investing in serendipity and see what happens startup stuff @ astora
🇻🇳HCMC / 🇬🇧London
Joined June 2022
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my prediction for next 2 years we’ll see a lot of software native people team up with more skilled physical labour.
selling saas products to other entrepreneurs is on way out and karen will always need her driveway paved.
software / digital marketing layer on top of team of skilled labourers could be a much nicer business than a social media schedule tool
The interesting thing about the "AI is killing software businesses" panic tells you more about who disproportionately dominates the cultural entrepreneurship narrative.
The loudest entrepreneurial culture online for the past five years has been indie hackers and build-in-public. Their entire model, spot a niche, ship a small tool, charge $29/mo, is exactly the segment AI vaporises first. Literally my feed is making it seem entrepreneurship is finished.
But nothing has actually changed about what makes a business defensible. For most it was never the software. It was always the boring stuff that i see really talked about it, its just "Build a personal brand". What about regulatory licenses, domain knowledge, proprietary data, networks, trust, key people. AI doesn't touch any of that. It just exposes how many "software businesses" are just features with a Stripe account.
As @aporia9n mentioned, if anything the opportunity got bigger, just in the opposite direction from where X is looking. Government processes, compliance-heavy industries, trades, logistics, sectors the indie crowd always ignored the culture has been to build products to sell to other small entrepreneurs or rather these industries are not sexy and slow . Those moats are intact and the tooling to attack them just got 100x cheaper.
There has never been a better time to build a business. There has never been a worse time to confuse building software with building one.
I think we all have to accept the $20/month micro-SaaS was a temporary glitch in the internet economy.
It worked because Google sent you customers for free and software was still too difficult for those customers to build themselves.
AI is killing both advantages at once. The customer no longer searches for your screenshot formatter, converter or tiny dashboard. He asks Claude to make one in 10 minutes.
Indie hackers are especially exposed because they disproportionately sell to technically curious founders, the exact people most willing to spend three hours recreating a $20/month tool to avoid paying for it. Selling software to software founders now is like opening a restaurant exclusively for people who love cooking at home.
Apps used to sit between the user and the task. Now ChatGPT, Claude or another agent increasingly owns the user relationship and decides which tools get used. The danger is not only that the lab replicates your feature. It can reduce your company to an invisible API supplier, or stop calling you entirely.
What survives will probably be the stuff that is annoying to reproduce: licences, regulatory approvals, proprietary data, physical operations, painful integrations, networks, reputation and human accountability. The code is no longer the asset, accumulated friction is.
Apps may survive where coordination matters, not where execution matters. Claude can create a converter or analyse a file because there is one user, one input and one output. It is much worse at replacing systems where many people, permissions, records and incentives need to remain synchronised.
2000-2025: Startup with a technical cofounder
2026: Start up with a Tiktok Baddie
Welcome to the new entrepreneurial culture where attention wins all.
You probs know its very common to DM creators and never get a reply .
Its cos your message goes in spam.
The partnership message via Creator Marketplace goes straight to their inbox.
So may not mean your offer sucks when outbound creators, just that your message goes to spam.
guy is onto something
And tbh, this “one-person holdco” model seems infinitely more fun than committing 10+ years to 1 startup / niche.
One month you’re in Mexico at an affiliate conference, the next you’re hiring 50 TikTok creators for some weird consumer brand, then learning the economics of heat pumps because an installer told you there’s a subsidy nobody has properly exploited yet.
Every year you’re forced to learn a completely different game: regulation, logistics, paid acquisition, manufacturing, tax, sales, whatever. You meet much stranger people, travel for actual reasons and collect proper life experience rather than spending a decade attending the same SaaS conferences and discussing your retention curve.
And what compounds is arguably more useful than expertise in one product. You get better at spotting bullshit, finding the person who actually knows how an industry works, recruiting people quickly, testing demand and understanding where the money is temporarily mispriced.
Obviously you’ll probably never build the next Apple. But most founders who sacrifice their 20s to one company won’t either. They’ll spend eight years managing employees, raising increasingly desperate rounds and defending a moat that disappeared three AI models ago.
At least this way the company never becomes your identity. It’s just one more vehicle inside a strange personal conglomerate built from cash, contacts, distribution and life stories.
Basically private equity with a passport, a Stripe account and no investment committee.
Facebook Creator Marketplace the GOAT of finding micro influencers for your startup and no one has mentioned it on here.
50-70% affiliate commission to get a start up off the ground of hungry micro influencers and you just got yourself your first users for
I think there's a huge gap for start ups / apps that help your average 50 year old Janet in dealing with government processes.
Gov documentation and consumer UI is terrible and daily info is still in excel sheets.
Child benefit applications, navigating tax reviews, car parking ticket review disputes, elderly benefits, IVF/fertility, medical bills, homeschooling curriculums...list is endless...so much opportunity to help consumers with bureaucracy.
