...for the last 15 years, if you wanted to build a serious software company, you built a product and exposed an api.

that was the move.

you created functionality… payments, messaging, email, search, analytics… and then you let developers plug into it.

the companies that won owned the pipes.
stripe owned payments.
twilio owned messaging.
sendgrid owned email.

the api was the distribution layer.

once you were integrated, you were embedded.

that model made sense in a world where execution was scarce.

llms compress execution into a prompt.

so the center of gravity shifts.

in this cycle, you build expertise and package it as a skill.

an api is a doorway into a function.

here’s how to send an email.
here’s how to process a payment.
here’s how to fetch this data.

it’s precise. mechanical. bounded.

a skill is a doorway into judgment.

here’s how to audit a landing page like a serious growth operator.
here’s how to structure a legal intake so you catch the real risk.
here’s how to clean and enrich messy directory data so it actually turns into revenue.

you’re encoding a way of thinking.

and that changes how companies are built and how they scale.

in the api era, distribution meant convincing developers to integrate you.
you needed docs. sdk’s. developer evangelism.
you fought for a place inside someone else’s codebase.

in the skill era, distribution means becoming part of someone’s agent workflow.

a founder opens claude code.
they type /seo-audit.

your skill runs.
it frames the output.
it structures the analysis.
it guides the decisions.

your expertise lives inside the execution layer itself.

you aren’t pulling users into your interface.
you’re embedding your thinking into theirs.

that changes company design.

the old playbook looked like this:

build saas
design ui
onboard users
drive retention
expand seats

the new playbook looks more like this:

encode a high-leverage playbook
package it as a skill
let agents call it thousands of times per day

the interface shrinks.
the leverage expands.

one installation can mean your methodology is invoked across hundreds of companies automatically.

the scaling curve looks less like seats and more like invocations.

what’s happening underneath all of this is simple:

software used to be the executor.
now software is the orchestrator.
next, expertise becomes infrastructure.

in the api era, the winners owned the pipes.

in the skill era, the winners own the patterns.

patterns for closing deals.
patterns for pricing.
patterns for positioning.
patterns for enrichment.
patterns for research.

many new companies will look surprisingly small on the surface.

a tight repo. a handful of powerful skill files.
maybe 2–5 people maintaining and improving them.

and it’s creating a new class of companies built less around dashboards and more around encoded judgment.

THIS IS THE SKILL ERA OF THE INTERNET.

welcome.

You know what fires me up?

That this is the greatest time ever to build a company (thanks to AI).

My first startup I built in college took 1.5 years to build the prototype. When I hit 100 users I was so happy i was literally in shock.

Today, you can hack a product in 24 hours and wake up to 1000+ strangers already using it. You can post a stray thought, record a selfie vid and millions might see it.

Words, code, distribution. It all feels like a giant multiplayer game. The rules are clear, the moves repeatable, the rewards compounding if you keep playing.

Kinda feels like a treasure hunt.

One post can change your career. One prototype can become a company. One company can snowball into a movement. All in a few clicks.

You rack up points. Except now the points are customers, revenue, and freedom.

It doesn't matter where you come from, what school you went to, what jobs you had. As long as you got fast internet, you can play.

Startups used to be for the privileged and now they're for the persistent.

And that fires me up. Maybe you too.

Pretty amazing.

Note: find startup ideas to build at ideabrowser.com

"Things I wish someone told me before I almost gave up on OpenClaw"

HOW TO BUILD MOBILE APPS WITH AI IN 2026

1. Use Claude Code, Rork, Vibecode app etc to get the first mobile MVP live the same day the idea forms. Need an idea? Go to Ideabrowser.com/join

2. Use Claude Code to tighten logic, handle edge cases, and make behavior predictable

3. Design the core interaction so it fits inside a 10-second screen recording from day one (this is key and is the new "lean startup")

