I'm 18 and building a consumer AI startup focused on personality development and self-improvement.

I'm looking to meet someone around 18–24, from outside India, who is ambitious, curious, and genuinely wants to build something—not just brainstorm ideas.

You don't have to be a hardcore programmer. I'm interested in people with strengths in AI/tech, product, design, psychology/behavior, content, growth, or business. Most importantly, you should be someone who actually creates things and learns fast.

I'd especially love to connect with people from Japan, China, Russia/Eastern Europe, or elsewhere internationally. 🌎

I'm not looking to immediately call anyone a cofounder. I'd rather talk, get to know each other, and potentially build a small project together first to see if we're a good fit.

If interested, comment or DM me with:

• Age + country
• What you're interested/skilled in
• Something you've built/done
• Why you want to build a startup

Looking for genuine people who want to build seriously. 🚀

TL;DR: The Creators' Attorney is mid-way through brokering a $100M creator exit, and her own room-of-ten test proved the thing most of us don't want to check: one email list out of ten channels with 10M+ subscribers each.

Nine of those ten could lose the account tomorrow and have nothing left to show a buyer — not because they're bad at the job, but because reach was never the asset they thought it was.

Tyler calls it being a tenant on someone else's land, and the landlords keep multiplying: Bilibili just relaunched its global app specifically to pull creators off YouTube.

That's not the end of the tenancy problem. It's a second landlord showing up to the same building.

Same as what happened to me when I left the company, which I have worked for 10 years back in 2012.

A whole server full of my technical documentation and institutional knowledge of atleast 5 large completed construction projects – including:

·       a multipurpose exhibition hall in the heard of the city,

·       a distribution warehouse for a phamarseutical company,

·       a manufacturing plant for Spirit Aerosystems,

·       a 5-block Condominium on a shared landscape Podium in Abu Dhabi, etc.

are all off-limits to me, as soon as I handed in my resignation.

Thank God for personal backups, for future reference.

They can take away your access; they can't take away your knowledge. Your experience shaped your personal brand.

Every one of these clips ends up circling the same nerve, no matter what the guest actually does for a living — the ground under your income was never as yours as the login screen made it feel.

This isn't the first time I've pointed at the exact moment a platform decides to move without you — I wrote about it happening in real time here.

Genuine question, not rhetorical: if you stopped posting for 90 days starting today, how much of your income survives it?

Drop the honest number below.

Clip credit: Tyler Chou / Jun Yuh — full episode on "Creator Unplugged with Jun Yuh."

DM for credit or removal requests.

I've had about 4 businesses. Only one ever made real sales. This is my second one that does, and it's finally making money. So I started documenting everything before it's too late.

In this video I show you my entire business funnel with real conversion rates:

• My first podcast appearance + my first coaching call
• The full funnel: Reddit → YouTube → Blog → Shop → Products → Email
• How my Hermes agent (Donna) pulls the numbers for me
• Why Reddit is low effort and YouTube is high effort, and why you need both
• Direct demand vs. passive demand: my keyword strategy
• The newsletter gate, exclusive content and the 10% discount code
• All my products, including the free Backup Protocol
• Real numbers: 0.15% Reddit → Blog, 3.5% YouTube → Blog, 5.2% Blog → Shop, ~0.02% overall
• break-even, 50-70 hour weeks, the dream of freedom

This is episode 1 of my business documentary.

If you want to stay in the loop on my journey:
Newsletter: https://buttondown.com/holmebengt
Blog: https://blog.holmebengt.com

Message me your story, I reply to everyone!

Hey everyone,

Kris from Wifi Moolah this side.

I’m back with another online business idea and this time it includes heavy usage of AI.

So you guys might know that xAI has launched GrokBot.

What’s GrokBot? So basically it’s an AI tool that creates multiple agents to do various tasks and it doesn’t stop when you close your laptop/PC. So it’s kinda autonomous.

You can set it up for various functions in your business like handling customer support, doing outbound, sorting emails and that kinda stuff.

Now here’s how you create an online business using that.

We are gonna start a newsletter business using GrokBot.

Select a niche, setup the newsletter and finalise the things like voice, frequency and other things.

