It’s official: the Starter Story team is heading to Boston for HubSpot UNBOUND 🎉 @HubSpot is throwing a party, and we’d love to see you there. Come hang out with us:

Hiring people, taking on a cofounder, or even taking a little funding can be a good source of motivation for certain types of people. Being a solo founder is not for everyone!! Bc it requires a lot of intrinsic motivation, nobody is counting on you! That was never a problem for me, BUT I know a lot of solo founders who lack that motivation and IMO could use a bit of a kick in the arse.

Yep. On YouTube, the premise of a video is far more important than the packaging. This goes for all content actually. People over optimize on "what to post" when really it's about what you actually do/did in "real life"

i make $40,000/month with my solo online business my friends @marclou, @levelsio, @robj3d3 all make a ton of money also from the internet but we almost all work in our own ways… different working hours, different goals, different people… so this is how i work

i just blocked ~10 fucking losers downplaying her success saying: - she got lucky - prolly thirst trapping - had an audience before so that's no surprise she is the top influencer for "manifestation" corner of tiktok: - started from scratch - grinds like hell - she created many more accounts from scratch these haters who talk down on people before doing even the most basic research are so pathetic.

Introducing Stanley: The first AI Head of Content that will help you grow your following. Stanley works just like a real employee: text him and he’ll create, edit, and strategize viral content across X, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Making viral content is hard. It requires deep research, deep platform understanding, and knowing what’s culturally relevant at that exact minute. When you ask ChatGPT to “write a social post” it doesn’t know what good content looks like, it’s not actively consuming content, and it doesn’t understand you. This is why the output is slop. Stanley solves this. First Stanley deeply understands your unique voice and writing style (and doesn’t include AI language like em dashes and “it’s not x it’s y”) Then he plugs into your day-to-day (your Slack, Notion, Calendar, Granola) and proactively suggests viral posts for you based off the most interesting things happening in your life. All you need to do is voice note him your thoughts, and Stanley optimizes and then schedules a post across all platforms. Example: Last week I asked ChatGPT "what happened on X" and got a generic summary. I asked Stanley the same thing and he told me about @JensenHuang's first post on X and the viral Deny’s comment. That’s because Stanley has a team of specialized agents that are always on. One agent researches viral posts through the X API. One studies your voice. One doom scrolls X, LinkedIn, and Instagram. 2 months ago we released Stanley in beta to 100 social media power users like @chasepassiveincome, @jayyanginspires, @MitcheIl, and @iampascio who’ve used Stanley in their daily content process. Engagement rates increased by >50% for the average beta tester. (in fact you’ve probably engaged w/ Stanley posts without realizing) Posting content has genuinely changed my life for the better: it’s helped me raise millions of $, landed me my first customers, and attracted the very best employees. Stan wouldn’t be a $40M ARR business without Content. Stanley is our attempt at democratizing that. Our mission is to help any Entrepreneur tell their story, so we'd love for you to try Stanley for free here: One more thing.. You can see a glimpse of Stanley’s power in the comments below. Drop a reply and Stanley will analyze your X content right now. It'll pull your posts, study your voice, and tell you what's working and what's not. Each reply costs us abt ~$1 in tokens. Go abuse it. (Thank you VC’s.) FYI: This post and launch video were written 100% w/ the help of Stanley (how’d he do?) See Stanley work below 👇

It is the convergence of 3 things actually. 1. Competition: for sure, it is easier to build software now, so if your product is simple more chances of getting copied, then margins reduced. 2. Vibe coding: users are building their own replacements, what we need to understand is that most of the time we use like 25% of a product, so a user only needs to replace the workflows they actually use which in some cases is not that hard. 3. AI Overviews: users used to search, read results, find you based on your content and then maybe trying your product. That is declining, if the intent is not commercial then there is high chance the user gets their question answered by AI overview and don’t need to open a single link. Those 3 things acting together are making things harder, reducing the pie for simple software market, and increasing the level of difficulty for indie hackers. We need to level up as well in return.

Wow turns out in China 🇨🇳 entrepreneurship culture is virtually non existent. Or at least, it's not cool at all. In America, being a founder is seen as high status. But in China, the highest status you can have is a stable government job!

People think the risk of AI on software is people vibe coding their own tools. No! It's increased competition. This is standard market dynamics. Competitors crush profits. If you're building software, you need a competitive advantage: Either (1) on the demand side: audience, brand, trust, etc Or (2) something others can't get: proprietary data, regulatory position, deep integration, etc.