year in review // 2025

life is better with god in your heart and b2b agentic saas

how I built @thred_ai - the first AI ad network it all started with sharing a bed with my cofounder for 6months.. the bed was small. building in the face of adversity. looking for meaning which lead to organizing hackathons for 4 months. having empathy for developers. and finally a crystal clear view on the problem space.

B2B SAAS SUMMER

Customer AI engineer at a unicorn was at my workshop. wants a demo of @thred_ai ... so I added a demo section to the top of our site. grabbing coffee. just show up.

fine-tune voice agents with me

Code that makes money is the best code. It serves people where they want to be met. consumer products penetrate markets with speed and compounding trends. few think past the trend they’re on and build for a short product life cycle. there is nothing wrong with this approach if you are honest about the intention. if moving fast is your sole metric to penetrate and you go onto build a better product from first sale, i’m rooting for you. if you build slop, make people happy and make a ton of money. i’m rooting for you. enterprise b2b saas penetrates markets with craftsmanship—not only in code, but design, founder led sales, storytelling, branding, earned insights, strategic partnerships… there is art, craftsmanship mixed in with statesmanship.. it makes sense considering the pot is more conceptually defined. as the definition of a developer will loose as token-based tools proliferate. dev tooling and labor markets will be upended and new ones will take their place. personally, I’m a fan of a greater meritocratic-output driven economy.

I wanted a cool flow diagram to show the customer journey on our site. my workflow is messy and suboptimal as i burn a ton of tokens, but it works for me. here's what i did: 1. i wrote the steps and outcomes. 2. generated JS to create responsive flow code 3. used mermaid to visualize the flow. it was ugly. 4. friend suggested Whimsical GPT extension. after trying it i was enamoured. 5. now i have the problem of solving for design alignment with the rest of the site and platform UI. i like CHAD cn. 6. attach whimsical diagram picture to a v0 fork of a baseline product UI i like to use for experimentation. this keeps design output focused. we got the premium plan last night after i mentioned the things i would do for more credits like the fire festival guy. i cranked out 3 screens since this morning - analytics, memory bucket and a secret third thing. shoutout to big g 7. @vercel 's v0 generated dark/light mode versions of the diagram with aligned design and responsive code. write steps in doc --> GPT for JS --> ❌mermaid (ugly) --> JS to Whimsical (better) --> Whimsical pic to v0 (elite) if you're lazy like me and want to accelerate prototyping use my code: threddotai

Applying is the easy part. whether it’s your first or 4th application, I wish you luck. building a generational business was never going to be easy. mastering the art of ai b2b vertical saas means pouring love, art, logic and a little magic into a concept, an idea of a thing and hope it germinates into a bigger thing that rolls into a zeitgeist shifting product. if you’re also biting your nails and sending a last minute application — let’s make a LinkedIn listicle baby together. the most important lesson in b2b saas sales is sending it with a smile. @Thred_AI 🏆 -your pal, Kazi

Principles to Live and Die By as a founder. 1) Be a Rebel - fight the system! 2) Bring other rebels to your cause 3) Do what’s best for the customer 4) Do what’s best for the organization 5) Stay close to builders and cutting edge 6) People who aren’t builders are usually time wasters 7) Be desperate for success, you can’t breathe without it 8) Arouse deep longing for your product in others without it you can’t win 9) Positively influence others 10) Do what it takes to be the best 11) There are no rules, anything goes 12) Keep your finger of the pulse of the culture 13) It’s always better when people come to you 14) The job isn’t done until it’s done 15) Announcing premature victory is for losers 16) Your customers deserve the best. Give them the best. 17) Jaguar’s are always ready to pounce. Be nimble like a jaguar. 18) There is no competition. Competition is for losers. Always go for monopoly power.

Stytch CoFounder/CTO @juliannaelamb Speedrun to $1B in 2 years Lessons on going from 0-1...billion Some rough notes from the pod: “We didn’t go for LOIs” -AUTH IS A PRETTY STICKY TYPE OF PRODUCT -you build authentication into your data model and it permeates throughout your product -unlock additional features -what are the pain points -what would your ideal situation look like -what would it take to move off your current provider -don’t sell in discovery, people are happy to rant about their frustrations if it’s a big enough pain point. -people underestimate how happy people are -what would it take for you to get comfortable to migrate engineering resources -what is the value that we would have to deliver on for this migration -we try to get great initial feedback before beta -get people to try it out and so there’s people to hype it up -so they already had experience trying it out ——> focus on one auth product so there’s a fully built up dev experience around that auth product ——> what are the SDKs like, Docs like ———> getting that initial feedback and early test use cases ———> early philosophy to get as much feedback as possible, get genuine feedback, early feedback is manufactured ——> we wanted unbiased feedback, ———> 6 months of initial feedback from open beta Twitter and maybe linkedin. —> we didn’t anticipate too much happening, Had a couple hundred signups immediately And someone going live within the first couple hours ———> that ended up working out ———> things were not totally hockey stick, but there was initial feedback ——> That beta helped us get initial thought partners and ppl who weren’t afraid to try things early ——> having that cohort is really valuable ***This has been in production for a longtime*** was the way to overcome enterprise requirements for reliability. If you liked this pod lmk!