Shitposting
San Francisco
Joined July 2011
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Pawan retweeted
If customers won't buy your stuff, try asking what they would buy. This sounds obvious, but surprisingly few founders do it, and it often yields valuable insights.
Pawan retweeted
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.
The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.
But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.
So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
Don’t wait for the new year to start working on your health. Start now. Build the habit before obsessing over the perfect workout, diet, or supplements.
Keep a scale in your bathroom. Weigh yourself consistently and jot it down. Watch the trend, not one day’s number.
Get your blood work done. A reality check can be the kick in the butt that gets you moving and keeps you mindful through the holiday season.
Move every day. Start with a walk after meals. Keep it simple enough to repeat.
Nothing revolutionary here. That’s the point.
You’re welcome.
Pawan retweeted
Where does one find people like this? I’d love to have an army of them at 37signals - or just one to start - but I’ve found everyone claims they can do everything but very few can actually do anything.
Pawan retweeted
here are 4 grok @bot templates for building on X you can use today:
- launching
- threat hunting
- threat intel
- X api integration
Pawan retweeted
Everything big starts small and focused.
1,000 true fans is step #1, whether you want a $100K per year business or the next Uber.
I’ve seen this with all of my fastest-growing and most successful startups. They start laser-focused on 100 to 1,000 people, niche-ing down as necessary with their messaging and targeting (demographically, geographically, etc.) to get to a manageable and cost-effectively reachable number.
So, you may ask yourself, “Why aim for a mere $100K when I can try to build a billion-dollar business?” Two reasons:
1) Aiming for the latter from the outset often leads to neglecting the high-touch 1,000 true fans who act as your most powerful unpaid marketing force for “crossing the chasm” into the mainstream.
If you don’t build that initial army, you’re likely to fail.
2) Do you really want to build and manage a big company? For most people, it’s not a fun experience; it’s an all-consuming taskmaster. There are certainly ace CEOs who thread the needle and enjoy this roller coaster, but they are outliers.
Read Small Giants by Bo Burlingham for some fantastic examples of companies that choose to be the best rather than the biggest.
Pawan retweeted
This post is on track to my most popular newsletter post of all time
Nice work @anshuc 👏👏👏
I'd always thought AI was terrible at design, but after reading today's 🤯 post by @anshuc, I realized I was just doing it wrong.
"AI models are capable of amazing creativity, but that creativity gets stifled. LLMs are trained to be next-token predictors: they look at a sequence of text and predict what typically comes next. Great design is exactly the opposite of this. Great design bends the rules and delights users with memorable, unexpected choices."
@anshuc led design and engineering teams at Apple for 12 years. In his words: "Most people only see 1% of AI's creative potential. I want to show you how to tap into the other 99%."
His 8 techniques for breaking out of the 1%:
1. Use seed strings to inject variety
2. Be much more ambitious with your prompts
3. Create positive feedback loops with subagents
4. Use image generation to enrich designs
5. Use video generation
6. Cut out elements that don’t add value
7. Remove AI tells
8. Rewrite copy by hand
Read the post here: lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-t…
P.S. This design was made by AI 👇
Pawan retweeted
Cold emails should look COLD.
If it looks:
1. Like a template
2. Like it will take more than 15 seconds to read
You are screwed.
My best one of all time, that I would send to founders of startups when I was running @Metalab, my design agency:
"love what you guys are doing, we should work together."
That's it. 60% response rate.
Pawan retweeted
Semrush charges $139.95/month.
Ahrefs charges $129/month.
A guy named Ben built the open-source alternative that you can run on your computer.
It is called OpenSEO.
Enter a competitor's website and it reveals the keywords bringing them traffic, the pages winning those searches, and the backlinks helping them rank.
And enter your own site and it tracks rankings, crawls technical problems, reads Search Console, and shows whether ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews mention your brand.
Then connect Claude or Codex.
Your agent can pull the real numbers, compare opportunities, cluster keywords, and save a strategy back into the dashboard instead of guessing from a prompt.