4. Study top short-form videos in your category and write down the first 3 seconds of each

5. Build demos around the hook rather than the feature list (mindset shift)

6. Record simple demos straight from the simulator or device and post them as is

7. Treat short-form video as a live feedback channel (v important)

8. Test multiple hooks for the same app before touching the code

9. Watch where people pause, replay, or comment “wait what” to see what matters (in analytics)

10. Screenshot comments that explain the product clearly and reuse that language

11. Paste comments into Claude Code and ask it to cluster feedback into concrete product changes

12. Ship the smallest change that makes the demo clearer

13. Use Claude Code to push those changes fast and re-record the demo the same day (can be founder led or find someone or ai avatar)

14. Repeat this loop daily until the app explains itself without narration

15. Let the demo become the distribution engine. This is your north star.

16. Add a paywall once curiosity appears to test willingness to pay

17. Add a one-question or short quiz in onboarding to create investment early

18. Use quiz answers to personalize the first output so it feels made for the user

19. Show the result immediately after onboarding to reinforce that the input mattered

20. Surface one clear “this is why this matters” insight right after first use

21. Save the first output so users feel ownership and return to it

22. Ask for one small follow-up action after value appears to deepen commitment

23. Turn common onboarding answers into new demo angles for content

24. Highlight progress or change over time with a simple before-and-after view

25. Trigger reengagement when the output meaningfully changes

26. Let users export or share their result in a way that preserves context (and that helps drive virality)

27. Continuously improve onboarding copy with Claude Code based on what converts

28. Lock in the hook when people start explaining the app to each other

29. Increase posting volume after the format proves consistent. Keep experimenting

30. Shape the product around what performs on video

31. TLDR: Ship → demo → observe reactions → tighten the loop → charge → repeat until momentum compounds

32. PMF incoming (hopefully). Take dividends, reinvest in new apps (buy or build) or raise VC if you fancy that.

33. You just built a mobile app with AI.

My 10+ observations on the greatest opportunities in AI agents right now:

And some ideas that are keeping me up at night.

1. The new buyer on the internet is an AI agent. Imagine billions of new customers showing up with money to spend but they only shop via MCP. That's what's happening. No MCP server means you're invisible to the fastest growing buyer on the internet.

2. Every franchise system in America (30,000+) needs an agent layer and none of them have one. One founder per franchise vertical. That's 30,000 businesses waiting.

3. Everyone said "distribution is the only moat" a year ago. Now I'd add that the only moat is distribution plus memory. The company that has your audience AND your agent's accumulated context is impossible to leave.

4. Consumer mobile is more interesting than it's been since 2012. Apps can finally DO things for you instead of showing you things. The next wave of $100M apps are being built right now.

5. The most interesting startup nobody has built is an agent marketplace where you rent access to someone else's trained agent. A recruiter spent 6 months training a sourcing agent on healthcare hiring. That agent is worth renting to every other healthcare recruiter on earth. The agent itself becomes the product.

6. A sorta strange phenomenon that's happening right now is agents are developing preferences. Give the same agent the same task 100 times and it starts developing patterns in how it approaches it. Nobody is studying this yet. But the agents that develop good patterns are worth more than the ones that don't. That's a new kind of asset.

7. Dead internet theory is about to become dead SaaS theory. Half the apps you use will quietly replace their support team, their onboarding team, and their content team with agents. You won't notice for months. Then you'll realize you haven't talked to a human at that company in a year.

8. The most valuable data in the world right now is sitting in the support tickets of small or mid tier SaaS companies. Every ticket is a customer telling you exactly what to build next. Mine this.

9. The best AI products feel like they're reading your mind. The worst ones feel like filling out a form with extra steps.

10. An interesting arbitrage I've noticed lately is hiring a human VA for $20/hour to supervise an AI agent that does $200/hour work. The human just checks the output.

11. The managed AI agent business is becoming the new agency model. $5k/month per client. You build it, run it, maintain it. The client gets a digital employee they never have to think about. This will be a $50 B+ category.