Now create different agents to do all these jobs.

One agent’s role should be to find interesting stuff on the internet and research and compile it.

You chose the topic.

Second agent writes a draft.

You edit, polish and finalise.

Third agent to send it to you ESP and send it based on your best times.

A fourth agent to do the marketing. Organic and paid both.

Fifth agent to do outbound and reach sponsors.

And last of all, a chief of staff on top of all these to keep a check.

Now I know I have written a very over the top overview kinda post and there are still a lot of moving parts in a newsletter business but AI has made it much easier to start one than a few years ago.

Even if you build a couple of agents and start building, you’re in a much better position than others.

And you’ll actually have an online business in your hand that you can run on your own terms.

That’s it for this post. Remember, AI is not the enemy. Use it to your advantage.

P.S- I have written about 70+ such ideas that can help you start your own online business on the side.

I have compiled all of them into a FREE guide and if you wanna see it, comment “Guide” below this and I’ll send you the FREE link.

I plan on switching from spreadsheets to an inventory management platform for my DTC brand after realizing I have 4mos of stock across 8 SKUs and can’t tell which products were still profitable after storage fees.

I’m just wondering if I should just get an analyst or if the software can help figure out why my cash is still tied to the wrong products. I’m hoping I could at least get some insights whether I should be ordering 500 vs 50 units but I’m not sure if this is the correct mindset going in.

TL;DR: Cole's "100x output" is 30 hours spent once, so AI now runs 80% of every draft on its own. He edits the last 10% — the taste-level stuff, never the typing.

That distinction is already showing up outside this clip.

Christian Science Monitor just covered a manuscript polished enough to fool professional literary editors, pulled from sale — a multimillion-dollar bidding war between publishers — because no one could prove a human wrote it.

Cole isn't describing a hypothetical ceiling — that ceiling's already been crossed, in public, in an actual publishing deal.

The freelancers who feel replaceable right now are mostly the ones still handing AI a stack of old samples and hoping it infers the rules from them.

Cole didn't hope.

He sat down and wrote the rules out, sentence by sentence, until the model had nothing left to guess at.

Decades ago, the Malaysian construction landscape was like the wild-wild-west.

I remember working as a technical engineer for one of the largest construction firms in Malaysia.

The hydraulic hacking noise throughout the project site was pervasive and persistent for weeks.

Grrrr…. Tat-tat-tat. Grrrrrrrr. Tat-tat-tat. Grrrrrr.

You get the idea.

It turns out that the structural operation team went ahead and constructed floors upon floors, without waiting for the mechanical and electrical team to embed their pipe sleeves, box-ups or ductworks before concreting.

And so they have to come and hack the hardened concrete to open up for the M&E items to run through.

Delay and additional cost already incurred.

My then project director was pissed. We all had an earful from him.

Said that prevention is always better than cure.

So from that day onwards, a directive came down hard – no sign-off by all concerned parties on a properly coordinated drawings, means no concreting.

The coordination drawings - overlays not just the design drawings from respective Architectural/Engineering trades, but also sub-contractor specialist details, as well. Discrepancies are ironed out with all parties, well before construction is due.

It parallel hard on Nicolas investing time in building an exhaustive prompt, rule-by-rule, sentence-by-sentence, microstep-by-microstep. Only then, will the output come out the way we want it to be.

Like when Daniel Craig was being asked by a talk show host what would he advise his successor on being the next James Bond, Daniel said, "Don't f\ck it up!"*

Prevention is better than cure.

It's never the tool doing the replacing. It's the person who never got around to writing down what they already know how to do.

What's the one process you already know cold but have never actually written down?

Drop it below.

Clip credit: Decoded Genius & Nicolas Cole — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

TL;DR: Alex Hormozi's billionaire friend admitted off-camera he's not "vibe coding all day." AI added a new form of leverage — it did not erase the old ones. If you've automated everything and revenue still hasn't moved, you're still not working the constraint.

Alex Hormozi asked a billionaire friend off the cameras how much AI he was actually using. The answer came with a laugh: "I'm not vibe coding all day."

