tony fernandes is one of my favorite entrepreneurs that no one talks about the amount of shit this guy has survived / attempted over the last 25 years is ridiculous > spent 14 years in the music industry & had zero airline experience > mortgaged his house + put in his own savings to take over a failing airline for $0.25 alongside $11m in debt (got 2 airplanes to start with) > three days after the deal went through, 9/11 happened > turned it profitable within roughly a year > then survived SARS, bird flu, the 2004 tsunami, record oil prices & the global financial crisis > in 2014 one of their planes crashed, killing all 162 people onboard > then covid grounded basically the entire airline and pushed the company into financial distress > instead of just waiting for travel to return, they tried turning airasia into a super app: food delivery, ride hailing, parcels, fintech, hotels, flights etc > that eventually became MOVE - which today has 16m+ monthly users and did $1.3b in gross bookings in a single quarter > spent almost 6 years restructuring the entire company after covid > completed the restructuring in 2026, separated the airline from Capital A & finally exited its financial distress status > then immediately went back on offense and ordered 150 airbus A220s, the largest A220 order ever, with options for another 150 > they even tried to cancel my boi for posting a shirtless image of him getting massaged in the office every time i feel down, people like tony serve as a reminder that this journey is supposed to be freaking hard

one of the most underrated moves in doing ugc is to hire middle aged people everyone and their mom fights for the most charismatic young folks, meanwhile there are tons of older people, willing to film themselves for a fraction of the price (as they don't know what proper ugc rates are; maybe they are retired or housewives and wanna make some side cash) @rlakhnyuk, for example, has successfully adopted this strategy with his job search tool

a lot of dev types are suffering from cognitive dissonance historically, the deal was simple: > get good at coding > be compensated well for it > potentially launch a saas & the only marketing you do is talking about new features or product hunt launches that reality is gone and will never return developers are now competing against an armada of marc lou's, all of whom are substantially better at drawing attention the only thing they're left with is crying out in public because deep down they know they are - and possibly never will be - as great of a marketer as marc is

sadly, bali builder culture seems to be gone i came back after 8 years, hoping to meet tons of founders working their asses off still remember the @levelsio interview with lex where he was talking about building well into the nights together with @marckohlbrugge and other founders instead, i spent many nights in the coworking kinda by myself (there are maybe 2-3 other people but they all seem to be just working European / US times as employees) feels like a lot of it is kinda performative as well, with many pretending to live a hustle lifestyle that they simply don’t embody - little surprising therefore that a lot of dubai are now based here lol anyways, i still met with amazing builders like @sobedominik or @floriandarroman but they’re the exception, not the norm, unfortunately

here's another example you could easily replicate with ai the founder, presumably the woman behind this account, is absolutely crushing it with faceless content app is currently waitlisted, bet she already got tons of sign ups if you check the comments

idea for anyone to take: do pocket fm but for history been listening to rest is history and a couple of other podcast for years now replay value on these is insane cause you know, it's history & people wanna learn about it an ai knows substantially more about history than any historian on earth then just copy pocket fm's marketing strategy

some of these dropshippers are just beyond creative honestly, if i were an established but struggling ecomm brand (think allbirds), i'd hire one of these dudes just to spin up accounts & test creatives like these en masse

we just added gpt image 2.5 to @genviral_ alongside a pretty dope new feature you can now edit images by marking or commenting on them most image models tend to be somewhat bad at following instructions, so you need to either a) be super explicit in your prompt or b) have some visual cue as to what exactly needs to be edited give it a spin & lemme know what you think :)

10,000 where do i start - because this number means so much, and yet so little throughout my 20s, i did not have any social media presence whatsoever back in january 2023, i first became aware of indie hacking, build in public, etc when a common friend introduced me to @sobedominik this eventually, while doing freelance, made me start being active here on X, building ugly ass software products no one wanted it was soon after that i met my cofounder @fekdaoui, having a call with him & trying to license one of his products for the german market and this short call eventually morphed into @genviral_ & a partnership that's hopefully lasting many years to come meanwhile, being active on X has enabled me to meet so many other incredible people, ranging from the hacker house we did in bangkok all the way to the countless people i get to interact with on a daily basis yet, i would remiss to say that it hasn't also been a very challenging period being a founder, let alone in a competitive field such as social media, has forced me to be crazy active on almost every platform this comes with its own set of challenges, such as constantly being bombared by other peoples' successes (and inevitably comparing yourself to those), negative comments, and so forth i'm honestly still struggling every day in striking a healthy balance and finding joy in all of this what i guess i'm trying to say is that if you're just starting out, don't see having a big following as the end all, be all and instead, try to use it for what i hopefully get to do for many years to come: meeting incredible people <3

btw, you can also go viral & crush it promoting desktop apps the general rule of thumb is always: the more unique your design and/or user experience, the simpler you can make your demo videos

i think it was @levelsio who recently mentioned that he projects saas becoming more and more of a get-rich-quick scheme type business meaning you quickly hop on a new trend, milk it, and move on well, i just spoke with someone (he wanted to buy hosted accounts from us to do what i'm about to share) & it's already happening BUT IN DROPSHIPPING he showed me this account as an example, so hear me out: the game in dropshipping has now evolved to taking listings from chinese supplier sites then, you start accounts on insta and tiktok (the reason he wanted to speak was for scaling this) where you test a given product with ai content (his stack was gpt image 2 and seedance 2) once something hits escape velocity, i.e., you have a viral video and people are asking for the product / not realizing it's ai, he quickly creates a store there are many saas products, like @LoicBerthelot dropmagic, where you can quickly spin up new stores to then start fulfilling those orders the wild thing was that almost his entire setup was automated with hermes agent he had a bot that constantly scraped, surfaced, and analyzed listings another one to auto message multiple suppliers to get the best deal and so on and so forth pretty wild