12. Right now there are probably millions of agents running on autopilot that their creators forgot about. Still burning tokens. Still sending emails. Still scraping websites. Still costing money. The "find and kill your zombie agents" tool is a product that writes itself.

What an incredible time to be building.

Coinbase is now testing 1 person teams + AI agents and announced laying off 700 employees.

Other companies doing this (layoffs + AI):

1. Shopify: No new headcount unless you prove AI can’t do the job.
2. Block: Cutting ~4,000 roles (~40%); Dorsey says AI lets much smaller teams do more.
3. Klarna: Its AI assistant now does work equivalent to about 700 support roles.
4. Duolingo: Went “AI‑first,” telling teams to rebuild workflows around AI before hiring.
5. Salesforce: Paused new engineering hires after AI tools boosted dev productivity ~30%.
6. Amazon: Cutting about 16,000 corporate jobs this year in an efficiency/automation push.
7. Meta: Cutting ~10% of staff and freezing thousands of open roles as it doubles down on AI.

882 jobs per day disappearing in tech. This is the pace right now.

And I think that's going to accelerate and move beyond tech.

My POV:

Every single one of these companies is telling you the same thing: one person with AI can do what used to take a team.

They're literally saying it with their org charts.

If you're employed, build a 1 person team on the side.

If you're laid off, build one today. The tools that made your role redundant are the same tools that let you build your own company.

The biggest wave of new startups is going to come from people who got restructured out of exactly these announcements.

POV: April 2026

There's probably $100+ billion up for grabs for people who build startup for AI agents

Over the next 10 years you're going to have a market of billions of customers (agents) with millions of wallets that want to use your services.

TLDR; The internet was built for people:

1. Search google
2. Read landing page
3. Book demo
4. Talk to sales
5. Buy

Agents don’t do that.

Agents will:

1. Ask which product to use
2. Read your docs/pricing/security pages
3. Compare you to competitors
4. Check if you have an MCP/API/tool layer
5. Buy or recommend you without ever “visiting” your site like a person

Everyone is going to have personal agents and business agents. This feels inevitable at this point. OpenClaw, Hermes, Claude Code, Codex, Google Spark. The tools are here. Which means there will be more agents on the internet than humans.

So, where's the opportunity??

Go look at every SaaS tool you use. Notion. Slack. Jira. Google Analytics.

Now ask: what is the version of this built purely for agents?

Agent-native payments. Agent-native communication.
Agent-native memory. Every category gets rebuilt.

Over the next 10 years you're going to have a market of billions of customers (agents) with millions of wallets that want to use your services. The founders who build for them now are going to look like the people who built websites in 1995. Might feel janky at the moment, but also obvious in hindsight.

This is today's episode of The Startup Ideas Podccast. Now live.

This is the next shift.

Watch https://lnkd.in/em_UxW26

We’re about to see the largest boom in micro-companies in history.

1 person to 10-people businesses that generate real cash, serve tiny but passionate communities, and operate with leverage (organic social, AI etc) that used to require mega teams

Once people realize they can earn a meaningful living by building something tiny and strange that fits a community they actually understand, everything shifts like ambition, lifestyle, career arcs, even how people think about “success.”

Some people will build two or three of these.
Some will build twenty.
Some will build one that accidentally becomes big.

You can literally feel the shift happening.

Just an increasing number of people quietly opting out of the traditional paths and choosing to build a life around small companies that actually work.

is genspark ($50M ARR in 6mo) underrated next to chatgpt, claude, gemini, and manus?

i spent 34 minutes testing its “super ai agent” and how it actually works.

1/ you write one prompt and it runs through gpt-5, claude sonnet, gemini 2.5, and mistral large then gives you the best response.

2/ you upload one image and it runs it through nano banana, flux, and bytedance then returns the most realistic version.

3/ you generate a video and genspark routes it through wan 2.2, pika labs, gen-2, and runway ml combining the best clips and motion.