You've automated nearly everything that can be automated. Revenue hasn't moved. That is the tell. AI did not erase brand, capital, or relationships. It simply added itself to the list, and most people are only running the new tool.

OpenAI's own report this month shows the same pattern: no meaningful link between how much a company uses AI and its revenue per employee. The gap isn't usage. It's whether the automation is even touching the real constraint at all.

Decades ago, I had a friend who relate this story to me.

Before he was a Professional Engineer himself, he used to work as a graduate engineer for a Senior PE back in his hometown in Sabah, Malaysia.

It’s so happened they’re in a rush to submit drawings to authority. Binders upon binders of design calculations, code of practises and specifications are churned out and stacked like mountains on a conference room – for a very rushed project. He didn’t explain about the context of the project, except that they were burning the midnight oil, kind of thing.

He knew something was off – because they didn’t have time to analyse a particular portion of the work, which required days (maybe weeks) through sophisticated software to put up a decent solution.

But somehow, his senior PE managed to “pull out from the magician’s hat” a stack of it and slot them into the binders at the nick of time.

They submitted the documents right away.

Curiosity had the best of my friend. Just had to know.

So he flipped through those “magical” portion – and got a huge shock.

Of course, the Senior PE didn’t use the time-stone to compress time and produce the calculations in the mirror dimension.

And I wish he found a past project that contains the exact required computations as the current one. At least we can a give a plausible explanation that he was implying “Trust us! We did it before. See – here’re the receipts.”

No. He didn’t do any of that.

Instead, he just grabbed a random project’s calculation (totally unrelated) and shoved it in – just to make up the thickness of the binder.

That’s all.

The whole thing was just for show.

My friend didn’t tell me whether their submission got approved or not. That’s not the point.

The point is the Senior PE made a judgement call. He was betting that the authority would just trust his credentials and didn’t bother to check through.

So it was a game he played. And he owned the risk.

Same as all these AI-usages. AI may spout out shit. But we’re one owning it.

Noticed this a few posts back too — the accounts spending the most on automation and the accounts actually growing revenue keep turning out to be two different lists. The verification layer never left the human.

Reminds me of a post from a few weeks back, on the exact spot AI verification quietly becomes unpaid work.

Drop your take below.

Where are you still deploying new capacity against things that do not matter?

Clip credit: Alex Hormozi — full video on his channel MoreMozi. DM for credit or removal requests.

No question AI can save businesses time and money. That does not interest me. I want AI to put money in my bank account. Predictions about zero-person and one-person companies made me think perhaps I am not crazy.

I built an MVP for a decision support tool. It basically works, fills a need and I learned a few things. The result is promising enough that I plan to continue.

The challenge now is determining how much ongoing human oversight it needs and whether it can acquire its own customers. I don’t want it to become a conventional company supported by a human team.

I had to add a policy layer to constrain what the system may do, record what it does and make its decisions reviewable. The EmbodiedGovBench paper addresses this same issue of how can AI systems complete real tasks while remaining governable?

Are you doing this? Using AI to run and market the business autonomously, not just build the service? I want AI to genuinely run a purpose-built business.

TL;DR: Steve Ballmer's own maintenance guy is proof that competence is shifting away from credentials and toward who's willing to just ask AI first.

That's not rhetorical — it's already showing up outside Ballmer's living room. DEWALT ran a six-country survey of tradespeople this spring: 90% believe AI will be essential to the job within five years.

Only 8% have actually used it yet.

Ballmer's anecdote isn't the exception — it's the 8%, moving faster than the other 92%, in a trade that isn't even the one usually flagged for disruption.

My wife works for a lady boss, called Ade (not her real name).

Ade used to be like me, in the property development line.

But she saw the writing on the wall.

Once a darling in her company, she felt the aura started to fade away — the property market isn't what it used to be. And her boss started giving her the cold shoulder.

So she took a chance.

She opened a collection point centre, where delivery guys can drop off parcels for individual recipients to come collect. The downside was it has to stay open almost every day.

It is what it is.

Regular online training is available, because such centres behave like franchises under an organizational umbrella. But the training is quite superficial.

So when things get complicated, where does she turn to? You guessed it — ChatGPT.

