John Rush

I built 30 startups in 20 years. VC-backed, Bootstrapped, Apps, SaaS, B2B, B2C.

99 mistakes I regret making:

1. Doing consumer apps.
The Failure rate here is 100x of b2b rates, nearly a lottery.

2. Raising VC money too early.
It shifted all our focus from “happy users“ to the headcount, media coverage, conferences, LOIs, partnerships, networking and the next funding round.

3. Hiring too early.
Employees and contractors are like an average nanny for your kid. They do the bare minimum, they dont take any risk. But not taking risks means no innovation. Only founders have enough incentives to take risks. SO the founders should do all the work until they gain traction.

4. Ignoring SEO.
None of the people in my network did SEO. We all thought it was something for later and we kept postponing it forever. Paid ads were easy and predictable and having too much money in the bank basically spoils you.

5. Ignoring content marketing.
Never took blogging seriously. Big mistake. I thought blogging is a full time job, but it's actually possible to spend an hour a day on it and still do a good job.

6. Social Media Marketing.
This is my biggest regret. I started using X just 2 years ago. Nearing 100k followers now. What if I started 20 years ago? Could I have 1M followers now? I think so.

7. Skipping idea validation.
I'd always assume for the audience. Anticipate what they need. It almost never turned out to be true.
My best projects were those I thought will fail and failed projects had my highest hopes at the start.

8. Hiring managers.
I haven't yet seen any useful manager in a startup.
They might be useful for corporations, but for startup I should have hired only doers.

9. Chasing Investors.
For every startup I'd spend 40% of my time fundraising.
I'd succeed in most of the cases, but at what cost?
I haven't done a single outreach to investors in 2 years, but I get VCs knocking my doors, because I have good traction and they search for such projects daily. So, don't chase VCs, just make users happy and VCs are gonna find you.

10. Hiring specialized developers.
Nothing is less efficient than a team of specialized developers for a startup (frontend, backend, db, devops, design, qa..).
Today I have 1 fullstack dev doing 5x more progress on a project than a team of 12 back then.
Avoid “teams“ at all cost until at least $30kmrr.

11. Hiring people I don't wanna hug.
My cofounder, an old Danish man said this to me in 2015. If you don’t wanna hug the person, it means you dislike them on a chemical/animal level. Every time I ignored this rule, I paid the high price later.

12. Betting on partners.
I partnered up with large billion dollar corporates many times with different startups.
They promise huge stuff, millions of users, but end up just wasting your time, destroy focus, shift priorities, make you spend zillions on ramping up security and compliance, and eventually bring in no users/money.

13. Read the rest in the 1st comment ↓

don't be me

> built & sold my first startup in 2009
> over the next 13 years, invested all this money in startups
> lost money on all 30 startups founder/invested
> still kept going
> sold my house to keep going
> pivoted into bootstrapping in 2023
> spent more of my savings to build several micro saas products & acquire one
> hired an expensive pro team to market it, burnt so much money with no results
> fired everyone in marketing and growth to go solo
> in 2024, most of the bets paid off, and the total crossed over $2M
> if things wouldn't go the right way in 2024, I'd be pretty much broke, with no home, no savings, no morale, not knowing what to do further.

Idk if this will encourage you to build a startup or to quit and go back to a regular job, but I've done my task here, I shared the raw truth.

WHAT'S YOUR EXCUSE NOW?

I’m feeling so pessimistic about AI today. After building dozens of AI agents for many years, here is what I got to say:

The biggest challenge in building AI agents is agent’s long term memory.

LLMs with huge context windows are pretty much scams, cuz they compress the text under the hood making it completely unreliable for any serious task (the error accumulation and forward propagation when run in an agentic loop ).

Existing LLMs would be capable of replacing humans if only the memory problem was really solved. But..nobody has come even close to solving this yet, and it may take a decade until this is solved.

I won’t even be surprised if it turns out that our general intelligence comes from our insanely amazing memory engine in our brains coupled with the logical apparatus. Right now the LLM can only apply logic, but it can’t memorize things as our brain does, therefore we’re very far from AGi or even a basic 100% autonomous ai agent. Unfortunately :(

But, I have an idea to solve this at least for business ai agents. I’ll present my solution soon in my next ai agents release.

