one of the downsides of being a founder is the social anxiety you can develop later today i'll go to a halloween party where i don't know anyone - and i'm feeling hella nervous used to be the opposite for me, did events like this almost on a weekly basis & always felt stoked beforehand but ever since > 90% of my waking hours are comprised of talking to ai, human interactions genuinely feel a bit nerve wracking atm anyways, wish me luck friends!

alright this is mental just discovered this dude from kazakhstan making $720k / month with two iOS games you can't really find a single thing about him on the internet - apart from the obscure instagram profile he hasn't posted to in 3+ years living the literal dream being rich & anonymous

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