4/ you paste an idea for slides and it uses gpt-5, claude 3 opus, gemini advanced, and genspark’s slide model to create a full deck with visuals and market data.

5/ AI slides and building a fundraising deck with a few prompts (wasn't perfect, but it was a good start for my personal workflow)

what's cool about genspark is it's inexpensive and does it all. kinda like the costco of LLMs.

TLDR; you hand it one prompt + input, and genspark routes sub-tasks across models and tools behind the scenes. it’s orchestration over one ideal model.

perspective shift.

instead of jumping from model to model, llm to llm, genspark shows what the next generation of ai will look like orchestration over obsession.

and for the rest of us using it, the only thing that matters is getting the best outcome.

what other AI app should I review next?

i'll keep doing it if it's helpful for folks.

full episode is in the comment section!

Thanks to genspark for partnering with me on this to create a high quality tutorial

I sat down with Howie Liu, the CEO of Airtable ($500M+ revenue, 1 billion in the bank) and asked him: is there really 1 trillion up for grabs in AI agents?

His answer: it's way more than that. It's the entire GDP of white collar labor. Tens of trillions.

Here's what stood out:

1. Howie runs 30 Claude Code instances in parallel on HyperAgent. Each one is coupled to a browser, fully autonomous. They review each other's PRs. That's how the CEO of a $10 billion company develops software right now.

2. He wrote his most recent board memo with AI agents. His best investors told him it was the best memo he'd ever written. It cost him $150 in tokens and 10x less time.

3. His take on why people aren't building: they're still using agents like chatbots. They ask "who's going to win the next election" instead of giving it a real multi-hour task. Using is believing. You have to spend a full weekend going deep.

4. AI agents are at less than 10% penetration in most industries. Software engineering is at 50% but even that's an overestimate because most devs are still in "tab autocomplete" mode. The frontier has moved way past that.

5. He revealed HyperAgent. Think of it as the visual agent builder that gives you a low floor and a high ceiling. You can prototype fast and also scale to running serious operations with a fleet of agents.

6. Howie's philosophy/POV: HyperAgent is to agents what the iPhone was to computing. The power was already there. The accessibility is what changes everything.

Good news

Howie is giving $1,000 in free HyperAgent credits to the first 1,000 people who sign up. $1 million committed to listeners of The Startup Ideas Podcast. You get Opus, frontier models, real agent workflows.

You just gotta click the link in the description of the YT vid (share this with a friend to give them the $1000 too before it runs out!)

I'll include link to youtube link in the comments here!!

episode is live on The Startup Ideas Podcast and thanks to Howie for supporting the community/channel.

Howie Liu is rooting for you to build a $100 million company with less than 5 employees. So am I.

watch, grab the $1000 of free tokens (why not?) and i'll see you in the comment section of youtube

reminder that you’re not behind, it’s just moving too fast

claude code crash course in 49 seconds for building out your ideas

everything is a wrapper.

money is a wrapper for time.
time is a wrapper for energy.
energy is a wrapper for attention.
attention is a wrapper for emotion.
emotion is a wrapper for storytelling.
storytelling is a wrapper for identity.
identity is a wrapper for belonging.
belonging is a wrapper for survival.
products are wrappers for problems.
brands are wrappers for trust.
AI is a wrapper for leverage.

what's about to happen:

> saas stocks see a massive correction
> pressure to boost profits
> saas companies see BIG productivity gains from AI
> saas companies lay OFF 100,000+ workers in 2026 :(
> hiring slows down
> laid off workers can't find jobs
> many become founders out of necessity
> build software companies with AI
> most struggle with distribution, not code
> new SaaS model emerges
> tons of new AI-first companies
> fewer employees, more automation
> most don't raise money
> they sell early, reinvest cash, and stay independent
> glad they got fired
> 10x the amount of entrepreneurs
> fewer unicorns, more "real' businesses
> boom in 1-10 person businesses
> becomes the dream thx old boss :)

GPT Realtime 2.0 is pretty incredible. 17 startup ideas that ONLY work because of what this model makes possible:

1. Real-time contract negotiation agent. Sits on a call between two parties, checks pricing tools and compliance databases in parallel, and suggests terms mid-conversation while both sides are still talking.

