Even back in university, I noticed how much younger people (17 or 18 years old) were always jumping into some kind of trendy business model or income stream that happened to be booming at the time.

• First, it was dropshipping and flipping items.

• Then came NFTs and everything happening in the crypto space.

• Now everyone seems obsessed with quick vibecoded AI solutions and investment apartments.

I've been scanning startup marketing sites lately (it's part of how I do outreach for my agency) and one defect keeps showing up: a page gets renamed or a route changes, nobody sets up a 301, and the sitemap keeps pointing at a URL that no longer exists.

It's invisible from inside the company. The site looks fine, every link in the nav works, and meanwhile search engines and old backlinks are quietly hitting 404s.

The fix is usually a one-line redirect. What makes it interesting to me is why it happens: renames feel like refactors, so nobody treats them as breaking changes for the outside world.

If you've ever audited someone else's site, or had yours audited, what turned up that nobody inside had noticed?

At 15 I trained my first machine learning model and landed an internship at a U.S. company.
At 16 I launched my first startup and promptly ran it into the ground.
I learned more from that failure.

At 17 I launched Pleep, an AI sales rep that lets any business owner integrate AI into their sales workflow in under five minutes. Four months later I quit my job to work on it full time.

Why bother? I kept asking myself: Why isn t there an AI sales monopoly yet? My take: because most competitors deliver AI consultants that talk like robots and kill revenue.
We focused on building a real rep that:

• Doesn t ask you to prompt or pick an LLM you just tell us about your business and we do the rest.

• Talks like your top salesperson, not a bot.

• Books meetings and pushes data back into your CRM.

Over the past few months, I ve been testing how far a founder or tiny team can stretch AI capabilities across marketing, copy, and visual asset generation. While AI handles a massive portion of speed and execution, it hits a hard wall when it comes to brand strategy, contextual judgment, and authentic human connection.

Pushing output out faster doesn't mean much if it loses the nuance that makes people care. For those running solopreneur setups or lean startup teams: which specific workflows are you comfortable delegating completely to AI, and what non-negotiable tasks are you keeping strictly human?

Ok so i ve been trying to get into the claude startup credits program.
Filled the form, hit submit, it says application submitted . Then like 5 seconds later the same form is back, blank.

So i filled it again. and again. 16 times now lol.

No idea if my application is actually going through or if i m just feeding a loop. No email, no status page, nothing that tells me either way.

If you ve applied, did the same thing happen to you? and has anyone actually gotten credits, and how long did it take.

I got a cold email with the subject line "Shik Shak Shok". No context, nothing about it in the email, then three paragraphs about warehouse software.

I opened it, read all of it. and of course didn't reply, but I still remember it, which is more than I can say for the

fifteen "Quick question, Andriana?" emails sitting above it.

So it won my attention and lost the deal. I can't decide if that counts as working.

Year our newsletter open rates dropped below 15% even though we had great content. I spent three weeks testing subject lines and send times but nothing seemed to help. The numbers stayed low.

The real issue was that Gmail and Apple Mail started marking our emails as spam. Why? Because many people were ignoring them. We had thousands of subscribers who hadn t opened a single email in over six months. These were accounts ghosts in our database.

I decided to run a re- campaign. It was simple: a text-based email asking if they still wanted to hear from us. I gave them a choice click "yes" if they wanted to stay or let us know if they were done.

Only a handful responded with a yes. So I deleted over 4,000 contacts the next morning. It was genuinely terrifying to see our subscriber count drop so much overnight.. I didn t look back.

I am not really big on promoting myself or what i do, but in this day and age you can have the best app/idea on earth and if no one will get to it then it's nothing. So what do you do? How do you promote? on a budget.