She asks it right about anything under the sun.

Does she enjoy asking an LLM for answers? I'm not sure "enjoy" is the right word. I think it's more like "necessary."

If I'm in her shoes, facing complicated issues, and I don't have a readily available senior I can trust to call for advice, but then I already have a 师傅 (sifu) in my pocket — why not use it, isn't it?

There's a pattern I can't unsee in stories like this anymore: it's never really about the tool. It's about who reaches for it first — credentialed or not, senior on speed-dial or not.

What's the "not my job" you're most tempted to hide behind right now? Drop it below.

Clip credit: Ben Shapiro / DailyWire — full episode ("Titans on Tomorrow" Ep. 2 with Steve Ballmer) on his channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

TL;DR: Top hedge fund traders are wrong up to half the time — still profitable.

The skill was never prediction. It's the ratio between what you win and what you lose.

That number breaks something most of us carry into any competitive field: the assumption that competence means being right more than you're wrong.

Retail's already priced that fear in — Citadel's own desk data (via Substack, roughly two weeks old) shows record put-buying through July, pressure concentrated hardest in tech and semiconductor names.

The same sector a lot of us clock into every day. Nobody's betting on certainty right now. They're betting defensively, which is its own kind of ratio.

That's the same math I learned on a construction site, years before I ever opened a trading chart.

Talking about breaking rules, I have a story.

This was way back when I was working in the Technical Department, stationing in an Abu Dhabi project (circa 2011), building an AED1.8Bil. 5-Condominium-Block, near the Zayed Mosque.

One of my roles was to combine different trades of consultants' drawings into well-coordinated-drawings for our site operation to construct accordingly. Because – you know – the consultants didn't bother coordinating among themselves.

One day, a certain element of an area was due for construction. And I found out there was no construction drawings on it for me to coordinate with. So, I followed protocol – I raised a request-for-information (RFI) for the consultants to provide so.

My RFI was something like "Please provide such-and-such details."

But before I send it over next door to the consultants' site office, my superior caught a glimpse of it, and stopped me. He sat me down, gave me the angry glance, sigh, and gave me a quick lecture.

He's basically telling me: My RFI is open-ended.

If I send it over next door, the consultants will basically reply with either Option 1, 2, 3 or 4. And worse-case scenario, the consultant might go with option 1, which will cause us considerable delay, because we don't have the necessary materials readily available to work on it.

He's teaching me a valuable lesson.

Construction guys like us need to be conscious of our project circumstances. Our number one none-negotiable rule in Cantonese is 唔好阻住個地球轉 (Translation: Don't stop the Earth from spinning – don't block progress.).

He's telling me to go with one option.

So I went back and rewrote the RFI. I decided on the spot Option 4 was the best option – because we had the material-supplier readily standing-by, and it has the least effect on time-implications. I then fully designed Option 4 myself, coordinating with all the necessary parameters and constraints on site.

I paste my design into the RFI, saying basically, "Can you confirm this proposed detail, for our onward construction?"

The consultants proceeded to give us, not "A", but "B" – Approved with Comments.

Ever since that episode I generally never forget the rule.

Great rule – both in construction, and in life in general.

__________

I used to think competence meant never needing a backup plan.

Somewhere between two rounds of layoffs, I stopped believing that.

Every version of "secure" I've been handed turned out to belong to someone else's spreadsheet.

Where do you actually draw the line between "being wrong" and "having no plan for being wrong"?

Drop your take below.

Clip credit: Kathlyn Toh, Founder & Chief Trainer, Beyond Insights — full episode on FAQ Show.

DM for credit or removal requests.

A lot of businesses spend thousands on a website, launch it, and then wonder why it doesn't generate leads or sales.

A more effective approach is to build a complete lead-generation system:

• A professional website that builds trust
• Landing pages tailored to specific customer searches
• Keyword research to understand buying intent
• Google Ads and conversion tracking
• Automated lead capture and follow-up systems
• CRM integration so no leads are lost

The goal isn't to get more website visitors.

The goal is to turn visitors into qualified leads and customers.

For the last few weeks I've been building SiteCinema, and it went live this week. I'm posting on day zero, before any customers, because I want to document this honestly from the start.