As a startup founder, just don't do this 🧵 :


1. B2C.
Most wish-washy stories and movies are made after b2c unicorns, so naturally most founders start with b2c ideas. I did that too.
But the harsh truth is that 99.9% of b2c fails.
You either make it to the stars or you fail. Nothing in between. Same odds as a lottery.

2. Partnerships.
I've wasted years on it. I've seen others do the same. It just never works.
Founders are such high on EGO that it's counterproductive to try to cooperate. It only works when both are successful. But it never works if one is big and the other isn't.

3. Paid ads.
Many think: I'll build a product and then pay for ads to bring users.
Ads only work if you have functioning organic growth and near PMF.
Otherwise 0*ads=0.

4. Paid influencers.
If my tweet gets 100k views, I get 300 signups.
If an influencer gets 100k views for my product, I get 15 signups. (I did many tests). Often, influencers had more followers than me.
Most have an inflated follower base. Maybe tiny influencers might be better.

5. Newsletter ads.
I tried producthunt, indiehackers.
Didn't get even a single paying users.
Paid a lot for it.
I had a way better experience with a few tiny newsletters.

6. Conferences.
99% of the people going to conferences go there to find customers.
It's like when you go to a night club to see 1 girl and 99 dudes.
It's fun for making friends and having fun, but it brings nothing to the biz.

7. Outsourcing marketing.
I have never yet seen a case of someone finding their PMF while outsourcing their marketing. Not a single case. It just doesn't happen.
Outsourcing is okay after PMF when you give them precise instructions. But it's a waste of money before PMF.

8. Cold Email Outreach.
There are two myths on founder twitter: kids making millions via tiktok influencers and the outreachers.
I tried myself. I hired pros to do it. Maybe I didn't hire the best, but I can say: you won't hire the best either. So, I'd not bother with outreach

9. PR.
Buying articles in Forbes and doing PR activities. It isn't just a waste of time & money, but it's also cheating.

10. Sponsoring.
The ROI is negative.
I do it for the "brand awareness".
But I expect no signups from this. It's just a bonus & rather me supporting others with my sponsorship.
Don't do it unless you are an altruist like me.

11. Hiring sales/marketing team.
Not at the start.
Only u know ur product. Get to $10k rev on ur own and only then think of hiring more help for marketing. Cuz the only people u can hire are the juniors who know little & u need to teach them. So learn 1st, so that u can teach.

12. Hosting your own podcast.
It takes tons of effort and energy that you shouldn't waste on it at the start.
Podcast is great when you scale, but not when u're looking for a PMF.
Unless u start with an audience and spend all ur time building an audience. 
---
Applies to
- pre PMF startups
- targeting startups & small biz
- b2b
- run by a 1 or 2 founders

I acquired Unicorn Platform for $0.8M and grew it from 25k to 631,000 users after literally trying every growth method I've heard of:

All my marketing failures & successes:


1. Partnerships with incubators.

I contacted all famous startup incubators and signed deals with most to place unicorn as a "perk" there.

I thought it'd become a passive stream of users, but I don't think I got even one paying user out of this. I canceled all these deals.

2. Paid ads.

I wasted lots of cash on google/meta/x/tt/reddit ads. No results at all for my 2-3 fig/mo budgets. Mostly clicks from bots & non relevant countries.

Now i run my ads on using my own TinyAdz.com. It works well, I plan to spend 5% of my profit on ads from now on.

3. SEO (one of two best channels).

I didn't touch it until April 2023; it was my biggest mistake.
Today, I do a mix of AI-generated blogs (using seobotai.com ), mini tools with wrapifai.com. I manually improve winning tools and articles.

4. Cross promo with partners.

I put lots of effort into this, but it turns out founders aren't that good at collaborating. I guess we all are high on EGO.

The only successful collab is with HuntedSpace(by @d4m1n ).