The hosted version starts at $10 a month. The entire codebase is MIT licensed, so you can also self-host it and pay DataForSEO directly for only the data you use.
No, it does not magically reproduce every database and advanced feature Ahrefs built over a decade.
But it breaks the most important rule of the old SEO market:
You no longer need their permission to own the tool.
github.com/every-app/open-se…
Pawan retweeted
God I love reading about perf improvement methods
My favorite trick to reduce memory overhead in a Go app is to replace all time.Time references with int64. time.Time is 24 bytes versus 8 bytes, so a 3x improvement. There's also a GC improvement since time.Time contains a *Location pointer.
We maintain a few indexes in our engine which are ordered by priority and timestamp (these are queue-related indexes). We'd like to do everything possible to ensure this index fits in memory (and only fall back to disk with enormous backlogs).
In our first implementation, we'd read these rows out of the database to construct the index and convert pgtype.Timestamptz -> time.Time. But this strategy only let us fit a few million entries in memory on a 2GB machine. After a light refactor and partially due to this fix, we're nearing hundreds of millions of slots.
This is nowhere near Cloudflare's level of optimization but was very leveraged in our case.
Pawan retweeted
Visualizing the YC B2B GTM Playbook
📂 YC B2B GTM
┃
┣ 📂 Demand Generation
┃ ┣ 📂 Cold Email
┃ ┣ 📂 LinkedIn
┃ ┣ 📂 Sponsored Events
┃ ┣ 📂 Alumni Asks
┃ ┗ 📂 Conferences
┃
┣ 📂 Market
┃ ┣ 📂 Problem Owners
┃ ┣ 📂 Ideal Customer
┃ ┣ 📂 Buyer vs User
┃ ┣ 📂 First Segment
┃ ┗ 📂 Trigger Events
┃
┣ 📂 Positioning
┃ ┣ 📂 Why You
┃ ┣ 📂 The Wedge
┃ ┣ 📂 Category
┃ ┣ 📂 Enterprise
┃ ┗ 📂 One-Liner
┃
┣ 📂 Messaging
┃ ┣ 📂 Core Story
┃ ┣ 📂 Founder Voice
┃ ┣ 📂 Objection Mapping
┃ ┣ 📂 Buyer Language
┃ ┗ 📂 Talk Track
┃
┣ 📂 Offer
┃ ┣ 📂 Promotions
┃ ┣ 📂 Offer Tiers
┃ ┣ 📂 Decision Makers
┃ ┣ 📂 Discount Rules
┃ ┗ 📂 Price Tests
┃
┣ 📂 Channels
┃ ┣ 📂 Batch Network
┃ ┣ 📂 Warm Intros
┃ ┣ 📂 Founder Outbound
┃ ┣ 📂 Inbound
┃ ┗ 📂 Partners
┃
┣ 📂 Content Engine
┃ ┣ 📂 Launch Post
┃ ┣ 📂 Thought Leadership
┃ ┣ 📂 Social Proof
┃ ┣ 📂 One-Pagers
┃ ┗ 📂 Advertisements
┃
┣ 📂 Launch Strategy
┃ ┣ 📂 YC Launch
┃ ┣ 📂 PR Coverage
┃ ┣ 📂 Launch Kit
┃ ┣ 📂 Partner RT/QT
┃ ┗ 📂 Follow-Up
┃
┣ 📂 Sales Motion
┃ ┣ 📂 Founder-Led
┃ ┣ 📂 Discovery First
┃ ┣ 📂 Live Demo
┃ ┣ 📂 White Glove
┃ ┗ 📂 Written Playbook
┃
┣ 📂 Closing
┃ ┣ 📂 Sales Process
┃ ┣ 📂 Proposal
┃ ┣ 📂 Negotiation
┃ ┣ 📂 Retention
┃ ┗ 📂 Go Live
┃
┣ 📂 Customer Success
┃ ┣ 📂 Manual Onboard
┃ ┣ 📂 Testimonials
┃ ┣ 📂 Periodic Check-In
┃ ┣ 📂 Renewals
┃ ┗ 📂 Ask Intros
┃
┣ 📂 Account Growth
┃ ┣ 📂 Client Referrals
┃ ┣ 📂 Add-On Sales
┃ ┣ 📂 Upsell
┃ ┣ 📂 Multi-Year
┃ ┗ 📂 Enterprise Planning
┃
┣ 📂 Metrics
┃ ┣ 📂 Paid Users
┃ ┣ 📂 Expansion Rate
┃ ┣ 📂 Win Reasons
┃ ┣ 📂 Loss Reasons
┃ ┗ 📂 Time to Close
┃
┗ 📂 Scale
┃ ┣ 📂 Repeat Deals
┃ ┣ 📂 First Hire
┃ ┣ 📂 Leak Fixes
┃ ┣ 📂 New Segment
┃ ┗ 📂 Repeatable Motions
Pawan retweeted
Google's SynthID is going to force the "lazy" marketers to change their entire content marketing process.