2. Voice-controlled trading terminal. Talk through your thesis, the agent pulls market data, runs models, checks exposure, and executes the trade while narrating every step. Five data sources checked simultaneously while you're still talking.

3. Live multilingual event host. Realtime-Translate does 70+ languages in, 13 languages out, while the speaker is still talking. Every attendee hears the speaker in their language. Conferences go global overnight.

4. Voice-first medical intake. Patient calls in, agent conducts symptom intake, pulls their chart, checks drug interactions, books the appointment. All in one call. Previous voice models mangled medical jargon. This one was domain-tuned for it.

5. AI dispatcher for field service. Plumber calls from the job site, describes the problem, agent pulls the parts manual, checks inventory, orders the part, schedules the follow-up. Plumber's hands never leave the pipe.

6. Voice-first coding companion. Talk through architecture decisions while it writes code, runs tests, and explains what it's doing. Crank reasoning to high for hard problems. Drop to minimal for quick changes.

7. Live auction agent. Connected to estate sales, equipment auctions, domain drops. It listens to the live stream, makes bidding decisions, and tells you why it's bidding or passing. Thinks harder on big-ticket items.

8. Deposition prep agent for lawyers. Listens to practice testimony, catches inconsistencies, cross-references case documents, flags problems mid-conversation. Actually understands legal terminology.

9. Live podcast research agent. Feeds you stats through an earpiece in real time. You mention a company, it whispers the revenue. You mention a trend, it pulls the data. Real-time research team for the price of an API call.

10. Silent sales coach. Listens to your call in silent mode, whispers coaching cues through your AirPods. "Ask about budget now." "They hesitated, dig deeper." 128K context means it remembers the entire hour-long conversation.

11. Voice-first property walkthrough agent. Walk through a property, describe what you see out loud, the agent pulls comps, estimates renovation costs, calculates cap rate, checks zoning in parallel. Full deal analysis by the time you walk out the front door.

Voice was always limited by intelligence, not audio quality.

Now that it has GPT-5 class reasoning, the voice agent can actually think while it talks. That's the unlock.

Everything above was impossible 6 months ago.

The entire AI-native opportunity map in a 2x2 matrix.

Most people build in the wrong quadrant.

Top left is too simple, already commoditized.

Bottom left isn't painful enough.

Bottom right is complex but doesn't repeat.

The money is top right. High repetition. High complexity. Insurance, recruiting, compliance, legal intake.

That's where agents win.

Tomorrow I'll break it down for 60 minutes at 12p EST. Last time, we ran out of room. Grab a spot. Link in comments

We are at the very beginning of the very beginning.

The opportunities are endless right now.

Let's go.

2026 is the GREATEST time to build a startup in 30 years

I’m 36. I’ve sold 3 startups, helped build companies that raised billions, and backed teams from seed to unicorn.

13 MEGA shifts that make this the BEST time to build in a GENERATION:

1. Hardware got smart. Download open-source AI models from HuggingFace to cheap robots and they're suddenly smart. Opens up tons of use-cases.

2. SaaS is imploding. AI can replicate $500K software for pennies. Enterprise software that took 30 engineers now requires 1 and a Claude Code subscription.

3. Outcome-based pricing is eating subscriptions. With AI agents handling work automatically, founders can guarantee results instead of selling features. This creates a massive arbitrage opportunity to steal market share from rigid subscription models.

4. Vibe marketing is the new marketing. AI agents/tools like Lindy, Gemini and Claude Code Using agents to do personalized outreach, ads and content creation it’s getting good. This is like getting on social in 2005.

5. Social is FYP-ified. Distribution no longer requires massive followings, just content that hits. Founders can build audience from zero without ads and then convert them to owned media channels (text/email).

