This week’s Founder Finds includes:
👥 AI-augmented teams
🛑 The best way to say no
⚙️ Context engineering skills
📰 A personal print magazine
📱 A lightweight iOS simulator
➡️ And more…
🪶 REMEMBER THIS:
Build a business that’s true to you. Authenticity is an edge.
🤓 FAV FINDS
Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members
⚙️ Agent Skills for Context Engineering shared by Alper Tunga
Agent skills focused on context and harness engineering
📰 Offprint shared by Elia Zane
A print magazine from your saved articles
📱 simslim shared by Gabriel
A lightweight iOS simulator for app developers
🏆 TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS
😴 Dru Riley published The 3% Mortgage Debate Is Really About Sleep, on what a spreadsheet leaves out
🦾 Elie Steinbock launched Bot Directory (and was retweeted by Elon Musk)
🎮 Yuyu launched HiddenGems.lol
👁️ Knight launched VisionGPT 2.0
🔮 PREDICTION OF THE WEEK
Your whole outbound email bill will drop under $50 a month.
Software that finds prospects and mails them is shifting from a monthly seat price to a price per email sent.
The evidence: one outbound platform, Explee, already sells sends at 3 cents each, so $30 buys about 1,000 emails. The seat that pricing replaces posts a 60% quota-attainment rate and 40% annual attrition in a benchmark of 351 sales teams.
From Trends PRO Report #0178, AI Sales Agents. See what founders already pay for outbound.
📘 Read This
Why Can 5 People With AI Outproduce 14 People Without It?
You might brag about team size until a layoff shows you revenue and margins improved with fewer people and AI on execution.
- Calculate revenue per employee before your next hire.
- Test AI first on every role. Old roles can be mapped to work AI could replace.
- Hire for new thinking instead of more capacity. Person #6 should add a perspective you lack.
🛠️ TOOLS OF THE WEEK
🎞️ Multi — Grow on YouTube on autopilot
🧿 HeadsUp.bot — Stay ahead of competitors
💵 StockDrifts — Visual stock research that builds conviction fast
☁️ OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEEK
Pair phone lockouts with live co-working partners.
Voluntary app blockers show no measurable gain in field trials, while strict, un-bypassable blocks raise output by 8 tasks an hour. Solo remote workers know this, which is why software-only blockers suffer high churn as soon as personal willpower dips.
Pairing a temporary phone lockout with a live co-working partner borrows focus from another person working at the same time. Requiring your partner’s approval to unlock the device before the scheduled timer expires creates real accountability. Charge for daily matched sessions and locked device profiles.
From Trends PRO #0176, Screen-Time Blocking Apps. See how focus apps price commitment.
❔ ASK YOURSELF
What If Your Best “No” Took 3 Seconds to Send?
You keep saying yes under pressure and resenting it. Pre-write one considerate refusal you can copy-paste or deliver from memory when someone looks you in the eyes.
- Draft a four-sentence no in 1 hour: refusal, gratitude, bigger yes, good wishes.
- Save it on phone and desktop for copy-paste-send in 3 seconds.
- Memorize the gist for in-person asks. Four sentences is enough.
📈 REPORT FLASHBACK
Prompt engineering, right about the work and wrong about the job.
In May 2023 we said people would make music by typing a prompt and that text-to-video would democratize filmmaking. Google’s MusicLM was still unreleased when we wrote it.
Both landed. Suno raised $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation on prompted music and prompted video grew from novelty clips into studio tooling.
The job title we named the report after is the part that died. The Wall Street Journal called prompt engineering “basically obsolete” and a Microsoft survey ranked prompt engineer second to last among roles companies plan to add.
The skill went everywhere. The seat disappeared.
That was Report #0111, from May 2023. See what prompt work paid in 2023.
🔧 TRY THIS
60 Seconds to Your First Competitive Insight
HeadsUp is an AI-powered competitive intelligence platform that watches your market 24/7.
It doesn’t just tell you what changed… It tells you what to do about it.
🏆 #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt
Get 90 days of competitor intelligence in 60 seconds with HeadsUp:
- See what you’ve been missing (pricing, features, positioning)
- Know what to do about it, not just what happened
- Get weekly briefs summarizing what matters
See what you’ve been missing 👉 Try HeadsUp free
The Most Popular Link From Last Week:
☁️ Remote Agent Browser
Get Weekly Reports
Join 54,000+ founders and investors
📈 Unlock Pro Reports, 1:1 Intros and Masterminds
Become a Trends Pro Member and join 1,200+ founders enjoying…
🧠 Founder Mastermind Groups • To share goals, progress and solve problems together, each group is made up of 6 members who meet for 1 hour each Monday.
📖 160+ Trends Pro Reports • To make sense of new markets, ideas and business models, check out our research reports.
💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.
💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.
Brought to you by the team behind HeadsUp