Or the companies that are just trying to optimize content costs.
Because OpenAI and Anthropic use Google's technology to detect AI-generated content, you'll start seeing companies revert their strategies over the next 12 months.
It's not only affecting text, on average, AI is used 79.5% of the time, no matter the type of content being created.
1. I believe platforms in the long run will have to label the content due to legal reasons. Some have already started labeling AI content.
2. The lazy marketer is trying to do 2 hours of work in 10 minutes. The technology is great, but the goal should be to use it and still spend 2 hours to create a better output than what a human can produce on their own.
Pawan retweeted
I am once again telling you that you can buy exact match domains one shot directory sites using Claude Code deploy them to vercel and get them indexed on google search console and they will get you free traffic of your target customer and you can run ads on them that promote your product
Pawan retweeted
With @hubermanlab
Action is the cure for most of your problems:
– Acknowledge what happened: mourn it, celebrate what was, then move on
– Get your "gear back on" immediately, don't wait for the feeling to pass
– Take action fast, the longer adversity sits unchallenged in your head, the stronger it gets
– The action doesn't have to be massive, just forward movement
– Do a quick analysis: why did it go wrong, what gate do I need to jump through next time
– Then go execute that next step
@jockowillink on @hubermanlab
Pawan retweeted
I soft-launched YouSpot yesterday (via a tweet).
YouSpot is an AI-native Solo CRM.
Fortune favors the focused.
So, here's who YouSpot is NOT for:
1) If you have a GTM team (marketing/sales) and looking to grow, YouSpot is not for you. Buy HubSpot.
2) If are an e-commerce store, YouSpot is not for you. Product is focused more on B2B and "high consideration" purchases.
3) If you have raised venture money, you should look into HubSpot for Startups. That's the right product.
4) If you're hoping for an open source project that you can run locally, and connect your own local models and use the Karpathy wiki style knowledgebase -- you are *awesome*, but YouSpot is not for you.
5) If you're trying to manage your personal stuff and family life -- I honor you, but YouSpot is not a B2C product. It's meant for 1-person companies (businesses being operated by a single human).
6) If you're worried about connecting your Gmail and other systems to a third-party app you didn't build yourself -- I respect your worry. The world is a scary place. But YouSpot is probably not for you (you're not going to get value without connecting third-party systems that can be used to build your second brain).
Other than that, would love to have you as a beta user! :). Just go to YouSpot.com. Waitlist for the free private beta, or skip the line by coming a $1/month subscriber (first 1,000 users and we're already 547 in).
Building this in public, so if you have questions around what's in my head (and what's in my second brain), just reply to this tweet and ask.
Cheers.
Pawan retweeted
a great cold email can change your life
my last 3 jobs came from cold email
here's how:
You can cold email nearly anyone, but nearly everyone overlooks how powerful it can be.
Sending one email each week that feels like a stretch can change your life. Will you get turned down? Sure, most of the time. But you only need one to pay off for something amazing to happen.
Take your time, write a thoughtful message, and muster the courage to press Send.
Pawan retweeted
0 to $500k revenue in 2 months building an AI native service company
great read for those thinking about what company to build today
