Y Combinator startup will pay humans to help AI agents when they get stuck. (This is what I read today.)
At the same time, I see how Indian employees in production have cameras on their heads, and the AI learns from their movements (practically filming their firing process).
In addition, there was already a site where AI agents hired human actions for stablecoins.
First, AI worked for us.
Now we are starting to work for AI.
And eventually, will AI work (without us)?
I don t want to portray a Terminator scenario where people will have to unite against AI, but what future awaits us in terms of cooperation/non-cooperation with AI?
Every top athlete has one (Lebron James, Novak Djokovic, Serena Williams). And it turns out, so do most of the biggest names in tech.
Steve Jobs mentored Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook. Eric Schmidt mentored Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google and later credited that relationship as one of the key reasons Google scaled the way it did. Bill Campbell, known as "the Coach of Silicon Valley," mentored Jobs, Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, and dozens of other founders throughout his career.
I don t mean this in a disrespectful way or anything like that, but throughout my life, I ve come across (and I m sure you have too) several products whose actual usefulness wasn t exactly impressive, but their creators still made a huge amount of money.
For me, for example, it was:
Fidget spinners (2017). At the peak, the global market was estimated at hundreds of millions to over $1 billion.
Metaverse land (2021) valuation could be for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars each, with the overall market reaching hundreds of millions during the peak hype cycle. I bought one too. :D (actually was scammed).
Pet Rock (1975) the creator became a millionaire within a few months.
The more visible I become on platforms, the more opportunities I receive (not just sponsored ones).
Quite often, people reach out saying they re looking for a marketing co-founder.
And practically every month, there s someone with another revolutionary idea, the next big thing, a multimillion or multibillion-dollar business but then you never hear about them again.
Honestly launched this past Monday and we ended up Top 4 with 350+ upvotes and 40+ comments. It doesn t feel real, because: 1. The support we received from hundreds of strangers across the internet was incredible, and we are beyond grateful for it. 2. We didn t plan this launch. At all.
We ve been so deep in building the product that we kept pushing our launch back again and again and again. All of a sudden, on Monday we woke up to dozens of Congrats on the launch! messages. In our pre-coffee, foggy brained states we were really confused as to why. But then it hit us: we forgot to change our launch date. To make matters worse, we didn t have any of the essentials: No hunter, no maker comment, no demo video (added in midday). There was just a placeholder of v0 materials we already iterated upon internally countless times. Our logo was even outdated, and the link to our product and website was nowhere to be found in the comments. Not one upvote or comment came from anyone we knew within the first hours of launching. Because our day wasn t crazy enough, the website broke, so most businesses couldn t fill out our interest form properly, and our consumer facing Chrome extension encountered a huge bug where users couldn t use our product after installing it. A situation like this usually means guaranteed failure, yet to our surprise, we climbed to a Top 5 position on the leaderboard and were swarmed with PH notifications all day. Even outside of Product Hunt we were being battered with notifications. We re extremely thankful for the outcome, especially considering the circumstances. This is not a scenario that happens often, but it proved something vital to us: Even with a shell of a launch, we re making something people want.
We always believed finding real, trustworthy reviews online mattered. But this experience made it clear it s not just important, it s necessary. As AI-generated content continues to blur the line between real and fake, the need for verified, authentic opinions is clear. That s the mission we re pursuing with Honestly.
PLG was the backbone of some of the fastest-growing companies in history.
Slack grew by making team invites frictionless. Dropbox gave you free storage for every referral. Zoom let you host 40-minute meetings without a credit card. Those models worked because reducing friction was enough.
I keep hearing and reading about how programmers are at risk; basically, everything that can be replaced by AI is at risk.
Yesterday, Lenny Rachitsky shared a post that PM openings are at the highest levels since 2022.
At the same time, I read how big giants (Meta, Amazon, etc.) are laying off engineers because of AI, and then I read about how they had to hire back again because something managed by AI went wrong.
Lovable hit $400M ARR with 146 employees. That's $2.7M revenue per employee. Midjourney goes even further. $500M revenue. ~110 employees. $0 raised from investors. That's over $4.5M per employee. Bootstrapped. For context: most SaaS companies celebrate $200k-$300k per employee as a strong benchmark.
If 146 people can generate $400M, what does the math look like at 10?
For over a week, the wider Product Hunt community has been chiming in with their two cents in the discussion about where to draw the line between which product features should be free and which should require payment.
Just yesterday on X, a post started trending about a tool with 35,000+ users, but only just over 1,300 paying customers. The founder was asking the community for advice on how to increase conversions.
Last week Garry Tan (CEO of Y Combinator) shared his entire Claude Code setup on GitHub and called it "god mode."
He's sleeping 4 hours a night. Running 10 AI workers across 3 projects simultaneously. And openly saying he rebuilt a startup that once took $10M and 10 people. Alone, with agents.