I'm still open to more collabs & cross-promos, just DM me.

5. Social media marketing.

I hired a marketer & put tons of time & money into building up her brand, but then she was headhunted by my competitor.

I had no choice but to try to do it myself, starting from 0.
Apparently, it worked out well. If you're a founder: tweet daily.

6. Influencer marketing.

I tried paying influencers. Overall, it's not bad. But 90% of influencers are fake, and their followers are fake.
As long as the influencer is real, the ROI was pretty good.

It costs anywhere between $100 to $1000 per tweet.

7. My own podcast.

I spent around $40k on it. Ended up closing down cuz it drained my energy.

If you love video calls, running a pod isn't a bad idea, but be original with the topic.

8. Conferences and speaking.

I joined many programs as a mentor and promoted the unicorn platform.

It brought some users, one by one. Since it wasn't scalable, I stopped completely. I do join big confs sometimes if they accept online speaking.

9. Sponsoring.

I sponsored hackatons, teachers and web directories.

All 3 worked out pretty well. Easy to scale. I plan to do a lot more it moving forward. I think it works way better than paid ads on google/socials.

10. Newsletter ads & Banner ads

I tried Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, and many others.
All failed. I paid a lot but got no results.

I also tried a banner ad on Product Hunt; lost the money.

11...22. see the rest in the 1st comment ↓

I tested all 82 🤯 Vibe Coding Agents & AI IDEs.

Here’s the short, useful take.

I tested tools for:
SaaS.
Mobile apps.
Games.
Internal tools.
Pure no-code.
Hardcore dev work.

My biggest takeaways 👇

1) Best for non-coders
Emergent – pure vibe coding. Zero code.
Lovable – AI + no-code. Replaced Figma for me.
Bolt – fastest from idea → live app.
Blink – websites + simple SaaS with auth & DB.
Wrapifai – forms, calculators, SEO tools.

2) Best overall coding agent
Claude Code – current #1.
Builds web, mobile, iOS.
Feels like the singularity moment.

3) Best for real devs
Cursor – strongest for serious codebases.
MarsX - best for building AI Agents.
Windsurf – true agent. Memory + web search.
Warp – top benchmarks. Clean IDE.
Qoder – understands huge repos.
Zed – Rust-built, multiplayer, fast.

4) Best mobile app builders
Vibecode – build apps from your phone.
a0dev – mobile-first. React Native.
Bloom – native apps. Share by link.
Rork – impressed me the most here.

5) Best for designers & product teams.
Anima – Figma → code. URLs → code.
Figma Make – prompt → beautiful UI.
v0 – best UI generator. Not full-stack.

6) Games
Gambo – full game from one prompt.
Rosebud – vibe coding for 2D/3D games.

7) Enterprise / advanced
Devin – junior dev for teams.
Cosine – multi-agent, no supervision.
Google CodeMender – auto-patches vulns.
Airtable / Notion – vibe coding for internal tools.

8) Open source gems
OpenHands
Continue
Aider
Cline
Zed

My rule of thumb

Idea + no code skills? → Emergent, Lovable, Bolt

Serious product? → Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf

Mobile first? → Vibecode, a0dev, Bloom

UI first? → Figma Make, v0, Anima

I skipped 53 more tools to stay inside the limit 😅

Check the 1st comment for the full list 👇

This is genius

The story of my marriage.

I wanted to marry and have lots of kids since I was a kid myself.
I've tried to do it the old way, and it never really worked, because I had such a long list of requirements. Sorry to sound so unromantic.

Eventually, I tried an entrepreneurial approach. I made an Excel doc with the columns: beauty, sport, humor, movies, music, hobbies, number of kids, parents, family, friends, health, age.

I spent 4h on Tinder every day for 12 months during COVID. Swiped quadrillion times, had 1000+ chats, and eventually filled out my doc with 100 entries. Then sorted by the average score of all the columns and married the girl nr1.

It's been 5 years now, many kids, lots of great times, and most importantly, she is kicking my ass in tennis, and the only way to win against her is to make her pregnant again. Then, in about the 6th month, I start winning.