6. Interfaces are vanishing. Conversations are replacing dashboards across industries. This removes training barriers and means customers can use sophisticated products immediately.

7. Companies are obsessed with efficiency and cutting costs right now. Corporate budgets are getting reallocated to AI.

8. 99% of MVPs won't need VC. Low-cost MVPs combined with creator partnerships and AI automation allow bootstrapped scaling. For most software businesses, outside funding is now unnecessary.

9. Global teams. You don’t need to hire in your own city anymore. Opens up tons of arbitrage opportunities and ways to create products unlike before.

10. Millions of creators want to get paid. If you have the right product, the right network of creators, you can hit scale insanely efficiently. Never before did this exist. Next gen founders are building startups community first, software second.

11. LLM APIs create building blocks weekly. I can’t even keep up with how many new APIs/tools coming out from LLMs weekly. Example: Nano Banana pro comes out, probably 1000 ideas built on top of that can be $5M/year businesses.

12. The long tail of software is now profitable. Niches that capped at $200k ARR can clear $5M with near-zero marginal cost.

13. Services are quietly becoming software. Manual agencies are one agent away from product margins.

We've entered the rarest of windows...

when multiple technological shifts collide at once, creating a brief period where small teams can build things that were previously impossible.

THE FUTURE OF BUILDING STARTUPS IS DIFFERENT.

This unique moment won't last forever. Markets will adapt. Giants will respond.

The window will close.

Happy building, my friends.

2026 is yours.

There’s $1T up for grabs for agent-first startups and this window is WIDE open. Probably 10,000+ niches.

How it plays out:

1. Every SaaS company follows salesforce and goes headless within 18 months

2. a new category of "agent-native" startups emerges that treat salesforce, HubSpot, workday etc as dumb backends. the startup IS the agent. the SaaS is just the database.

3. the entire consulting/services industry around enterprise SaaS gets compressed into software. the agent replaces the implementation team.

4. outcome-based pricing becomes default. nobody pays per seat when the "seat" is an agent making 10,000 API calls a minute. you pay when revenue hits your account.

5. the winning founders are ex-operators who understand a vertical workflow cold. the code is the easy part. knowing that a property manager spends 14 hours a week on lease renewals? that's the insight worth $100M.

6. distribution becomes the moat. when anyone can wire agents to APIs, the company with the audience and the brand wins. media + agents is the new SaaS. There’s a rush to incubate live/short form shows.

7. Silicon Valley goes all influencer. Roy lee gets this. Pat Walls gets this. Sam Parr gets this.

8. the first $1B agent-native company in each vertical will look nothing like the SaaS it replaced. smaller team, higher margins, no implementation cost, no churn from bad UX because there is no UX.

the fastest path to wealth right now: find an industry that still runs on dashboards, phone calls, and spreadsheets. build the agent-native version. charge per outcome. own the workflow end-to-end.

someone reading this right now is going to build a $100M company off this exact shift. tell me about it on the The Startup Ideas Podcast
when you do. Im rooting for you.

Less reading, less bookmarking, more building.

the last wave rewarded people who built pretty interfaces on top of ugly data.

I think this wave rewards people who build smart agents on top of exposed APIs.

Or who just build the APIs themselves

Here we go

the "single until series b" trend has got to be one of the worst trends to come out of silicon valley in a long time

my greatest joy is my wife, my child, and my business

you can have it all

vibe coding is eating SaaS...this is probably happening more than we think

These 15 techniques pretty much 10x the quality/output of ANYTHING you vibe code with Gemini 3 etc

i think the best city to build a startup from is usually the city you as the founder are the happiest and can lock in the hardest

shopify started in ottawa. supercell from helsinki. spotify from stockholm etc

your output is tied to your environment, your focus, your happiness

how to build an ai native vertical saas in the claude cowork era:

