886 Studios

congrats to ikigai Launchpad batch 03 team, LFG, for the launch of their new app, @footnotes_app ! it’s currently charting on the app stores in the United Stated, Canada, Taiwan, Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Indonesia, and Singapore. go check it out!

Applications for ikigai Launchpad Fall ’26 close this Friday on September 11. Get $100K in funding, mentorship from Silicon Valley founders, and a program designed for speed. You’ll join a batch of founders working on their own big ideas, we’d love to hear yours.

Consumer tech has optimized for engagement, attention capture, and extraction for two decades. The playbook has been: free product -> monetize attention -> mine the data -> dark-pattern the retention. It's been wildly profitable, but corrosive to society. AI is a fork in the road. The same technology that could hyper-personalize manipulation could also make user-aligned business models economically competitive for the first time. We want to fund the second branch: founders whose incentives point the same direction as the user's. We're especially interested in the following categories: - Attention-return products: media, social, or information tools where the metric is time saved, not captured. Monetized by subscription or outcome, not ads. - Non-predatory consumer finance: lending and wealth tools for Asia's mass-affluent and underbanked that win when the user's financial position improves, not when they revolve debt. - User-side agents: software that represents the user against the extractive stack, negotiating bills, canceling subscriptions, filtering manipulation. — Kevin Lin @kevinlin, Partner at 886 Studios & ikigai Launchpad, Co-founder of Twitch

we hosted an AMA with the ikigai Launchpad mentors last week where they answered questions on how we screen founders, when to kill an idea, and how AI is reshaping SaaS pricing. here were some key takeaways: 1) traction isn't required to apply. what we look for instead is rate of progress: are you learning fast, pivoting fast, talking to customers fast. that matters more than your current user count. 2) if you're a solo founder, our advice is to consider finding someone to build with, even in this era of AI. building a company alone is brutally hard, and the vast majority of people can't pull it off solo. 3) there's a J-curve test for killing an idea. if you're not seeing it, that's usually the signal to move on, not to push harder on the same thing. stubborn is only good until it isn't. 4) full-time means full-time. 50 to 60 hour weeks are pretty normal if you're building something that makes an impact. part-time doesn't get you there. we want to go all-in with you, but only if you're all-in first. 5) AI is rewriting SaaS pricing. seat-based is giving way to outcome-based, because AI is now doing the job a human used to do. we'll be hosting more AMAs like this before the next batch begins! applications for the Fall '26 batch are OPEN. next round of acceptances closes on September 4th.