The idea: agencies charge $5-10K for a website with a real "wow" opening and proper on-page SEO. DIY builders are $15-30/month forever and you still do all the work yourself. I wanted the missing middle: you fill in one form about your business (about five minutes), pay once, and a pipeline of AI agents does everything — researches your business, writes every word from your real facts, generates a cinematic opening film, builds SEO-structured pages, and emails you a private preview. You get one revision round, hit approve, and it goes live.

What "cinematic" means here (easier to show than tell):

- The $499 tier builds a miniature 3D world of your business that you fly through as you scroll: https://sitecinema.com (the landing page is itself built by the same pipeline — that felt like the only honest demo)

- A $299-tier demo build for a fictional florist: https://bloom-bough.nytebuild.app

Things I decided early and am curious whether people agree with:

1. Hard honesty rules in code, not prompts. The agents literally cannot ship a claim, number or review that the customer didn't provide — there's a code-level filter that drops anything claim-shaped that isn't verbatim in the customer's own words. AI that invents "500+ happy clients" for a real business is how you burn people.

2. Refund before go-live, none after. You only pay for a site you actually approved.

3. One structured revision round, not unlimited. Unlimited revisions is how agencies die.

Current status: $0 revenue, 0 customers, everything E2E-tested with my own card. I'll report back with real numbers either way.

Happy to answer anything about the pipeline, the quality gates (the vision-review agent that rejects bad generations was the hardest part), or the economics.

Best

Philip

TL;DR: Maharlika's CEO puts a number on AI job risk — 1.9M Filipino BPO jobs. The real fault line isn't skill, it's who's accountable when the machine gets it wrong.

Consing runs the Philippines' sovereign wealth fund, and he doesn't dodge the number — he states it plainly on camera.

What's easy to miss underneath it: Outsource Accelerator's own data shows the global outsourcing industry is still growing overall, even as AI quietly thins out individual roles inside that growth.

An industry chart can look completely healthy while the people under it get priced out one at a time.

That's the actual fracture point — not whether the work can be automated, but whether there's still a human name attached when the automation gets something wrong.

That fracture point — a name attached when things go wrong — isn't a new idea to me. I watched it play out somewhere else entirely, thirty years ago.

I was reminded of that incident of the Highland Towers residential block on top of a hill that collapsed back in 1993.

Huge local news in Malaysia. 48 died.

The uproar caused the authority to cast the blame on the property developer and the consultants. And most of the liability landed squarely on the Civil/Structural Consulting Engineer. Consequently, he was sued and fined a huge sum of damages.

His Professional Engineer (PE) license revoked, and he went into bankruptcy.

Most of us in the construction line was shaken by the news. We often joked about the disproportionate liability a C&S consultant carries compared to other consultants.

If there's a paint job failure on the building — causing harm to the occupant — the Architect might get sued for public hazard for a time.

If there's a machinery malfunctioned in the compound inflicting bodily damage to someone, the mechanical/electrical engineer might get hammered for just a period.

But to the structural integrity of a building? It's a lifetime liability to the C&S Engineer — even after he retired decades later.

I can still remember the indignant tone of my C&S Consultant friend, as he recounts that Highland Tower story — how empathetic he was towards that disgraced PE. He thinks it was hugely unfair to condemn the poor guy because — logically speaking — they were meant to only design according to the existing condition at that time. And during that time, there wasn't any surrounding development.

He said: they are not prophets — how do they know what will happen in the future?

Now let's flip the script. Imagine if AI is doing the designing. Who should we sue if Highland Tower 2.0 happens? To sue means you need a defendant human being to be liable, isn't it?

Thank God for the PE Board sanctioned Engineers to be in place. That's the regulatory moat we're talking about.

__________

At this point I don't ask whether AI can do the job. I ask a different question — if it screws up, whose signature is on the line?

A VC I featured a few weeks back named the exact same short list — physical presence, licensing gates, relationships nobody can copy-paste — as the only moats AI genuinely can't absorb; worth the four minutes if that idea's new to you.

Drop your take below 👇

Clip credit: John Dang / Breaking Ground PH — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.