1. pick a sub-niche inside a large, profitable market
2. map one recurring workflow that drives revenue or saves time
3. write the workflow step-by-step like you’re training an intern
4. separate mechanical steps from judgment calls
5. connect claude to the actual stack: crm, sheets, inbox, slides, contracts
6. remove exports and copy-paste from the process
7. collapse raw data → reasoning → finished output into one session
8. store every output so context compounds over time
9. turn your best prompts into named, reusable commands
10. build memory around the niche (not generic instructions)
11. package the result as a finished outcome
12. price per report, per memo, per meeting, per deliverable
13. publish the workflow collapsing in real time for distribution
14. use organic traction as signal before running paid ads
15. expand into adjacent workflows inside the same vertical
16. layer governance and approvals where required
17. become the default operating layer for that sub niche
18. repeat the model in the next vertical once memory and distribution compound
19. good times

claude can now sit inside real enterprise tools:

– google workspace
– excel + powerpoint
– crm systems
– prospecting tools like apollo + clay
– traffic data like similarweb
– contracts via docusign
- etc etc

that means the model sees the full workflow

the opportunity for you

find a niche.
collapse a workflow.
package the outcome.
own the memory.
expand from there.

that’s how ai native saas gets built now

it's a wonderful time to be building

two types of people

7 STARTUP IDEAS I’D BUILD USING CLAUDE AGENT SDK/CLAUDE OPUS 4.5:

1. SOC 2 / ISO compliance packet agent for saas

Agent that reads a SaaS company’s policies, infra docs, and tickets, then assembles SOC 2 / ISO audit-ready evidence. I’d connect the SDK to Linear/Jira, Notion, GitHub, and GDrive, load in standard SOC 2 templates, and have it produce checklists, evidence folders, and draft responses for auditors.

2. Nonprofit grant writing agent

Agent that finds relevant grants, drafts tailored applications, and organizes all deadlines for a nonprofit.

I’d plug Claude Agent SDK into a grants database + Google Drive, feed it past successful applications, and have it generate full packets and follow-up tasks for the team.

3. Airbnb host operations agent

Agent that responds to guests, coordinates cleaners, handles pricing tweaks, and generates monthly summaries. I’d wire the SDK into Airbnb’s API (or inbox), Google Calendar, and a cleaner’s scheduling tool, then give it workflows for messaging, scheduling, and simple pricing rules.

Who knows. Maybe this gets acquired by Airbnb.

4. Shopify conversion/creative agent

Agent that reviews a Shopify store, analyzes analytics, and ships specific CRO fixes plus ad creative. I’d hook the SDK into Shopify, Google Analytics, and a simple image/video tool, then have it propose changes, write new copy, tag winning products, and draft UGC-style ad scripts.

5. Real estate deal coordinator agent

Agent that keeps a real estate deal on track: chasing documents, scheduling inspections, reminding clients, and tracking key dates. I’d connect the SDK to email, e-signing, calendar, and a simple deal tracker, then give it a closing checklist so it runs the communication and nudges.

6. YouTube research + script agent for creators

Id love this.

Agent that researches topics, pulls data, builds outlines, and drafts long-form scripts based on a creator’s style. I’d give the SDK access to YouTube, Google, and a library of past scripts, then have it return a ready-to-record outline with hooks, segments, and CTAs.

7. Agency “Brain” and Onboarding Agent

Agent that absorbs an agency’s SOPs, past projects, and Slack history, then answers questions and ramps new hires. I’d load all docs through the SDK, connect it to Slack and Notion, and give teammates a chat interface where they can ask “how do we do X?” and get step-by-step answers plus links.

BONUS IDEA:

Insurance claims prep agent

Agent that helps people prepare insurance claims by collecting photos, receipts, timelines, and forms into a clean packet adjusters love.

I’d probably hook the SDK into email, cloud storage, and a claims-template library, then have it assemble everything automatically and flag missing items.

TLDR;

The Claude SDK acts like a full operating system for agents memory, tools, workflows, everything.

These ideas were just something to get your creative juices flowing.

Happy building.