Literally everyone is flogging some social media posting app to another broke SaaS founders when poor old Janet the boomer with cash squirreled away is shouting down the phone dealing with some public agent to get child benefit
Everyone is selling the solopreneur life as a lifestyle upgrade. "Escape the 9-5. build your own thing.
design your days."
Here's what they're missing; most people won't choose this path: they'll be pushed onto it.
Grads are sending 300 applications and hearing nothing. the first rung of the career ladder isn't getting harder to reach, for many it's gone.
So the "portfolio career" future isn't arriving because people suddenly want variety. It's arriving because the traditional entrance is closing.
Which changes the question entirely. It's not "should i go solo?" anymore. It's "What do I do now that the following the traditional path is becoming highly unattractive?"
My answer thus far is: Stop joining the queue or ensure you are brilliantly creative if you want to get a job.
I wrote about the people winning right now by doing the opposite of everyone else to get on that first rung (whether a client or a job) by doing weird stuff like baking cakes and hand-delivering them to prospects, or even making steel swords for clients (literally). So to survive in the current culture now you have to be so creative to carve out your island of attention.
We now truly are in a world where the new gold rush, is attention.
Actually I'd say most of the discontent in developed is just the shear unlimited options and paths we have.
Social media has bombarded us with other lives, all seemingly available: run an online startup from Bali, buy a house in Sussex, move to SF and raise a round, go remote in Lisbon, stay near family. Every one of them looks real because you can watch someone your age actually living it, in real time, every day.
And the truth is you can do almost any of these. You just can't do all of them at once...our brains have been warped by social media to always want something else.
So instead of living the path we're on, we run some kind of permanent background process optimising for the "best path." Comparing, second-guessing, keeping options warm and in the end people just stay where they are in this buffering state between choices.
I mean previous generations were unhappy because they had too few options, so this paradox of abundance ironically is the greatest threat to contentment and general satisfaction.
Society bombards us with instructions to be happier, fitter and richer. Why have we become so dissatisfied with being ordinary? economist.com/1843/2021/08/1…
Its funny but the FT comments are unanimous that it's a scam. And parts of it clearly are, but this is classic British status-ism. Very telling where I think education is heading:
The traditional degree was a trade: three years and £50k of debt in exchange for access to graduate jobs. That trade is breaking. I've spoke with many grads at LSE and they are sending several hundred apps with no job. Elite grads are struggling to convert degrees into the jobs they were promised, and AI is eating the entry-level knowledge work those degrees fed into. When even Oxbridge can't guarantee the outcome, £9,535 a year is a very hard price to defend.
STEM as an employment ticket is finished. The jobs that survive split two ways: essential physical trades (nurses, plumbers, electricians) and distribution-dependent hustle: people selling services, products, attention, in niches, where the moat isn't the skill, it's the reach (but tbh now everyone copying each others distribution)
Which means university quietly reverts to what it was 100 years ago: a place you go to learn to think, read, write, argue. Humanities. Status and network. Not job training. This is a good thing, the idea of the university for the majority was a massive socially constructed Ponzi
My take is the the model that works is institutions as mini incubators: take equity in the businesses students start, income share agreements, private debt priced on the actual course, not the fiction that all degrees are worth the same £9,535.
The universities sneering at it are defending a product whose core promise they can no longer keep.
The UK’s biggest university is a private company ft.trib.al/LLm6qYD
Facebook Group Admins are probs distribution’s best kept secret yet nobody is talking about that….so many boomers only use Facebook and tech inept…such a huge market. Yet feels like everybody is trying to push their app to other founders
Top marketing channels for startups on @trust_mrr:
🔎 SEO — $10.3M
✍️ Content marketing — $8M
📸 Instagram — $7.6M
👍 Facebook — $6M
🗣️ Word of mouth — $5.7M
📝 Blog — $5M
🔵 Google Ads — $4.8M
🤝 Affiliate — $4.8M
🎯 Meta Ads — $4.5M
🎵 TikTok — $4M
n=1,162
(channels are self-reported)
The new best way to source startup ideas is to look at UGC job posting platforms or Reddit UGC subs.
People post job briefs that explicitly tell you how they are distributing and format. Look for the ones that are paying min ~$500 a month.
These are validated distribution formats if the posters are investing heavily in them.
looking for a video editor to handle instagram reels on two pages—jordan peterson and business content. $500/month to find clips, edit 18 reels daily (20–60 sec), add captions and effects. long-term role.
app.pitchlo.com/go/5efad5e9-…
I’m convinced the best way to build a reddit account is to start as a “community policeman” 😅
Being the sub’s bullshit-detector on people’s posts that are seeding gets you legitimate street cred and trust within subs.
Seen this guy do it a few times he ranks up upvotes quickly.
Apify + vibe cobe your own automation = $$$ cost savings on software.
Phantom Buster $159 sub eliminated
B2B Distribution mini hack:
Call it a “Revenue Share Agreement” rather than “Affiliate” = high conversion